Siegfried Bäumler

This legendary Bayreuth Festival production of Wagner’s 'Der Ring des Nibelungen', directed by Harry Kupfer, with designs by Hans Schavernoch, and conducted by Daniel Barenboim, is considered perhaps the finest video recording of these four operas ever made. For their innovative modernist staging, Kupfer and his team turned away from the work’s time of origin and located The Ring at a “road of history”, a meeting-place of past, present and future, which sets the scene for the story’s struggles of power and love. Barenboim’s authoritative yet highly responsive reading of the immense score and the extraordinary performances of the cast help to make this a truly memorable Ring.

Wolfgang Wagner’s arrestingly beautiful production, filmed live at Bayreuth in 1981 and directed by Brian Large, features a stellar cast led by Eva Randova, Bernd Weikl and Siegfried Jerusalem. “A production and performance that showed the festival at its finest… Wolfgang Wagner’s Bayreuth production of his grandfather’s “farewell to the world” has “an unusual beauty and logic of its own… There is an air of magic and mystery about the staging… The performance was excellent… Horst Stein [conducted] a beautifully proportioned Parsifal.” (The New York Times)

Listeners should not come to these symphonies expecting works worthy of Brahms, Mendelssohn and Schumann. They lack the melodic inspiration of these composers and the ingenuity of development and form of Schumann and Brahms. Having noted this, they are still fine symphonies, worth an occasional listen. The orchestration is very similar in places to Brahms, so that if you're not listening very closely, you might think actually think you're hearing an obscure Brahms orchestral piece, perhaps a discarded movement from the First Serenade.

The three composers represented here do not stand at the forefront of the history of Danish music, but all three of them have in at least one respect secured themselves a position for which they will be remembered. As the first and only Dane, Otto Malling wrote a textbook on orchestration (1894), Ludvig Schytte published the collection ì45 Sonatinas and Execution Piecesî, which has been a sine qua non for anybody learning to play the piano in Denmark, and Siegfried Salomon wrote the opera Leonara Christina (1926), which includes one of the greatest hits in Danish opera, ìThere are Three Cornerstonesî, for many years a regular feature of Radio Denmarkís request programs, sung by Tenna Kraft. The romantic virtuoso concerto has never been highly thought of in Denmark.