Glenn Gould - "Glenn Gould Plays His Own Transcriptions of Wagner Orchestral Showpieces" Vinyl, LP, Album, 1973 (Columbia Masterworks)

Glenn Gould playing Richard Wagner is a strange and even an exotic cocktail.   Wagner is very much the heavy metal of the 19th-century composers, and one who doesn't shy from over-kill or over-reaching the borders of opera, stage, and ego.   Gould is a musician who I often think of as a magician who can find the most profound nuances in a composer's work.   Gould took the huge orchestration of Wagner's music and re-arranged the works for solo piano.  Here, Gould is like a surgeon dissecting a piece of music in a laboratory of his own design. 

I love Wagner for his melodies and extreme romanticism, but hate everything else that goes with his image/work - racism being one thing that bugs me.  Uri Caine is the other musician that stripped away Wagner from his culture, and fine-tuned his melodies as a cafe band.   But Gould was there first with his down-to-earth ability to strip Wagner as well, of all of his jewels and ambition, and makes a point that the composer was a great melodist. 

When I hear Gould's Wagner album, I'm not really hearing the composer, but the chef that's making the ultimate dish from the genius pianist.  Like Thelonious Monk who plays around the melody, or sketches as if he's using a fine ink brush, Gould works in a similar method in tracing out the Wagner melodies into a new work. 

Gould's version of Wagner is not to replace the epic orchestrations, but just add a footnote or an endnote to work that is often not torn apart in such a fashion, like Gould and Caine's playful approach to Wagner.   One of my favorite classical albums, that for me, is a totally new entrance into Wagner's music. 

Uri Caine Ensemble - "Wagner E Venezia" CD Album, Germany, 1997 (Winter & Winter)

The great Richard Wagner melodies played by a six-member band, live, in what sounds like a cafe in Venice Italy.  Uri Cane is a composer, and a jazz and classical pianist.  He has done a similar treatment to Mozart's music, but for me, Wagner is the key ingredient for this type of cultural mash-up.    What Caine did was bring Wagner back to earth, not as this insane over-the-top composer, but as a classical composer who wrote these tender sweet incredible melodies.   So in other words, Wagner stripped down.   The theater is gone, the Norse gods are zipped, and what we have here is cafe music played in front of what sounds like an audience in some outside cafe.  

It's a peculiar choice to present Wagner's music in this light, but one that is highly effective and what's more important strips the image off (at least for this recording and band) to appreciate the Wagner experience without the dramatics.  The ensemble besides Caine on piano, is two violins, an accordion, stand-up bass player, and Violoncello.  By far my favorite Wagner recording of all time. And beautifully designed package as well.