Wagner: Overtures & Preludes

Wagner: Overtures & Preludes

This is a dazzling collection of nonvocal excerpts from Wagner's operas, from the peace and loveliness of Rafael Kubelik's <i>Siegfried</i> Idyll to the passionate, disturbed Prelude to the first act of <i>Tristan</i>, led by Karl Bohm, and the wild <i>Ride of the Valkyries</I>, with Herbert von Karajan in a particularly rambunctious mood. Other highlights in the two and a half hours of music are transcendent readings of two <i>Parsifal</i> excerpts by Eugen Jochum and the Bavarian Radio Orchestra and a <i>Flying Dutchman</i> set. But couldn't DG have tried to include some information about <i>anything</i> in their teeny paper insert? <i>--Robert Levine</i>