Last Saturday would have been the late conductor Sir Georg Solti's 88th birthday, and the BBC Philharmonic's programme was intended as a tribute to his towering contribution to the reputation of Wagner in Britain. It included the rarely heard concert suite from Götterdämmerung, which, as with the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan, was compiled by Wagner himself in an attempt to reach as wide an audience as possible.
The strategy worked well enough; Nietzsche was won over after hearing these excerpts in the concert hall, and it is not difficult to see why. The compression of hours' worth of music into half-hour chunks works so well that the listener could easily feel guilty: it's all the pleasure without the pain.
Such guilt may have been somewhat assuaged by Downes's remarkable restraint in his conducting of the overtly theatrical overture to the Flying Dutchman. Disappointing as this may have been for some, any urge to reach for the volume control must have been mitigated by the conviction of the playing.
The Siegfried Idyll, Wagner's radiant birthday offering to his wife, received a comparably understated performance. This was Wagner at his most tender; no sudden passionate surging ruffled the gentle lyricism, while Downes's almost classical approach to phrasing allowed space for the overall structure to breathe.
Overall structure is perhaps something we tend not to listen for in performances of the Tristan prelude; here, absence of the familiar sense of urgency and short-breathed string phrasing produced a quite distinctive Tristan tone, almost more reflective than yearning. The young Swedish soprano Irene Theorin responded sensitively to Downes; although the final, long-awaited climax swamped her for a few moments she showed no sign of strain.
Wagner's selection of interludes from Götterdämmerung seamlessly weaves together Dawn and Siegfried's Rhine journey from act one with his funeral music and the closing immolation scene. In this last Theorin was a passionate Brünnhilde, while Downes allowed the orchestral sound to broaden and open out. The final moments, as Valhalla is consumed by flames, were shattering and glorious.
