Richard Wagner

Following on from their recent success at this year’s 2013 BBC Music Magazine Awards where they won the Award for Technical Excellence for their recording of Parsifal, PentaTone is delighted to bring you the next installment, Das Rheingold.

This is the 7th release in PentaTone’s successful Wagner Edition and the 1st one in the Wagner Year. Das Rheingold is the first release of the cycle: Der Ring des Nibelungen. The other 3 “Ring recordings” will follow in the course of 2013.

Continuing with their critically acclaimed Wagner series, the attached images show previous releases which have received unprecedented critical acclaim.

The recordings have various been awarded The Sunday Times CD of the Week, The Opera Choice of the month in BBC Music Magazine, the Recording of the month also in BBC Music Magazine and several Gramophone Editor’s Choices.

PentaTone’s Wagner Edition is an unprecedented project and we aim at supporting it with a lot of attention in the media throughout the year. In the Wagner year there will be a lot of attention for Wagner through articles in the media and performances of his opera’s. We expect therefore the interest for the PentaTone Edition (especially as a collector’s item) to increase substantially.

This next release will be supported by advertising in various magazines.

2013 sees a series of Wagner reissues on Eloquence from complete operas and highlights to Wagner singer portraits and even an audiobook!

Bayreuth is the holy grail of Wagner lovers and this outstanding disc captures great choral moments from Wagner’s operas over a period of nearly 30 years, with key ‘big’ moments from seven operas, from the Sawallisch Tannhäuser (1962) to Peter Schneider’s Lohengrin (1990). The choruses are among the glories of Wagner’s stage works. They are central, not extraneous, to the action, and the mood and style of each reflect the dramatic imperatives of the work concerned. This anthology includes the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin, the Sailors’ Chorus from The Flying Dutchman, the Pilgrims’ Chorus from Tannhäuser as well as the Guild Choruses from Die Mesitersinger and the dark Vassals’ Chorus from Götterdämmerung, as well as three defining moments from Wagner’s farewell to the world – Parsifal.

2013 sees a series of Wagner reissues on Eloquence from complete operas and highlights to Wagner singer portraits and even an audiobook!

Reissued for the Wagner Year are highlights from Herbert von Karajan’s mighty ‘Ring’ cycle. The disc includes extended highlights from the four ‘Ring’ operas and allows us to sample Karajan’s choice of different singers for the same character in different operas – Fischer-Dieskau’s Wotan in Das Rheingold and Thomas Stewart’s in Siegfried. There are notes on the music as well as an essay by Karajan expert Richard Osborne on the background to Karajan’s Ring, as well as a photo gallery of many of the key singers. There were and will always be many competitive Ring cycles on the market, but, as Martin Baker sums up ‘[Karajan] creates […] a transparent aural stage where the light and shade in the music has an almost forensic quality. Musically the Karajan Ring cycle has a visceral intensity that, especially in the subterranean scenes, hints at the sinister mythologies that informed Germany’s recent history and is probably closer to the heart of the narrative’s darkness than any other recording.’

2013 sees a series of Wagner reissues on Eloquence from complete operas and highlights to Wagner singer portraits and even an audiobook!

This is a 31-year retrospective (1956 – 1987) of great Wagner singing on Decca and Deutsche Grammophon featuring fourteen extracts from nine operas with seven great singers. Wagner’s heroines make for some of the most pivotal moments in his operas and this anthology highlights almost every aspect of his women – suspicious and inflexible (Fricka, here taken from a recital recording by Regina Resnik), redeeming (Elisabeth and Brünnhilde), passionate (Sieglinde), transfigured (Isolde). We hear the great voices of Joan Sutherland (who sang a number of Wagnerian roles before establishing her incomparable reputation in the bel canto repertoire), her idol, Kirsten Flagstad (here singing Kundry), Flagstad’s Scandinavian successor Birgit Nilsson (in two of the greatest opera scenes – Isolde’s Liebstod and Brünnhilde’s Immolation), and at the start of this recording, the splendidly Italianate singing of Susan Dunn as Elisabeth and Sieglinde. The illuminating notes on the music and the singers are by Wagner scholar Peter Bassett and the booklet includes a photo gallery of the singers.

2013 sees a series of Wagner reissues on Eloquence from complete operas and highlights to Wagner singer portraits and even an audiobook!

