Necessity being the mother of invention, the English conductor Ben Woodward has arranged the full-symphonic textures of some of Wagner’s operas for eighteen-part chamber orchestra to bring them within range of the forces available to Regents Opera in London – arrangements which should, indeed, put them with the reach of smaller companies everywhere. This new ‘room-sized’ Wagner enhances the sense of scale of the originals with a striking degree of clarity.

Cast:
- Brünnhilde, Isolde: Catharine Woodward (soprano)
- Wotan: Keel Watson (bass-baritone)
- Siegfried: Philip Modinos (tenor)
- Mime: Holden Madagame (tenor)
- Hagen: Edwin Kaye (bass)

“Vizcarra’s pianistic talent is the real star of these discs… it makes me anxious to see what else Vizcarra has up his very talented sleeve.” – Theater Jones, March 2017 (Vol.1: Piano Transcriptions by August Stradal, TOCC0151)

“After the experience of volume 1 the sheer technical skill of pianist Juan Guillermo Vizcarra now comes as a given. What does please me even more is the reinforced sense that in purely musicianly terms he is a very impressive interpreter of Wagner… If Vizcarra excelled at gentle rapture in Tristan, here he displays the scale of his technical address with the most overtly virtuosic playing on the disc. …Listening to these transcriptions can be seen as a useful preparatory stage to appreciating the operas.” – MusicWeb International (Vol.2: Piano Transcriptions by August Stradal, TOCC0192)