This mostly fine performance of Lohengrin from Munich in 1963 is, I believe, making its first appearance on CD with this Orfeo release. The mono recording, remastered, is quite good, with the voices always audible despite Knappertsbusch’s huge orchestral approach. A pleasant surprise is Kna’s choice of tempos: invariably a rather pokey, large-arc conductor, he delivers an exciting, well-paced first act and a thrilling third act. There are moments that slow down peculiarly in Act 2, but even then it makes musical sense.
Hans Hopf leads the cast in the title role, and this performance finds him about two years before he became beefily unlistenable. He’s baritonally heroic and grand and makes the most of the text, but he tends to come in just under the note on occasion (most punishingly in the Bridal Chamber Scene) and cannot compare with the two leading Lohengrins of the same era, Jess Thomas, and the marvelous, otherworldly Sandor Konya.
Ingrid Bjoner, the Norwegian soprano who was buried under the grandeur of Birgit Nilsson (who was eight years her senior) in most of the big Wagner/Strauss roles, turns in a major performance of Elsa. She doesn’t have Victoria de los Angeles’ girlish beauty or Elisabeth Grümmer’s purity, but from her first utterance of “Mein arme Bruder” her sadness is clear, and her nobility never in doubt. Astrid Varnay, with a voice that never approached “beautiful”, remains the Ortrud by which others must be judged (except for Christa Ludwig’s amazing reading on EMI under Kempe), and she is properly gigantic and monstrous here. Hans Günter Nöcker yells too much as Telramund and Kurt Böhme sounds at the end of his rope as King Heinrich, but Josef Metternich’s Herrufer is marvelous.
This Lohengrin comes in an unfortunate third (or more) after Kempe (EMI) and Bychkov (Profil—a surprise entry), and, one might argue for the sheer star power, after Solti (with Domingo and Norman on Decca), but it’s never dull and it has both tenderness and strength. Is it wrong to want this opera to be beautiful as well?
