Something Old, Something New

These words are part of a good luck mantra for a wedding day but also sum up the opera CD releases for 2006. The old is the extraordinary recording of Wagner’s Ring cycle, recorded live at Bayreuth in 1955 and now being released opera by opera (I have the “Siegfried” only so far). Other live recordings from that period are usually in mono and often in very muddy sound. This is full clear 1950s stereo. The recordings were suppressed for many years by John Culshaw, chief producer at Decca, because he did not like live recordings and was bent on his studio recording conducted by Solti being the first complete Ring to be released. It has taken more than fifty years then for this first stereo Ring to reach the catalogue. The sound is excellent, the performances amazing (Windgassen, Hotter and Varnay, the greatest Wagner singers of their time, all at the height of their powers) and Josef Keilberth’s conducting is electric.

For the new I cannot do any better than Rossini’s “Matilde di Shabran”, recorded live at the Pesaro Festival in 2004. Loyal readers of this blog will recall my ecstatic review of the performance I attended at the time. This recording faithfully represents that performance with a lovely Matilde from Annick Massis and a spectacular tenor hero from Juan Diego Florez.

In recital CDs, it has been very much a year for the men. Bryn Terfel’s “Tutto Mozart” shows that his ventures into Wagner and Puccini have blunted none of his expertise in the more gentle if less exciting music of the eighteenth century. I have not heard the whole of Simon Keenlyside’s “Tales of Opera” but what I have heard has been impressive. It has had universally warm reviews and he was in top form when I heard him at the Edinburgh Festival.

Another of my “Edinburgh Men” was the enormously gifted Jonas Kaufmann. I heard him there as Walther in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger” and this year he has produced an excellent recital disc of songs by Richard Strauss.

Finally the singer I heard just days ago at the Barbican in London and whom I rate as one of the most special singers I have ever heard. Juan Diego Florez’s “Sentimiento Latino” takes us away from opera to popular songs from his native South America. Some of the orchestral arrangements are in less than the best possible taste but the singing is gorgeous. The greatest singer in the world? I can think of none better.