Wagner: Tristan und Isolde

When John Christie launched his opera festival at Glyndebourne in the English countryside in the mid-1930s, it was always his dream to stage Wagner. Seven decades later, the dream came to fruition with Nikolaus Lehnhoff's visionary staging of Tristan und Isolde: an instant classic by a legend among directors, setting Wagner's doomed lovers in a luminous abstract world inspired by the postwar Bayreuth tradition. This performance dates from its first revival, in 2007. Nina Stemme, René Pape, Katarina Karnéus and Robert Gambill head a world-beating cast, and conductor Jiří Bělohlávek draws sounds of ravishing beauty from an audibly-inspired London Philharmonic Orchestra.