Richard WAGNER (1813-1883)
Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876): Das Rheingold
[144.09]: Die Walküre [211.16]: Siegfried [231.38]:
Götterdämmerung [260.10]
Hans Hotter (bass) - Wotan, Wanderer; Astrid Varnay (soprano)
- Brünnhilde; Wolfgang Windgassen (tenor) - Siegfried; Ramon
Vinay (tenor) - Siegmund; Regina Resnik (soprano) - Sieglinde, 3rd
Norn; Ira Malaniuk (mezzo) - Fricka, 2nd Norn, Waltraute
(Götterdämmerung); Natalie Hinsch-Gröndahl
(soprano) - Gutrune; Hermann Uhde (baritone) - Donner, Gunther; Gustav
Neidlinger (baritone) - Alberich; Paul Kuen (tenor) -
Mime; Erich Witte (tenor) - Loge; Josef Greindl (bass) - Fafner,
Hunding, Hagen; Ludwig Weber (bass) - Fasolt; Gerhard
Stolze (tenor) - Froh; Bruni Falcon (soprano) - Freia, Ortlinde; Maria
von Ilosvay (contralto) - Erda, 1st Norn, Schwertleite; Rita
Streich (soprano) - Woodbird; Erika Zimmermann (soprano) - Woglinde;
Hetty Plümacher (mezzo) - Wellgunde; Gisela Litz (mezzo) - Flosshilde,
Siegrune; Brünnhild Friedland (soprano) - Gerhilde; Liselotte
Thomamüller (soprano) - Helmwige; Lise Sorrell (mezzo) - Waltraute
(Die Walküre); Sybilla Plate (contralto) - Grimgerde; Erika
Schubert (contralto) - Rossweise
Chorus and Orchestra of the Bayreuth Festival/Clemens Krauss
rec. Bayreuth Festival, 8-12 August 1953
OPERA D’ORO OPD1504 [14 CDs: 843:47]
This reissue of the Clemens Krauss mono recording of the Ring
from Bayreuth in 1953 is described by the Allegro Corporation, who are
responsible for the presentation, as a “deluxe edition”.
Although it is hardly in the same category as the genuinely
“deluxe” reissue of the Solti Ring from Decca it is a
considerable advance on the frequently perfunctory treatment given to
historical reissues, coming as it does with four booklets containing
complete texts and translations and a fifth booklet of 24 pages (entirely in
English) giving not only synopses of the operas but three essays on the work
itself. These essays include what is in effect an in-depth review of the
performance from Robert Levine of Classics Today, which is admirably
frank about the drawbacks of the recording while rightly praising many
aspects of what is undoubtedly a most important issue. I shall refer to
Levine’s comments at several points during the course of my own
review.
Levine correctly identifies the two principal pluses of this
recording as the conducting of Clemens Krauss and the superb singing cast
which Bayreuth managed to assemble in 1953. He also notes that the
fifty-year old mono sound is “excellent”, making the comment
that “many believe it was the Decca records team that recorded all the
Bayreuth performances in the ’50s.” This wish-fulfilling
statement is fiction masquerading as fact. John Culshaw, the producer of the
studio recording of the Solti Ring in Vienna which began five years
later, notes in his autobiography Putting the record straight that
Decca did indeed dispatch a recording team to Bayreuth in 1953, but after
recording the dress rehearsal and opening night of Lohengrin they
were recalled to London and a German team was substituted who promptly
changed Decca’s microphone placements. The results were found
“unacceptable for technical reasons” and Decca refused to issue
them. Culshaw cites questions of balance, and elsewhere refers to the fact
that at Bayreuth without careful microphone placement “the brass,
which plays from an area under the stage, can sometimes sound
muffled”. That is certainly the case here. Moreover in Ring
Resounding Culshaw states that Gordon Parry persuaded the Decca
authorities to record the Keilberth Ring in 1955 (recently reissued
in stereo) with the implication that they needed persuasion since they were
not accustomed to doing so.
