There is nothing very special here. As Furtwangler and Karajan have demonstrated, Wagner Preludes can make splendidly involving entertainment, but ideally they need the Berlin Philharmonic (or perhaps the VPO) to sound really gripping. The Oslo Philharmonic is here not very flatteringly recorded.
Die Meistersinger—spaciously conceived—does not lack body, but overall the violins lack allure and one craves a more sumptuous resonance in this repertoire. Not long before listening to this record I had the pleasure of playing through George Szell's Wagner collection from the 1960s. The CBS recording is far from perfect (although it is enormously improved in the current digital remastering) but the playing is electrifying, especially the Tristan Prelude and Liebestod, which by comparison, sounds lukewarm in Oslo, while Siegfried's Funeral March from Gotterdammerung, which under Szell is devastatingly powerful in its despairing grip, here merely sounds fairly exciting.
I enjoyed, though, the finely rehearsed playing of the Oslo strings in their cascades of scales which accompany the reprise of the Pilgrims' Chorus in Tannhauser, and the Valkyries gallop in brightly. But perhaps Jansons's best performance is Rienzi, exhilarating in its good humoured zest. The EMI recording is good rather than remarkable and clearly the engineers have not entirely solved the acoustic problems presented by the Oslo Konserthus.'