Nina Stemme

It's a tall order to compile the best classical music of the twentieth century, but EMI has selected its top 100 classics for this six-disc set, and it's difficult to argue with most of the choices. Without taking sides in the great ideological debates of the modern era – traditionalist vs. avant-garde, tonal vs. atonal, styles vs. schools, and so on – the label has picked the composers whose reputations seem most secure at the turn of the twenty-first century and has chosen representative excerpts of their music. Certainly, the titans of modernism are here, such as Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, Dmitry Shostakovich, Sergey Prokofiev, Claude Debussy, and Benjamin Britten, to name just a few masters, but they don't cast such a large shadow that they eclipse either their more backward-looking predecessors or their more experimental successors.

The controversial 1995 Salzburg/Paris co-production of Der Rosenkavalier received a well-deserved revival at the Baden-Baden Festival in 2009. Now on DVD, Herbert Wernicke’s 15-year-old approach turns out to be curiously middle-of-the-road.
Wernicke’s fascination with mirrors proves fruitful here, creating a giant Rorschach test, fractured and multiplied on a vast scale, to provide a riveting visual framing of the artifice and actuality of the work, interweaving drama and comedy, male and female, youth and maturity, pretence and reality, that makes it all appear indissolubly tied together.

Although this is a re-issue, and not a re-mastering, everyone with any interest in Wagner, and Tristan and Isolde, simply must have this wonderful set. To be fair, it's really all about Linda Esther Gray, and the outstanding WNO under Goodall. The WNO are brilliant here, and sympathetically recorded by the Decca engineers. You'll hear subtleties in the playing that are lost in other versions, and you can forget about Goodall's supposed ultra-slow tempi, for here he's surely perfect. (The Prelude is actually over a minute faster than Karajan.) But it's Goodall's handling of key moments that is so seductive - and thrilling.