Recorded live at a performance in Bayreuth on 14 August 2011, this Lohengrin naturally benefits a lot from the place's amazing sound; the listener will surely forgive the little noises from around the stage or hall: it is, after all, a very small price to pay for having a front-row seat at a live performance, and with the element of risk – taken by the singers, at least – which heightens the experience. The production brings together some of the greatest voices of the day, led by the tenor Klaus Florian Vogt, a real free radical, who started his career as... horn player in the Hamburg Philharmonic! But soon he heard the call of the lyrical, and he began a superb career as a tenor, first lighter, in Mozartian roles, and then more powerful with Wagner and the roles of the young "Heldentenor." As Elsa, we have Annette Dasch, who had already made a much-remarked-upon début in Bayreuth the year before – also as Elsa. Bass Heinrich Zeppenfeld is following the same Bayreuth trajectory, as King Henry the Fowler. The ambiguous Ortrud is played by Petra Lang, who since moved on to play Isolde, also at Bayreuth, a few years later – a fine rendition. © SM/Qobuz

The recordings here by Martha Mödl from 1955 document not only her impeccable rendering of the German, but also her singular singing status. She started out as a mezzo-soprano, but in 1949, with her first Kundry, she switched to the vocal range midway between mezzo and dramatic soprano, and in March 1952 she sang her first Brünnhilde. She was there from the very start in Neubayreuth: From 1951 to 1955, Mödl sang Kundry in all of the Parsifal performances and only began alternating with Astrid Varnay from 1956. She was also cast in the Ring from 1951, first as Gutrune and the Third Norn, and from 1953 also as Brünnhilde and in 1954 as Sieglinde as well. There, too, she alternated with Varnay, who had been performing almost without pause as Brünnhilde since 1951. Mödl sang Isolde in 1952 and 1953. To the director Wieland Wagner she was a “high dramatic soprano free of pathos”. He valued the way her “voice, personality and performance formed an absolutely inseparable whole”. Her stage presence can no longer be experienced through the recordings, but the vocal penetration of the roles can be. © Profil

These are on-stage live recordings of various great Wagnerian moments of the great Swedish dramatic soprano Nina Stemme (born in 1963) made between 2003 and 2013, right during the opera singer’s time of glory, at the prime of her ability – it’s worth pointing out that a dramatic soprano’s voice, as opposed to a “classic” lyric soprano, reaches her full prime rather late in her musical life, considering the extravagant muscular stress required for the roles of Isolde, Sieglinde or Brünnhilde. The orchestra of the Vienna State Opera is conducted by either Seiji Ozawa or Franz Welser-Möst – at the time when they succeeded each other as Music Director of this honourable and particularly traditionalist institution. And let’s not forget that Nina Stemme won the Plácido Domingo’s Operalia Prize in 1993, and gained international recognition as Isolde at Glyndebourne in 2003, the year of the first recordings presented here. Since then, she has played all the legendary female icons such as Elektra, Turandot, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, and many other major roles in Bayreuth. A stellar career fully recognised in this album. © SM/Qobuz

This Profil release is pulled together out of several performances of Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin in a production given at Cologne Philharmonic Hall, led by Semyon Bychkov, in late May to mid June 2008. While issued as a hybrid multichannel DSD three-disc set, the sound is not particularly spectacular, being a little murky and slanted toward the extremes of the spectrum; quiet passages are extremely quiet and loud ones will levitate you out of your seat. It is nonetheless a good performance of Lohengrin, though no one in the cast is particularly well noted, and none of them turns in a performance that would tend to capture one's attention apart from the rest. Clearly this Lohengrin is presented with the attitude of providing an appropriate and respectful service to the work, rather than providing a showcase for a given singer. And for that it works; it is a swiftly moving, efficient performance included with the complete libretto in three languages and if one is planning on taking in a performance of Lohengrin and wants to become familiar with the opera beforehand, this Profil set is close to ideal. On the other hand, for those who own a Lohengrin or two already and know how Elsa is going to get out of the mess she's in, this set likely won't unseat any longstanding favorite recording already on the shelf. As the depth of Lohengrin recordings is nowhere near what it is for the operas in Wagner's Ring cycle or Tristan und Isolde, Profil had a chance to bring on a genuinely competitive set; here it settles for something merely acceptable and relatively ordinary, which is still a nice offering but not likely to grab the brass ring. © TiVo

