It must be rare if not unique for a musician to conduct a work composed to celebrate his birth and written by his father, but that is, of course, the case here with Siegfried Wagner and the Siegfried Idyll. The grown man directs the piece with a welcome sympathy for its spring-like nature, a less slow and serious reading than we often hear today, and none the worse for that. The 1927 recording, however, is somewhat dim and affected by surface noise: I feel EMI might have made a better job of the transfer. The extracts from father's operas emerge rather more clearly. Looking at the Bayreuth archives, I find that he conducted there surprisingly little: The Ring in 1896, Tannhauser in 1904, Parsifal in 1909, Hollander in 1914, and that's it. So all these excerpts were made a while after his last appearance in the pit on the Green Hill. That doesn't make them a whit less interesting, for they show in every case his inborn ability to allow the music to sing and an ability to shape a prelude or an orchestral passage as a whole. Tempos, as I expected, are usually faster than what we are used to today and I don't think that's entirely due to the exigencies of the 78rpm disc. I think some of today's Wagner conductors, notably Barenboim and Levine, could learn much from listening to these historic performances about how to maintain the Haupstimme in any specific passage: that is heard most significantly in the Third Act Prelude to Parsifal.
Unfortunately on only one track do we hear voices—the authoritative Gurnemanz of Kipnis and the tender Parsifal of Fritz Wolff in the Good Friday Music. This extract has been frequently reissued on LP, but is none the less welcome on CD. However, if you want these unsatisfactory extracts as such, rather than as an issue of historical interest, you would do better with the more recent discs of 'bleeding chunks', conducted by the likes of Toscanini, Klemperer and Furtwangler, who understood the composer's needs as well or better than his son. Wagner, of all composers, does benefit from a more modern orchestral sound than that heard here. Better still hear the operas complete.'