Favorite piece by Wagner?

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Originally Posted by imageWIS

Maria Callas singing Liebestod
At the risk of reigniting the political stuff in this thread, I just came across this free webcast in decent sound quality of Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting a very fine and deeply felt Liebestod with Sarah Bullock and the Philharmonia: http://www.philharmonia.co.uk/thesou...harmonia_live/ I got the MP3s when they came out, but I didn't know about this webcast. I'm revisiting this music again because the LA Phil and Salonen just started their Tristan & Isolde concerts this week in pretty interesting pairings: each act with a Debussy piece on separate nights, and two nights of all 3 acts of the T&I. I'll be attending the 2nd 3-acter in a couple of weeks. The very end will be worth the 4 hours of wading through Wagner. The video art by Bill Viola that accompanies the LA Phil performances is astounding: shot at hundreds of frames a second with very high definition video projected on very tall and narrow screens, they're depictions of the elemental feelings in the music. Imagine a 30-foot version of this (click on it for the video): The darnedest thing about the full video sequence is that the water falls downwards first with everything dry when the Liebestod starts, before going up at the end that you see in the excerpt. I'm still trying to figure out how he did that. More videos at this NPR article: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...506273&sc=emaf --Andre