Search - Paul Johnston :: Wagner: The Ride of the Valkyries, Overtures and Choruses

Historian Paul Johnson's insightful liner notes to this reissue of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries point out that "we can hear singers and musicians swept up together in the spine-tingling experience" of the music. Truly, this is some of the most dizzying music on record, led by Sir George Solti with a wonderful mix of pile- driving Wagnerian energy and strangely exuberant detail. There are numerous important overtures and choruses, with Birgit Nilsson singing "Mild und Leise" from Tristant und Isolde and the Immolation Scene from Götterdämerung. This music has, of course, been assailed as connected to Wagner's anti-Semitism, and that fact provides Johnson for his launch-off: As a child, he couldn't hear Wagner in any context other than the one here, an anthology of overtures and choruses. But Johnson notes that the composer's "undoubtedly unpleasant character" was, in fact, sublimated through the music. Whether that is true will never be clear, but what is now clear is that the music engulfs the listener, and for someone looking for a top-down gloss on Wagner's oeuvre, this is a wonderful CD to spin. --Andrew Bartlett