Customer Reviews

Wagner: Tristan und Isolde

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

 

 

Before this recording was available, I often thought Nilsson and Vickers would be the IDEAL Tristan and Isolde together--if only there were a recording. Now there is! Strangely, I had also cast Grace Hoffman as Brangaene in my mind, and she's there too! This is one of those performances (live from Buenos Aires) that no matter how bad the sound balances are, the listener is transported to stage with the singers leaving your headphones and easy chair miles away. This is because the singers' performance transcends the material as a great opera performance should but rarely does. For me to give any opera recording five stars, no less a live performance from 1971, is altogether phenomenal. It's worth any price.

I really cannot understand all the recent hoopla over Eaglen and Heppner in TRISTAN! Anyone who knows anything about the opera and has heard recordings such as this one (or Nilsson & Windgassen under Bohm on DG) - to say nothing of the old Met broadcasts - will recognize this for the "real thing" rather than a tenuous and uninteresting sight-reading by comparison. Nilsson and Vickers get into the roles and create something truly magic and spellbinding. Stein may not be Furtwangler but he leads a flowing performance with authority and strength. The supporting cast is first-rate. Grab it before it disappears (which the good stuff seems to do with alarming frequency).

He was a sublime musician. But that was second. He sang with moral authority. He demanded that you feel the music and think about what he was singing. Nilsson simply astonished. What recordings fail to capture was the volume of her voice, which was true loud and soft. This recording captures the two greatest postwar singers in performance.

I will not say again what other people already have and with better words... Needless to say that Vickers + Nilsson should have been the best singers as Tristan and Isolde in that period. In particular, if you have ever heard the EMI studio recording with Vickers under Karajan and the live DG one with Nilsson under Boehm, this is undoubtly the case... on paper... First let's say that Stein's direction is very interesting indeed as well as Hoffmann's Brangaene (much better than in other roles like the Nurse from the Frau ohne Schatten). Franz Crass is also very well in place and his voice has been captured will all its intensity. This is unfortunately not the case for the rest of the cast, including the Orchestra and... Isolde. Sound is rather constricted, not in stereo but even in mono it lacks some space around the voices (not atmospheric enough!). Vickers is not bad although that was his first stage appearance as Tristan. Further as given in the liflet, he first was reluctant to singing with Nilsson whose voice had scared so many potential Tristans before (including Domingo in his prime!). Vickers only lacks some confidence in the role but he already had everything as he later proved under Karajan's recording (not to miss with Ludwig, superb, and Dernesch, very feminine although not completely commanding vocally speaking but memorable!). NO!, Nilsson was simply in bad condition that night! Maybe she herself was afraid of the special event, maybe the microphones were not ideally placed or well adjusted to her (huge) voice (the long monologue towards the end is awfully cut while it should be an Isolde's masterpiece!). She further sounds not as bright as usual, as if she was swimming in cotton. One year later for her farewell in Italy she would sing Isolde with force and powerful ease never reached before (Myto CD under Mehta) although the voice started sounding a little old. But I should say "little, little..." because by other standard comparisons, she remains Isolde! Music lovers like me should probably wait a little more for the version of 1973 under Boehm once again but at the Choregies d'Orange in France, once issued on CDs but unavailable for nearly 10 years!

I do not own this recording, but have only borrowed it. I wish I had it. It is the best of all the Tristan und Isolde's I have heard. The voices fill the space, and work well with the orchestra demands --- no "disappearing Tristan here, or screeching Isolde" trying to survive the din of all the instruments. And the conductor's reading of the score is vital and vibrant, and in this work, which I have paid to see five times and never stayed awake during once, that is something to say.

Confession: I have not heard this recording. But I have heard, and own, recordings of Nilsson and Vickers singing Tristan und Isolde at the Met and from the Choregies d'Orange in 1974. They played off one another's feral power and meticulous musicianship, and the results are (in the two cases I can vouch for) utterly astonishing. I can't imagine they're any less impressive, here. (P.S. I've heard of a Ramon Vinay/Birgit Nilsson Tristan from the early 60s which is itself a decibelathon.)