Help for Heroes: Matthew Rye enjoys a disc of orchestral rarities but is unconvinced by an act of vocal heroism

After bringing us Henk de Vlieger’s masterly orchestral encapsulations of Wagner’s greatest music dramas, Neeme Järvi now provides a supplement with some relative rarities from the composer’s own orchestral output. The main course is his one completed Symphony, the work in C major written in 1832 when under the spell of Beethoven, who, it must be remembered, had died a mere five years earlier. His idol’s own symphonies were an obvious influence, but so was Fidelio, whose forthright optimism seems to lie at the heart of the first movement’s triumphant, triadic main theme, while in the finale, there’s even a surprising echo/pre-echo of the motoric rhythms in Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major, though of course that work wasn’t to be heard publicly for some time to come. The Symphony in E major, a two-movement torso from a couple of years further on and later orchestrated by Felix Mottl, came to light only in the 1980s, and takes us just a little further out of Wagner’s early Classicism.