GREAT RECORDINGS phase 12

WAGNER
Orchestral Music from Der fliegende Holländer
Lohengrin
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
Tannhäuser & Tristan und Isolde
Berliner Philharmoniker
Herbert von Karajan

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'Superb playing, vividly recorded. Karajan is a fine Wagnerian and with the orchestra he has fashioned so completely to his own vision he gives superlative performances.' (Gramophone)

This must be one of the most spectacular of all anthologies of orchestral extracts from the music dramas of Richard Wagner. In September and October 1974 in their superb concert hall, the Philharmonie (opened in 1963), the Berlin Philharmonic and their music director devoted a number of intensive recording sessions to this programme of 'Karajan conducts Wagner', first issued on two LPs in 1975.

Karajan was a great man of the theatre and had a visionary love of Wagner's music. He first experienced Die Meistersinger when his father took him at the age of 4 to part of a performance in Salzburg. The prelude to Wagner's great medieval comedy opens this CD programme, followed by the opening music from the 1860 Paris version of Tannhäuser, Wagner's other opera about a singing contest.

The spiritual world of the Knights of the Holy Grail, and Lohengrin in particular, is evoked in the sublimely beautiful prelude to the opera and the music celebrating the Knight's wedding to the all-too-mortal Elsa. The evocative seascape of the overture to another supernatural tale, this time of the Flying Dutchman, leads finally to the revolutionary music that opens and closes Tristan und Isolde, Wagner's extraordinary psychological drama about love and death and 'love-in-death'.