Classical Music

Classical Music

This historic broadcast recording was always counted as one of the best recordings of this opera. With the best singers of the Frankfurt opera after WW II like Heinrich Bensing, there was always a demand for a release of this recording. Thanks to a collector who made a direct master copy of the original broadcast tape in the early 50's, Walhall is able to release it in great sound.

Giuseppe Verdi's opera Il Trovatore, a staple of the operatic repertoire and long a popular success with operagoers and lovers of Italian opera, received the casting it rightfully deserves in this 1961 live performance from Berlin, 1961. The all-Italian, all-star lineup of singers includes Ettore Bastianini as Count di Luna, Fedora Barbieri as Azucena, Franco Corelli as Manrico and Mirella Parutto as Leonora. This recording has been called the best live version of the opera on record. The fiery conductor Oliviero de Fabritiis leads the Orchestra e Coro del Teatro dell' Opera di Roma.

The stature and recognized genius of Mozart’s late operas, including Don Giovanni has forever transcended the considerable changes in performance traditions and audience tastes. Appreciation for a previous generation’s approach to this work can be heard on this live 1952 performance from Aix-en-Provence starring a fine, if not wholly well-remembered singing cast that includes Leonie Rysanek, Léopold Simoneau, Heinz Ruhfuss, Marcello Cortis and Carla Martinis. Hans Rosbaud, a conductor who has undergone some critical reassessment in the last few years, conducts.

Winfried Zillig arranged this recording in 1948 with a unique cast. The young Christa Ludwig, in one of her first recording sessions, gives an excellent interpretation of this opera.

This is a Lohengrin sure to be welcomed by the true Wagnerian connoisseur. Offered complete for the first time on CD and re-mastered in 24bit/96kHz audio, Walhall’s Eternity Series brings to market a 1949 Moscow, USSR performance of the opera, sung in Russian. Evincing tremendous vocal power and voice control, Ivan Kozlovsky (1900-93), a lyric tenor then at his apex, heads the all-Russian cast; his performance ranks with those of the more familiar Wagnerian Lohengrins of the era, Melchior and Konya, in their respective primes. Samuil Samosud conducts the USSR Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus.

Performance of works from the age of Henry Purcell have changed considerably since this 1960 live recording from Aix en Provence given the exponential growth in all things historically-informed, but there is still enormous pleasure to be gotten from listening to great singers sing the great stage works of any age, even if they fall on today's ears as at least somewhat dated in style. Conductor Pierre Dervaux leads a cast featuring Teresa Berganza as Dido, Hanny Steffek and the great Gerard Souzay as Aeneas in Purcell's Dido & Aeneas, in good sound, 24bit/96kHz remastered.

Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957) was known primarily for his art songs and song cycles. His one-act opera Penthesilea is his most well-known opera. The work was inspired by Heinrich von Kleist’s tragic play of the same name. Schoeck also wrote the libretto for the work. This production was recorded in Stuttgart in 1957, and features Martha Modl in the title role.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Despite its enormous success during the 19th c., Giacomo Meyerbeer’s grand opera Les Huguenots is rarely staged today, and arguably not with much more frequency at the time of this 1955 studio broadcast from the Vienna opera in a German-sung production. The conductor Robert Heger leads a cast of whom only Walter Berry and the great Wagnerian Gottlob Frick still have any real resonance today, with Maud Cunitz sneaking in just under the wire of recognition. The cast is a fine one however, with the German lyric tenor Karl Terkal a worthy re-discovery, and Valerie Bak a rare presence on record.

Heinz Wallberg's intimate familiarity with the work (he conducted it on almost fifty separate occasions) can be heard throughout this 1961 performance of Richard Strauss' operatic masterpiece Der Rosenkavalier. Captured live at the Teatro Col�n, Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961 with a stellar cast that included Regine Crespin and Fritz Wunderlich, among other Straussian notables, and offered here in 24bit/96kHz re-mastered sound, this is a recording to be set alongside those of Clemens Krauss, Karl B�hm and Herbert von Karajan, all famed and important 20th c. Strauss interpreters.

This 24Bit/96kHz audiophile remastered two-disc recording of Aida, captured in performance on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, NYC in 1962 features a young, vibrant cast of future stars and Metropolitan Opera stalwarts. Opposite the great Italian tenor Franco Corelli as Radames is soprano Gabriella Tucci as Aida; mezzo-soprano Irene Dalis is Amneris and a young and future prominent American bass Cornell MacNeil portrays Aida’s father. George Schick, one-time President of the Manhattan School of Music, conducts the Met Opera Orchestra and Chorus.