Wieland Wagner's production of Parsifal was performed at the Bayreuth Festival every year from 1951 to 1973. This makes it the longest-running production of Parsifal on the Bayreuth programme following the world premiere of 1882, which ran until 1933. Wagner’s opera opened the first post-war festival on the 30th of July, 1951, the day after the former Bayreuthian Wilhelm Furtwängler had performed Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

REVIEWS:

Hans Knappertsbusch led Wagner’s Parisfal at the Bayreuth Festival in 1951 and 1952, and then annually from 1954 through 1964. For some reason his August 16, 1955 performance has never surfaced on CD until now, and it’s one of Kna’s stronger Parsifals.

Tempos are generally faster and more fluid than in the commercial 1951 recording. Compare the Act 1 Prelude’s Grail theme and the Transformation music, the Act 2 Flowermaiden’s scene, and the Act 3 Good Friday Spell in both recordings, and you’ll hear what I mean. Furthermore, Act 1’s recalcitrant bells had been replaced by 1955 with an electronic version that was reliable in intonation yet made less sonorous and majestic an impact.

One can argue that 1955’s cast is the most consistently satisfying out of all the Kna Bayreuth Parsifals, with no weak links. Ludwig Weber reprises his distinctive and lieder-like Gurnemanz from 1951. Hermann Uhde’s heavy voice is better suited to Titurel’s gravitas here than Klingsor’s malevolence in 1951. 1955 features Gustav Neidlinger’s Klingsor, which is as riveting a piece of vocal acting as his legendary Alberich in Das Rheingold.

Ramón Vinay sings rather than barks the title role, and the unforced lyricism of his top notes seems to spur on Martha Mödl to deliver her best all-around Act 2 Kundry. True, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s Amfortas abounds with sibilantly snarling consonants, but he’s in fresher, more agile voice than in his 1972 studio Amfortas under Georg Solti.

-- ClassicsToday (Jed Distler)

Following on from the last Knappertsbusch release of a programme of pure Beethoven featuring Backhaus and the Vienna Philharmonic dating from 1954, Orfeo's new album offers a recording of an entire concert performed in 1962. This recording features Geza Anda and the Cologne Radio Orchestra, one of the few concert orcehstras that Knappertsbusch conducted at the time apart from the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, and using the highly professional recording technology of Westdeutscher Rundfunk. The programme of this concert is again a Beethoven piano concerto, the passionate Third in C minor. The pianist Geza Anda, then aged 41, was the diametric opposite as a performer to the 74-year-old Hans knappertsbusch.

A newly restored collection of previously released (and no longer available) Knappertbusch best sellers from our catalog. Bruckner's Symphony No. 3 first released on Music & Arts CD-257 (1987); Symphony No. 4 on CD-249 (1987); Symphony No. 7 on CD-209 (1986), and Symphonies 4 through 9 in boxed set CD-1028 (1998), which included a different version of Symphony No. 3. Jeffrey Lipscomb wrote of the previous edition, CD-1028, in his amazon.com review: "Kna was one of the great Bruckner interpreters - he was unique in conveying this music's earthy, almost primeval side. Kna was a stubborn advocate of the so-called `revised' editions (Kluge's notes make a compelling argument for them)." And Tony Duggan wrote of the same set in Music-Web International: "This superb collection of Knappertsbusch at his best in Bruckner should not be missed. It offers fascinating insights into how Bruckner used to be perceived and played, and can teach us a lot even today."

Although Knappertsbusch conducted “Lohengrin” many times, until now no recording by him has been issued, so the welcome discovery of this live performance from Munich fills a gap in the discography... We first hear Knappertsbusch pushing the Prelude on, refusing to linger but instead urging the singing strings to create what is almost a sense of tension and expectation, culminating in the great chordal climax by the brass. The Act II Prelude, too, is wonderfully played, the orchestra producing a dark, brooding sound proleptic of Ortrud’s calling upon the “Entweihte Götter!” --MusicWeb

When the ORFEO label was established in Munich forty years ago, surely no one with the music scene back then would have predicted that the record company would develop into a firmly established player on the classical music market. One of the label’s main priorities in the early years was vocal music, with opera rarities top of the list and since the mid 1980s the re-use of historic tape recordings. Big names featured on the label’s own productions, while ORFEO also developed into a talent factory by discovering and nurturing young artist. This “Legendary Conductors” 10 album set for the anniversary of 40 years of ORFEO label history presents a selection of outstanding recordings with legendary conductors in the true sense of the word.

Tempo flexibility, dynamic contouring, and rhetorical gesture are part and parcel of Bruckner's music as promulgated in the first published editions used by Knappertsbusch until the end of his life. John Rockwell wrote that "Knappertsbusch's way with Brucknerian rubato - varying the pulse of the music without undermining Bruckner's solid grandeur - seems to capture the essence of the music time after time, mixing serenity with thrilling urgency." Granted, Kna did not always follow the letter of the first printings in his realizations. His predilections for dramatic underlining reflects the same tradition that infuses the old scores with various refinements of tempi, phrasing, and dynamics. Critics judged the performance on this CD superior to the conductor's VPO recording (on Decca) when it first appeared (in 1998); now it has been completely refurbished.

Before the great wave of Bruckner conducting that has taken place since the 1970s, it was Hans Knappertsbusch (1888–1966) who stood out as unquestionably one of the most important Bruckner exponents, and Bruckner was part of his core repertoire. There are several recordings by him of the 3rd to 5th and 7th to 9th Symphonies, two in the case of the Seventh, a live recording from the 1949 Salzburg Festival with the Vienna Philharmonic, and this transfer direct from the original tapes of 1963 (and not “off the air”) with the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra. The Seventh is particularly suited to comparison with older recordings insofar as there is no question of the alternative versions and editions we otherwise associate with Bruckner. The difference between the two recordings is substantial, which is no particular surprise when it comes to “Kna”. His later reading released here is painted on a broader canvas, goes into less individual detail; at the same time, one can appreciate how comprehensively Knappertsbusch plans the grand design while noting with amazement – especially at the brass-scored fortissimo climaxes typical of Bruckner – how energetically the conductor shapes, phrases, “turns into music” even here, something one does not hear these days. The orchestra is impressive for its exceptional solo contributions. It is the same orchestra that would record the Bruckner symphonies complete with Günther Wand a decade later.