Tristan Horx

"In his 60s, Domingo remains a marvel. Indeed, he gives us a performance of Tristan, carefully studied, heroically sung, sympathetically interpreted, that truly crowns his career as a tenor and recording artist. (…) Even more remarkable is the Isolde of Nina Stemme. As she showed at Glyndebourne a couple of years ago, she offers the most telling Isolde since Nilsson's at Bayreuth for Böhm; (…) To near-perfection she is the angry, frustrated woman of Act 1, the besotted lover of Act 2 and the transfigured Isolde of Act 3. Nothing in the long and taxing role escapes her notice, yet the detail is never exposed at the expense of the portrayal as a whole. (…) Mihoko Fujimura, Bayreuth's current Fricka and Waltraute, not only has a lovely voice but - like her mistress - never misses a point in the text. Hers is a lighter voice than that of most Brangänes (…). Over all presides the alert and commanding Pappano. This is not an interpretation in the timeless, deep vein of Furtwängler, more in the dramatic mode of Karajan in 1952 and Böhm. We are here concerned with a living drama, an aching tragedy played and played out through every bar with a pulsating energy tamed by a thoughtful mind."

Alan Blyth, Gramophone Magazine / September 2005

Although this is a re-issue, and not a re-mastering, everyone with any interest in Wagner, and Tristan and Isolde, simply must have this wonderful set. To be fair, it's really all about Linda Esther Gray, and the outstanding WNO under Goodall. The WNO are brilliant here, and sympathetically recorded by the Decca engineers. You'll hear subtleties in the playing that are lost in other versions, and you can forget about Goodall's supposed ultra-slow tempi, for here he's surely perfect. (The Prelude is actually over a minute faster than Karajan.) But it's Goodall's handling of key moments that is so seductive - and thrilling.

The composer Friedrich Gernsheim, who was highly respected during his lifetime, is largely unknown today. Yet, especially in his choral compositions, he broke away from traditional ideas of form at an early stage and was thus ahead of many of his contemporaries. With this recording, Tristan Meister and Vox Quadrata have set themselves the goal of bringing the forgotten choral works of the Jewish composer back into the public consciousness.