This is a 50-year retrospective (1950 – 2000) of great Wagner singing on Decca and Deutsche Grammophon featuring twelve extracts from eight operas (including all four operas of the Ring cycle) with nine great singers. Wagner’s knowledge of heroes derived from two sources: the myths of ancient Greece, and the sagas and poetry of northern Europe. In both traditions, heroes possess god-like attributes which set them apart from non-heroic mortals and reinforce the view that they are superhuman. They often have gods as parents or grandparents. But Wagner humanizes his heroes, most notably Siegmund (sung inimitably by Jon Vickers in the legendary Decca recording of Die Walküre with Erich Leinsdorf), and the naïve Siegfried (with Wolfgang Windgassen singing both the Siegfried and Götterdämmerung Siegfrieds). Other great heldentenors represented on this collection include James King and James McCracken. Celebrated bass-baritones are also represented here: Paul Schöffler (singing Wotan’s Farewell from a rare 1950 recording), Ernst Haefliger (as the Dutchman) and most recently, Matthias Goerne (Wolfram). The insightful notes are provided by Wagner scholar Peter Bassett and a photo gallery of the singers is also included.

Liszt was the first, but pianists of later generations also journeyed through the gigantic cosmos of the Wagnerian music drama with paraphrases and transcriptions for the piano. Severin von Eckardstein has brought together the best of these on his latest SACD. The result is a fascinating look at the reception history of Wagner’s music.

With Kirsten Flagstad as Brünnhilde, Lotte Lehmann as Sieglinde, Kathryn Meisle as Fricka, Lauritz Melchior as Siegmund, Emmanuel List as Hunding, Conductor, Fritz Reiner, San Francisco, 13 November, 1936. First released by our predecessor organization, educational Media Associates of America, Inc., in 1976 on LP-426, this recording was subsequently reissued in a restoration by Maggi Payne in 1999 as Music & Arts CD1048, and was newly restored for the present edition in 2013 from recently discovered NBC transcription discs by Ward Marston and Aaron Z. Snyder.

William Youngren wrote of the previous CD issue in Fanfare magazine: ”Reiner conducts with verve; Flagstad is splendid throughout; Lehmann is in good form, but occasionally overacts; Meisle is powerful and convincing; Schorr sings well but sounds old and fluffs a few notes; Melchior is superb - he and Flagstad make the Todesverkündigung scene alone worth the price of the disc.“

recorded in Bayreuth on 30th July 1962.

For a performance of 'Lohengrin' to be completely successful, it depends largely on the evil couple who stand opposed to the Swan Knight and the girl he protects, Elsa. The 1965 production at the Vienna State Opera was acclaimed for its musical aspects, and on its opening night Christa Ludwig as Ortrud made evident why Wagner himself described this character as “terribly magnificent”. Christa Ludwig celebrates her 85th birthday on 16 March 2013, and with her interpretation of roles such as this she secured for herself a place in the annals of the Vienna State Opera. Her curse ('Entweihte Götter!') was accorded spontaneous ovations by the audience and the subtlety that she brings to this role, straddling as it does the range of a dramatic soprano and a dramatic mezzo, makes this sorceress the undisputed manipulator of the action. All this can be heard clearly, on this live recording. With the dramatic baritone Walter Berry as Telramund, she had a partner on that evening whose vocal power was hitherto largely unsuspected, yet who offered no less vocal sophistication. Overall, the performance on that evening was stormier and more agitated than many a more 'ethereal', enraptured version such as one often hears. It was driven by Karl Böhm at the helm of the orchestra of the Vienna State Opera, and with a State Opera Chorus that had been excellently prepared by Wilhelm Pitz. Eberhard Waechter as the Herold and Martti Talvela as King Heinrich were powerfully resplendent, while Claire Watson as Elsa and Jess Thomas as the title hero formed the 'good' couple, rounding off this superb cast with their bright tone colours. Her voice, schooled in Mozart, was slender and clear in focus, while his virile tenor, clear in accentuation and in diction, offered a model of the Wagner style of the 1960s that also dominated in Bayreuth: as was preferred by the director, Wieland Wagner. This 'Lohengrin' offered a modern reading in the best sense of the word, allowing the characters their mythical grandeur while at the same time letting them approach the contemporary audience as men and women of flesh and blood.