Mödl is present from the very first note, and, just for a moment, Wagner's idea of the union of man and woman into the perfect human being seems to have become reality. Brünnhilde's visions of fear are then of oppressive intensity, followed by moments of peaceful illusion and elemental power, before she unconditionally relinquishes her divinity. In her autobiography 'So war mein Weg', Mödl confesses that the Siegfried-Brünnhilde interplay was the most difficult role she experienced in the entire Ring: "The part is short, but it is always a third above my register. I had to be particularly careful", something she had to do most of the time.

Heidelberger Sinfoniker The Heidelberg Symphony Orchestra has specialized in music of the Classical and early Romantic periods, concentrating on works by Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Felix Mendelssohn, and performing according to historically informed practices. The ensemble is conducted by Thomas Fey, and has recorded exclusively on Haenssler.

When Martha Mödl died at the age of 89, she had still not retired. The mezzo soprano turned dramatic soprano turned mezzo once more was a stage creature of rare magnetism. After a late start in music, she sang principal roles in the mezzo repertory during most of her thirties, but made a leap into the front rank of singing actresses with her engagement at the Bayreuth Festival, beginning with its re-opening in 1951. She alternated the three Brünnhildes and Isolde with Astrid Varnay and created a complex, tortured Kundry in Wieland Wagner's revolutionary production of Parsifal during the festival's first postwar season. Her ascent into dramatic soprano roles came gradually, first in such equivocally placed roles as Lady Macbeth and Venus, later in the higher reaches of the Ring heroines, and Isolde.

Concluding their series of the orchestral music of Johannes Brahms on Profil, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln present the Symphony No. 4 in E minor, the Academic Festival Overture, and the Tragic Overture on this third volume, thus rounding out a standard set of the seven works that are usually packaged together.

Russian pianist and composer Lera Auerbach is one of the most arresting and unique figures in classical music in the early twenty first century. It has been the custom, at least thus far, for Auerbach to perform her own keyboard music on recordings. However, in Profil's Flight and Fire, her Russian colleague Ksenia Nosikova, professor of piano at the University of Iowa, plays a program of five previously unrecorded Auerbach works.

Wiener Staatsopernchor The Vienna State Opera Chorus, founded January 5, 1927.

One of the elite orchestras on the world stage, the Berliner Philharmoniker – also widely known as the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra – was founded in Imperial Germany in 1882. Hans von Bülow took over as conductor in 1887, raising the prestige of the organization, as did subsequent guest conductors, including Johannes Brahms, Edvard Grieg, Gustav Mahler, and Richard Strauss. In the 20th century, they survived the loss of their venue and their conductor during World War II and went on to thrive under conductor Herbert von Karajan, who led the group from 1956 to 1989. During his tenure, the orchestra won Grammy Awards for both opera and orchestral recordings.

The Hungarian violinist Johanna Martzy was born in Temesvár, then in Hungary, today in Romania, on October 26, 1924, and was hailed as a wunderkind.

Letztes Jahr fanden im Gegensatz zum ersten Pandemiejahr 2020 zwar die Osterfestspiele Salzburg statt, aber eben nicht zu Ostern, sondern als „Osterfestspiele im Herbst 2021“. Eine szenische Produktion gab es an diesem Wochenende vor Allerheiligen nicht zu sehen, dafür dirigierte Christian Thielemann Mozarts „Requiem“ und Musik von Richard Wagner. Letzteres Konzert war, wie dies nun anhand des auch aufnahmetechnisch vorzüglichen Mitschnitts nachzuprüfen ist, ein Ereignis, vielleicht sogar – was das in gleißenden Farbtönen aufspielende Orchester der Staatskapelle Dresden anlangt – eine Sternstunde.

The recordings here by Martha Mödl from 1955 document not only her impeccable rendering of the German, but also her singular singing status. She started out as a mezzo-soprano, but in 1949, with her first Kundry, she switched to the vocal range midway between mezzo and dramatic soprano, and in March 1952 she sang her first Brünnhilde. She was there from the very start in Neubayreuth: From 1951 to 1955, Mödl sang Kundry in all of the Parsifal performances and only began alternating with Astrid Varnay from 1956. She was also cast in the Ring from 1951, first as Gutrune and the Third Norn, and from 1953 also as Brünnhilde and in 1954 as Sieglinde as well. There, too, she alternated with Varnay, who had been performing almost without pause as Brünnhilde since 1951. Mödl sang Isolde in 1952 and 1953. To the director Wieland Wagner she was a “high dramatic soprano free of pathos”. He valued the way her “voice, personality and performance formed an absolutely inseparable whole”. Her stage presence can no longer be experienced through the recordings, but the vocal penetration of the roles can be.

