Posted by Anonymous 4 on March 31, 2006, 7:47:59, in reply to "Re: Tristan Records" The final alinea is a bit yuck-ee to me. I think it depends a lot on what you want from singers. It's true that the recommendations I gave are not particularly _big_ voices, but I don't really care about volume. So take Richards comments with at least the same grain of salt as you take mine or at the very least try out all recordings before you decide on anyone. To address some points : - To this set of ears the remastered Solti Tristan has no audio problems. Fritz Uhl is definitely not swamped, he just has a light voice. But he's totally up to the part. Again, it depends what you expect from a singer. Guys like Uhl also tend to enjoy following Wagner's dynamics instructions and not go full speed all the time (and why should they...loud tenors became a bit banal to me after a while). - Böhm : Again, it totally depends on how you approach it. I can certainly _sympathize_ with Richard's dislike for the conducting, but again, it's _an_ opinion. In fact the Böhm is one of the most widely enjoyed recordings and generally the criticisms are directed towards Windgassen, but Böhm's conducting is very broadly praised. - Karajan : I agree with the criticism about the engineering...it's weird. However, the singers are again excellent provided you don't go for all loud all the time Kleiber : Well, to me she's still there, but maybe Richard's copy has an audio dropout ? Yeah, I know she still sings beautifully and sensitively and gorgeously controlled in the Love duet instead of green-light-full-steam-ahead. I can understand some people get depressed there if you're accustomed to big soprano-orgasms in that place. All in all it depends a lot of what you think the role demands of a soprano. Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing per se _against_ the approach that Richard enjoys, but it's not the only way. Taking a completely different approach and performing Wagner-lite might be less impressive in a way, but can be very satisfying both to the ears and to the brain. It's completely okay to dislike singers like Uhl, Dernesch, Price etc. but it's silly to dismiss them automatically...that whiffs a bit of "I think therefore it is". Try to listen it with other peoples' ears before dismissing something. Unless of course you're purely being polemic and don't mind me polemizing back, which is fine :-)
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Which Richard forgot to mention : Of course this _is_ an opinion :-D 
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