Wagner
Tristan und Isolde – An Orchestral Passion (arr. Henk de Vlieger)
Staatskapelle Weimar/Hansjörg Albrecht
Oehms Classics OC 1729 58:02 mins
Wagner reductions for orchestra are now almost commonplace. A out of Wagner’s 270-minute opera, with creative liberties successfully taken in the ordering of the work’s sections. is another popular site for reductive plunder, the most extreme example of which was Leopold Stokowski’s 28-minute ‘symphonic synthesis’ in the 1930s of the Prelude, the love duet and the finale. In 1994 the Dutch composer and arranger Henk de Vlieger embarked on a much more ambitious project – a through-composed hour without a break and without voices, which nevertheless sought to convey the whole story.
