Ring, etc.

When you're an opera fiend, and this fact is known, people who are opera-curious or even opera fans but not yet mentally ill about it are bound to ask you, "which Ring should I buy?" My shorthand answer is "[until you have problematically specific tastes] buy the Solti." My snooty answer is, "develop problematically specific tastes and then mix and match. My ideal goes something like: famous big deal Kna Gotterdammerung w/ Varnay etc or maybe in fact Solti, impossible to find Flagstad/Melchior Met Siegfried* or recently released bazillion dollar Windgassen/Varnay thing, Leinsdorf Walkuere with Vickers, Brouwenstijn, young Nilssen, and I don't really care what Rheingold because I hate Das Rheingold." By this point most people have fled. Anyway La Cieca has, I believe, taken it one step further and is going act by act, which should be fun. Check it out over at Unnatural Acts.

Come to type of Wagner, I couldn't help myself this afternoon and bought a used Gala set of Bernstein and Farrell doing bleeding chunks. Get home and put it on only to find it is very late in the game for Farrell and recorded in an unflattering acoustic, the Dawn Duet anyway. Looks like the main or only draw is going to be the considerably earlier Immolation under de Sabata, a bonus track. I suppose the Tristan and Walkuere stuff could be better, but it's around the same year as the d.d. in which she sounds, and I just can't think of a more apt way to put it than the hipster locution: like ass. [Edit to add: I think it's the recording acoustic as much as her vocal estate. The Sieglinde from two years earlier sounds rather a lot better.]


*seriously, I stumbled upon it used in Chicago, then some asshole borrowed and never returned mine, and now I'd have to order it from overseas