Thread: New Ring on BR Audio

Posts: 3

Post by Arell October 30, 2015 (1 of 3)
Naxos has released the first instalment of a new recording of Wagner's Ring, Das Rheingold. The other parts will be released one per year. It's recorded by Hong Kong Phil,conducted by Jaap van Zweden. Cast includes Matthias Goerne and Michelle DeYoung.

What's interesting is that apart from CDs, it is released on Blu-ray Audio as well. Price is as low as 9 GB pounds.
I'm looking forward to the first reviews, especially regarding the sound quality.
24-bit, 96 kHz PCM stereo and surround.

http://www.hraudio.net/showmusic.php?title=11089
(Release date in UK seems to be today.)

Post by Joseph Ponessa October 30, 2015 (2 of 3)
I recently purged about 15% of my collection. The Ring cycles were hit particularly hard. Quite a number of cycles did not make the final cut, including most of the videos, which seemed avant-garde at the time and now look just pathetic. So I'm down to nine cycles now:
Furtwängler 1953 on SACD
Solti on SACD and BR Audio
Karajan on SHM-CD
Böhm on new CD mastering
Swarowsky on CD
Janowsky I on CD
Levine I on DVD
Levine II/Luisi on BR Video
Janowski II on SACD

It is interesting that Levine and Janowski have contributed two each, and dominate the last forty years. Other conductors during this period have been sabotaged by distracting stagework. The last studio recording was 25 years ago, and it has been increasingly difficult to assemble consistently excellent casts of singers. Is the Gergiev cycle stalled midway for this reason, as the Dohnanyi was before?

I was pleased by Van Zweden's recording of Parsifal, and have hopes that his new Ring cycle will take its place as the tenth on my shelf. An online video segment reveals that his performance of DAS RHEINGOLD was in concert form, a nice compromise between live and studio recording. (The cycles of Furtwängler 1953 and Janowski II were recorded in concert, to good effect.)

Van Zweden's orchestra is scheduled to present one opera each year, so the entire cycle will not be finished until 2018, the year I go onto Social Security.
That may prove to be, so far as collecting goes, wahrlich "das Ende."

Post by feinstei November 2, 2015 (3 of 3)
Isn't the Furtwangler Ring from '53 on Japanese SACD fantastic? Wish that EMI would release it, reasonably priced for the rest of the world!

Your SACD Solti Ring is, I assume, the incredibly overpriced set from Esoteric?

I found that the Blu-Ray version was better sounding than the Esoteric set (which BTW, was NOT mastered from the original analogue tapes as this deceptive and dishonest Japanese company claimed, but rather, from the same exact digital masters as the Blu-Ray set was).....

Closed