Valkyries Ride through Time and Space: Recordings of ‘Walküre’ over a span of eighty years are evaluated by Niall Hoskin

Reviews of Die Walküre, conducted van Zweden, Hong Kong, 2016 (Naxos, 4 CDs); Die Walküre Act I, conducted Tennstedt, Royal Festival Hall, London, 1991 (LPO, 1 CD); Leo Borchard, Telefunken Recordings 1933–1935, includes Wotan’s Farewell, sung by Hans Reinmar (Testament, 1 CD).

March 2017, Volume 11, Number 1, 84–8.

A year is a long time to wait after a ‘Vorabend’, but Naxos has now brought us the second instalment of its Ring project. In the intervening time, conductor Jaap van Zweden has been appointed music director of the New York Philharmonic, but he will see this cycle through by 2018. The brainchild of the Hong Kong Philharmonic’s Chief Executive Michael MacLeod, it has involved recruiting a diverse cast of international singers, as well as summoning extra harps, woodwind and heavy brass from Australia, the USA and Europe. MacLeod reckons his cosmopolitan casting gives him the pick of the bunch as far as Wagner singing goes, and this is indeed a strong line-up, though not a homogeneous one.