Customer Reviews

Ultimate Wagner: The Essential Masterpieces [Box Set]

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This is a fantastic bargain, an overlooked 5-CD tour of Bayreuth from the Sixties (Karl Bohm's mid-decade Ring cycle) through the Seventies (Silvio Varviso's 1974 Meistersinger) to the Eighties (James Levine's 1985 Parsifal). The only outsider is Solti's studio Tristan und Isolde from Vienna with the young Birgit Nilsson in gleaming voice.

There's a special theatrical frisson to every excerpt, and even for experienced listeners who might not want to buy the parent sets from which these sizable chunks have been extracted, it's pure pleasure to hear all these performances. The live sonics, engineered originally by Decca dn Philips, are often amazingly fine and never less than good. In sum, a wonderful way to get to a festival that few of us are likely to experience in person.

Lots of singing, but not much in the way of the orchestral passages, which is mostly why I like Wagner.