Wagner: Parsifal;

It's a commonplace that Daniel Barenboim has done some of his best directing in Berlin, not Chicago, as this recording of Parsifal with the Berlin Phliharmonic attests. Wagner's score is fiendishly difficult--it's perhaps the composer's most delicate music--and Barenboim's decidedly intellectual temperament is complementary. The soloists (José van Dam, Siegfried Jerusalem, John Tomlinson, and Waltraud Meier) are superb. For me, Meier's startling, toneless gasp at the beginning of the third act--the first human sound after the ravishing orchestral introduction--is alone worth the price of this record. --Joshua Cody