RYAN WIGGLESWORTH
composer and conductor
I remember vividly Günter Wand’s last performance in London, at the 2001 BBC Proms – I sneaked into the rehearsals and went to the concert. He was the master Bruckner conductor, because he gave everything a seemingly infinite amount of space without ever losing the direction and thread of the drama. Without seeming to do very much, he was in total command. I became hooked on his Bruckner recordings, not least his more recent one of the Ninth Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic.
I regularly return to the Takács Quartet’s recording of the Beethoven Razumovsky Quartets. What I love about middle-period Beethoven is that things aren’t quite stretched to breaking point yet, but you can see him pushing at all of the boundaries, and the sheer inventiveness is breathtaking. The sound of the Takács Quartet’s recording is wonderful, as is the players’ ability to plumb the depths of this music. It’s impossible to produce the ultimate performance of these works, but the Takács Quartet get pretty close.
Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder was an astonishingly ambitious work for Edward Gardner to take on at the start of his tenure as chief conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic, but their recording of it shows how glorious that orchestra is – the depth of its string sound in particular is just wonderful. Ed is a great architectural conductor – he is so good at pacing large paragraphs of music, which is what Gurrelieder needs. He knows exactly when to put his foot on the pedal and ratchet up the drama.
When I became organ scholar at New College, Oxford in 1998, the choir had just released its disc of Byrd and Tallis’s Lamentations – this recording is just for men’s voices, without the trebles. To hear that music sung with such spaciousness and genuine emotion behind it is very special, and the choir had a particularly wonderful line-up of singers at that time. This was the disc that began my deep love of English Renaissance polyphony, and I still listen to it regularly. Ryan Wigglesworth conducts his opera The Winter’s Tale at English National Opera from 27 February