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It is lovers both of Wagner’s music and of modern interpretations/reinterpretations of his music dramas – a rarefied group, to be sure – who will be most interested in the James Cook song cycle, Liebestod Symphony, on a new Diversions CD. The five songs making up this not-really-symphonic work have words by Cosima Wagner, A.C. Swinburne, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Sidney Lanier, and John Janeway. Originally scored for soprano and orchestra and heard on this disc in an arrangement for soprano and piano, this half-hour cycle is about both Tristan und Isolde and the man who composed the opera. Indeed, Cook (born 1963) focuses more on Wagner than on the opera: the first four songs all set poetry about the composer.

The music, like much of Wagner’s, is tonal but pushes the bounds of tonality: Cook has clearly studied Wagner and absorbed, to some extent, the harmonic world in which his later operas, such as Tristan, exist. Neither the poetry nor the music, however, is particularly revelatory of anything about Wagner the man or Wagner the composer. The piano carries much of the mood of the material, especially in the first four songs, Eulogy, Romanza, Venetian Requiem, and Westward Home. The fifth song, Sacred Love-Death, makes it clear from its title that its subject is the topic explored by Wagner in Tristan, and Cook’s music here has more sensitivity and warmth than in the earlier songs – although it would likely sound better in orchestral form than on piano.

Helen Lacey sings feelingly, and Paul McKenzie’s piano accompaniment – which often assumes the leading role – is sensitive and emotionally involved. The whole song cycle, though, is a bit odd. It is hard to know for whom, other than himself, Cook wrote it: it sheds no great light on Wagner or Tristan, and seems mostly the creation of someone who, himself an opera composer, wants to pay modest homage to a far greater one. Liebestod Symphony does not, however, actually incorporate material by Wagner, as (for example) Bruckner did in the original version of his Symphony No. 3, which is dedicated to Wagner. Liebestod Symphony comes across as Cook’s musical thoughts on Wagner, expressed through settings of the words of other people. That is fine for what it is, but the whole cycle is thin in content and seems content to reach out to a very, very limited audience.