There are elements which suggest strongly that the recording was
never designed for commercial release - voices tend to come and go depending
on their position on the stage. The orchestral balance is far from
satisfactory with the distant-sounding trumpets often close to the threshold
of inaudibility - as in their statement of the Gold motif which precede the
Rhinemaiden’s paean of praise, CD 1 track 3 - where they should
dominate the texture. The recording clearly derives from a single set of
performances, with no possibility of patching errors from dress rehearsal
tapes. Krauss only conducted one cycle of the Ring in 1953 since the
other cycle was assigned to Keilberth. Oddly enough the Keilberth cycle,
issued pseudonymously by Allegro, was the first complete Ring on LPs
although threatened copyright suits ensured that its sojourn in the
catalogue was short-lived.
Levine also states that the sound “has been re-mastered for
these CDs to make it even clearer, with voice/orchestra balance more
natural.” Again this is a rather dubious statement. The very opening
phrase from Woglinde (CD 1, track 2) comes as a real shock, very close to
the microphones and sounding louder than the full orchestral outburst which
precedes her words. The laughter of the Rhinemaidens just before
Alberich’s appearance is loud enough nearly to obscure the orchestral
sound emanating from the pit. Afterwards the balance becomes more realistic
as the characters move backwards across the stage (with some audible
thumping) to the extent that Alberich’s mocking laugh at the end of
the scene hardly registers. Neidlinger here, as in his later recording for
Solti - which it closely resembles in every detail - employs Wagner’s
notated laugh for Alberich in Siegfried, which is surely right.
Levine does not comment upon the quality of the orchestral playing itself,
which is scrawny in the extreme during the Rheingold Prelude. The
strings in particular sounding rather unpleasant and the horns tubby rather
than heroic. Happily things soon improve as the performance takes wing - and
take wing it most certainly does.
Much of this is due to the appearance of Hans Hotter as Wotan.
Throughout this cycle he is in much firmer voice than he was when he came to
undertake the role for Solti in Walküre and Siegfried
some ten years later. Culshaw states that he was not cast in
Rheingold there because the “role no longer suited him”.
There may well have been an element of special pleading here - at the time
of the Rheingold sessions Hotter was under exclusive contract
elsewhere - but his performance here does not begin to justify such a
scathing comment. Time and again he produces insights into text and music
that eluded George London in the Solti recording. His voice is always heroic
and well placed without a suspicion of wobble. Nor do the top notes,
sometimes a cause for concern in later years, create any sense of asthmatic
hoarseness. What we have here is a Wotan at the height of his powers and the
performance is electrifying.
In his booklet note Robert Levine mentions Wolfgang
Windgassen’s error with a late entry in the Forging song -
unusual for Windgassen, who was prone to running ahead of the beat rather
than behind it - but does not mention a far worse error by Bruni Falcon as
Freia, who completely misses out one whole phrase just before the entry of
the Giants in Rheingold (end of CD1, track 5). Apart from this
slip the drama of the opening of this scene is well realised by Krauss. That
said, he seems to be hustled by Ira Malaniuk’s dramatically well
observed Fricka who consistently pushes the tempo forward. However with the
entry of the Giants themselves (CD1, track 6), there’s a very rough
performance of Fasolt by Ludwig Weber, who almost totally misses the
compassionate side of this lovelorn character. At the very start he slows
down drastically from the tempo set by Krauss. One is constantly aware of
his desire to take the music at a more moderate pace. His tuning is not all
it should be either, going off pitch badly during the passage where the
Giants seize Freia (end of CD1, track 9).
The other Gods are well taken. Gerhard Stolze is perhaps an
unexpected choice for Froh, but the pungency of his character tenor is much
less in evidence here than it would become, and he produces heroic tone with
some degree of lyricism. Hermann Uhde is well cast as the blustering Donner,
and Erich Witte is a personable Loge with plenty of engagement with the
text. He also has the right smoothness of delivery for his Narration,
although the trumpet again misses out on the pianissimo delivery of
the Rhinegold theme during Loge’s colloquy with Fricka, vanishing
totally beneath the voices (CD 1, track 9).
