Wagner: Ich sah das Kind an seiner Mutter Brust (from Parsifal) (Kundry's narrative)

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.

The third volume of The Flagstad Recitals couples music by Wagner and Mahler. Flagstad’s LP of Wagner scenes recorded with Hans Knappertsbusch is complemented by the “Todesverkündigung” from Act II of Die Walküre with Sir Georg Solti as well as the “Immolation Scene” from Götterdämmerung from a Norwegian broadcast performance conducted by Øivin Fjeldstad. Also included are the two Mahler song cycles Flagstad recorded with Sir Adrian Boult and the Vienna Philharmonic.

In his booklet notes John Steane asks us to “remember (for it is easy to forget) that in this recording we hear the voice of a woman over 60. It is still possible to feel, as Desmond Shawe-Taylor did when hearing her years earlier in a concert performance with Furtwängler, that the ‘sumptuous, saturated tone-quality of this sort has almost vanished from the world’.”

‘It is wonderful to hear how the great soprano can produce the softest flute-like tone on a high G, fining it down to vanishing point’ [Mahler: ‘Ging heut’ morgen über’s Feld’ from Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen] Gramophone

[Wesendon-Lieder] “…beautifully played on this disc, as is everything else, by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Knappertsbusch. Flagstad's deeper insight into the music shows particularly in ‘Stehe still!’ and ‘Im Treibhaus’ but she is very well suited by all five songs." Gramophone

[Kindertotenlieder] “That glorious voice is heard here in a very fine recording, and Sir Adrian and the Vienna Philharmonic form a happy combination. And in any case, Flagstad sings these particular songs most beautifully; Lieder on this scale finds in her a fine and sensitive interpreter. Incredible that she was 62 at the time." Gramophone

“Flagstad was a superb Sieglinde, and her glorious voice is perfectly suited to the rich inspiration of the Wesendonk-Lieder … one of the finest Brünnhildes of our time” The Penguin Guide to Bargain Compact Discs

Domovina Studio, Prague, May 31 and June 1–2, 1966 (1–3, 5–7)

The Czech Radio, Prague, November 18, 1976 (4, 9, 10) and June 7, 1972 (8)

Ludmila Dvořáková enjoyed global fame as a slim, blonde soprano with a magnificent stage presence and possessing a voice of a distinct timbre, capable of both softness and drama, smoothly negotiating the high registers and with a dark middle register, always accurate and breathtaking. She excelled in the most demanding dramatic soprano roles and, following in the footsteps of Ema Destinnová, Maria Jeritza and Jarmila Novotná, was the first modern-era Czech singer to appear at the world’s major opera houses, including the MET in New York. Ludmila Dvořáková started her career in Ostrava and soon caught the attention of Prague, where the National Theatre engaged her in 1954. In the following year, she was afforded the opportunity to work for the Staatsoper in Vienna, and in 1960 for the Staatsoper in Berlin. When Wieland Wagner heard her singing Ortrude in Munich, he invited her to the Bayreuth festival.

Her debut appearance, in 1965, was followed by six years of collaboration and a degree of fame that no Czech artist had previously attained in Bayreuth. In 1966, she was offered contracts with the MET and Covent Garden. This recital, featuring recordings released on CD for the very first time, is compiled from Dvořáková’s rare studio recordings made for Supraphon and Czechoslovak Radio. The venerable soprano’s imminent 90th birthday represents a perfect opportunity to recall a voice that garnered enthusiastic applause at major opera houses worldwide.

These recordings were made when the great Norwegian soprano was in her vocal prime, between 1935 and 1940. Although her voice remained astonishingly well preserved till late in her career, later recordings of the same music are no less resplendent but perhaps lack the last degree of dramatic tension she could bring when regularly singing these roles on stage.

Included is the Act 2 duet from Parsifal, which became a calling-card not only for her but for her partner in this recording, and times without number on stage, Lauritz Melchior.

Desmond Shawe-Taylor remarked in the New Grove Dictionary of Opera that ‘No one within living memory surpassed her in sheer beauty and consistency of line and tone’. She quickly became a legend in Norway, where her portrait adorned both the 100 Kroner note and the tail of Norwegian Air Shuttle planes, but her fame spread throughout the musical world (she is one of the few opera singers to have her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame). Rudolf Bing called her ‘the greatest soprano of the century’, and many would agree.