Richard Wagner: Das Rheingold

„No one has bettered Solti’s Decca Ring in terms of sweep, scope, grandeur, dramatic immediacy, and sheer adrenalin“ Stereophile

As first instalment of the legendary SOLTI Ring the RHEINGOLD is released as a Limited Deluxe 2 HYBRID SACD edition, in a 12" slipcase. The other operas of the Ring cycle will be released successively over the coming months. 

Among the amazing cast is George London as Wotan, Set Svanholm as Loge, Gustav Neidlinger as Alberich and Kirsten Flagstad as Fricka. Sir Georg Solti is conducting the Vienna Philharmonic.

NEW 24bit/192kHz Stereo Transfer.

Audiophile Hybrid SACDs can be played on every CD player. The digital resolution is much higher than a usual CD just allowing for better sound experiences.

The booklet contains: technical note on the new HD remastering by Decca Classics Label Director & Executive Producer Dominic Fyfe. Introductions to each opera by John Culshaw. Synopses in English & German. Libretti (original German + English translation). Original session photographs, facsimiles of Solti’s and Culshaw’s scores, and previously unpublished and newly-discovered curios from the sessions.

At the beginning of the 1965 documentary ‘The Golden Ring’ Humphrey Burton und Decca producer John Culshaw are pictured in the back of a sedan enroute to the airport to meet Georg Solti. Burton asks Culshaw what his major preoccupation is now that the recording is about to begin. “To do the best by Wagner”, Culshaw replies and then adds, tellingly, “and to try and recreate in sound and just in this medium alone what he wanted, what he meant”.

The Decca Ring has always been about the sound. Decca’s endeavour with this new transfer of the original analogue master tapes has been to do the best by Solti, by Culshaw and his chief engineer Gordon Parry, and ultimately by Wagner. “Here is the greatest achievement in gramophone history yet”, wrote Alec Robertson in Gramophone in 1965. It was the perfect marriage between art and technology, Solti and Culshaw assembled a dream cast of the leading Wagner singers of their day, including Birgit Nilsson, Wolfgang Windgassen, Hans Hotter, Gottlob Frick, Kirsten Flagstad, Regine Crespin, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Christa Ludwig, James King, Lucia Popp and Joan Sutherland.