Richard Wagner

James Levine's is a more recent entry in the realm of Dutchman recordings, and sonically the recording is absolutely stunning, with great attention having been paid to the recording process. The casting for this Metropolitan Opera effort is also uniformly first rate, even in the less grateful roles of the hapless Erik, sung by the impressive Ben Heppner, and the scolding nurse, Mary, sung by Birgitta Svendén. Morris's brooding Dutchman is hard to match on any other available recording, and Deborah Voigt is a ravishing Senta. The chorus work is quite good, though not quite as rich as that heard in the Solti/Chicago recording. Overall, Levine does a workmanlike job of conducting these impressive forces, though there are passages in which his tempi seem to drag. This recording is a must for anyone who needs a completely up to date version of Wagner's first major opera.

Richard Wagner was one of the most revolutionary figures in the history of music, a composer who made pivotal contributions to the development of harmony and musical drama that reverberate even today. Indeed, though Wagner occasionally produced successful music written on a relatively modest scale, opera – the bigger, the better – was clearly his milieu, and his aesthetic is perhaps the most grandiose that Western music has ever known. Early in his career, Wagner learned both the elements and the practical, political realities of his craft by writing a handful of operas which were unenthusiastically, even angrily, received. © Rovi Staff /TiVo

Bailey's … is the most rounded portrayal to date … the set as a whole is a considerable achievement, a worthy addition to the Decca/Solti Wagner discograohy.

Herbert von Karajan made Anton Bruckner’s mammoth 8th Symphony a center of his large repertory, recording it for release four times, in 1944, 1957, 1975 and finally in 1988, shortly before the maestro’s death. Karajan’ s emotional connection with the 8th is obvious and, in comparing the last two of these releases, I’ve been very impressed with how an aging conductor could re-invent his interpretations. As one can tell from these two Karajan performances and those from other musicians, the 8th can support many different approaches, with an almost kaleidoscopic array of musical and emotional elements revealing different colors as its components are played in different ways.

Wagner's genius is often associated with his unique feeling for orchestration. Yet the transcriptions and paraphrases for piano solo recorded here lay bare the beauty and boldness of his harmonic language, with an evocative power unrivalled at the time. Nikolai Lugansky, at once narrator and virtuoso, immerses us in a world where the heroes of legend tell us - and with what loftiness of spirit! - of the torments and aspirations of humanity.

All of Wagner’s operas require a sure hand in the pit: no run-of-the-mill répétiteur will do. But two works, in particular, depend on the conductor as much as anyone on stage for success in performance Tristan and Parsifal. By choosing these two for the first complete Wagner dramas he’s committed to disc, Thielemann is letting us know just how important Wagner’s music is to him and how seriously he wants to be taken as a Wagner interpreter. With this new Parsifal, the conductor demonstrates that he’s a Wagnerian with a point of view, and a master of the composer’s huge musicodramatic structures.

This 1928 recording–with several cuts, particularly in the last act, which is cut in half–is a great curiosity. (As a bonus, the third CD, after the abbreviated last act, contains about 40 minutes of the last act in an excellent 1927 performance starring Walter Widdop and Gota Ljungberg and a brief but enlightening discussion of Wagner's leitmotifs and their uses by scholar Ernest Newman.) The two leads, Gunnar Graarud as Tristan and Nanny Larsen-Todsen as Isolde, are more lyric-voiced singers than we're used to in this music, and so the performance seems somehow more intimate (I doubt they would have been as effective in the theater as they are on this recording). Anny Helm is a thrilling Brangaene, and the others are good.