The Sunday New York Times has a very interesting article By Paul Griffiths,
entitled "A Wagner More Intimate Than Heroic", at:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/19/arts/music/19GRIF.html

It starts:

   "How big does Wagner have to be in order to be great? The question
   is posed by the Eos Orchestra, which presents "The Rhinegold" on
   Thursday and Saturday at the New York Society for Ethical Culture.
   Conducting the imposing prologue to the "Ring" cycle, in an
   English-language production staged by Christopher Alden, Jonathan
   Sheffer will have before him not the original immense forces but
   just 18 or so players, performing an arrangement of the score by
   the British composer Jonathan Dove."

This idea both intrigues me and concerns me.  It intrigues me because,
although the idea of intimate Wagner could seem like an oxymoron, his music
is often on an intimate plane, even if also on a massive scale.  The Forest
Murmurs, the Liebestod, and many other passages speak intimately even if
there are hundreds of people playing.  I recently heard Donald Runnicles
do a concert version of Act III of Walkuere, using a reduced orchestra from
what he uis used to in Bayreuth or Vienna, and the textures were wonderful,
the lines clear.  Wagner set out specifically to write "heroic" music, yet
I am intrigued by distilling it down to its musical essence and hearing it
"clean" or as Scotch drinkers might say, "neat".

It concerns me because the sound he was going for could only be created by
a massive force, and "re-orchestrating" this could be like taking a work
by a painter who uses a wide-ranging palette and reinterpreting it as a
sixteen color bitmap...his Siegfried Idyll was first performed by a small
ensemble in his own house, for Cosima's birthday (I believe?), so there is
some precedent, I suppose.

I would love to hear this next Thursday, but I am in Atlanta, and not in
New York.  Are there any MCMLers who are planning to attend? If so I would
love to hear a report, and, if you are a lover of his *music*, how you
perceived this reduction of the scale.

Miguel Muelle
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http://mmuelle.home.mindspring.com