Richard Wagner / Lorin Maazel

American violinist, conductor and composer with a photographic memory Lorin Maazel arranged music from the Ring of the Nibelungs into a seventy-minute suite. Richard Wagner’s four musical dramas are based on a medieval Germanic heroic epic. Wagner worked on the piece between 1848 and 1874. The Rhinegold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried and Twilight of the Gods can be performed separately, but the storyline connects all four parts, the playing time of which is approximately fifteen hours. In 1876, during the first year of the Bayreuth Festival, the first comprehensive performance of the cycle took place over four consecutive evenings. Maazel’s suite is thus only a brief taste of Wagner’s vocal-instrumental colossus.
Chief conductor of the Prague Chamber Philharmonic and former chief conductor of the Slovak Philharmonic Emmanuel Villaume is equally at home in the concert and opera repertoire. He regularly collaborates with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona
and Covent Garden in London.