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

Jessye Norman was always protective of her art and the sound image she projected, no different with these unreleased recordings. However, with the approval of her loved ones, they’re now being released post-mortem.This new release (which is available in a lavish, physical limited edition) features three of Jessye’s recordings done between 1988 and 1998, when she was at the height of her career. There are substantial excerpts from her extraordinary performance of Tristan und Isolde recorded with Kurt Masur and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, featuring tenors Thomas Moser (Tristan) and Ian Bostridge (the young sailor) and soprano Hanna Schwarz (Brangäne).The rest of the programme consists of live recordings conducted by James Levine and Seiji Ozawa. With the former, Jessye Norman sings Strauss's Four Last Songs and Wagner's Wesendonck-Lieder in a recording that favours orchestral richness to the detriment of the voice. This may explain why the American singer chose never to release this recording, even though her hedonistic interpretation of Strauss's farewell to life is still striking. The album ends with a recital complete with orchestra, tailor-made for the diva in 1994 in Boston. It features two cantatas: Berenice che fai by Haydn and Phaedra, written by Benjamin Britten for Janet Baker. Nestled between the two, you’ll find a stunning rendition of Berlioz's The Death of Cleopatra. © François Hudry/Qobuz

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

Although the premiere in 1865 was not to be at Vienna State Opera but at Munich’s court theatre (June 10th), Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde was performed more than 400 times at the House on the Ring since its premier in 1883. This live recording from June 2013 under the baton of Franz Welser-Möst presents Nina Stemme as Isolde – her debut in that role at Vienna State Opera –, Peter Seiffert as Tristan (who was honoured Kammersänger of the Vienna State Opera the same month the recording was made), Jochen Schmeckenbecher as Kurwenal, Stephen Milling as König Marke and Janina Baechle as Brangäne. © Orfeo

This live recording of Tristan und Isolde, from the 1974 Bayreuth Festival, conducted by Carlos Kleiber, is notable for its energy and impetuosity, and its occasionally astonishing speed. Moments that in many performances can sound ponderously momentous here have a fleet recklessness that seems far more appropriate both musically and dramatically. The ending of the Prelude, taken much faster than usual, is a thrilling analog for the heedless passion that's soon to overtake the protagonists. Kleiber holds the singers and orchestra together for his wild ride, and for all his rhythmic flexibility and unpredictability, his reading has a sense of naturalistic inevitability. While this is not a dream cast (the very possibility of assembling such a thing for a performance or recording of Tristan is probably a chimaera), all the soloists are fully convincing dramatically, even if they are not vocally the most memorable singers ever to take on these roles. Catarina Ligendza is an appealingly young-sounding Isolde, and she also has the power to negotiate the role's huge demands. Helge Brilioth's heroic Tristan is sung with strength and fervor. Largely due to Kleiber's vision and his ability to carry his performers along with him, this revelatory performance of Tristan should be of interest to anyone who loves the opera.© TiVo

Leading the Frankfurt Radio orchestra, the hr-Sinfonie Orchester, conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada is performing and recording the great repertoire of symphonic music. His 100% Wagner programme brings together a selection of overtures and preludes. No singing: just orchestral music. Siegfried is absent here, as is the Tetralogia, along with the preludes from the third acts of Parsifal and Lohengrin. But as a whole, the record – a single disc, unlike Marek Janowski's double album for PentaTone – is well-put together.Heading the German outfit, Orozco-Estrada blazes a new path among the operas of the great Builder of Bayreuth. The programme moves through the pieces in chronological order of composition. The Flying Dutchman starts the proceedings, followed by Lohengrin and Tristan and Isolde forms a bridge to the high point that is Parsifal. Then the clock turns back, as Tannhäuser leads us on at last to Rienzi. It's a daring move to finish on this work from Wagner's youth! That said, the listener will recognise the value of this precious overture. Of course, in the middle of the score, the rolling snare drums herald the rather pompous tone of the final military march, punctuated with cymbal crashes. But that shouldn't overshadow the passages of great beauty which recall  – and come on, you've just listened to it – Tannhäuser, in particular the combination of the choral pilgrims' motif against a barrage of strings.The Flying Dutchman, the first work to break with opera in the same manner as Meyerbeer, greets us in medias res, in Wagner's dramatic laboratory, where wonderful worlds are born. Impeccable brass and agile strings, an interplay of finely-balanced volumes, structures and textures: the orchestra buffets the Dutchman, sets Lohengrin aflame, rumbles around Tannhäuser and demonstrates how these pages contain all the ingredients – thematic, dramatic, lyrical – of the drama, in embryo. We will wait faithfully for a complete Wagner with these superb musicians in the pit! © Elsa Siffert/Qobuz

