I recall Decca went from the first opera to be recorded, not the second, but the third which could have been a financial decision as much as an artistic one. Who knows?
What I do know is on side 6 of Rhinegold, LP, from the forging of the rainbow bridge hammer blow to the end is a bit of a magic 15 minutes for me.
Surely Decca would have high quality digital transfers in their archives by now. Some may not like the involvement of digits but its the only way to go after 50 odd years.
The Culshaw book is 100% on the recording story. Nothing on his personal life. In the book there is a photo of some of the team listening to playbacks. A picture of D F-D enjoying a ciggy I remember!
There was a reason why Decca recorded the operas out of sequence, but I can’t remember what it was. It may have been due to casting problems. They wanted a particular singer for one of the roles, but couldn’t sign him up, so went to (I think) Wolfgang Windgassen very much as a second choice?
If I had been able to get a copy of Culshaw’s ‘Ring Resounding’, I could tell you. Let’s hope that some enterprising publisher reissues it to coincide with the rerelease of the records.
I have no piercing insight into why Decca would let the tapes of ‘The Ring’ disintegrate. Sounds like incompetence, and it may be no more than that.
@graham55 it was your original post that first drew this to my attention. The remastering project is described on Decca’s website:
Hopefully Richard will allow that link as it’s not actually selling you the recordings. Although the live link shows up in German, if you go there then the site is also in English. It’s the 25th anniversary of Solti’s death rather than the 100th of his birth, although I imagine those two won’t be that far apart.
There is also another website which does sell the recordings, so I won’t link it. But if you type soltiring and add .com then you will find it. The most interesting thing here is the extensive guide to the leitmotivs of the Ring. But you can also see what they say about the SACD and the vinyl offerings. The only part available so far is the highlights album. But you can buy this as a download from Qobuz.
Incidentally the book Ring Resounding is available via Amazon markets from time to time. There is a copy there right now. Culshaw also write another book, an autobiography, which he called “Putting the Record Straight”. There is much more here about his personal life, written in the same style as Ring Resounding, although it kind of stops suddenly just before his final illness. I bought that via Amazon markets too, some years ago. I will look in the book later and see why they originally recorded Siegfried before Walkure and post the answer here later today.
I read about the recovering of the original tapes from another source. I forget what now. But anyway if you Google and include 2022 remastering, you can find all the references quite easily.
Thank for posting that, David. It’s very useful to bring this new release to the attention of Members. These are probably the most important set of classical records ever recorded, after all.
I’d buy the Culshaw book in an instant, but my Visa card isn’t working. That has not done much to improve my state of mind!
The reason for recording Siegfried before Walkure is discussed over about ten pages or so of Ring Resounding. But these two pages summarise the position.
Reading the book again just now, I realise how much more than a recording engineer was John Culshaw. He was the producer of the whole thing, working extremely closely with Solti and masterminding the whole scheduling and recording process, including choosing and engaging all the artists, many of whom were extremely famous and highly sought after. Fascinating.
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It’s fascinating to get that insight into what was going on behind the scenes. I will try extra hard, when I have a working credit card again, to track down copies of both John Culshaw’s books.
They wanted another very good and busy tenor and did get him under contract, but he failed over many months to put the work in to learn the part well enough and ultimately Culshaw and Solti had to abandon him. Culshaw doesn’t say what his name was, although I guess that information is in the public domain somewhere. The book explains how they got through the nightmare of abandoning one artist and securing Wolfgang Windgassen, who was truly a second choice, but Culshaw is very complimentary about the effect of having such a talented and experienced tenor singing the part of Siegfried after their original choice had stumbled unsuccessfully through the first two recording sessions. Fascinating stuff.
I have the 48/24 Audio Blu-Ray of the entire cycle, for which I paid under $60. At the time, Decca claimed that the state of the tapes was such that a 96/24 remastering made no sense. Maybe true, maybe not. But based on the price of the single disc download, this new mastering of the cycle is going to be a heck of a lot more. If Qobuz let’s me stream it, I’ll probably be satisfied.
