Few would have been surprised when Solti’s Decca recording of Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung was voted The Recording of the Century: there was simply nothing which came within a bull’s roar. The entire seven-year project (1958-1965) was a miracle not just of great casting, singing, conducting and orchestral playing; it was equally epic in its organisation, logistics, budgetary discipline and technical innovation. The world of recording was never the quite the same. It changed the way people heard opera in their living rooms.
An army of experts and professionals deserve credit for the outstanding quality of the finished product (which has retained its magic aura to this day) but the twin geniuses of the project were undoubtedly John Culshaw and then plain Georg Solti. Culshaw had long been a force in the industry as Decca’s leading recording producer but Solti, despite appearances at the Salzburg Festival and recordings with both the Israel and London Philharmonic Orchestras as feathers in his cap, was a completely unknown quantity in an undertaking as mammoth as this, by far the largest, most ambitious and genuinely visionary recording ever attempted.
Now, with live performances of The Ring appearing as regularly as Railway Square...
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