The anvils during the Descent to Nibelheim are a feeble bunch,
completely ignoring Wagner’s requirement for a crescendo to
fortissimo and back again. They remain resolutely at the same volume
throughout. During the succeeding scene Alberich and Mime are in the safe
hands of Gustav Neidlinger and Paul Kuen, who would reprise these roles five
years later for Solti. Although Neidlinger’s backstage voice when
invisible lacks the immediacy that Culshaw brought to the later recording,
it remains well in the picture. What is less commendable is the manner in
which the final bars before the entry of Wotan and Loge are artificially
faded down to produce a most inelegant change of CD. Surely the break should
have been made during the silent bar when Mime drops the Tarnhelm in panic,
as it is in most other sets.
At the beginning of the second CD Krauss sets a very leisurely tempo
for the opening section of Mime’s narration, tempting Kuen to push
ahead of the orchestra and conclude a full half bar before them (track 2).
However with the re-entry of Neidlinger and the extended confrontations
between him, Hotter and Witte which constitute the remainder of the scene
and the beginning of the next there is a real sense of dramatic involvement.
This is assisted by superlative singing from all three principals and
degrees of instinctive subtlety which Neidlinger failed to recapture for
Solti five years later. It is just a shame that his instincts lead him to
extremes in the delivery of his Curse (track 8). There he not only acquires
the wrong sort of forcefulness but shakes his tuning loose to an
unacceptable degree. He appears to be a full tone off pitch at two separate
points. Solti delivers the orchestral peroration at a proper Sehr
schnell which seems to elude Krauss, who is just a smidgeon too
polite.
With the re-entry of the Giants, Weber is again remarkably unfeeling
in the passage where he spies Freia’s hair through the piled-up hoard.
At this point Wagner exceptionally gives a dynamic direction of
p to the singer, but Weber simply ignores this, barnstorming
through his notes and ending up shouting (track 10). Hotter brings a
remarkable degree of sensitivity to his horror-struck exclamation when
Fafner demands the Ring to fill up the crevice. Shortly thereafter Falcon as
Freia sings both her cries of Hilfe! a beat too late, producing a
most uncomfortable discord against Malaniuk’s Fricka. One is grateful
that this is her last contribution to proceedings. After that Maria von
Ilosvay delivers Erda’s Warning with great solemnity (track 11). The
orchestral sound seems to come somewhat further forward during the Forging
of the Rainbow Bridge, exceptionally well delivered by Uhde and leading into
a splendid performance of the final scene.
Krauss is indeed a very good conductor of the Ring - his
approach has plenty of weight when required. He delivers excitement too
without adopting the extremes of speed of later Bayreuth performances by
conductors such as Karl Böhm and Pierre Boulez. Occasionally he is
unexpectedly slack - as at Donner’s Hier, ihr Riesen! which is
hardly lebhaft as marked - but for much of the time he keeps a firm
hand on proceedings. Despite the unflattering recorded sound he manages to
rival Solti in the presence he gets from the orchestra. The strings in the
Forging of the Rainbow Bridge sound like a completely transformed body from
their feeble predecessors at the opening. It is interesting to speculate how
his Wagnerian style might have developed - Hitler apparently regarded him as
second only to Furtwängler - but his relatively early death robbed us
of the opportunity to discover this.
Energy levels are maintained during the Prelude to Act One of Die
Walküre, with the strings churning away at their repeated
figurations with all the guts that one could wish. As the curtain rises and
Siegmund enters the hut, we hear the sound of the wind from the storm
outside - an effect that Culshaw omitted for Solti - and the opening scene
is beautifully phrased. Both Regina Resnik and Ramon Vinay as the Volsung
twins were shortly to convert downwards to mezzo and baritone respectively,
but here their top notes are fine although the tone of both is darker than
would be expected from the specified soprano and tenor. Vinay unfortunately
goes wrong at the beginning of the second section of his narrative (CD1,
track 6), getting half a bar behind for some six bars. Apart from that
everything goes well, the orchestral balance is a decided improvement on
Rheingold, and Krauss thankfully does not take the Spring song
too quickly, just at a properly rhapsodic lilt. At the beginning of the Act
Vinay is a little brusque - his call for Ein Quell! sounds like an
impatient customer in a pub just before closing time (CD1, track 2) - but he
soon settles down, with some impassioned mezza voce. Both he and
Resnik sing their hearts out in the love duet, but bring plenty of subtlety
to the words too. Greindl is a very black-sounding Hunding.
