PentaTone Classics  PTC 5186581 (13 discs)

Stereo/Multichannel Hybrid

Classical - Opera

Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen

Tomasz Konieczny, Christian Elsner, Iris Vermillion, Jochen Schmeckenbecher, Matti Salminen, Petra Lang
Rundfunkchor Berlin
Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin
Marek Janowski (conductor)


It took Richard Wagner (1813-1883) 26 years to complete his magnum opus, the opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, which consists of four separate operas tied together by leitmotifs, recurring musical themes which link plot elements. In some of his essays, Wagner speaks about the Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”) which was his ideal way of unifying all works of art via the theatre. It is a union of opera and drama, in which the individual arts are subordinated to a common purpose. Der Ring des Nibelungen, and specifically its components Das Rheingold and Die Walküre represent perhaps the closest that Wagner, or anyone else, ever came to realizing these ideals.

The Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin together with conductor Marek Janowski, one of the great masters and exponents of the music of the German tradition, recorded the four operas Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung at the Berlin Philharmonie in 2012 and 2013. All recordings were made during a unique series of live concertante performances, which allows for an orchestral clarity that is impossible to achieve when the orchestra is placed in a pit.

The first ever multichannel surround sound recording of the Ring is now being released by PENTATONE in a luxurious collector book (300 x 300 mm) containing 13 SACD and more than 250 pages rich with content, including liner notes, biographies and full librettos in English and German.