Listen to how Konwitschny conducts the Overture, the large ensemble in Act 2, and indeed much of the solo work and be reminded of the lost art of pacing and shaping a Wagnerian paragraph. Above all he evinces the secret of steady, forward movement in Wagner; he unerringly feels the pulse of this score. He's helped by having an orchestra fully versed in this opera's tradition and by having perhaps the best chorus, Bayreuth's excepted (on the Sawallisch set for Philips), ever to have recorded the piece. Add to that an ideal balance on the engineers' part between all these elements and you have a formidable argument in this version's favour. Indeed some slight tape noise apart, you would hardly guess that this set was recorded all of 30 years ago—or perhaps, given the unsatisfactory nature of so many recent sets, from the point of view of recording, you might indeed well guess that this wasn't a recent attempt. And at this stage I would like to offer something of an apology to Decca. My ears must have been deceiving me when I preferred the sound on the DG/Sinopoli version to that on the Solti when reviewing the DG set. After several rehearings and comparisons here, it seems to me now that the sound on the Decca is the only one to have the presence and clear balance found on this EMI version, though the Bayreuth set captures the unique acoustics of that theatre.
Where the soloists are concerned, in all but one crucial respect, those on this reissue are second to none. Indeed, as is the case with the Berlin orchestra, Grummer as Elisabeth, Frick as the Landgrave (for once no bore) and Fischer-Dieskau as Wolfram, display quite unreservedly the advantage of long acquaintance with a particular idiom. If you doubt my word try the exchange in Act 2 between Elisabeth and the Landgrave (disc 2, track 4), where Grummer and Frick provide a marriage between line and expression that's little short of ideal. The same is true of all Fischer-Dieskau's confidently and sensitively managed solos. It's true that Grummer's tone has some threads in it during ''Dich, teure Halle'' but thereafter her sincerity, as when she puts herself on the line in Act 2 and in the Prayer in Act 3, is unrivalled, as is her unerring instinct for the shape of a phrase. Wunderlich and Unger both contribute positively to the ensemble in the Hall of Song.
The exception I referred to earlier is Hopf's clumsy account of Tannhauser's music. He has little problem with the role's cruel tessitura, indeed often makes a pleasanter sound than Kollo (Decca) or Windgassen (Philips), but his aspirating of runs and turns, and his generally heavy-handed delivery, are at times hard to take, especially in the earlier acts. He makes some amends by his intense utterance in the Rome Narration, and throughout he always attempts to find his way to the heart of the role, even when fluent execution fails him. Schech isn't the most glamorous of Venuses; no match for Solti's Ludwig, or indeed for Haitink's Meier (EMI), but her contribution is never less then secure.
All in all, if it's the Dresden version you are looking for, you could do worse than choose this mid-price reissue in front of the more recent and less convincing Haitink version, though my enthusiasm expressed three years ago for the Philips reissue of the Bayreuth version remains undiminished—that offers a Wagner-approved conflation of the Dresden and Paris versions and is a truthful record of a dedicated evening at Bayreuth in 1962, much enhanced by Sawallisch's conducting, which has many of Konwitschny's qualities, if not quite the older conductor's overview of the piece. Silja, Windgassen and Waechter are also singers in the class of those on the Konwitschny. For the Paris version my new comparisons this time leant me away from Sinopoli towards Solti, though I would be loath to sacrifice Domingo's splendid Tannhauser.'