Your recommendable recordings of Parsifal?

[Tapiola]

Your local trading standards officer speaking here! If you mean the 7-day cancellation right (Distance Selling Regs), that's a different issue: it gives you extra rights beyond Sale of Goods Act principles on faulty goods, e.g. when you just decide you don't like the item. (Though NB with CDs/DVDs you lose that right once you break any seal on the discs, to stop people sending stuff straight back once they've copied it.)

Rights on faulty goods last a lot longer than 7 days, even though you should always act as soon as you discover the fault, and you're in a better position the earlier you find and report it. If you first play the discs weeks after purchase, you may technically have lost your right to reject the goods and 'rescind the contract'. Rescission puts the parties back to where they were before the contract, so you get a full refund and they get the goods back. But the next remedy if you've lost your right to reject, compensatory damages for the fault you're stuck with, only makes sense on an opera set if the damages are 100% (because you've got to buy another complete set to get the missing disc). That's why if you're suitably firm you'll probably get a new set out of them. At least they then get the dodgy set back and may get a credit from their own supplier.

LeMartinPecheur,

Many thanks for this

Always good to be in full possession of the facts!

[Tapiola]

Most Parsifal devotees will want this classic Naxos 2CD set of historical highlights:
http://www.mdt.co.uk/MDTSite/product/CD/8110049-50.htm

You get to hear the original bells that sadly got melted down for the Nazi war effort. This is a quote from our very Mr Cowan reviewing the discs:
"Seventy-two years on and Wagner's 'Bayreuth Bells', the ones designed specifically for use in Parsifal... still set up the most unbelievable din. Their low-pitch sonorous clanging crowns the First-Act 'Transformation Music' on an amazingly vivid 1927 Bayreuth Festival recording conducted by Karl Muck."

I wholeheartedly concur, gurnemanz. These discs are amongst the most prized in my collection - fabulous.

Thes original bells were, even by 1927, losing pitch, and this can be perceived from the recordings.

[ARBurton]

The only Parsifal I would really put in the "what would you save from a burning building" list is my radio tape of Cluytens at Bayreuth in 1965. Followed by Thielemann in Berlin in the late 1990s....

[Karafan]

Radio tape? Did it make it to CD? Oh, perhaps that was his Scala recording...? Who were the singers, ARB, please? And what is it you particularly enjoy about the recording?

K.

[Chris Newman]

If anyone had a tape-recorder in their hand bag (or briefcase) the night that Gottlob Frick sang Gurnemanz for Reggie Goodall I'll offer a very considerable dowry!!