Parsifal is the second installment in Pentatone's ambitious project to record Wagner's ten important operas between in 2011 and 2013 in celebration of the bicentennial of his birth, featuring live concert performances with Marek Janowski leading Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin and Rundfunkchor Berlin. Janowski is an old hand at Wagner, having conducted the first (and very fine) digital recording of The Ring, and he brings a sure understanding and unified conception to Parsifal. One of its most immediately noticeable characteristics is its urgency, which essentially means faster tempos. His version at three and three-quarters hours is nearly a half hour shorter than classic recordings like Knappertsbusch's 1951 Bayreuth version and Solti's Decca release. What's gained is a momentum and sense of dramatic movement in an opera that's notorious for bogged-down performances. It also has the effect of making the opera seem more personal, even intimate at moments, because the momentum gives the dialogue between characters such immediacy. Janowski is sensitive to allowing the music plenty of space to unfold where it calls for evoking a timeless expansiveness, such as the scenes in the Hall of the Grail. The orchestra and chorus perform with seamless assurance and with a velvety sensuality. Janowski keeps textures transparent so that details of the scoring are easily audible, and that transparency also contributes to the intimacy of his reading. The exemplary vocal performances are uniformly very fine, and the singers bring an acute sense of drama to their roles and their interactions The recording is blessed with a wealth of expressive, resonant, tonally sumptuous, and clearly differentiated low voices, including Evgeny Nikitin as Amfortas, Dimitry Ivashchenko as Titurel, Franz-Josef Selig as Gurnemanz, and Eike Wilm Schulte as Klingsor. Christian Elsner is a passionate Parsifal and his ringing tenor is heroic and robust. As Kundry, Michelle DeYoung sings with warmth and poignancy and is especially effective in her rich lower register. The sound of the hybrid multichannel SACD is immaculate and spacious.© TiVo

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

Shortly after Andris Nelsons began his tenure as the Gewandhauskapellmeister of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig in 2018, he initiated a partnership between that group and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with whom he has served as music director since 2014. These two venerable orchestras have traits in common beyond the current leadership, and one of those concerns the subject of the present box set, Richard Strauss. Following in some mighty footprints, Strauss debuted with the Gewandhausorchester at 23, presenting his Symphony in F minor in 1887; 20 years later, he was regularly guest conducting the group. During a 1904 tour of North America, Strauss made his lone appearance conducting the Boston Symphony in a performance of three of his works along with music by Beethoven and Wagner. The inspiration for this survey of Strauss' major works for orchestra comes from a 2019 U.S. tour by the Gewandhausorchester. During this trip, the orchestra made appearances in Boston that included a joint performance of the Festliches Präludium for organ and orchestra, Op. 61. Joined by organist Olivier Latry, this is the lone work performed by the combined orchestras, with the duties of conveying these monumental works divided between the two groups. The Boston Symphony covers the first three discs, and the Gewandhausorchester takes the next three, with the final disc containing the Festliches Präludium and shared duties between the groups. Not only do we have two of the world's leading orchestras, but Nelsons brings in a couple of star soloists for this survey in cellist Yo-Yo Ma for Don Quixote, Op. 35, with the Boston Symphony, and pianist Yuja Wang for the Burleske in D minor, with the Gewandhausorchester. Exceptionally wrought performances throughout by the orchestras -- including fine solo performances from the orchestra musicians -- clearly represent the passion Nelsons has for Strauss' music and how well he communicates with the musicians under his baton. Credit also goes to the Deutsche Grammophon engineers for providing pristine sound from these two superior venues over four years. The Boston Symphony had to withdraw from a scheduled combined tour to accompany this release, though the Gewandhausorchester was able to continue.© TiVo

In this world-premiere recording, Andrew Gourlay conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra in his new Parsifal-Suite, a finely-wrought concert piece consisting of instrumental music from Wagner’s Parsifal. The Prelude and Good Friday Music are regularly performed separately from Parsifal, but Andrew Gourlay wanted to "give us more time to settle into the music". As he puts it, "Wagner uses the preludes in such a magical way to settle us into the mood of an opera" so that "we feel like we’re at the beginning of a long-haul journey". The Prelude alone cuts short that journey, so Gourlay has sought to encapsulate Parsifal’s main elements in a seamless suite. In keeping with the fluidity of Wagner’s score, Gourlay has carefully selected the order of the excerpts so that they flow into one another without breaks, using "the tiniest tweaks to allow the instrumentation to connect". The result is a sumptuous 45-minute work that allows Wagner’s exquisite music to be enjoyed in a new way. © Orchid Classics

