Wagner
graham.rickson
John Adams: Nixon in China Peter Sellars (director), Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Chorus and Ballet/John Adams (Nonesuch)If, like me, you prefer your opera recordings to be heard and not seen, make an exception for this DVD of Peter Sellars’s remarkably lucid staging of John Adams’s Nixon in China. A work which, as David Nice pointed out when watching the live relay of this production, is probably the only opera composed since Britten’s death to gain a secure place in the repertoire. It’s hard to imagine the piece looking better, the vast Met stage perfectly suited to the work’s quasi- Read more ...
stephen.walsh
What is one to make of Lohengrin, Wagner’s last “opera” (as opposed to music drama), in this day and age? Is it a medieval romance, like Weber’s Freischütz but with a deus ex machina at the beginning rather than the end; or is it a nineteenth-century domestic melodrama in disguise, with the hero revealed in the bedroom scene as a Papal Nuncio travelling incognito. Why mustn’t Elsa ask his name? Is it, as Lothar Koenigs hints in the WNO programme, some echo of Wagner’s doubts about his own (possibly, as he thought, Jewish) parentage? Or is it rather a pre-echo of modern password culture, with Read more ...
David Nice
First, the good news: you can see Wagner’s entire Ring at the Royal Albert Hall, with absolutely the world’s finest Wagner singers and conductor in concert, for a grand total of £20. The bad news is that unless you have a season ticket – in which case it works out even cheaper – you’ll probably have to queue for most of the day to guarantee a place in the Arena or Gallery, and then you’ll still need the energy to stand for up to five hours an evening.None of that will deter devoted Prommers, whose numbers swell and grow younger every season. Little wonder, with the price of £5 a ticket held Read more ...
edward.seckerson
In 2007 the English tenor, Ian Storey, made a dramatic and highly visible debut as Tristan in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the season opening of La Scala, Milan, conducted by Daniel Barenboim and directed by Patrice Chereau. It was seen by millions on TV, in cinemas, and on DVD and marked a big development in this singer’s career. This year he will be singing Siegfried in Götterdämmerung, again under Barenboim, as part of a complete bicentennial Ring cycle at the BBC Proms.Storey eschews the heldentenor label preferring to call himself a “dramatic” tenor but whichever way you look at it his Read more ...
David Nice
Like Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges and Puccini’s Turandot, Wagner’s first opera – The Fairies in English – has its roots in a “theatrical fable” by the 18th century Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi. There the resemblances end. Only Prokofiev follows Gozzi’s playful mix of commedia dell’arte and fairy-tale characters. The 20-year-old Wagner has one moment of fun – cut in this performance – but a mere handful of musical gestures and plot devices prophesying greatness to come rises to the surface in this gloopy mess. You’ve got to admire the ambitious scope of it, but inspiration is Read more ...
David Nice
In many ways the most well-tempered of conductors, Wolfgang Sawallisch (1923-2013) brought a peerless orchestral transparency and beauty of line to the great German classics. Even the most overloaded Richard Strauss scores under his watchful eye and ear could sound, as the composer once said his opera Elektra should, “like fairy music by Mendelssohn”. A modest and affable old-school gent, Sawallisch prided himself on these qualities and on the longevity of his devotion to one company especially: he was music director of the Bavarian State Opera for over 21 years, from 1971 to 1992.Courtesy of Read more ...
philip radcliffe
The “Mastersingers of Manchester”, about 350 of them, were gathered together by Sir Mark Elder to celebrate the Wagner bicentenary with this performance of Act Three of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in its entirety. He also pulled in about 200 orchestral musicians, exploiting the city’s resources just about to the limit.Sir Mark even broke into song himself in the build-up to the main event. With the help of his assistant conductor Jamie Phillips and soloists and young musicians, some only 12 years old, from the Hallé Youth Orchestra and Chetham’s School of Music, Elder set the scene with Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sir Simon Rattle (b. 1955) and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (est. 1986) have been together from the beginning. Founded by period-instrument musicians eager to run their own affairs rather than play obediently for conductor-managers like Christopher Hogwood and John Eliot Gardiner, the OAE invited Rattle to conduct a concert performance of Idomeneo in that first year. Of the orchestra’s several other guest conductors, including Iván Fischer and, until his death, Sir Charles Mackerras, none has had a stronger or longer link.There have since been many highlights in the relationship Read more ...
David Nice
Much more regularly than the seven years it takes the Flying Dutchman's demon ship to reach dry land, the Zurich Opera steamer moors at the Southbank Centre. None of its more recent concert performances up to now has branded itself on the memory as much as its 2003 visit, when chorus and soloists stunned in Wagner's Tannhäuser. This one will, though: and the wonder of it is that Bryn Terfel's surely unsurpassable Dutchman, condemned to the seas for all eternity unless saved by the faithful-until-death love of a good woman, had other singers to match him.In the first act, the great Wagnerian Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The one thing you can rely on when a programme is billed as "The Real" something-or-other is that that is exactly what you won't get. This film, commemorating the centenary of the birth of the great Hungarian conductor, did a thorough job of tracing his career through the great orchestras, concert halls and opera houses of the world, pulling in various stellar musical names and bags of excellent archive footage en route. But anybody already familiar with Sir Georg's life and works would not have come away a great deal wiser.Fortunately it's a great story, however you tell it. A gifted pianist Read more ...
Helen Meany
Irish theatre generates high expectations. So much so, that if there isn’t a premiere of a play by one of Ireland’s leading playwrights – Sebastian Barry, Enda Walsh, Marina Carr, Frank McGuinness, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson or Mark O’Rowe – the annual Dublin Theatre Festival tends to be viewed by regular Dublin theatregoers as somehow deficient. But while this year’s festival didn’t offer a singularly brilliant piece of new Irish playwriting, in its range and diversity it posed a series of very provocative questions.Now in its 55th year, Dublin Theatre Festival 2012 ran for over two- Read more ...
David Nice
The prospect of adventuring from one unpredictable day to the next in the course of Michael Tippett’s Triple Concerto, and from dawn to twilight in just over an hour’s orchestral music from Wagner’s Ring, seemed very much weighted in the English composer’s favour. Frankly, had Mark Wigglesworth only conducted Siegfried’s Funeral March in this concert’s second half, he would have consolidated an already glowing reputation as a top-notch Wagnerian. That he and the BBC Symphony Orchestra burned their symphonic way through Dutch percussionist Henk de Vlieger’s audacious, unbroken “orchestral Read more ...