The Golden Ring - The Making of Solti’s “Ring“ (Wagner Ring Cycle)

’’Watching the Vienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti, and a stellar cast record Wagner’s immense Götterdämmerung for Decca in the fall of 1964 provides a thousand lessons in the art of working under pressure. For this classic documentary, The Golden Ring, a BBC camera crew eavesdropped as producer John Culshaw guided his engineering team through tricky technical maneuvers far removed from the relative ease of modern digital editing. What utter concentration and focus Birgit Nilsson, Wolfgang Windgassen, Gottlob Frick, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau bring to their collective and individual singing! Solti, for his part, oozes energy and exactitude as he pleads for greater precision and frets over details in the car en route to the sessions. There’s a generous selection of bonus audio tracks culled from the Solti Ring cycle, awesomely remastered in Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound (the main program is in AC3 Digital mono). Director Humphrey Burton’s annotations offer fascinating anecdotes. A gripping release, in sum, and not just for opera fans.’’ --Jed Distler ’’When it first appeared, we learned some amazing things from this great documentary: how the Vienna traffic was halted for soft passages of music in the Ring recordings; how producer John Culshaw persuaded Sir Georg Solti to speed up proceedings at Siegfied’s funeral; and, most scandalous of all, that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was a smoker! Shock, horror, wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t see it with … etc. Equally fascinating, on a more serious level, is the sight of these engineers back in the dear dead days of the 1960s, editing tapes by hand. If you think of the musical and financial responsibility carried by those nonchalant strokes with the blade, the mind really does begin to boggle, even more so if you’ve ever tried it yourself! This is a truly wonderful film, packed with drama, humour and information. The drama arises out of the power of the music and of the personalities involved in creating it, principally Solti, but also Culshaw, who presides at his editing console with all the charismatic sang-froid of a World War 2 Spitfire pilot, cravat and all. Solti, relatively young at the time the film was made, is a revelation. His dynamism, dedication and unflagging energy are legendary; less so are the pharmaceuticals that he used in order to keep himself going, laid out for all to see on his hotel bedside table. The humour is constantly breaking through, most notably with the stunt involving Birgit Nilsson, Brünnhilde, and a large stallion – you need to see it really, but it’s not as bad as it sounds (this is family viewing). Less intentionally funny are the two Decca chappies responsible for organising the complex schedules (long before the days of computers, so they probably worked just fine). Their little scenes reminded me of the two Englishmen in The Lady Vanishes, who, whatever the mayhem going on around them, really only want to find out the score in the test match back home. The film is followed by generous audio highlights from the Decca Ring. I say ‘generous’, but it’s not really a very good idea – surely most people who want a DVD on this subject will already have a complete Ring on disc? In any case, the enhanced sound (“Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound“) seemed to me less immediate than that on the CD transfers published a few years back – some of that elemental quality seems to have been lost. Just as the video of the making of Bernstein’s ‘definitive’ West Side Story recording was an unique insight into state-of-the-art recording techniques in the mid-1980s, so this film chronicles, in an absorbing and entertaining way, the situation as it was some twenty years earlier. Humphrey Burton, whom we have to thank for so many great musical documentaries, produced a classic here, which Wagner enthusiasts, as well as all those simply interested in the development of recording, will enjoy enormously.’’ --Gwyn Parry-Jones