At the outset of Act Two Krauss sets a very fast pace, and thereby
creates a difficulty for himself. Wagner specifically states (twice) that
the tempo should be exactly maintained throughout Wotan’s opening
address to Brünnhilde and in her Hoyotoho! (CD 2, end of track 1
and track 2). This produces a sense of driving energy which exactly fits the
situation but because Krauss has pushed ahead so rapidly at the very
beginning he has to slow down as the voices enter, and the sense of impetus
is dissipated. Also here, once again, the orchestral balances are awry, with
the trumpets’ delivery of the Sword theme - so important in the
context of the plot at this point - frequently too quiet and sometimes
obscured altogether. This is a shame, because Hotter is here at the height
of his game, Malaniuk seems to be more relaxed about Krauss’s speeds,
and Astrid Varnay is a spectacular Brünnhilde from the very off. During
the early 1950s she and Martha Mödl were the two principal exponents of
the role throughout the world, and frequently shared the part in the two
annual Bayreuth cycles. Mödl for all her expressiveness had a somewhat
curdled tone which could turn sour and drift into unsteadiness. Varnay had
no such problems, and she yields few if any points here to Mödl in
tenderness as she comforts her father and laments his decision to abandon
Siegmund. In the long monologue at the centre of the Act (CD 2, track 7)
Hotter colours his voice rather differently from his later performance for
Solti, but every bit as effectively, although the orchestral balance in the
climaxes is somewhat lacking in impact.
Krauss handles the following scene between the Volsung twins well
but he seems to be nervous of boring the audience during the
Todesverkundigung with its solemn cadences. These he tends to hassle
in a manner which lacks the other-worldly atmosphere that the scene demands
(CD 3, track 2). At the beginning of Act Three (CD 3, track 8) he launches
the Ride of the Valkyries at one hell of a lick, maintaining a steady onward
pressure that reduces some of the lines delivered by the warrior maidens to
an unseemly gabble. His speed does not allow sufficient space for the brass
to reverberate and the opening statement of the main theme on the horns is
almost totally obliterated by the skirling woodwind and strings that
surround them. Under the circumstances it may be cruel to point out that
some of the girls, robbed of the chance to expand their tone, make a
somewhat insignificant and uneven impression. Hotter too sounds out of sorts
after his entry (CD 3, track 11), with the nobility of his tone underplayed.
The rather ‘woofy’ sound noticeable in his later recordings
comes to the fore for the first time in this cycle as he attempts to keep
pace with Krauss’s driving delivery.
When Brünnhilde steps forward to receive her punishment, the
tension momentarily slackens (CD 4, track 1). As her sisters attempt to
intercede Krauss once again takes off and the ensemble threatens to come off
the rails altogether as the voices pile unrhythmically one on top of the
other. It is only when Brünnhilde and Wotan are left alone that the
performance suddenly regains dramatic weight and the delivery by Varnay and
Hotter of their long final scene is simply magnificent. There are unexpected
moments, in the delivery of lines when Wotan (losing his temper) tells how
he shattered the sword, or when Varnay fearfully asks what she is to suffer.
These are unconventional but come off superbly (CD 4, track 4). During the
Farewell Krauss allows Hotter all the time he needs to phrase his lines with
affection and emotion. This he does in a firm voice which shows no sense of
tiredness at the end of a long evening. He has to take more than one breath
during his final phrase, and the strokes of his spear which summon Loge (CD
4, track 7) are conspicuous by their absence from Wieland Wagner’s
minimalist production. These hardly impinge on what is a great experience
both musically and dramatically. Even the orchestral balances seem to
improve.
