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Running Rings What are we to make of a comparison between Walter Weller’s comment (December, page 39) concerning the Siegfried Idyll and John Culshaw’s book Ring Resounding? Culshaw goes into some detail about the recording session. He tells us how the lights were dimmed and – important for our purposes – how Solti was “persuaded to conduct sitting down”. The date was Sunday November 14, 1965. Now Walter Weller, the “leader of the orchestra”, alleges “Solti wasn’t even in the country at the time!” What will now be the verdict of history? Was Culshaw running rings resounding around us all? Have we another, perhaps more apparently independent view of the proceedings? The CD booklet-note doesn’t help much either as I don’t think Ivan March, the writer, was at the session. To use the words of Inspector Frost: is someone telling porkies? But why? I think the answer is important as the Decca Ring is such an iconic recording and the Idyll is, in a way, part of it all. John Haden Worcester, UK

Sir Georg Solti: but where was he?

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Ring refined I am not sure everyone will agree with me but I cannot help thinking that the Solti Ring only truly came into its own with James Lock’s 1997 transfer and that some of the negative impressions recorded in the December issue were due to the previous limitations of the technology. What struck me when I heard the new transfer was that in his own way Solti had been just as attentive to his singers and players as Karajan and that there were kinds of alchemy going on which had not previously been so obvious. The greater depth and lustre meant you heard just how beautiful the instrumental playing was. Sir John Tomlinson remarked also that Gottlob Frick had sounded a little disappointing as Hagen when he bought Götterdämmerung back in 1965 – I agree, but I actually think he sounded on top form on the 1997 version. It is a speciic example, but I believe representative.

It should also perhaps be commented briefly that Karajan too can be shatteringly powerful – for example the end of Das Rheingold or Siegfried’s forging song, or the Funeral Music. They obviously paced things differently but both are more convincing than most others who followed. John Stone London, UK

One and only Ring In 1976, at the tender age of 17, my knowledge of classical music, and Wagner, were shaky, to say the least. I had discovered Solti’s Rheingold, rented from a library, and thought it a stupendous work with all these Gods, Giants and Dwarfs! I then rented what I thought was the complete Walküre, but was in fact only the Todesverkündigung and Act 3; further research enabled me to realise that these works were only part of a greater work: The Ring. That same year, on holiday at my grandmother’s in Folkestone, I noticed a classical shop – when that used to exist in small towns! – managed by a very lovable gentleman, the late Mr Chard. Thinking that the whole Ring might just be, at most, three or four discs more, I told him that I was interested in purchasing Solti’s complete Ring. His eyes shone and, emerging like Fafner, he proudly produced an enormous – and heavy – green and gold embossed box. I was flabbergasted that this was The Ring! Despite the hefty price tag, my father accepted to buy it and we somehow managed to put it into an already full car and take it back to Switzerland. This is how I came to purchase Solti’s Ring. Even if, meanwhile, it has seen brothers and sisters (I own 15 Rings), my cherished LP box will always be the one and only Ring! Peter Mosimann Geneva, Switzerland

Helen Watts on song John Steane is absolutely right that the Lieder recordings of the late Helen Watts (Obituary, December,

page 8) unaccountably did not keep pace with the rest of the recorded output we are so

Helen Watts: in recital lucky to have. This makes it even more of a pity that her Telefunken “Liederabend” of Brahms, Schumann and Mahler, which never had wide circulation and is arguably one of her best discs, seems not to have appeared on CD. Worth considering as a late tribute? Stephen Golding Oxford, UK

6 feBruary 2010 GRAMOPHONE

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