Buena grabación.

A very good cast. For me, it is new: i did not know the voices. It's veru well. And Eugen Jochum on tyh podium. What else?

A great live recording of Richard Wagner's "Parsifal", starring some of the finest Wagner singers and artists, such as: Jean Cox, Janis Martin, Franz Mazura, Donald McIntyre, Hans Sotin and Gerd Nienstedt! It is Bayreuth 1973 and Maestro Eugen Jochum is in the pit! Highly enjoyed and strongly/firmly recommended!

It's easy to forget that this production of Parsifal was the same one that reopened the Bayreuth Festival in 1951. The cast changed quite a bit during the 60's and 70's though there were some singers who sang in it season after season. Janis Martin began as a mezzo, but you'd never know it from the ease of her high notes. She is very professional and involved here yet she is not particularly memorable in the way that Modl and Varnay were. She has been well-coached and sings beautifully. She also is one of the few Kundrys who do all of the screams Wagner calls for (most, even today, leave out the one required at the end of the second act.) Jean Cox is good though Parsifal doesn't suit him as well as some of the other Wagner heroes. Mazura is a terrific Gurnemanz whose diction is superb. Others have sung it more beautifully, few have made as much of the text. McIntyre is also a fine Amfortas while Sotin and Nienstedt are both excellent. The Flower Maidens are a good bunch (who laugh longer at their exit than any others I've heard).Jochum leads a well-paced performance that never sounds too slow and is often quite exciting. The sound is very good (though Amfortas' first line got lost somewhere.) My copy had some minor file corruption (clicking) at the end of the first disc.

BIAS ALERT: I am a Franz-Mazura freak. He has been on my buy-everything list for a long time. This is largely because I almost always find the villains the most interesting characters in operas, and Mazura is one of the greatest villain-actors, especially the Wagnerian "howling-and-spitting" creeps like Alberich and Klingsor. Even more than Gustav Neidlinger (PeaceBeUponHim), Mazura is the master of nasty, frenzied menace. So I was very curious to see what he would do with a gentle, stolid good-guy like Gurnemanz. The answer is: he's WONDERFUL! He's not deep and heavy like Josef Greindl or Gottlob Frick, and not a rich, golden voice like Kurt Moll or Hans Sotin, but he's more human-sounding, more sincere and in-the-role than anyone I've heard in a long time.Everyone else in the cast is more-than-adequate, except perhaps for Gerd Nienstedt (as Klingsor) who almost always bores me and sounds, as usual, kind of genericJochum's conducting is strong and quite sensitive.