Die Walküre on the Mariinsky label

On 11 February 2013 – the year marking two centuries since Richard Wagner’s birth – the Mariinsky label will be releasing a recording of the opera Die Walküre, the second part of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle. It features the Mariinsky Orchestra under the baton of Valery Gergiev and some of the present day’s most outstanding Wagnerian singers – soprano Nina Stemme (Brünnhilde), bass-baritone René Pape (Wotan), tenor Jonas Kaufmann (Siegmund), soprano Anja Kampe (Sieglinde), mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova (Fricka) and bass Mikhail Petrenko (Hunding) as well as Mariinsky Opera soloists (Valkyries). The recording was produced over the course of several months at the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre. Discs may be pre-ordered on the Mariinsky label’s official website.

Die Walküre will be the label’s nineteenth release and the first instalment of Wagner’s tetralogy, the full recording of which is a priority task for maestro Gergiev (the release of Das Rheingold, the preliminary evening of Wagner’s cycle, will also take place in the near future). Two years ago, the Mariinsky label released Richard Wagner’s last opera Parsifal starring René Pape as Gurnemanz, which was named “Disc of the Month” by BBC Music Magazine and “Editor’s Choice” in the October issue of British music magazine Gramophone.

In 2003 Valery Gergiev brought the first ever production of Wagner’s tetralogy in German at a Russian theatre to life. The production’s premiere in Europe, which took place in Germany in 2004, was feted by the media as a truly historic event. Der Ring des Nibelungen has since been performed in Moscow, South Korea, Japan, the USA (including at the Metropolitan Opera in New York), Great Britain (including at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden) and Spain.