Polished ‘Ring’: David Breckbill hails the Thielemann cycle as one of the finest ever recorded

Having spent a fair amount of my life trying to recreate through indirect, fragmentary evidence what it must have been like to experience Wagner’s works in the theatre in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I find myself bemused by this incarnation of Bayreuth’s 2008 Ring production. What I would not give to hear such a recording from a century or more earlier! But to evaluate an audio-only recording of a live production that stems from the age of DVD and Regietheater is to view the situation from the opposite direction: here one is forced to realise that the missing visual/theatrical dimension holds the key to much of what one hears, that to speak of the conductor’s or Sieglinde’s interpretation as perceived through sound only is an inadequate and misleading endeavour.