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With his 1993 solo album These Old Pictures, James King was established as a top-notch bluegrass vocalist. The album, however, was only the latest step in a musical career that had begun 14 years before.

A featured member of Ralph Stanley's Clinch Mountain Boys in the 1980s, King, who was raised in Virginia's Carroll County, grew up listening to bluegrass. His father, Jim King, had appeared on Roanoke television with Don Reno and Red Smiley as tenor vocalist and guitarist for the Country Cousins, and, with his uncle, Joe Edd King, had played with the late Ted Lundy of the Southern Mountain Boys in the 1960s.

Following a stint in the Marines, King launched his musical career in 1979. His recording debut came on the long-titled album Stanley Brothers Classics with Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys and Introducing James King in 1985. His second album, Reunion with Ralph Stanley Featuring George Shuffler and James King, was released three years later.

King's 1985 self-titled debut solo outing was followed by It's a Cold Cold World, released in 1989 and reissued as Webco Classics, Volume Two in 1996. While both albums showcased his crystal-clear lead vocals, neither featured the high-quality instrumental accompaniment of his later work.

After signing with Rounder Records, King's career was propelled into overdrive. These Old Pictures -- which featured members of the Johnson Mountain Boys (Dudley Cornell, Tom Adams and David McLaughlin) and the Lynn Morris Band (Marshall Wilborn and Tim Smith), plus ex-Nashville Bluegrass Band mandolinist Mike Compton -- was named Breakthrough Album of the Year by Bluegrass Unlimited and led to King being nominated as Emerging Artist of the Year by the International Bluegrass Music Association in 1995. King's fourth solo album, Lonesome and Then Some, featured many of the same players.

In 1997, King joined with Cornell, Wilborn, Glen Duncan, Joe Mullins and Don Rigsby to form the bluegrass supergroup Longview. The solo Bed by the Window followed a year later. ~ Craig Harris

Heather Harper, one of the most recorded singers of her time, made an extraordinary transition from a lyric soprano in the English pastoral tradition to a spinto-weight artist of great power and authority. While her earliest appearances and recordings brought to mind such other singers as Isobel Baillie and Jennifer Vyvyan, her prime years showed a voice that had grown in size and roundness while retaining its initial flexibility. Many critics have opined that her 1966 recording of Handel's Messiah remains unequaled. While she chose to avoid most of the Italian spinto repertory, her work in the mid-weight German operas of Wagner and Strauss was exemplary, as were her concert and oratorio performances. Harper premiered several works by both Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett and was outstanding in the works of both composers.

Harper studied at the Trinity School of Music in London and made her operatic debut as Verdi's Lady Macbeth at Oxford University in 1954 -- an undertaking that was both out of step with her initial repertory and a precursor of things to come. Her first appearance at the Glyndebourne Festival took place in 1957 when she sang the First Lady in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte. She returned to the Sussex countryside in 1960 in the same role and, in 1963, added the role of Anne in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress. In 1966, she sang 12 Glyndebourne performances of Handel's Jephtha with such colleagues as Richard Lewis and Margaret Price. In 1960, she sang the role of Helena in Britten's Midsummer's Night Dream at Covent Garden with a cast handpicked by the composer and subsequently recorded. The Bayreuth Festival heard her Elsa in Lohengrin in 1967, not long after she had begun a series of collaborations with Sir George Solti, who was music director at Covent Garden from 1961 to 1971. Her long delayed Metropolitan Opera debut in 1977 offered her Countess in Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro. She also sang her sympathetic and warm-voiced Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes there.

Harper was a distinguished singer of the concert repertory. It was to her that Britten turned in 1963 when authorities in the Soviet Union refused to grant travel permission to Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, for whom the composer had written the soaring soprano part in his War Requiem. Harper stepped in and was acclaimed for her performance. Throughout the 1960s, Harper also recorded numerous works of Handel (Theodora, Judas Maccabaeus) as well as Classical period works by Haydn (The Seasons and several masses) and Beethoven (Missa Solemnis and the Symphony No. 9). Her recorded performances of Vaughan Williams (Symphonies 1 and 3) and Delius (Mass of Life and Requiem) achieved a fine balance between magisterial distance and passionate involvement. Her participation in Solti's recording of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony alerted many to a burgeoning instrument which was ideal for the lighter German dramatic repertory. She later sang with that conductor on his recording of Mahler's Symphony No. 8.

