Welsh National Opera will shortly mark the Wagner bicentenary with its themed summer season, staging a new production of Lohengrin and pairing it with Jonathan Harvey's Wagner Dream. This concert paved the way for those operas, with Wagner extracts conducted by the company's music director, Lothar Koenigs.
The prelude to Parsifal opened the evening, solemn and all rather careful, the transcendent beauty of the writing never quite emerging. This was followed by Siegfried's Funeral March and Brünnhilde's Immolation from Götterdämmerung. At twice its normal size, the WNO orchestra, under the inspired leadership of David Adams, rose to meet the challenge of the music's epic scale and resonance, with the inimitable sound of Wagner tubas augmenting the brass section, who were all on top form. Yet while Koenigs managed the mechanics of the performance efficiently, he seemed to add nothing in the way of tone-colour or emotional weight that could be said to have fired the imagination.
Another big anniversary was celebrated in the second half of the programme, the centenary of the premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring on 29 May 1913, its element of ritual sacrifice linking it to the Wagner. Once again, the orchestra relished showcasing its talent, with the principal timpanist and brass players standing out.
But there was little of the Rite's raw, visceral quality; the feeling of sensual, primal force and of accumulating tension waiting to explode was curiously absent. History may have recorded the riotous Paris premiere as a succès de scandale, but to find Koenigs offering up such an anodyne, sanitised version of one of the most electric and brutally expressive scores ever written was in itself almost shocking.
