Wagner: Orchestral Music

Epic interpretations of orchestral music from Wagner’s music dramas, conducted by James Levine. In 1991 and 1995 James Levine recorded two albums for Deutsche Grammophon of what have become known as ‘bleeding chunks’, in Ernest Newman’s phrase, from Wagner’s operas. Collected together for the first time on this Eloquence reissue, they form a comprehensive survey of overtures, preludes and excerpts, featuring many of Wagner’s best-known melodies and most thrilling orchestral climaxes. There are the noble trumpet tunes to open his early operatic successes, Rienzi and Tannhäuser, and the turbulent sea-scape to open Der fliegende Holländer. Both the serene firstact and jubilant third-act Preludes to Lohengrin are included, as well as highlights from the Ring and the preludes to the operas he composed while on a seven-year working holiday from the Ring, Die Meistersinger and Tristan und Isolde. The anthology concludes with some of the most quietly ecstatic music Wagner ever wrote, for the baptism of Kundry on the Good Friday Meadow in the third act of Parsifal. Levine became music director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York aged just 27, having studied as a teenager with Walter Levin, Rudolf Serkin and at the Juilliard School. Under his leadership the Met orchestra was trained and transformed into a superlative Wagner orchestra: full-bodied, silky and holding power in reserve for Levine to harness at the points of intense crisis and triumph without words in the music dramas. On

Tracks

1~1~Lohengrin: Prelude To Act I
1~2~Die Walküre: The Ride Of The Valkyries
1~3~Siegfried: Waldweben
1~4~Götterdämmerung: Siegfried's Funeral March
1~5~Tristan Und Isolde: Prelude And Liebestod
1~6~Die Meistersinger Von Nürnberg: Prelude To Act Iii
1~7~Parsifal: Karfreitagszauber

Details

Format: CD
Artist: James Levine, The Met Orchestra, Berliner Philharmoniker
Release Date: 14 June 2019
Genre: Classical Music
Label: ELOQUENCE / D.G.
Distributor: Universal Music