It’s hard to know at whom this release is aimed. Wagner’s idiom changed perhaps more radically than that of any other famous composer. Listen to the overtures to Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love) and The Fairies and you’d think you were listening to Offenbach or even Gilbert and Sullivan, not the man who went on to compose Tristan and Isolde, The Ring and Parsifal. This strangely assembled program contains an orchestral tribute to The Mastersingers by one Henk de Vlieger, about whom no information whatever is vouchsafed, other than that he was born in 1953.

This attempt at a symphonic synthesis is surely based on The Ring: An Orchestral Journey brilliantly recorded by Lorin Maazel and somewhat less excitingly by Edo de Waart. The difference is that, while the Ring Cycle is studded with orchestral interludes and even accompanied vocal passages which have become showpieces in their own right,
The Mastersingers has very few. Which brings me back to my original point: who really wants to hear a sort of operatic soundtrack which is hardly self-sufficient?

Järvi and the Royal Scottish orchestra are in fine form and the Chandos acoustic is deep and rich, but I somehow can’t help longing to hear it played by The Berlin or Vienna Philharmonic.

The other odds and ends are juvenilia composed by Wagner in the 1830s before his epiphany and contain the odd tantalising pre-echo of later masterpieces, but they don’t add up to much. I would recommend this CD only to the pathologically curious or Wagner completists.