Word: solti
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WAGNER: DIE WALKURE (5 LPs; London). Following close upon last year's triumphant Gotterdammerung, London completes its new recordings of the complete Ring cycle with a wonderful Walkure. Conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti again heaps high all the sumptuous glories of the Wagnerian orchestra, at the same time charging every passage of Wotan's family fracas with drama. The lush and beautiful singing is alive with emotion, the stars being an international assemblage of accomplished artists: Birgit Nilsson as Briinnhilde, Regine Crespin as Sieglinde, Christa Ludwig as Fricka, and Hans Hotter as Wotan. Not quite so great...
...five acts are here, sung by an assemblage of stars: Renata Tebaldi, Carlo Bergonzi, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Nicolai Ghiaurov and Grace Bumbry. Their voices often outshine their characterizations (though Bumbry is good as Eboli and Ghiaurov as Philip), and the solos are stronger than the ensembles. Conductor Georg Solti generally keeps rein on the sprawling tragedy, which unfolds with dark grandeur and erupts with fiery excitement in the auto da fe in the great Spanish square...
...latest discovery came at the Prague Spring Festival of Music, which celebrated its 20th anniversary with the biggest and most impressive roster of conductors to appear at any of Europe's summer music festivals-among them George Szell, Charles Munch, Zubin Mehta and Georg Solti. Fronted with such competition, Celibi-dache's debut with the Czech Philharmonic was a stunning triumph. He realized, raved one critic, "qualities of the orchestra which until now we could only imagine." Under his baton, Hindemith's Metamorphosis "became a new discovery," Brahms's Fourth Symphony "a perfection of color...
OPERA: Baritones rarely get the girl, but this year they take the cake. Geraint Evans turns in one of opera's great characterizations as the lecherous old swindler in RCA Victor's Falstaff, amply supported by the other singers and by Conductor Georg Solti. In Rigoletto (Deutsche Grammophon), Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. best known for his sorrowful lieder. proves himself equally expressive as the tragic hunchback in a powerful performance led by Rafael Kubelik...
...MIRACULOUS MANDARIN SUITE (London). Intended for a dance pantomime, this is some of the most unsettling music ever written. A mandarin, lured by a prostitute and mortally stabbed by her accomplices, finds his lust stronger than death and miraculously lives until his passion is spent. Budapest-born Georg Solti, once a student of Bartók's, whips the London Symphony Orchestra into such a frenzy that the music has the power of a thunderbolt and the illumination of lightning...