James Levine在1991年與1995年所發行的兩張華格納專輯,是李汶演奏華格納被形容為” bleeding chunks”的經典代表作.兩份錄音首次集結發行,非常經典的華格納演出!
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 which 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 first-act 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 this reissue, they are prefaced by the 1991 recording made by Levine in Berlin of Wagner’s birthday gift to his wife Cosima, the ‘Siegfried Idyll’ which he based on themes from the ‘Ring’.
曲目:
CD 1
Siegfried Idyll
Rienzi: Overture
Tannhäuser: Overture and Venusberg Music
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Prelude to Act I
Lohengrin: Prelude to Act III
Der fliegende Holländer: Overture
CD 2
Lohengrin: Prelude to Act I
Die Walküre: Walkürenritt (Ride of the Valkyries)
Siegfried: Waldweben (Forest Murmurs)
Götterdämmerung: Siegfried’s Funeral March
Tristan und Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Prelude to Act III
Parsifal: Karfreitagszauber (Good Friday Spell)
Berliner Philharmoniker (Siegfried Idyll)
The MET Orchestra
James Levine