Customer Reviews

Julia Varady ~ Wagner - Wesendonck-Lieder, Tristan und Isolde, Götterdämmerung

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Rumanian soprano Julia Varady has long been famed for her performances of Strauss, Mozart, and Verdi, but here, recorded late in her illustrious career--she retired from the stage last year--she shows herself to be the day's preeminent Wagnerian soprano. No thundering Nilsson or Flagstad she: Her voice is slender and gleaming in the silver-toned manner of Gundala Janowitz and she uses it with a Schwarzkopf-like intelligence that doesn't preclude deep emotional warmth and a heady spontaneity. The Wesendonk Lieder receive their finest recorded performance since Janet Baker's famous--and sadly unavailable--recording from the sixties. Varady pays scrupulous heed to musical values while articulating the text with an unemphatic attention to detail and an unexaggerated understanding of meaning worthy of her husband, the great lieder singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who here conducts the Desutches Symphony Orchestra in a glowing but clear-eyed and resolutely unsentimental accompaniment. As if this weren't enough, Varady, who would never sing Brunnhilde or Isolde on stage, gives thrilling accounts of both heroines final scenes--warm, womanly, cutting through the orchestral textures with rapturously beautiful, unstinting, and unstrained tone. Altogether a disk for every Wagnerian and every lover of the art of singing to treasure.

This recital disc was made in 1997. It is amazing how Varady's voice is so pure and beautiful. Simply amazing. Her account of the Immolation scene and Liebestod is among the finest ever made!! This disc was nominated for a Gramophone award, and it sure deserves its nomination. A magnificent achievement.

I just got this recording, I'm ashamed to say that, although I was familiar with the operas, I hadn't heard the Wesendonck Lieder previously. But it's hard to imagine a more impassioned performance than this one. Julia Varady's voice is the superb instrument for Wagner's late Romantic style, and the conducting of the orchestra by Deitrich Fischer-Dieskau is top rate, despite what another reviewer has stated here. I heartily recommend this to anyone interested in some of the more obscure corners of Wagner's oeuvre.

Julia Varady's account of the Immolation & Liebestod is one of the most beautiful I've ever heard. She certainly stands up with the legends - Birgit Nilsson, Christa Ludwig, Jessye Norman, Eileen Farrell, Cheryl Studer. Yes, her voice is not as powerful but it is very beautiful and characterful - there's passion infused in every phrase which makes it so uniquely satisfying. A great addition to your library.

As for FD's conducting, it's not bad as the reviewer below stated. FD's principle is that he accompanies the singer. And the voice is not an obbligato to the orchestra. So naturally, he adjusts accordingly. I think it's superb. In fact, better than some more famous conductors have done.

Although Varady's voice is not so strong, she more than compensates for it by her great interpretation.

This disc has been warmly welcomed for Julia Varady's singing of the traditional "big" Wagner roles. Her voice, with its mezzo-ish tint and less than apocalyptic grandeur, would probably not work in a huge house but manages in the studio. But what has not been commented on is the accompaniment by her husband, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. It's plodding and leaden, like a metronome on barbiturates. The extended orchestral ending of the Immolation scene is doled out like bites of slow death. You just can't wait for it to end. And so one wonders how Varady would fare with a top-flight conductor who was not so uxoriously (and ill-advisedly) devoted; it might be relevatory (one way or t'other), like hearing Joan Sutherland when she sang with conductors other than hubby Richard Bonynge. By all means sample Varady's Wagner, but for a thrilling account of the Wesendoncks, try the always underrated Astrid Varnay -- though a few recent releases have started her reputation on the way back up to Valhalla.