Customer Reviews

Wagner: Highlights from 'The Ring'

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

 

 

Most of the items on this recording are very well done and recorded, but regrettably the CD is let down by Caballe's peformance in the Immolation Scene. I am an admirer of her work as many others are, but find her German is not very idiomatic (one could make the same observations about Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's Italian), and she does not sing the top notes cleanly but scoops them from below instead. In this price range you could do better with the Bohm, Solti, or Karajan - or perhaps Szell best of all - highlights recordings.

I got this 16 years ago and it was my very first Wagner CD.

Now I have a large number of Wagner CDs but this remains a favourite.

There are many arrangements of Ring excerpts around, but this has the best versions, in my view, especially for Dawn & RJ.

Mehta's pacing is excellent, particularly for the Goetterdaemmerung tracks, and the sound is superb: so much detail is revealed very clearly.

The Immolation Scene with Caballe was recorded separately (the stereo placing is clearly different from the others) and she is nothing like a Nilsson, but it's OK.

So, overall, a wonderful introduction to some of the key Highlights of the Ring.

This is a most excellent album, marred by the fact that when the cassette version was adapted to CD length, a recording of Caballé singing the Immolation Scene was tacked on to fill out the length. This is unfortunate, because it mars the perfect artistry and artistic integrity of the original, and of the rest of the CD. My recommendation is to obtain the CD but rerecord it, excising Caballé's singing track, which I frankly find unlistenable, not to mention terribly out of place in an album of Ring instrumentals.

Other than that, the CD is great, and Mehta is the perfect interpreter of this haunting, inspiring, delicious music. It's a terrible shame that the album was mucked about with like this in making the CD, but rerecording it on your own will eliminate this problem.

This CD gives you some of the best highlights of Wagner's "Ring" and includes some powerful vocals, but the emphasis remains with the dramatic symphonic music. The entrance into Valhalla and the Ride of the Valkyries are obviously going to be the favorites of guys like me who like Wagner, but don't like Wagner every day. Like cheesecake, Wagner is not meat and potatoes music, it is pure dessert, gushing with cream and carmel sauce.

Though not an opera officianado, I really enjoyed Brunhilda's Immolation scene in this CD. The dramatic ending to the Ring is one of the greatest musical accomplishments in the history of music.