Decca have made a 192/24 rip of all of the very original master tapes that were in a vault somewhere. The SACDs and vinyls are expensive. I think Qobuz will let you stream 192/24 if you want to.
Certainly the new remastered highlights disc is available as a 192/24 download at a price of about £20 from Qobuz. But I went for 96/24 which was about £16.
You can stream the first track or two of that download for free from Qobuz if you want to give it a go, but I think that’s only “CD quality”.
Incidentally this is what Decca say about the transfer:
“For this 2022 edition we have utilised a completely new set of high-definition 24bit/192kHz transfers of the original two-track stereo master tapes. Almost every tape box is marked “Edited & Passed: JC” where John Culshaw personally initialled each reel as passed for production. These transfers were made as part of Universal Music’s preservation project at the Arvato facility in Gütersloh, Germany. Overseen by Andrew Wedman, formerly of Emil Berliner Studios, the tapes were aligned and played on Studer A820 machines coupled with Weiss analogue to digital converters and a proprietary workstation to record the output.
Working with 38 reels of original mastertapes –some up to 65 years old and spanning seven years of recording–there were inevitably instances where some individual tapes needed edit repairs or suffered oxide shedding. Tapes in poor condition were baked for ten hours at 55°C to restore their integrity. The playback alignment was greatly helped by the fact that the first tape reel in each opera has an announcement from engineer James Brown or, in the case of Die Walküre Culshaw himself, with left/right identifiers and a series of tones to ensure the correct calibration of the tape head. Decca’s 1950s Ampex-designed AME noise reduction circuit –a precursor of the Dolby circuitry to reduce tape hiss –was not deployed such that we could use the very latest noise reduction software at the remastering stage.
The result is a set of HD transfers which are like photographic RAW files with little or no processing to create as pure a starting point as possible before remastering.”
The special set of all of the new vinyls with lithographic prints, album booklet artwork and a Blueray audio of the whole lot with Dolby Atmos is £630.
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Qobuz has the 96/24 download at USD22. I haven’t checked other download merchants.
The most detailed assessment of the prior releases I’ve seen is contained in a 2013 article from the Wagner Society I’m having trouble linking the article itself, but Google should find it. Use Wagner Society Solti Ring. The author concluded that despite a modest use of CEDAR, the Blu-Ray was the best release yet. As I am not a Ring fanatic, I do not see myself spending $374 (17*22) dollars for a potentially improved version.
It’s possible to listen to (pretty average) extracts from Solti’s account on the net, by typing in something along the lines of Solti Rhinegold Entry Of Gods Into Valhalla’into your search engine.
It’s not great sound, but it gives a fair idea of what the music, and this recording of it, are all about.
That does it for me. Retrospective attempts to reduce noise ALWAYS spoil the original. I’ll continue to look out for a good original Die Walkure set thanks.
Absolutely — when it was released, the album received a very good review in Gramophone.
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I worked my way through a lot of their albums after that and the majority were also well worth a listen. They’re now one of my Roon favourites!
I think at least one of their albums won a Gramophone Award. I reckon they are one of the finest string quartets around today, especially in the Czech repertoire.
The Dvorak, which I bought on CD, several years ago, is definitely a favourite.
Roger
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I wouldn’t be surprised… not only a great string quartet but the quality of the recording itself is very impressive.
Loving this recording of Bruckner’s second, in Thielemann’s ongoing Bruckner cycle with the Vienna Philharmonic. So much, in fact, that I went back to the 8th (which I didn’t like at all when it first came out) and decided to eat my earlier words on that one. One thing for sure - these recordings require a top notch front end and rather loud volume setting.
Cheers
EJ
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Music teacher asked our 9-year-old about his favourite piece of music. His answer: “Beethoven No. 5”. That’s my boy! 
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I concur. I have the same CD and both the performance and sound are excellent! Rare combination indeed.
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