Otto Klemperer: The Complete Operas & Sacred Works - Warner Classics Edition
WARNER CLASSICS
CD
$117.57Apr 12, 2024
This box set comprises all the operas and sacred works Otto Klemperer conducted for EMI Columbia and HMV. Oratorios by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Handel are accompanied by operas of Beethoven, Mozart and Wagner. There are also rehearsals and listening playback sessions for the recording of Mozart's Don Giovanni and a Bonus CD with recollections from artists who sang in Klemperer's opera performances. Otto Klemperer deeply loved both the theatricality of opera and the spirituality of oratorios, and these performances from his great Indian Summer represent the fruits of his lifetime of thought and experience in this repertoire.
Mozart created 22 stage works in his lifetime. This 10 CD box comprises the world-famous ‘evergreens’ in historical recordings from Vienna 1955. Soloists are Christa Ludwig, Lisa Della Casa, Hilde Gülden, Alfred Poell, Cesare Siepi, Fernando Corena, Kurt Böhme and many more.
REVIEW:
Böhm's conducting creates a slim, fluid Mozart sound in which the dynamic pendulum could swing a little more impulsively here and there, but which still has an instinctive feel for theatrical and dramaturgical diction on the one hand and interaction with the singers on the other.
Based, in part, on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff is Verdi’s last work for the stage – and only his second comic opera. And yet the humor in this multilayered masterpiece is distinctly wry, for all the main characters exhibit an array of human weaknesses that are implacably exposed by Verdi and his librettist Arrigo Boito. In this legendary performance from the Salzburg Festival, Herbert von Karajan is not only leading a stunning cast of singers featuring the Wiener Philharmoniker, he too directed the opera, in the amazing set design of Günther Schneider-Siemssen.
Featuring a front-line cast (Rysanek, Frick, Suthaus, Hotter, Nilsson, etc...) that sends Wagner aficionados into states of reverie at the prospect of listening once again to the authoritative, superlative singing casts one could assemble in the 1950's, this amazing performance of the second opera in the "Nibelungen" tetralogy also proves that conductor Herbert von Karajan live was, like the singers, in a class of his own in the 1950's as well. His few surviving Wagner recordings from this period, like this La Scala 1958 Die Wälkure, are a must for every Wagner connoisseur.