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The Wagner Project
Matthias Goerne
Classical - Released November 24, 2017 | harmonia mundi
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Wagner : Parsifal
Herbert Kegel
Opera - Released August 12, 2008 | Brilliant Classics
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5 de Diapason
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Parsifal
Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra
Classical - Released May 29, 2011 | Challenge Classics
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Wagner: Parsifal
Jonas Kaufmann
Classical - Released March 1, 2024 | Sony Classical
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Choc de Classica
The world was due for a major new recording of Wagner's Parsifal, with some years having elapsed since the monster, four-hour work had seen a fresh one. There are a number of attractions to this one, recorded live at the Vienna State Opera in 2021. First is the production, designed and directed from house arrest in Russia by Kirill Serebrennikov. The version was controversial at the time, and subsequent events have made it timely. Serebrennikov transplants the tale to a modern prison, with characters in tracksuits and the like; the complex witch Kundry is (believe it or not) a photojournalist. None of this affects the singing, which is done straight, but the release graphics give one an idea. The major draw for many listeners, and probably the one that put the album on classical best-seller charts in early 2024, will be the presence of star tenor Jonas Kaufmann, in fine form in the title role (and album listeners get to avoid the flashback staging designed to circumvent that fact that the 50-something Kaufmann was playing a young man). The instrumental work from the Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper is very strong. However, what really puts this performance in the history books is the performance of mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca as Kundry. This was apparently her first appearance in a Wagner opera, but in the top-volume material in Act III, she is fully Kaufmann's equal. Some may find that she carries the whole production, with a rising line of intensity running through the whole giant structure. In any event, even listeners who own the Parsifal of Herbert von Karajan or one of the other classic readings will want to check this recording out.© James Manheim /TiVo
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Wagner: Parsifal by Hans Knappertsbusch
Hans Knappertsbusch
Opera - Released February 8, 2023 | Alexandre Bak - Classical Music Reference Recording
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Wagner: Parsifal
Evgeny Nikitin
Opera - Released February 1, 2012 | PentaTone
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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
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Wagner : Parsifal
Herbert von Karajan
Classical - Released January 1, 1981 | Deutsche Grammophon (DG)
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Gramophone Record of the Year
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Wagner: Parsifal WWV 111 by Clemens Krauss
Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Opera - Released October 21, 2021 | Alexandre Bak - Classical Music Reference Recording
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Wagner: Der fliegende Holländer, WWV 63 (Live)
Bayreuther Festspielorchester
Opera - Released March 14, 2006 | Orfeo
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Gramophone Editor's Choice
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Wagner: Le vaisseau fantôme (Diapason n°615)
George London
Opera - Released June 28, 2013 | Les Indispensables de Diapason
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J. S. Bach : Köthener Trauermusik, BWV 244a
Raphaël Pichon
Choral Music (Choirs) - Released October 6, 2014 | harmonia mundi
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4F de Télérama -
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Wagner: Parsifal, WWV 111
Martha Modl
Opera - Released June 2, 2023 | Profil Edition Guenter Haenssler
Booklet
The production of Wagner's overgrown Grail tale Parsifal from the shrine at Bayreuth, directed by the composer's grandson Wieland and first staged in 1951, was famously spare in its design; the conductor, Hans Knappertsbusch ("Kna," to perfect Wagnerites), thought the sets were still to be constructed and was chagrined to find that there really were very few. Vocally, however, the music was luxuriant. By the time of this 1955 live recording, most of the singers, including Martha Mödl as Kundry, were veterans of the production, and there was a strong newcomer, baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Amfortas, already with his characteristic honeyed tone. The production was recorded in the studio in 1951, with somewhat better sound than on this release, but really, the live sound is impressive for 1955 (some of the credit should go to Hänssler Classic's remastering), and text intelligibility is great. Further, Knappertsbusch is known to have preferred live performance to recording, and the production benefits from a good deal of forward motion; sample around and compare timings with other recordings, for almost everywhere, Knappertsbusch comes in faster than average. Yet the music never feels rushed in any way. Of course, several generations of Wagner singers have come and gone since this recording was made, but for those wanting to experience Wagner "from the source," this may be a prime choice despite its age.