In Act One of Siegfried Paul Kuen’s Mime unaccountably
enters a bar late in his description of fear (CD 2, track 1) and stays that
way for a very uncomfortable eight bars groping desperately for the correct
pitch. When Windgassen makes his late entry in the first verse of the
Forging song (CD 2, track 2) he does not attempt to harmonise with
the orchestra, simply ploughing ahead with his notes despite the discords
that result. He then simply skips a bar in order to catch up. What follows
is not much better. In a clearly desperate attempt to produce volume,
Windgassen adopts a totally cavalier attitude to both rhythm and notes -
sometimes pushing ahead of the beat, sometimes lagging behind, sometimes
mangling the words and omitting whole phrases altogether. As for the
hammering: John Culshaw in Ring resounding comments that when Decca
were recording the Keilberth cycle two years later, the onstage hammering
was “so loud and unrhythmical as to obliterate the voice of
Siegfried”. An emergency patching session had to be arranged to
correct this; I presume this is the version employed in the commercial
release of that cycle. Now we can hear what he was complaining about: there
are patches of notated hammering missing, the rhythm rarely conforms either
to Wagner’s precise notation or to his carefully differentiated
dynamics. Other strokes are added seemingly at random. Through all this
Krauss keeps driving along, presumably hoping that the nightmare will soon
be at an end. In the theatre this sort of approximation of an admittedly
horrendously difficult scene might just be acceptable in a dramatic context.
As part of an audio recording it is just unacceptable, an illustration of
nearly everything that can go catastrophically wrong in a live performance.
Thankfully after the interval sanity is restored in the Second Act.
Neidlinger and Hotter are, as one would expect, superb in their opening
scene, striking sparks off each other both dramatically and musically. When
Windgassen and Kuen return they too sound much more at ease. However the
horn call (CD 3, track 2) suffers from considerable unsteadiness on
sustained notes - which may be tape flutter. In the ensuing scene with
Fafner Windgassen manages at various points to come out half a bar ahead and
(twice) half a bar behind, the final time as he tastes the dragon’s
blood. Kuen is no more satisfactory in the scene leading to his death; he
avoids Gerhard Stolze’s caterwauling for Solti, but is no more
accurate to the notes that Wagner has actually written. The unusually clear
diction of Rita Streich as the Woodbird (luxury casting) cannot offset the
generally sense of rhythmic sloppiness in this scene.
A similar moment of unease occurs during the opening bar of Act
Three (CD 3, track 8), where the orchestra seem to take a couple of seconds
to accelerate into Krauss’s driving tempo. The main problem with this
crucial scene in the drama comes later. When Wotan asks Erda - Hotter and
von Ilosvay both in good voice - to foresee what are his intentions, and she
is unable to answer, Wagner screws up the dramatic tension with three
notated beats of silence. These are additionally marked with a pause and the
even more specific direction “Langes schweigen” (CD 3,
end of track 10). Here Krauss allows no pause at all, and the sense of
suspense and resolution is completely dissipated. Mind you, other sets
compound the offence by even more unforgivably inserting a CD break at this
point. In the later scenes the combination of Windgassen, Hotter and Varnay
is pretty spectacular, although once again Windgassen displays a tendency to
push ahead of the beat which actually infects Varnay as well at one point.
He shows none of the signs of tiredness which can sometimes cause problems
at the end of a long evening. We are told that 1953 was the first year in
which he had sung Siegfried at Bayreuth. Although this pays dividends in
terms of freshness of approach there is a penalty to be paid in his evident
lack of familiarity with the difficult role; I shall return to this problem
later.