It shouldn't take listeners long to get over the novelty of hearing Wagner on the piano. After all, piano transcriptions were the primary way opera, in general, and Wagner specifically, were spread around Europe in the 19th century, and the composer's primary champion in this medium was none other than the greatest pianist of the age, Franz Liszt. Liszt's own transcription of the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde is the pièce de résistance on this release by pianist Nikolai Lugansky; it is not terribly often played, and it has lost none of its imposing scope over the decades. Lugansky leads up to this with transcriptions by Louis Brassin, upon which Lugansky has elaborated, and with a quartet of transcriptions from Götterdämmerung that come from his own hand. These are quite artfully done, incorporating the familiar leitmotifs of the Ring cycle while filling them in with technically fearsome connective tissue. Lugansky has done nothing less than put the listener in the place of an audience that might have heard Liszt play Wagner in the composer's own day, and ideal sound from the small Scuola della Carità reproduces the aristocratic Paris salons where Liszt would often have held forth. A bold, fresh release from Lugansky that made classical best-seller lists in early 2024.© James Manheim /TiVo

In the early '20s, Franz Schreker was one of the best-known composers in the world. His music was suppressed by the Nazis because he was Jewish, and due to the High Modernism of the postwar period, a second totalitarianism, his reputation did not recover. This was a shame, for Schreker was anything but a conservative, and it is good to see that he is finally getting his due. What he needed at this point was a high-profile recording with top soloists, and that is exactly what he gets here from Christoph Eschenbach and the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, with soprano Chen Reiss and baritone Matthias Goerne. Deutsche Grammophon's PR text refers to "Schreker's sumptuous, hyper-Romantic music," but this is not quite right. Schreker could sometimes be that, as in the Romantische Suite that closes the album, but Straussian late Romanticism was only one of his influences. In terms of using tone color as a structural element, Schreker was in every way a contemporary of Schoenberg (his close friend) and Webern. Eschenbach's generous selection of orchestral songs here provides a good way to appreciate this quality; sample Die Dunkelheit sinkt schwer wie Blei from the Fünf Gesänge, with its mysterious strumming-like sounds. The text of that song is from a German translation of the Thousand and One Nights anthology, and Reiss sounds great in the Zwei lyrische Gesänge to texts (in German) by, of all people, Walt Whitman. Schreker could be neoclassic (in the economical Kleine Suite); he could be Impressionist-tinged; he mastered a full Expressionist idiom in the opera that gives the album its title, represented here by a substantial instrumental excerpt. This double-album release conveys the breadth of Schreker's musical language, but he is never blankly eclectic. A wonderful album that will help to rewrite the 20th century canon.© James Manheim /TiVo

On this double album “Tristan” Igor Levit explores nocturnal themes of love and death, fear, ecstasy, loneliness & redemption in the music of Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Gustav Mahler and Hans Werner Henze. It includes Levit’s first concerto recording with the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig under Franz Welser-Möst with the album’s central work Henze’s Tristan for piano, electronic tapes and orchestra. The five works, including Liszt’s Liebestraum No. 3 and Harmonies du soir, as well as transcriptions of Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan und Isolde and Mahler’s Adagio from Symphony No. 10, span a period of 135 years (1837 to 1973) and represent very different genres. Only one of these works was originally conceived for piano solo, but Igor Levit’s exploration of borderline experiences in our lives – death in "Life" (2018), spirituality in "Encounter" (2020) and now, with "Tristan", the link between love, death and our need for redemption – inevitably means that it is not just masterpieces for the piano that are central to his concern but, above all, compositions in which certain thematic associations find their most personal expression. Levit’s own thoughts revolve less around the themes of love and death as such than around the experience of night and of the nocturnal as a dark alternative to our conscious actions by day. "Night has so many faces. It can signal a place of refuge or the loss of control, it signifies love and death, and it is the place where we feel our deepest, most paranoid fears”, says Levit. "The Adagio from Mahler’s Tenth Symphony contains a famous outburst of pain in the form of a dissonant chord, and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is all about a kind of emotional nuclear meltdown. All of the piece’s essential actions take place at night. In his reminiscences, Hans Werner Henze likewise recalled his work on Tristan as a time of nightmares and of dreamlike hallucinations”. Hans Werner Henze’s Tristan – described by the composer as a set of “Preludes for piano, tape and orchestra” – is a raptly refined hybrid work comprising passages for solo piano and electronics and is a concerto, a symphony and a piece of music theatre all wrapped into one. The present recording of this work was made during the concerts that were given in Leipzig in November 2019. Liszt’s nocturne in A-flat major – his Liebestraum No. 3 – derives from a setting of melancholic lines by Ferdinand Freiligrath: "Oh, love as long as you can love! / Oh, love as long as you could crave! / That hour is fast approaching when / You’ll stand and weep beside the grave!" The same sense of nocturnal despair is also found with Mahler, who in late July 1910 was working on the opening movement of his Tenth Symphony when he discovered that his wife was having an affair. Igor Levit performs this Adagio in a little-known piano transcription by the Scottish composer Ronald Stevenson, whose great Passacaglia on DSCH he has done so much recently to promote. Only in Harmonies du soir, the eleventh of Liszt’s twelve Études d’exécution transcendante, is there any sense of reconciliation, a peaceful counterweight to the ecstasies and nightmares experienced by those Wagnerian and Mahlerian figures who in Wagner’s own words are “devoted to the night”. © Sony Classical