The Metropolitan Opera’s next “Ring” cycle is years away. But for local Wagnerians champing at the bit, the New York Philharmonic offered a teaser this weekend in the form of Lorin Maazel’s 1987 distillation “The ‘Ring’ Without Words.”
The late ’80s were glory days for the classical record industry, reveling in the success of the still-new CD, and Maazel’s 70-minute arrangement, created at the behest of the Telarc label, neatly filled a single disc.
As an exercise, “The ‘Ring’ Without Words” — led at David Geffen Hall by Nathalie Stutzmann, the music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra — is impressive. Maazel, the Philharmonic’s conductor in the early 2000s and by all accounts a brilliant musical mind, set himself the challenge of making a synthesis without pauses that flows through the four-opera cycle in order, using only Wagner’s notes.
The result has some arresting how-did-he-do-that moments. The crash of Donner’s hammer, from near the end of “Das Rheingold,” is suddenly thunder bringing us into the midst of the storm that opens “Die Walküre.” The sparks of the magic fire that encircles Brünnhilde in “Walküre” dissolve into the forging of the sword in “Siegfried.”
Maazel renders the seams in these crosscuts artfully invisible. Yet there’s a cool efficiency to the work that squares with its origins as a corporate product. Wagner’s 15-hour cycle is full of grandeur and emotion, but though the performance on Sunday rose to clanging climaxes, it barely suggested the operas’ scope from the epic to the intimate; this was merely a brisk rundown.
Part of that was the Philharmonic’s fault. For “The ‘Ring’ Without Words” to make any real impact, it has to be dazzlingly played. On Sunday, some passages were more transparent than usual — you could hear the flutes through all the rushing arpeggios at the dawn of “Das Rheingold” — and the string flourishes had bite at the start of the “Ride of the Valkyries” and in Siegfried’s funeral march.
But there was also squareness rather than timelessness in that mysterious beginning of “Rheingold,” as well as some iffy intonation in the brasses, and some unsteady entrances and transitions that were notable given that it was the program’s third and final performance.
I had a better time on Friday evening, when Stutzmann led a smaller group of musicians in Bach at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. The Philharmonic usually gives a free Memorial Day concert there, but this season it was rescheduled for winter.
This was smooth, mellow, warmly spirited Bach — old-fashioned in a good way, like a throwback to the era before spikier, faster Baroque interpretation became the norm even for standard symphonic forces.
The acoustics of St. John the Divine are challengingly reverberant, and some of the sensitive baritone Leon Kosavic’s soft singing in the cantata “Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen” was lost. But he was excellent, as was the soprano Talise Trevigne, who sang another cantata, “Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen,” with brightly florid yet melting tone.
The enormous church is actually better suited to chamber music than large ensembles, as a superb, graceful quartet — Yoobin Son, flute; I-Jung Huang, violin; Sumire Kudo, cello; Paolo Bordignon, harpsichord — showed in the “Sonata sopra il Soggetto Reale” from the “Musical Offering.”
It was all more moving than “The ‘Ring’ Without Words.” But on Sunday the audience was at least left with an immaculately luminous final chord, and it was gratifying to see Stutzmann acclaimed by the orchestra after her last big gig in New York went somewhat awry.
Two years ago, she made her Met debut leading a pair of new Mozart productions in repertory. She made a jokey comment in a New York Times preview article that for some reason set off the Met’s musicians, who twisted her meaning into a criticism of their work ethic; they even aired their complaints on social media.
But on Sunday, when the applause brought her back onstage at Geffen Hall and she gestured to the orchestra to stand, the members honored her by remaining seated, letting Stutzmann take a solo bow.
New York Philharmonic
Performed at David Geffen Hall and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Manhattan.