The musicians of the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden were committed to their tradition of staging an annual commemorative concert even under these difficult circumstances and decided to organize a Memento Mori to mark this date that is inscribed in the annals of city history. The program comprised a small ensemble conducted by an expert for Baroque music and two ideally suited voices for the format. The concert was recorded for the Deutschlandfunk Kultur station and broadcast as a message of peace in the world. There were fewer than ten people in the auditorium of the Semperoper, all socially distanced and listening raptly to this unique event. Ultimately this was the first sign of life, the first musical greeting from the orchestra in a concert not open to the public after months of inactivity due to the pandemic. When, barely a year ago, Arnold Schoenberg’s “Gurre-Lieder” (featuring more than 300 performers on stage to a full house!) were performed and produced for album shortly afterwards (Edition Staatskapelle Vol. 50, PH 20052), no one would have predicted that this sonorous performance would be followed by a long phase of silence. May the present recording serve as testimony in the form of a contemporary sign of a cultural reawakening.

Günter Wand (1912-2002) left us dozens of gramophone records: complete symphonic cycles and impressive live recordings of his concerts with the NDR Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic. The archetypical anti-star all his life and for that very reason under-appreciated, this conductor only attained international recognition in his old age as an unequalled interpreter of classical music. Accordingly, most of these multiple-award-winning benchmark recordings date from his later years. Wand's music-making moved those who heard it with its impeccable balance of perfection coupled with faithfulness to the original, emotional fulfilment, intellectual control, utmost sensitivity and spiritual penetration. He described his mission as "serving music", a cause to which this totally unpretentious man remained committed for seventy years. He rose to be one of the true "greats" of the twentieth century, a figure standing head and shoulders above our restless times, his name synonymous with the highest musical quality.

"I grew up in that wonderful city; I studied there and my family lives there. As a mus ician who is always on the lookout for interesting new discoveries, I wanted to record these works for viola. You will find some familiar pieces in my selection, works that have long been in the standard repertoire for violists the world over, alongside new, unexpected arrangements." "Unlike in the first two recordings of this series, in the I a test one I am no longer playing on my old viol a by Te store (Mil an, 1756 ), but on a new instrument by the viol in-maker Jurgen Manthey (Leipzig, 2020), whom I have known for 25 years and whose work I rate very highly. My playing technique has changed recently. Nowadays I play repertoire of the nineteenth century with more emphasis on the historical accent. For this reason, on this recording I am using gut strings and a bow made by the most famous nineteenth-century bow-maker, Nikolai Kittel from St. Petersburg ( 1856). The grand piano we used on this recording is also a historic in strument: a Bl Uthner of 1905 from Leipzig." Tatjana Masurenko

Born in Venice in 1946, he studied music, medicine and archaeology. He qualified as a medical doctor but then trained as a conductor under Hans Swarowsky in Vienna. He was appointed a lecturer in contemporary and electronic music in Venice in 1972. His international musical career began with a variety of compositional activities (chamber and orchestral music, premiere of the opera Lou Salome in Munich in 1981). His conducting career took off in the mid-1970s with opera productions and performances at the major opera houses of the world including Vienna, London, New York, Milan, Florence, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Dresden. Sinopoli performed and recorded with the great orchestras of Europe and America and made guest appearances in Vienna with the Philharmonic and the State Opera, in Milan at La Scala and in Japan. From 1983 to 1987 he was principal conductor of the orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. From 1984 he was principal conductor, and from 1987 to 1994 music director, of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. He was a Bayreuth Festival conductor from 1985 to 2000. Giuseppe Sinopoli began working with the Dresden Staatskapelle in 1987, and was its principal conductor from 1992 to 2001. He was appointed designated GMD of the Saxonian State Opera from 2003. He made numerous award-winning recordings and toured Europe, North America and the Far East with the Staatskapelle. Giuseppe Sinopoli died in Berlin in 2001.

Christian Thielemann writes: I see Die Meistersinger as the pivot and central point of Wagners entire oeuvre. On the one hand it is a reaction to Tristan; on the other, he had found himself in a blind alley with Siegfried, and together those two works showed him the way out of it. The fascinating thing about Die Meistersinger is that you can find everything in it. Hero and anti-hero, comedy and tragedy, upperclass and lower-class lovers, burlesque and reflection, the old and the new, in short a whole world. The magic words summing it up for me are atmosphere and poetry. How can I, as a conductor, make the music glitter in its exaggerations and parodies, and at the same time lend it authority? Conversely, how can I make its emotionalism sound not false but genuine, emphasizing the deeply felt popular note in the music? Wagner is fundamentally asking his interpreters to square the circle, which is what makes Die Meistersinger such a difficult work to perform. Perhaps it can succeed only by osmosis, if we open ourselves up entirely to all its moods, colours and aromas, inhaling them so deeply that they naturally emerge from us again at the right moment.