When the late conductor Lorin Maazel led his roughly seventy-minute orchestral distillation of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung with the National Symphony Orchestra some twenty years ago, The Washington Post praised him to the hilt. He “played the NSO as if it were a single instrument,” the newspaper marveled, “an uber-organ or cosmic synthesizer.” He repeated that feat eight years later, when I heard him conjure the same magic conducting The Ring Without Words, as it is titled, with the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. The suite was most recently performed by the NSO last month, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda.
The Ring Without Words was commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic in 1987. Maazel’s task was to cut down Wagner’s sixteen-hour, four-opera music drama to an orchestral sequence that could fit on what was then the latest technological marvel: the compact disc. His handicraft was celebrated—it may have even been what sealed his appointment as music director of the New York Philharmonic. Yet is far from perfect. Composers deriving orchestral suites from operas often take artistic liberties, but Maazel made no additions, deletions, or embellishments for his condensation. He simply selected the best moments from the cycle and strung them together in chronological order from beginning to end.
Of course, Wagner’s own technique evolved and ripened over the course of the Ring’s composition, culminating in the denser chromaticism and more abundant leitmotifs of Götterdämmerung. Not coincidentally, this is the opera that conductors typically say they enjoy performing the most. It is perhaps no surprise then that about 40 percent of the music Maazel included comes from that one opera. The composite work suffers from that imbalance, and Maazel sometimes neglected to weave the earlier material into a smoothly running whole. For example, the finales of Acts I and II of Die Walküre, both of which Maazel chose to include, resound so conclusively that the audience is tempted to think the performance has ended before it is even halfway over. Indeed, some in the audience of the NSO this last January were fooled into applause by these false finishes.
Regardless, this Ring Without Words—presented by the NSO for the first time since Maazel led it in 2004—was a jewel not just of the NSO’s season, but also of the career of the company’s music director, Gianandrea Noseda. And it is a fitting precursor to Noseda’s next major assignment: he will conduct his first full Ring cycle this May in Zürich, where he is the general music director of the Zürich Opera House. This is the culmination of a long project. The four new productions have premiered one at a time in recent years, each to major critical acclaim.
After this performance, it is easy to see why. Possessing a fleet and refined Romantic sensibility, Noseda led a commanding and muscular performance that recalled his splendid concert rendition of Act II of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde with the NSO in 2019. He sometimes threw his whole body into the exercise—his feet occasionally leaving the floor of the podium—to emphasize moments of triumph and tragedy with a dynamic athleticism. The reading was clarion and clear, and it heavily indulged the brass section, reminding us that Wagner once said he would be perfectly content if he could compose only for the horn. Quieter moments in the strings and woodwinds also wafted in pleasantly.
More than one audience member talked about a trip to Switzerland later this year to take in what will undoubtedly be a landmark of Wagnerian performance. Washington was fortunate to have this taste of it.