Im very satisfied

Great to hear Karajan's live Ring rather than his studio productions.

Superb Ring Cycle

Magical RING from Karajan and Company. My first RING was Karajan's studio version. After all these years, it was wonderful to hear the corresponding live performances. They're even more compelling than the studio counterparts.

nice one!

It is important to listen to a live Karajan's Ring, but this is not necessarily the most fascinating experience!! I prefer Rheingold, Siegfried and walküre Act III in Bayreuth 1951.

There was a period when, like several close friends of mine and for similar reasons, I despised Karajan and enjoyed quoting Bruno Maderna’s dismissive remark about “Karajan’s chocolate Beethoven.” Of course, our opinion of him was entirely formed on the basis of DG studio recordings from a certain period, and Exhibit A in our brief against him could easily have been what everybody refers to as “The Karajan Ring,” Karajan’s DG studio recording of the cycle. Since then, I’ve heard more performances both live and studio from earlier in Karajan’s career, and I have a more nuanced perception of his abilities. But the performance that really administered the coup de grace to my preconceptions was the live Salzburg Siegfried that preceded the DG studio recording, which I was able to hear in less than ideal sound a couple of years ago. I’ve also heard great bleeding chunks from the Walküre that preceded the DG recording. On the basis of these experiences, I think that the real “Karajan Ring” is not what was released on DG—a recording made in the relaxed and artificial context of the studio, where the conductor himself was complicit in the engineering of a kind of smooth perfection—but in the extremely interesting and more distinctive live performances that preceded the recording of the installments of the studio Ring. I don’t know whether this remark will be intelligible or not, but, in the live performances, you experience the sheer force of Karajan’s monomaniacal focus and control as it is being deployed in the thick of battle, whereas in the studio recordings you only hear a byproduct, what the control freak engineered under controlled circumstances.It is worth remarking that the very consciousness on the part of Karajan and his DG engineers and producers that they were undertaking a cycle in competition with Solti and Decca, a cycle they intended to be THE Ring that consumers should buy, would have had an equivocal impact on the recordings that were eventually released. On the one hand, convinced of the importance of their undertaking, everyone involved would have aspired to the highest professional standards. On the other hand, the sheer pursuit of the kinds of technical perfection for which Karajan, DG, and the Berlin Philharmonic were famous to the exclusion of other musical virtues would have resulted in a loss of the spontaneity and excitement so infinitely more characteristic of the live performances. (Where the tempi in the studio recordings differ from the tempi in the live performances, the live performances feature quicker tempi.)Which is why I welcome Opera Depot’s release of the live Karajan Ring in better sound than the transfers I’ve heard.