Golden Melodram 10066 (12 CD"s);This 1952 live-from-Bayreuth Ring led by Joseph Keilberth is one of the tightest, tautest, most energized Rings available; only Böhm is faster (and not always--the "Siegfried" performances are the same length) and more intense in general, with Boulez fast but without the same passion. (Keilberth"s Götterdämmerung is 28 minutes faster than that of Knappertsbusch!)The sound is as good as that from any studio recording from the period, and the voice-orchestra balance is just right (the occasional too-far-back-on-the-stage phrase notwithstanding). It is a Ring of big contrasts: Siegfried"s Rhine Journey has never sounded so joyous (a few flubs in the brass just prove that the orchestra is made up of humans), his Funeral Music is as heavy as lead; the "Announcement of Death" in Walküre is intimate and still, the Valkyrie"s Ride almost insanely wild (with intermittent patches of bizarre singing from the sisters). The individual performances are more flavorful and "individualized" than on almost any other recording: Max Lorenz"s grown-up Siegfried is all mood swings and swagger (and a bit wayward, vocally), Bernd Aldenhoff"s young Siegfried is inexhaustible, Paul Kuen"s Mime simply the most multifaceted and best sung on disc, ditto the Alberich of Gustav Neidlinger (the picture of viciousness); Astrid Varnay catches every moment of Brünnhilde"s change from impetuous young warrior maiden to loving daughter to disobedient child to woman, and she"s in blazing, brilliant voice; Gunther Treptow and Inge Borkh are a passionate, highly dramatic and extroverted Wälsung pair and Joseph Greindl"s Hagen is monstrously nasty. The late Hans Hotter towers over it all as Wotan in the wisest and freshest of his many performances caught on record. The rest of the cast is always involved and involving. This is a fabulous Ring. --Robert Levine