Wiener Philharmoniker, Sir Georg Solti - Wagner: Siegfried (Remastered 2022) (2023) [Hi-Res]

NEW 24bit/192kHz STEREO transfer: SIEGFRIED is the third release of the legendary Solti Ring. The other music dramas of the Ring cycle will be released in the coming months. Customers who purchase all four works through this shop will have the opportunity to purchase an exclusive hardcover booklet with the GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG.

The booklet contains: A text about the new HD remastering by Decca Classics Label Director & Executive Producer Dominic Fyfe. Introduction to the opera by John Culshaw. Synopses in English & German. Libretti (German + English). Photos from the original recording sessions, facsimiles of Solti's and Culshaw's scores, and previously unpublished curiosities from the recording sessions.

At the beginning of the 1965 documentary The Golden Ring, Humphrey Burton and Decca producer John Culshaw are seen in the back of a limousine on their way to the airport to meet Georg Solti. Burton asks Culshaw what his greatest concern is now that recording is about to begin. "To do justice to Wagner," Culshaw replies, then adds meaningfully, "and to try to reflect in sound and in this medium alone what he wanted, what he meant."

The Decca Ring was always about sound. With this new transfer of the original analogue master tapes, Decca has sought to bring out the best for Solti, for Culshaw and his chief engineer Gordon Parry, and ultimately for Wagner. "This is the greatest achievement in gramophone history to date," wrote Alec Robertson in Gramophone magazine in 1965. It was the perfect marriage of art and technique. Solti and Culshaw assembled a dream cast of the leading Wagner singers of their time, including Birgit Nilsson, Wolfgang Windgassen, Hans Hotter, Gottlob Frick, Kirsten Flagstad, Régine Crespin, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Christa Ludwig, James King, Lucia Popp and Joan Sutherland.

"No one has surpassed Solti's DECCA Ring in momentum, ambition, grandeur, dramatic immediacy and sheer adrenaline" (Stereophile).

"A grandiose cast and opera recording carried by inner tension as well as orchestral virtuosity, which has lost none of its relevance to this day. A brilliant, wide, emphatically opera-realistic sound panorama, which has not been equalled by numerous recent recordings. Downright a sensation." (Stereo Magazine)

New technical possibilities: Solti's Siegfried was recorded between 1958 and 1965 and was the first complete studio recording of Wagner's monumental cycle with the four operas "Das Rheingold", "Die Walküre", "Siegfried" and "Götterdämmerung". Meanwhile, recording technology evolved, and Decca accommodated the changes by releasing remastered versions of the cult recording. The last audiophile reissue of Solti's Ring, however, was ten years ago, and since then technology has made decisive progress. This prompted Decca to produce an audiophile new edition. Philip Siney, the label's long-time sound engineer, did the remastering, which was done with HD 24 bit / 192kHz transfers to the original master tapes and generated a unique sound level.

"The Greatest Recording of All Time" wrote both Gramophone Magazine in 1999 and BBC Music Magazine in 2011, Sir Solti's recording has won the Grammy Award, the Edison Award and the Grand Prix Mondial du disque - deservedly so, as you can hear at first note. The combination of Sir Georg Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic in collaboration with the most important Wagner singers of the 1950s and 1960s creates an almost electrifying atmosphere in front of the microphones. The Vienna Philharmonic devotedly bathes in Wagner's romantic sounds and knows how to fill every sensual expression of feeling in the highly emotional operas with musical life. More than 100 musicians are involved in the orchestra, sometimes six harps and four bass tubas are used simultaneously. And as enormous as the sound masses are, Sir Georg Solti always navigates the orchestra through the scores with taste and style. One senses that Sir Solti reveres Wagner's romantic side, that he wants to tease out all the fairy-tale facets of the music and makes no effort at all to give the compositions a leaner shape. And that is probably what accounts for the authenticity and the evocative effect of the recordings.

Wolfgang Windgassen, tenor (Siegfried)
Birgit Nilsson, soprano (Brünnhilde)
Gerhard Stolze, tenor (Mime)
Hans Hotter, bass (Wanderer)
Gustav Neidlinger, bass (Alberich)
Marga Höffgen, contralto (Erda)
Kurt Böhme, bass (Fafner)
Dame Joan Sutherland, soprano (Waldvogel)
Wiener Philharmoniker
Sir Georg Solti, conductor

Digitally remastered