© James Manheim /TiVo
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Richard Wagner : Der Fliegende Holländer - Pierre-Louis Dietsch : Le vaisseau fantôme ou le maudit des mers
Marc Minkowski
Classical - Released November 4, 2013 | naïve classique
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Diapason d'or
![Bayreuth Festival Orchestra Wagner: Siegfried, WWV 86C & Parsifal, WWV 111 (Excerpts) [Live]](https://static.qobuz.com/images/covers/ib/fs/i061raloqfsib_100.jpg)
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Wagner: Siegfried, WWV 86C & Parsifal, WWV 111 (Excerpts) [Live]
Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Opera - Released February 4, 2022 | Profil
Booklet
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
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For Clara: Works by Schumann & Brahms
Hélène Grimaud
Classical - Released September 8, 2023 | Deutsche Grammophon (DG)
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Robert Schumann was never more purely Romantic than in his set of piano pieces Kreisleriana, Op. 16. The set is of extramusical, literary inspiration, taking its name from a character in stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann, and it features the explosive imagination of the young Schumann at its best. Schumann announced the work, which he apparently wrote in four days, rather breathlessly to his inamorata, Clara, and more than almost any other work of his, it seems to spill over the boundaries of the short piano piece. Hélène Grimaud has recorded the work before, but she seems to have added intensity this time around. She is nervously excited in the faster virtuosic numbers, but sample No. 4 to hear her marvelous control over the tonal instability that appears in many of these pieces. The Brahms Intermezzi, Op. 117, were also "For Clara," sent to Clara Schumann toward the end of his life; the two had remained friends, and here, in Grimaud's evocation of tempestuous old-school pianism, one is stirred to wonder what Clara sounded like playing this music. The connection of the nine Lieder und Gesänge, Op. 32, of Brahms to Clara is less clear, and the set, with baritone Konstantin Krimmel on the vocals, may seem like an afterthought; the three performances on the album were all made at different places and times. However, taken on its own terms, it is a fine performance of this set, consisting entirely of settings of texts by Eastern poets. Krimmel catches the rather mystical nature of the songs, and Grimaud, with whom he has worked in the past, is effective as an accompanist. This is an important entry in Grimaud's catalog, with a Kreisleriana that is as fine as any.© James Manheim /TiVo
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For Clara: Works by Schumann & Brahms
Hélène Grimaud
Classical - Released September 8, 2023 | Deutsche Grammophon (DG)
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Wagner : Tristan und Isolde, WWV 90
Wolfgang Sawallisch
Full Operas - Released May 18, 2018 | Orfeo
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5 de Diapason
An enemy of fashion and glitz who shunned cocktails and society dinners, Wolfgang Sawallisch was a humble, retiring man whose life was wholly dedicated to music and music alone. Behind what might seem like a well-worn cliché of the "honest man", he was surely one of the greatest artists of his generation. An exceptional pianist, he would sometimes accompany his friend Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau through memorable nights dedicated to Schubert's great cycles. A conductor, he knew the whole repertoire by heart, not only working with an orchestra but also taking to the piano with all the singers. He was a Kapellmeister in the most elevated sense of the term. Between 1971 and 1992 he made his hometown’s Munich Opera (Bayerische Staatsoper) one of the greatest stages in the world, offering performances of an utterly exceptional standard. The gradual seizure of power by producers would put an end to a collaboration which had produced so many unforgettable nights. Sawallisch went on to enjoy a kind of Indian summer as a conductor in his final years, at the head of the Philadelphia Orchestra, where he encountered huge success. First and foremost a performer of Wagner, Wolfgang Sawallisch first made his mark on Bayreuth in his youth, when, in 1962, he conducted landmark performances. The archives of the festival are full of recordings which are slowly being released, whose almost-identical distributions on different dates have sown confusion. Sawallisch conducted Tristan and Isolde with the legendary couple Birgit Nilsson/Wolfgang Windgassen several times, for the festivals in 1957, 1958 and 1959, well before the sensational version conducted by Karl Böhm. This new release covers the night of 26 July 1958 (so it is not a cover of the version released by MYTO of the show on 21 August of the same year). The doomed lovers are given an exceptional treatment under the electrifying baton of a young Sawallisch. © François Hudry/Qobuz
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Delius: A Mass of Life
Frederick Delius
Classical - Released November 24, 2023 | Lawo Classics
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The most popular works by Frederick Delius, like Summer Night on the River and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring are orchestral tone poems with a British tinge, seeming to offer a British counterpart to Debussy's Impressionism. Eine Messe des Lebens ("A Mass of Life") has little that is British about it at all unless it be a general commonality of mood with the vast spectaculars written for England's choral festivals. This work has had its champions, including Sir Thomas Beecham, but it has rarely been performed or recorded. The fact that it is in German is one impediment; the work sets texts from Friedrich Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra. Many readers of the day put a grandiose spin on that work; nowadays, it is seen more as lyrical and poetic. The Richard Strauss tone poem based on Also sprach Zarathustra reflects the former view, and so does the Delius work, although it has some almost static mystical passages. There are influences from English choral music, from Wagner, perhaps from Grieg. The work requires a double chorus and a large orchestra; this live performance from Bergen in 2022, with the Bergen Philharmonic, four soloists, and one Norwegian and one English chorus, must have been a logistical challenge. Eine Messe des Lebens (which is in no sense a mass) is something of a beast, but conductor Mark Elder makes a strong case for it. His handling of the large forces is lucid and moves clearly toward goal points, and he balances the choruses, soloists (the principal being baritone Roderick Williams, in fine form), and orchestra well; perhaps the prize should go to the LAWO Classics engineers who kept all these layers clear in a live concert situation. This recording may or may not rescue Eine Messe des Lebens from obscurity, but those interested in Delius, and for that matter in Nietzsche and his reception, should definitely hear it.© James Manheim /TiVo
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Wagner: Tristan und Isolde
Stephen Gould
Opera - Released September 1, 2012 | PentaTone
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As the conductor for PentaTone's ambitious project to record all of Richard Wagner's music dramas, Marek Janowski has delivered a fine live concert version of Tristan und Isolde that has received critical praise for its strong cast and extraordinary sound quality. Janowski draws out some exciting playing from the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the multichannel super audio recording gives the ensemble the depth and fullness that is absolutely vital in Wagner's richly scored music. The cast is assured and vocally capable, but the star is soprano Nina Stemme, whose Isolde is vividly rendered and strong enough to carry the performance through to the Liebestod, setting standards of expressive power and stamina for the other singers to match. Considering the difficulty in finding vocalists who can handle Wagner's demanding roles, the performances by Stephen Gould as Tristan, Johan Reuter as Kurwenal, and Kwangchul Youn as King Mark are certainly better than average, and satisfying for the purposes of this concert performance. While this recording does not rank among historic Tristans for the thrills of a fully staged production, or for any legendary artists in the main roles, this is still an admirable effort that promises even greater things for the remainder of PentaTone's series.© TiVo
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