The Colon performance under Kleiber the Elder was released by Medici Arts as part of a package featuring a documentary on the tenor Max Lorenz, “Hitler’s Siegfried.” It preserves all of Act 1, and Act 2 from the beginnning of the Waldweben through the fight with Fafner, stopping short of the last exchange between Siegfried and the dying giant. The sonics here are at times difficult to listen through, and the frequency range is so attenuated as to tip the balances toward the low end, but it’s worth attention for both the orchestra and the voices. We again feel secure that the players know what’s going on. The orchestra seethes with attack and animation, with dramatic and descriptive intent, the brass and lower woodwinds registering the most strongly, and it struck me that much of what we hear in the older orchestras is a way of inflecting based not merely on execution of crescendo/diminuendo, but on the singer’s messa di voce, which embraces not merely the give and take in loudness, but  developments in color (brass and winds) and, sometimes, in vibrato (strings), as the phrases are drawn out. As other airchecks from the Colon in the ’30s have disclosed, there was a vibrant tradition of Wagner performance in Buenos Aires then, and this orchestra, under Kleiber, is as alert to scenic event as any native one.

Furtwängler, with any orchestra, takes a real listening-through. The depth of his work is cumulative, reliant on the long arc, so I’m not going to say much about it here, except that it struck me on this re-acquaintance that his way of leading us along is not so much a matter of slower tempo or even the gravity of utterance, but a way of holding the final note or chord of a phrase just a tad beyond its marked value before proceeding—a counterintuitive manner of achieving his sort of “breathed” momentum, like waiting after an exhale before letting the next inhale start. Keilberth, one of the four soaked-in-the-brine “K’s” who curated the Ring at Bayreuth in the ’50s and early ’60s (with Knappertsbusch, Krauss, Kempe) and not necessarily my favorite one, leads a strong and strongly cast performance that is so vividly recorded, and played with such expertise, that for pure listening pleasure it’s hard to gainsay. Stiedry’s Met cycle is probably the least interesting of these, just a solid repertory rendition, but its overall liveliness and many of its singers ^(I) will suffice to illustrate the values of the older standard.

I promised some remarks on the connection of vocal type (not of interpretation per se, but of basic weight and color of sound) to character representation, but time presses, so they will have to be brief. Just as I noted in the current cast an overall lack of the sort of physical presence that would convey the “heavy,” mythic aspect of some of the principal characters, and a reluctance to run the risk of stereotyping that would enliven the character roles, we discover the aural equivalents of these in the singing, and find that the older standard is again instructive. I’ll start again at the lower range end, and work upward.