New York Classical Review

If you like looking at pictures of Alfred Roller’s sets for Götterdāmmerung or portraits of Jean de Reszke as Siegfried or Birgit Nilsson as Brünnhilde, you would likely have enjoyed the New York Philharmonic’s taut and brassy performance of The Ring Without Words Thursday night, conducted by Nathalie Stutzmann.

Wagner’s mightiest Gesamtkunstwerk—literally a “work of all arts combined”—lends itself to contemplation from various perspectives. So perhaps it was inevitable that a remark by the composer’s grandson Wieland Wagner—that in Der Ring des Niebelungen the orchestra was “where it all is, the text behind the text, the universal subconscious”—encouraged conductor Lorin Maazel to make an orchestral distillation of the drama in 1987 and record it with the Berlin Philharmonic.

A guest appearance conducting the piece with the New York Philharmonic in 2000 led to Maazel’s appointment the following year to succeed Kurt Masur as the orchestra’s music director. Whether Stutzmann—presently music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and recently a successful debutante at the Bayreuth Festival with Tannhāuser—harbors similar ambitions is not known but for now someone else is coming to fill the post. Really.

Not wildly demonstrative on the podium, but crystal-clear in her intentions, the French singer turned conductor sustained a performance of Maazel’s artfully stitched score that swept the listener along in an uninterrupted flow of music, so that when the last chord died away one could hardly believe 75 minutes had passed.

Maazel’s intention—and he apparently stuck to it—was to use only Wagner’s instrumental parts, assigning a sung line to an instrument only when absolutely necessary for the passage to make sense. In any case, as he wrote in a memo to himself about the project, “Every note must be Wagner’s own.”

The listening experience on Thursday was somewhere between ballet music without dancers—which can be unsatisfying in a concert—and a sprawling tone poem by Richard Strauss. Wagner’s ubiquitous leitmotifs stood out as signposts even more than they do in fully staged performances.

Just as balletomanes picture specific choreography when they hear a few bars of Coppélia, fans of the Ring would have no trouble supplying the dramatic action in each of this piece’s brassy climaxes and pianissimo episodes. For everybody else, the printed program went to great lengths, with capsule synopses of the four operas and leitmotifs in music notation, to keep the listener oriented.

In the end, however, thanks to Wagner’s vivid scoring, listeners could trust their ears to take in the musical drama without benefit of singers or scenery. Even if one didn’t know that the opening bars of undulations in E flat major represented the eternal flow of the Rhine, one could sense that momentous events were in store. They arrived soon enough with an exuberant trombone call, a boom on the bass drum and a stormy tutti.

The ensuing music was rich in incident and atmosphere, sometimes dancing gaily with flutes and glockenspiel, more often making pronouncements with Wagner tubas and trombones. Moments familiar from concert excerpts surfaced from time to time: the “Ride of the Valkyries,” sounding a bit earthbound in the dry Geffen Hall acoustic; “Forest Murmurs,” enlivened by vivid wind solos; “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey,” rising to an ecstatic fresh-air fortissimo.

Other episodes clearly spoke of heroic deeds, dark scheming, romantic passion and aching regret, whether or not the listener made the connection to specific characters or scenes in the operas.

Well coordinated and tuned, especially in the all-important brass sections, the orchestra responded avidly to Stutzmann’s lively beat. One hopes she will pass this way again, and soon.

The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. nyphil.org