In the opening of Götterdämmerung we are met with a
very good trio of singers, with Regina Resnik not sounding at all mezzo-ish
as the Third Norn. Windgassen, recovered from his exertions during
Siegfried, is well matched with Varnay in their dawn duet. When we
reach the Gibichung Hall we encounter Hermann Uhde as a properly heroic
Gunther and the black-toned Greindl as his half-brother. Levine is very rude
indeed about Natalie Hinsch-Gröndahl as Gutrune, describing her
as “so awful that she only throws more light on how luminous the
others are”. This contrasts with the view of William Youngren in
Fanfare, who regarded her as “superb” although Paul Orgel
in the same publication described her as a “weak link” and
“unsteady”. This just goes to show how individual ears can hear
things differently. On the other hand she is definitely not heard to best
advantage in her scene with Siegfried in Act Two (CD 3, track 1), sounding
at once blowsy and thin in tone.
Levine also comments unfavourably on the bass Josef Greindl,
describing him as “otherwise wobbly and invariably ineffective on
recordings” although he acknowledges that here he is “rock-hard
and meaner than sin”. Having suffered through Greindl’s
assumption of roles in Verdi and Beethoven on video (review) I would state unequivocally that
he was not much better in the theatre. He certainly never has the slightest
hint of warmth in his tone. His casting in operatic sets during the 1950s
seems quite inexplicable, when one considers for example his implacable and
totally unsympathetic assumption of the role of King Mark in the otherwise
superb Furtwängler/Flagstad Tristan. Here in the Ring he
is confined to entirely villainous characters, and the lack of warmth in his
tone is less of a problem. In later years he could display a distressing
tendency to sit on the flat side of the note. Here he could give an object
lesson to his Gibichung siblings in accuracy of tuning. Uhde sounds
decidedly uncomfortable during the duet where he swears blood brotherhood
with Siegfried (CD 2, track 1).
One major plus with this set is the consistency of casting
throughout - unlike very many rival recordings. Only one role is taken by
different singers in two operas, and that is the part of Waltraute whose
part in Götterdämmerung is so much more substantial than in
Walküre. Ira Malaniuk gives a searching and intimate account of
her narration (CD 2, track 5). When Windgassen arrives disguised as Gunther
he shows that he did not stand in need of the electronic manipulation to
which Culshaw subjected his voice in the Solti set. Act Two comes off very
well indeed, with a superb choral contribution and Greindl sounding really
menacing in his summoning of the vassals. The Stierhorn
contributions, played on trombones, are not well balanced with some of the
instruments sounding very much closer than others (CD 3. track 2). During
the trio at the end of the Act the entry of the horns with the
‘Blood-brotherhood’ motif, as Gunther in horror contemplates the
murder of Siegfried, is really badly articulated. The repeated notes are
joined together in a manner than manages completely to obscure what they are
actually playing (CD 3, track 8).
Act Three builds up a good head of steam, and is dramatically
involving throughout. Again, though, there is a whole collection of errors
which undermines the impact of the whole. Once more Windgassen is the main
culprit. Just before his top C at the entry of the vassals his nerves lead
him to enter a whole bar early (CD 4, track 3). Shortly after this, in his
narration, he completely omits the line telling how he took the Ring and
Tarnhelm from Fafner’s hoard. A couple of minutes later he gets ahead
of the beat in his description of his awakening of Brünnhilde. The
booklet with this issue tells us that 1953 was the first year that he sang
the role of Siegfried at Bayreuth. To be frank throughout this performance
there are plentiful signs that he hadn’t learnt it properly. On the
other hand, nine years later Culshaw observed that his rhythm “had got
slack”. Disastrously he tried to replace him for the Decca recording
of Siegfried so the problem seems to have been endemic even in his
later career. One must however observe with pleasure that Varnay delivers an
excoriating account of the Immolation, and that Greindl’s Hagen
roars out his final line with a regard for the written notes that is all too
infrequent in more modern performances.
