I think Leinsdorf on the strength of his 1962 Decca Walkure release would have been a great complete Ring......
Also of active conductors Abbado seems to have the right stuff as evidenced by his
Also Pappano may have some promise from his recent Tristan
The annoited one seems to be Theileman since he just released a complete Ring, the main problem is how to get group of current singers to match up to best casts of previous sets.......
I have observed that conductors who are very good at Bruckner also excell at Wagner.....or is the other way around?
(Solti, Karajan, Barenboim, Klemperer etc)
Anyway one of the great Bruckner conductors Eugen Jochum does not have a Wagner Ring and I suspect he would be quite good......
Out of conductors now longer with us then to me Kleiber would be an obvious choice.
I have heard Pappano conduct a live Ring and also heard him conduct Tristan. These were both of very high standards, particularly the Die Walkure.
However I have heard Semyon Byckov conduct Lohengrin and Tannhauser with each performance being absolutely exquisite. In fact his performance of Tannhauser helped me re-evaluate the piece upwards in my own mind. This would therefore make me pick him.
I would however stress that this is no criticism of Pappano who at the moment, in my book, is the best conductor of the core Italian repertoire today.
Another outsider would be Esa-Pekka Salonen the director of the Philharmonia with his modern approach.
"The Tristan idea has been growing in my mind ever since Wieland Wagner asked me to do a production at Bayreuth, but there never was time during the years I was with the New York Philharmonic. Now that my time has become more flexible, I return to Tristan as one of the major projects I want to achieve in the near future. The idea would be to produce it at the Bayreuth Festival in 1973 and to record and film it thereafter. I realize that you may not be interested in staging the opera at Bayreuth but I can think of no one on Earth better suited for a free, fresh and "inner-directed" film version." (Bernstein 1970)
1. I wish Carlos Kleiber had accepted the Eurodisc offer for the Digital Studio ring. From that dreamy Janowski Ring I would only change Theo Adam and Marek Janowski.
2. André Cluytens, even if it was from the Wiener Staatsoper. I think he is an underrated conductor at hte Bayreuth Golden Age.
3. I add up to Otto Klemperer in a studio ring for Columbia with the Philharmonia Orchestra (Dieskau and Christa Ludwig!).
Rattle and the BPO did a complete Ring Cycle over a few summers at the Aix en Provence Festival. The Gotterdammerung is available in the BPO's Digital Concert Hall and was very well regarded when I did the anonymous Ring recordings some months back. They also did a Tristan at the Baden Baden Easter Festival about 2 years ago and will be doing Parsifal this Easter.
I remember reading that Tullio Serafin loved Wagner's operas - that would have been interesting to hear in good stereo sound since he lived so long. Similarly, the Italian maestro De Sabata in studio recordings of Wagner would probably have been hair-raising based on his Tristan und Isolde at La Scala.
Rudolf Kempe, in stereo and in ideal conditions. I have his 1957 ROH live Ring, a private recording and Bayreuth cycles from 1960 and '61. The 1961 has been remastered by Orfeo in spacious mono sound and is superb in almost every way, only lacking stereo sound. It is my favourite Ring recording. Birgit Nilsson thought Kempe was a wonderful conductor and so do I.
Also thought immediately of Kubelik here.
But to think of a complete Bruno Walter Ring, even a complete Walküre...
And apropos Rattle, there's also a Youtube video of a concert performance of Rheingold he did with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (yes, a period instrument orchestra).
Toscanini (his younger self, not the more rigid conductor of the 1950s) and Victor de Sabata. I wish De Sabata had recorded every opera in existence.
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