Kind of Blue: Arnold Whittall marvels at the release of the Karajan ‘Ring’ cycle on a single Blu-ray disc

Review of Der Ring des Nibelungen, conducted Karajan, Berlin, 1966–9 (Deutsche Grammophon, 1 audio Blu-ray disc).

July 2018, Volume 12, Number 2, 88–91.

One of David Breckbill’s most memorable reviews for this journal had him writing about Jon Vickers’s Siegmund in a 1961 Die Walküre at Covent Garden, conducted by Solti, where ‘his voice and artistry are in utterly eloquent form’. Breckbill singled out ‘his expressive variety in the midst of a seamlessly sustained line beginning at “Kühlende Labung gab mir der Quell”’ as a particularly notable instance of that special eloquence. A comparable magic can be heard five years later in the Walküre that launched Herbert von Karajan’s complete Ring cycle, a series of studio recordings (made in Berlin’s Jesus-Christus-Kirche) preceding the Salzburg Easter Festival stagings, which Karajan also produced between 1967 and 1970.