Berliner Luft: David Breckbill finds uniformity of recording conditions is not matched by consistency in casting in a complete cycle of the canonical music dramas

Review of Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung, Parsifal, conducted Janowski, Berlin, 2010–13 (PentaTone, 32 SACDs).

March 2015, Volume 9, Number 1, 89–93.

The bicentenary of Wagner’s birth in 2013 spawned innumerable tributes and projects commemorating the occasion. Marek Janowski’s decision to mount concert performances of the ten canonical operas in the Berlin Philharmonie with the Berlin Radio Chorus and Symphony Orchestra, and with PentaTone there to record the proceedings for SACD in detailed and atmospheric surround sound, was surely one of the most ambitious. The fact that it was manageable at all, and that the recordings were made at single public performances of each opera over the course of only twenty-eight months, demonstrates just how adept the recording industry has become at producing high-quality recordings of live concerts, and how reliable standards of orchestral execution have become by the early 21st century, since in the end one of the strengths of this cycle is the orchestral playing or, more importantly, the kinds of subtle effects Janowski elicits from his players.