Schoenberg Verklarte Nacht, Op. 4.

Wagner Siegfried Idyll. English Chamber Orchestra / Vladimir Ashkenazy.

Decca digital (Full price) (LP) 410 111-1 (Cassette) 410 111-4 (CD) 410 111-2.

Putting the Wagner, much the shorter piece, on Side 1, and the Schoenberg on Side 2, suggests Ashkenazy's orientation, and so does the coupling itself. These are works which in a similar way sit between the chamber and orchestral repertories, equally well presented on full or solo strings. With the ECO at its most resonant, richly recorded in London's Kingsway Hall, Ashkenazy firmly opts for orchestral scale, though inevitably this is sparer sound than one gets in either work from Karajan on DG. Very clearly too he relates the Schoenberg, standing as it does pivotally between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, back to Wagner. Not only is it a question of idiom but of treatment. Ashkenazy sees both works almost as operatic scenas but without a voice. So in the Siegfried Idyll he makes a clear distinction between the a tempo passages and the more flexible linking passages. Neville Marriner in both his recordings with the ASMF (1969 on Argo; 1980 on HMV) made a comparable contrast by reducing his forces to solo strings for many of those interludes. That feeling for structure in Ashkenazy goes well with his naturally expressive style. Like most conductors he opts for an unmarked stringendo in the big climax, then adopts a slower speed than usual for Siegfried's horn theme.

The Wagnerian associations in the Schoenberg could hardly be clearer. This is as Romantic a reading as you could want, and the special link with Tristan is underlined when, in the first half, where urgent passages relapse into stillness, Ashkenazy seems to echo Act 3 of that opera where the hero falls back in exhaustion after bursts of frenetic energy. The special mark of Ashkenazy's reading is not just its warmth and sensuous beauty—superbly caught in the digital sound—but its lyricism. Where the thick textures can easily seem clotted, Ashkenazy throughout brings out the Hauptstimmen, or leading melodic lines, very markedly, important when the melody keeps moving so freely from one instrument to another.

These are both beautiful as well as compelling performances.

EG