Willem Mengelberg and the New York Philharmonic, 1925.
An early electric recording of this famous overture by an old-school Wagnerian conductor. It’s a good example of the late nineteenth-century approach to this music, all storm and melodrama. Mengelberg was regarded in his day as one of the greatest conductors in the world, and was instrumental in the early years of the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. He was director of the New York Philharmonic for a few stormy years in the 1920s, in direct rivalry with Arturo Toscanini.