Despite being regarded as one of the great Wagner conductors of his age - he conducted a performance of Tristan und Isolde in front of an audience of 12,000 in New York's Lewisohn Stadium in 1937 - Fritz Reiner recorded very little of the composer's music, and of that, much has been neglected.
Here Mark Obert-Thorn has brought together all of Reiner’s commercially-issued 78-era recordings of Wagner, squeezing them all onto a single CD with preludes and orchestral interludes and music from six operas: Die Meistersinger, Parsifal, Die Walküre, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and Siegfried.
With many of these recordings, made between 1938 and 1941, cut onto wide-frequency 33 1/3 rpm lacquer master discs, sound quality is unusually high for the era, and with quiet vinyl used as sources Mr. Obert-Thorn has once again produced a superb and historic release.