In the 1960s, Harper was brought to Chicago, where Solti was the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's music director, for many celebrated performances. She repeated the Mahler Symphony No. 2, sang in Haydn's Creation, performed Bach's Saint Matthew Passion on two separate occasions and participated with Carlo Maria Giulini in Rossini's Stabat Mater. In the latter, her two electrifying, perfectly-placed high Cs attested to the size and thrust of the mature voice.

Harper sang the premieres of both Britten's television opera, Owen Wingrave and Tippett's The Ice Break.

Sir Donald Conroy McIntyre was one of the noted bass-baritones of the second half of the twentieth century. He was a fine actor with a compelling stage presence and a full, rich voice that made him ideal for heroic baritone parts and one of the favorite Wagner singers of his time.

He studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London during the last half of the 1950s and made a notable debut with the Welsh National Opera as Zaccaria in Verdi's Nabucco. He joined the company of the Sadlers' Wells Opera in 1960, remaining with them until 1967. He developed a wide repertory there, singing over 30 roles including the part of Pennyback Bill in the first fully staged British production of Kurt Weill's Aufstieg und Fall des Stadt Mahagonny in 1963.

His Covent Garden debut was in 1967 as Pizarro in Beethoven's Fidelio, but he made his strongest early impression at Covent Garden that same year as Barak in Die Frau ohne Schatten, Richard Strauss' 1918 opera, which then was finally just beginning to establish itself in the repertory.

By then he had gained a considerable reputation as a beginning Wagnerian singer, and was asked to debut at Bayreuth in 1967 as the Telramund in Lohengrin. In 1973 he became the first British singer (as he was and is generally considered) to sing the role of Wotan in a complete cycle of the Wagner Ring des Nibelung operas at the Bayreuth Festival. He repeated the feat at Covent Garden beginning in 1974 with a Covent Garden Cycle that began that year with Colin Davis conducting, and debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in 1975, again as Wotan.

In 1976, he starred in the Centennial production of the Ring at Bayreuth in the controversial production conducted by Pierre Boulez. It was videotaped and broadcast around the world, and was the first Ring to become available on home video on VHS tape and on LaserDisc, as well as being released on Philips LPs and compact discs.

McIntyre has appeared in major opera houses, including the Vienna State Opera, the Hamburg State Opera, the Munich State Opera, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Sydney Opera House, and La Scala in Milan.

Among his other notable appearances are in the title role of Verdi's Attila, Kaspar in Weber's Der Freischütz, Golaud in Debussy's Pelléas und Mélisande, Amfortas in Wagner's Parsifal, Dutchman and Hans Sachs (Die Meistersinger). He was also a notable Shaklovity in Mussorgsky's Khovanschina, the sympathetic Captain Balstrode in Britten's Peter Grimes, Sarastro in The Magic Flute, John the Baptist in Strauss' Salome and Orestes in his Elektra, Escamillo in Carmen, Kurwenal in Tristan, Count des Grieux in Verdi's Traviata, and the arch villains Nick Shadow (Rake's Progress) and Baron Scarpia (Tosca). Many of these portrayals are available on compact disc.

He sang the world premiere performances of the role of Axel Heyst in Richard Rodney Bennett's opera Victory in 1960, and at the British premiere as Prospero in Luciano Berio's Un re in ascolto at Covent Garden in 1989. In 1996 he added the part of Baron Prus in Janacek's The Makropulos Affair at the Met.

He has received many honors. He was made a member of the Order of the British Empire in 1977 and a Commander of the British Empire in 1985. In 1992 Sir Donald MacIntyre was knighted on the New Zealand Honours List.

