Warner Classics: 2564696589

“The present excerpts are taken not from opera performances, but from an orchestral concert in the Dresden Staatsoper – and what a magnificently expansive acoustic it has! Runnicles paces with the experience of the opera house and creates the most natural ebb and flow of tempo…the Dresden orchestra create marvellously dramatic sonorities in strings and brass alike, thundering out those mighty chords in the death/funeral sequence… Throughout, Runnicles generates maximum tension…Overall this seems to me one of the finest and most moving single-disc summations of what Wagner’s orchestral writing is all about…” Gramophone