Wagner: Die Walküre

01/11/2007
Mike Ashman
Gramophone (UK)

...Melba’s yet incomplete Ring is a record of the first production of a complete Cycle by an Australian company, in Adelaide, November 2004. Asher Fisch (a sometime Barenboim alumnus) gives an account, in Arnold Whittall’s words, “that is well paced and effectively balanced between dramatic immediacy and longer-term formal goals”. Well and comfortably played by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, and sensationally recorded (the best-sounding Cycle on the market to date, bar none), this cycle’s Walküre yields valuable, dramatic performances from Lisa Gasteen and the Walsung pair Deborah Riedel and Stuart Skelton (also known to British audiences)...