[SACD-R][OF] Wagner: Great Orchetsral Highlights (George Szell, The Cleveland Orchestra) - 1962, 1968/1999 (Orchestral, Romantic)

George Szell conducts highlights from Wagner’s Ring Cycle of Operas, with the bonuses of the Meistersinger and Tristan Preludes.
Reviews from David A. Kemp on Amazon.com

George Szell (1897-1970), one of the greatest conductors of the twentieth century, was born in Budapest, studied piano, conducting, and composing in Vienna and Berlin, and learned his craft as a conductor in the opera houses of Europe. World War II brought him to America, where he conducted at the Metropolitan Opera (1942-1946), and finally led the Cleveland Orchestra from 1946 until his death, “molding the ensemble into one of the world’s finest,” as the Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music notes. Szell and the Cleveland became as distinguished a collaboration as Toscanini and the NBC or Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. Szell brought the Cleveland Orchestra to such a peak of perfection that many good judges considered the Cleveland under Szell the premier conductor/orchestra team in the world.
In the late 1950s and the 1960s, the procession of marvelous Szell recordings with the Cleveland Orchestra that came rolling out of Severance Hall became for discerning music lovers a benchmark of excellence; many of them have never been surpassed. (My own list of these nonpareils would include the complete Beethoven symphonies, the complete Beethoven piano concertos with Leon Fleisher, the Beethoven overtures, the Mahler Fourth Symphony, Strauss’s Don Quixote, the Dvorak Slavonic Dances, and the Wagner disc under review here, but there are plenty of other worthy candidates from the extensive Szell/Cleveland discography). Szell’s hallmarks as an interpreter were vigor, tension, clarity; avoidance of extremes, excess, and eccentricity; complete lack of sentimentality; and masterful control of an orchestra that had become awesomely virtuosic and perfectly responsive in his hands. In sum, a typical Szell/Cleveland performance was taut, disciplined, bristling with energy, insight, and conviction, and immaculately played. His performances virtually never sounded routine, usually had a fresh-minted quality, and had a way of unfolding with an uncanny sense of rightness, of inevitability, conveying the impression that this is the way this music ought to be played.
This CD contains the six orchestral excerpts from Wagner’s Ring that Szell and the Cleveland recorded in 1968. To these have been added two substantial excerpts from non-Ring Wagner operas, Die Meistersinger and Tristan und Isolde, recorded in 1962. All the performances are superb, as fine as any in the catalog. The sound is good, clear and full, if not up to the best standards of today. The Penguin Guide to Compact Discs, in reviewing this reecording, awarded it their highest honor, a rosette, and said of it: “The orchestral playing here is in a very special class. Its virtuosity is breathtaking. Szell generates the greatest tension . . . and the improvement in [sound] quality with the latest remastering for CD is little short of miraculous. This is worthy of Szell’s extraordinary achievement in Cleveland in the 1960s.”
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