Powerful of voice, though without the deep, cutting tone of some of his predecessors, bass Karl Ridderbusch nevertheless made a strong impression in the great Wagner bass roles. His plush instrument boasted thrusting top notes during the years of his considerable prime and possessed sufficient size to dominate a large orchestra. In addition, its fine focus made him a splendid singer of Bach, as was evidenced by his beautifully sung Christus in the composer's St. Matthew Passion. Originally trained in engineering, Ridderbusch turned to singing when he won an amateur competition and was noticed by German tenor and TV personality Rudolf Schock. Schock was sufficiently impressed to help underwrite a program of studies at Essen's Folkwangschule. Ridderbusch made his stage debut at Münster's Städtisches Theater in 1961 and shortly thereafter accepted a contract at Essen where he began to undertake the Wagner, Verdi, and Strauss roles that would form the core of his subsequent repertory. In 1965, he joined the Deutsche Oper am Rhein. In 1966, he made his American debut singing Sarastro with Lyric Opera of Chicago and in 1967, he first appeared at Bayreuth. Ridderbusch made his first Metropolitan Opera appearances in 1967 and sang in an impressive Ring cycle at Covent Garden in 1971. His Hagen, somewhat heartier than most, was nonetheless a dangerous personality and was vigorously sung. Meanwhile, he had begun a long-term relationship with the Wiener Staatsoper and was frequently heard in Munich as well. Soon, he came into conductor Herbert von Karajan's circle of preferred singers and became a regular at the Salzburg Easter Festivals and in the conductor's related recording projects. During the period in which he was Karajan's leading bass of preference, Ridderbusch recorded such roles as Pogner in Die Meistersinger, Marke in Tristan und Isolde, Heinrich in Lohengrin, Hagen in Die Götterdämmerung, and Rocco in Fidelio. Nor was he unaccustomed to recording with others. Daland and Falstaff in Nicolai's Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor were sturdy interpretations sung under the direction of other leading conductors. Given his facility in the top register, Ridderbusch moved to undertake Hans Sachs and quickly became one of the role's leading proponents. His Sachs in the Chicago Lyric Opera's 1977 production of Die Meistersinger was, if somewhat bluff, richly and warmly sung.

The Bayreuth Festival Orchestra is a seasonal orchestra mostly comprised of leading musicians from German orchestras. The Bayreuth Festival and its orchestra exist because Richard Wagner dreamed of a venue and special festival in which his stage works, particularly his cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, could be performed properly. Though the orchestra is made new each year, many musicians return every year to perform.

After years of searching for a proper location, Bayreuth was brought to Wagner's attention by Hans Richter. Though the existing structure of the Margravial Opera House wasn't appropriate for staging his works, Wagner enjoyed the city, and construction on a new hall, the Bayreuth Festival Theater, began in 1872. Wagner conducted a performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in the Margravial Opera House to mark the occasion of the foundation stone being placed for the new theater. The festival's inaugural season began in August of 1876 and was attended by Kaiser Wilhelm, as well as many of Wagner's peers, including Bruckner, Grieg, and Tchaikovsky. Hans Richter conducted the premiere of the complete Der Ring des Nibelungen during the first festival. Wagner chose Hermann Levi to premiere Parsifal, Wagner's final completed opera, at the festival in 1882. Levi served as principle conductor of the festival for nearly 20 years. Following Wagner's death in 1883, his widow, Cosima, continued to hold the festival in one- or two-year intervals. She was vehement that Wagner's works should continue to be performed as originally written. Cosima retired from the festival in 1907 and their son, Siegfried, became artistic director. Following Siegfried's death in 1930, the festival was run by his widow, Winifred, with Heinz Tietjen as artistic director until 1944. Karl Elmendorff was the principal conductor from 1933 until 1942.

