Neeme Jarvi conducts Wagner Overtures and Preludes

Highlights from Neeme Järvi's extraordinary five-volume Wagner series with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Classic FM Drive Featured Album, 19 August 2013.

This superb disc brings together orchestral highlights - especially overtures and preludes - from Neeme Järvi's five-volume Wagner series with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. As an added bonus, they have also included the overture to The Flying Dutchman, a piece never before released.

Famous extracts from Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Rienzi are also here. But there are some rarities too - the fizzing overture to Das Liebesverbot, Wagner's opera of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, and the rarely performed overture which Wagner wrote in 1835 for the play Columbus by Theodor Apel. 

A perfect introduction to Wagner's sound world, vigorously performed and beautifully recorded.