Download not available

Taken from several live performances at the Gasteig in Munich in early 2023, this recording of Wagner's Siegfried made classical best-seller charts later that year. It is part of a series that began in 2016, intending to record the entire Ring Cycle live. The recordings have all been successful, and this is testimony to the skills of conductor Simon Rattle. There are conductors' Wagner performances, and there are singers' Wagner performances. This is the former. The Bavarian Radio Symphony seizes the listener's attention from the opening bell, and the energy never flags. There is nothing objectionable about the singers, but few of them will stick in one's head. The exception, perhaps, is soprano Anja Kampe as Brunnhilde (and Danae Kontora as the Voice of the Forest Bird); Kampe, of course, doesn't enter until the end, but at that point, everything comes together for a really thrilling conclusion of "radiant love, laughing death." Although these were live performances, they might just as well have been made in a studio; Bavarian Radio's engineering in its hometown is superbly detailed, and the audience discipline is awesome (no applause or other crowd noise of any kind is retained). There is a liveliness to Rattle's Wagner that sets it apart from performances in the German tradition, and it is fully on display in this recording.© James Manheim /TiVo

Johann Sebastian Bach has made the reputation of Café Zimmermann ever since the ensemble was formed in 1999. This new recording presents the music of the Kantor from a different angle, that of the notebooks in which musicians wrote down pieces and movements they particularly liked. This recording brings together works composed by Bach in the late 1740s which may be described as intimate in character, including the famous Trio Sonata from his Musical Offering. The Baroque idiom of this "experimental" sonata is contextualised by the innovative style developed by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel in one of his own trio sonatas. A number of arias by J. S. Bach are also presented here with exclusively instrumental forces. Under the direction of violinist Pablo Valetti and harpsichordist Céline Frisch, the ensemble even ventures into Mozartian territory with the Aria and Fugue, K. 404a, taken from two pieces by Bach that Mozart himself had annotated and arranged in his own musical notebook. Finally, a chorale that Bach was particularly fond of, a three-part fugue played here by harpsichord and flute. Carl Philipp Emanuel had it printed at the end of his father’s musical testament, The Art of Fugue: "Before thy throne I now appear". © Alpha Classics

With this set of 12 cantatas, a few of them quite short, Dutch historical-instrument conductor Ton Koopman approaches the end of his monumental traversal of the complete Bach cantata corpus. The cantatas here mostly date from the last two decades of Bach's life. By this time Bach had cantatas from earlier cycles ready for most occasions pertaining to the liturgical year. Several of the works here were written for special occasions -- weddings in at least two cases. The orchestration for the most part is large and varied, with several pieces including trumpets and tympani; the Cantata No. 195, "Dem Gerechten muß das Licht," BWV 195, features a dazzling array of strings, oboe, oboe d'amore, transverse flutes, horns, trumpets, bassoon, timpani, and continuo. The result is that these pieces play to the strengths of Koopman's interpretations: the warm, flawless blend of the Amsterdam Baroque Choir and the sharp differentiation of the instruments within what remains a big, festive sound overall. The famous cantata in this group is the Cantata No. 140, "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme," BWV 140, with its "Sleepers Awake" chorale and its lovely variations on a pastoral theme. Sample the opening chorus (CD 2, track 1) for an idea of what you can expect in the various large choruses in the lesser-known cantatas in the set: each has its nice textural touches, and not a one gets lost in Koopman's expert interpretation. Hear the "Welt, ade, ich bin dein müde" (World, goodbye, I am tired of you) movement of the Cantata No. 158, "Der Friede sei mit dir," BWV 158, for an example of Koopman at his best: this odd combination of a bass aria with mantra-like interjections of the chorale from the choir's sopranos would throw a lesser conductor. The soloists in this set are also unusually effective. Soprano Sandrine Piau's voice is unhampered by the high pitch Koopman employs, and her soaring lyricism makes an effective foil for the unusual, rather English horn-like timbre of the alto of Bogna Bartosz. There is something a bit cool in Koopman's readings; for deep humanistic insights into Bach's music, the evolving cantata set by John Eliot Gardiner may be preferable. But in the public, festive music heard here, this lion of the historical-performance movement is hard to beat. © TiVo