Wagner: Die Walküre (Remastered 2022)

As a storm rages through the forest, two desperate people find shelter. Neither realizes—yet—that their forbidden love will have consequences on a cosmic scale. On the second night of Wagner’s Ring cycle the drama hurtles to earth in one of opera’s most moving and tragic love stories. A brother finds a sister, a father betrays his son, and a goddess discovers her own humanity, in a tale that sweeps from the blossoming passion of Siegmund and Sieglinde, through the spectacular “Ride of the Valkyries” to the climax, high on a windswept mountain, where Wagner takes us inside the mind of a god and lets us feel his heart break. Die Walküre is both the most passionate and the most accessible episode of Wagner’s mighty Der Ring des Nibelungen. In 1965, for Decca’s pioneering recorded Ring cycle, producer John Culshaw and conductor Georg Solti assembled an unrivalled cast, with the towering German bass-baritone Hans Hotter as the god Wotan and Régine Crespin as Sieglinde. But at the heart of the drama is the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, and with Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic in full-blooded support, the great Swedish Wagnerian soprano Birgit Nilsson gives one of the most overwhelming performances of her career. This version of the Solti Ring has been specially remastered in Spatial Audio, with every detail glistening like never before.