I recently purged about 15% of my collection. The Ring cycles were hit particularly hard. Quite a number of cycles did not make the final cut, including most of the videos, which seemed avant-garde at the time and now look just pathetic. So I'm down to nine cycles now: Furtwängler 1953 on SACD Solti on SACD and BR Audio Karajan on SHM-CD Böhm on new CD mastering Swarowsky on CD Janowsky I on CD Levine I on DVD Levine II/Luisi on BR Video Janowski II on SACD
It is interesting that Levine and Janowski have contributed two each, and dominate the last forty years. Other conductors during this period have been sabotaged by distracting stagework. The last studio recording was 25 years ago, and it has been increasingly difficult to assemble consistently excellent casts of singers. Is the Gergiev cycle stalled midway for this reason, as the Dohnanyi was before?
I was pleased by Van Zweden's recording of Parsifal, and have hopes that his new Ring cycle will take its place as the tenth on my shelf. An online video segment reveals that his performance of DAS RHEINGOLD was in concert form, a nice compromise between live and studio recording. (The cycles of Furtwängler 1953 and Janowski II were recorded in concert, to good effect.)
Van Zweden's orchestra is scheduled to present one opera each year, so the entire cycle will not be finished until 2018, the year I go onto Social Security. That may prove to be, so far as collecting goes, wahrlich "das Ende."
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