Ever since Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus and the subsequent film by Milos Forman, the operas of Mozart's rival Antonio Salieri have enjoyed a revival: historians determined that not only did Salieri not poison Mozart, he admired him, and Mozart at least respected the older Italian. Indeed, Les Horaces (1786) represents several accomplishments that were not on Mozart's résumé: it is a full-scale French opera, and its recitatives are orchestrally accompanied and contribute elegantly to the action. Berlioz, always an astute critic, numbered himself among the admirers of Salieri's French operas of the 1780s; this one was not as successful as the others, but that could have been due to any number of factors. The plot deals with a woman, Camille, whose romantic life is caught between factions in a war in early Roman times, and Rousset's live reading here benefits from a strong soprano lead, Dutch singer and French Baroque specialist Judith van Wanroij. Other singers likewise step up, but the real credit goes to Rousset, who gets the strengths of Salieri's score: the grand intermèdes, and the exciting finale of Act 1, where the joining-together of action and music is in Mozart's league even if the tunes are not. Also praiseworthy is the engineering work of the curiously named Little Tribeca team, who obtain the best possible sound from none other than Versailles. Highly recommended to those who have dismissed Salieri: this is a sympathetic and enthusiastic performance of his music. © TiVo

Andris Nelsons has emerged as one of the top conductors of big late Romantic repertory, and his cycle of Bruckner symphonies has contained some gems. Here, he pairs the Symphony No. 6 in A major, with the gigantic Symphony No. 9 in D minor, where the composer strove for the heights of Beethoven's Ninth, but didn't quite make it: he died before completing the work. Many completions have been offered, but Nelsons here performs only the first three movements, as completed by the composer before his death. In this case, the Adagio lives up to its "feierlich" (ceremonial, festive) marking despite its 24-plus minutes of slow movement, making for a satisfying finale. Nelsons' Symphony No. 9 in general is quite a strong one, and a good deal of the pleasure is down to the expertise of the venerable Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, which all around ranks among Europe's best. The brass execute flawlessly in the mighty fanfares of the Symphony No. 9, and they're matched by the strings in Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, and the Prelude to Parsifal. Sample the Siegfried Idyll for an example of central European orchestral playing at its absolute best. The Symphony No. 6 in A major is not quite as successful, although the orchestra's talents are undimmed. It's hard to get "feierlich" out of his slower-than-normal, rather lugubrious Adagio (the corresponding movement in the Symphony No. 9 is not so slow), and a sense of the larger line so crucial to Bruckner is lost. In general, however, this is a major release for Brucknerites, with Deutsche Grammophon, as with other releases in this series, furnishing excellent sound from the Gewandhaus.© TiVo

In 1743, two years before Rameau’s Platée, Boismortier created an extraordinarily modern and madcap "comic ballet", Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse. As the exuberant plotunfurls, Cervantes’ hero encounters monsters, enchanters, princesses and people from Japan, making for plenty of offbeat and audacious dances and choruses. Musical beautyrubs shoulders with satirical and irreverent comedy. A choice work for Hervé Niquet, who leads his Concert Spirituel with unparalleled energy! © Château de Versailles Spectacles

While Mozart was largely overlooked in the French capital, Antonio Salieri took on the reigns of the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris Opera), a fruitful collaboration that was completely broken up by the French Revolution. After the success of his work Les Danaïdes, composed for Paris in 1784, Salieri worked tirelessly with Beaumarchais, spurred on by the success and scandal of his Figaro, on a new project which would become Tarare. Beaumarchais moved himself shamelessly toward stardom, skillfully self-promoting and attending rehearsals so as to assure that the orchestra played pianissimo to emphasize the primacy of his verse during performances. Beaumarchais found that the music was too overwhelming to “embellish the lyrics”.Created one year after Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (which was relatively well-received in Vienna before triumphing in Prague), Tarare was an immense success in Paris maintaining the status of the composer’s repertoire despite the political turmoil of the time before disappearing from view around 1826, thereon ceasing to be played. Beaumarchais’ words were immediately adapted into Italian by Lorenzo Da Ponte to be performed and met with equal success in Vienna. Tarare is half lyrical tragedy, half comic opera with a hint of orientalism.After resuscitating Les Danaïdes and Les Horaces, Christophe Rousset finished off his series of recordings dedicated to Salieri’s French operas for the Parisian public. Tarare is very much of its time, that of the Lumières, and used the power of art to challenge despotism in all its forms. Thanks to Christophe Rousset’s excellent delivery and lively direction, this recording enables one to judge the merits of the composition and the chasm that separates an honest and talented musician from a solitary and impassioned one like Mozart. © François Hudry/Qobuz