Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Wagner: Die Meistersinger, Act Three; Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 2, "Lobgesang"

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

The longstanding problem with broadcasting Wagner operas is their length. Some of them simply won't fit into my three-and-a-half hour timeslot. The only way to accommodate them is to broadcast the complete opera on two successive Sundays. This I have done in past years to accommodate Parsifal, appropriately enough, on Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. Over two Sundays I did the same for a long German baroque opera, Telemann's Der Geduldige Sokrates.

Last Sunday I presented the first two acts, and today I present the third and final act, of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg (1868), in an historic recording made live on stage at the Metropolitan Opera, January 15, 1972. This is actually an airtape of a radio broadcast from the Met, the tape derived from the Met's audio archives. Sony Classical was permitted to release Die Meistersinger in digitally upgraded sonics in its series, "The Metropolitan Opera." Sony's series delves into the Met's vaults as far back as the 1940s, giving us today the opportunity to hear the voices of the Met's stellar casting lineup--singers from the period in the mid twentieth century that opera lovers often regard as the Golden Age of opera singing.

Thomas Schippers was conducting the Met's orchestra and chorus on that occasion four decades and more ago. Among the "Mastersingers of Nuremberg" are James King, Ezio Flagello, Benno Kusche, and bass-baritone Theo Adam starring as Hans Sachs. Soprano Pilar Lorengar stars as Eva. The Met's 1972 Meistersinger was issued on three compact discs in 2011.

Following the Wagner opera, we'll stay in the mode of nineteenth century German romanticism. There's sufficient time remaining to audition a large scale work by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, his Symphony No. 2, "Lobgesang" or "Hymn of Praise" (1840). This work takes off where Beethoven's Ninth Symphony leaves off. But is it a symphony, or rather a big cantata,or maybe a mini-oratorio? Mendelssohn composed it on commission from the city of Leipzig to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Gutenberg's invention of printing. The "Hymn of Praise" was recorded in Munich in 2012 for the French Harmonia Mundi label. Pablo Heras-Casado conducts the Chorus and Symphony Orchestra of Radio Bavaria. The vocal soloists are sopranos Christiane Karg and Christina Landshamer, joined by tenor Michael Schade. HM released "Lobgesang" in 2014 on a single silver disc.