Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Wagner, Die Meistersinger: Acts One and Two

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

The longstanding problem with broadcasting the operas of Richard Wagner 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 in two broadcasts on two successive Sundays. This I had done to accommodate Parsifal on Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, 2013. Over two Sundays I did the same for a long German baroque opera, Telemann's Der Geduldige Sokrates. This Sunday for a second time I present the first two of the three acts of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868).

The last time I presented Die Meistersinger this way was on two Sundays in September, 2014. You heard a historic recording made live on stage at the Metropolitan Opera, January 15, 1972. That was actually an air tape of a radio broadcast from the Met. Thomas Schippers conducted the Met's orchestra and chorus and bass-baritone Theo Adam starred as Hans Sachs.

Listen today to a recording made live in concert performance at the Philharmonie Hall in Berlin, June 3, 2011. Marek Janowski was directing the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, and bass-baritone, Albert Dohmen, sang the role of Sachs. Released on four Pentatone CD's in 2011, this Meistersinger anticipated the two-hundredth anniversary of the composer's birth and 1813.

The German Pentatone label launched a bicentennial recording project that would give the public the ten best known operatic masterpieces of Wagner in state-of-the-art sonics and with singing casts made up of the finest Wagnerian voices of our time. All ten recordings in the series originated at the Philharmonie with Janowski on the podium. I have already broadcast several of the operas is in the Pentatone series.