The new translation by Bill Parker and Rex Levang comes thankfully
with - rather too heavily abridged - stage directions (in English only)
which were for some unfathomable reason altogether omitted from the
translations provided with some parts of the Solti set. However the idiom is
very modern indeed and rather Transatlantic in tone, somewhat reminiscent of
the translation by Peggie Cochrane which originally accompanied the Solti
recordings but has long since been abandoned: Wotan exclaims “I paid
for that dwelling with dirty money!” and the final line of the
tetralogy is “Get away from the Ring!” which may be literally
accurate but sounds somewhat over-chatty. The booklet could also have been
more carefully proof-read. At one point a passage correctly ascribed to
Gutrune in the German is inexplicably reassigned to Gunther in the
translation (page 14). All the booklets - and the CD labels too - come with
new artwork by John Martinez. This somewhat recalls Rackham reflected
through art nouveau spectacles, although I am not quite sure what the
crouching nude male on the back of each booklet is intended to convey. There
are a few booklet photographs, although that of Clemens Krauss was clearly
taken many years before his participation in this cycle.
The Krauss Ring has come in for some extremely enthusiastic
praise from some quarters; Levine quotes James Rockwell of the New York
Times describing it as “the best on records” and Alan Blyth
in the Gramophone referring to it as “the most compelling and
best-cast cycle” available. Blyth was notorious for his preference for
vintage live performances as opposed to modern studio recordings, but
despite the fact that he seems quite prepared to ignore the errors his
comments are understandable; and his views are reinforced by the -
admittedly often idiosyncratic - recommendations of the Rough Guide to
Opera. Ronald Grames in Fanfare agreed, describing the set as
“one of the finest - if not the finest - performance of the tetralogy
available”, a verdict with which Colin Clarke in the same publication
agreed when reviewing the Orfeo release in 2011. Neither mention any errors
in the performance. The cycle has also been released by Pristine Audio and
was considerably re-mastered for that reissue by Andrew Rose with results
that Paul Orgel in Fanfare described as “less congested”
and allowing “many previously obscured details” to emerge. He
noted that a “loud cough” and “squeak” in the
opening bars of Siegfried had been successfully expunged by Pristine.
Here they are back, along with plentiful evidence of a bronchitic audience.
The three bars of timpani roll which begin the Prelude - which had
disappeared in some previous issues of the recording such as that by
Archipel, but was restored by Pristine - is once again missing. Indeed the
sound in this new release is so much of an advance on the Archipel issue
(the only version which I had available for comparison) that it sounds like
a different recording altogether, and a much better one to boot.
However the layout on CD represents a step backwards from Archipel,
with for example an unnecessary side break inserted into Act Three of
Walküre, where Archipel managed to fit the whole of that opera
onto three CDs. We are also given unwanted and superfluous breaks in Acts
Two and Three of Siegfried, and Acts Two and Three of
Götterdämmerung, where the music could easily have been
presented unbroken on a single side. There seems to be no good reason for
this, except a misguided desire to equalise the lengths of the CD sides. It
represents a real black mark against this issue since it could so easily
have been avoided. The unavoidable side break in Act One of
Siegfried, badly judged in the Decca set for Solti, is even worse
chosen here, splitting the music in the middle of an orchestral phrase.
Indeed the set as a whole includes nine breaks in the music between CD
sides, whereas the Solti re-mastering has only six. In the event only four
would actually have been required here.
At the end of the day the recorded sound, despite the massive
improvement of the re-mastering, still leaves quite a lot to be desired, to
the extent that this could not possibly be considered as the sole
representation of the Ring in a collection. Then again no complete
recording could ever be perfect - I mentioned several serious concerns about
the Decca Ring in my earlier review - and this performance, with its
generally superlative singing and conducting, must be counted among the
greatest of live recordings of the cycle. It is well worthy of a place
alongside the Goodall Ring (in English) as a second traversal of the
music for those who rightly regard the Ring as one of the greatest
masterpieces of all time. Those of a sensitive disposition should still
avoid the end of Act One of Siegfried. Prospective purchasers might
find the clearly more interventionist re-mastering on Pristine to be even
better, even if not much can be done about the performance errors. Given
these errors, surely an even more preferable alternative with many of the
same principal singers - Hotter, Varnay, Windgassen, Vinay, Kuen, Weber,
Greindl, Neidlinger - is the Keilberth Bayreuth recording from two years
later, in stereo sound and incontrovertibly produced by Decca engineers.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
Masterwork Index: Der
Ring des Nibelungen
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