Wagner Tannhäuser

A selection of Richard Strauss’s most-loved lieder and songs, and Elisabeth’s arias from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, the role in which Lise Davidsen will make her debut at Bayreuth Festival. Plus Ariadne’s aria from Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos: her 2017 Glyndebourne debut in the title role was named “one of those ‘I was there’ moments” (The Times).

When these discs were originally released singly in the early '80s, they were not only marvelous recordings of the purely orchestral music from Wagner's operas, they announced the arrival of a marvelous new conductor. At the time, Klaus Tennstedt was known only as the conductor of several astonishingly good recordings of Mahler's symphonies, but his abilities in the standard repertoire were as yet unknown. But with these two discs of recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic, Tennstedt proved that his Mahler was no accident. Indeed, so strong, so central, and so overwhelmingly compelling are his Wagner recordings that his Mahler recordings seem almost accidental. In the disc of excerpts from the Ring operas, Tennstedt is at once immensely dramatic, ecstatically lyrical, and profoundly musical. In the disc of preludes and overtures from Tannhäuser, Rienzi, Lohengrin, and Meistersinger, Tennstedt is at once intensely concentrated, widely expansive, and deeply human. Aided by the super-virtuoso playing of the Berlin Philharmonic and the stupendous impact of EMI's early digital, Tennstedt's Wagner was as fine or finer than any of his contemporaries and nearly in the same league as his predecessors.

Wilhelm Furtwängler is a musical titan, one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century. Some would say he is the greatest of all. A supreme, inimitable interpreter of the Austro-German symphonic repertoire, and of Wagner's music dramas, he remains a towering point of reference for performers and audiences.The unparalleled scope of this 55CD set makes it an essential for the music-lover. Not only is it the first collection to unite Furtwängler's entire catalogue of studio recordings, it also encompasses every live recording he made with a view to commercial release. Painstaking research has even unearthed a treasury of previously unpublished material, recorded in Vienna and Copenhagen.

I have always had rather a soft spot for Michele Campanella playing Liszt. This dates back to when he was the pianist on the first LP of Liszt I ever bought – a Pye disc of him playing the two concertos. With the bi-centenary of Liszt’s birth looming in the Autumn this is the first of the year’s celebratory sets that I have encountered. It should be noted however, as with the bulk of Brilliant Classics releases, these are licensed re-releases although in this case the provenance is not totally clear.

Eugen Jochum (1 November 1902 – 26 March 1987) was an eminent German conductor. He became famous primarily as an interpreter of Anton Bruckner's works. He became the first conductor to perform a complete recording of the nine symphonies of this composer.

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his later works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"), by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).