Much of the city of Bayreuth was destroyed during World War II, but, remarkably, the theater was left intact. Following the war, Winifred was banned from the city and its festival. Eventually, the festival was taken over by her sons, Wolfgang and Wieland. Under their leadership, the Bayreuth Festival returned in 1951. In what has become tradition, the festival opened with a performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, with Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting, harkening back to Wagner's own performance in 1872. The 1976 centenary performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen (known as Jahrhundertring), directed by Patrice Chéreau and conducted by Pierre Boulez, is heralded as one of the cycle's finest productions. This staging would later be recorded and released in 1980. Following Wieland's death in 1966, Wolfgang continued to direct the festival until 2008. From 2008-2015, Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner were the festivals directors. In 2015, Katharina became the sole director of the festival. A great number of notable conductors have worked with the BFO, including Karl Böhm, Daniel Barenboim, James Levine, and Christian Thielemann. The Bayreuth Festival remains dedicated to staging Wagner Operas.

Recordings of the BFO have been numerous, especially since its return. They have been featured on many labels including Deutsche Grammophon, Golden Melodram, and Orfeo. Historical recordings have also been made available, including several performances conducted by Elmendorff. Among these, are a 1928 performance of Tristan und Isolde on the Naxos label. In 2018, the BFO released several live recordings on the Opus Arte label: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (2008), Lohengrin (2011), Tristan und Isolde (2009), Der fliegende Holländer (2013), and Tannhaüser (2014). ~ Keith Finke

One of the great unsung conductors of the middle twentieth century, Rudolf Kempe enjoyed a strong reputation in England but never quite achieved the international acclaim that he might have had with more aggressive management, promotion, and recording. Not well enough known to be a celebrity but too widely respected to count as a cult figure, Kempe is perhaps best remembered as a connoisseur's conductor, one valued for his strong creative temperament rather than for any personal mystique.

He studied oboe as a child, performed with the Dortmund Opera, and, in 1929, barely out of his teens, he became first oboist of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. His conducting debut came in 1936, at the Leipzig Opera; this performance of Lortzing's Der Wildschütz was so successful that the Leipzig Opera hired him as a répétiteur. Kempe served in the German army during World War II, but much of his duty was out of the line of fire; in 1942 he was assigned to a music post at the Chemnitz Opera. After the war, untainted by Nazi activities, he returned to Chemnitz as director of the opera (1945-1948), and then moved on to the Weimar National Theater (1948-1949). From 1949 to 1953 he served as general music director of the Staatskapelle Dresden, East Germany's finest orchestra. He then moved to the identical position at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, 1952-1954, succeeding the young and upwardly mobile Georg Solti. During this period he was also making guest appearances outside of Germany, mainly in opera: in Vienna (1951), at London's Covent Garden (1953), and at New York's Metropolitan Opera (1954), to mention only the highlights. Although he conducted Wagner extensively, especially at Covent Garden, Kempe did not make his Bayreuth debut until 1960. As an opera conductor he was greatly concerned with balance and texture, and singers particularly appreciated his efforts on their behalf.

Kempe made a great impression in England, and in 1960 Thomas Beecham named him associate conductor of London's Royal Philharmonic. Kempe became the orchestra's principal conductor upon Beecham's death the following year, and, after the orchestra was reorganized, served as its artistic director from 1963 to 1975. He was also the chief conductor of the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra from 1965 to 1972, and of the Munich Philharmonic from 1967 until his death in 1976. During the last year of his life he also entered into a close association with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Interpretively, Kempe was something of a German Beecham. He was at his best -- lively, incisive, warm, expressive, but never even remotely self-indulgent -- in the Austro-Germanic and Czech repertory. Opera lovers prize his versions of Lohengrin, Die Meistersinger, and Ariadne auf Naxos. His greatest recorded legacy, accomplished during the last four or five years of his life, was the multi-volume EMI set of the orchestral works and concertos of Richard Strauss, performed with the highly idiomatic Dresden Staatskapelle. These recordings were only intermittently available outside of Europe in the LP days, but in the 1990s EMI issued them on nine compact discs.