Wagner
Hallé, Elder, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester online review - re-consecration of the houseFriday, 04 December 2020
The Hallé have been slow off the mark, compared with some, in their response to the challenge of concert-giving in the Covid era. But now that they have delivered on the first of their winter season performances, it has clearly been worth the wait.... Read more... |
GogolFest:Dream review - the best music festival of the summer?Thursday, 17 September 2020
GogolFest:Dream in Kherson, somewhere near the Crimea in Ukraine was the music festival of the summer. Admittedly, in my case and for many, having missed out on WOMAD, Glastonbury, Fez, and others it was the only festival of the summer, and the bar... Read more... |
Classical music/Opera direct to home 15 - opening up at different ratesFriday, 12 June 2020
It's taken time, but at last we have two major musical figures speaking up for cultural institutions in dire straits. Following a crucial, detailed article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian, Simon Rattle and Mark Elder have finally taken up the... Read more... |
Classical Music/Opera direct to home 6 - Parsifals for EasterFriday, 10 April 2020
Wagner's final drama, of learning, suffering and redemption through compassion, is second only to Bach's Passions at this time of year, and seems likely to strike a special note in the present crisis. Opera companies around the world, making much in... Read more... |
Siegfried, LPO, Jurowski, RFH review - an incandescent journey to the mountain topSunday, 02 February 2020
Of Wagner's four Ring operas, Siegfried poses the biggest casting problem. Most heroic tenors with the lungs to last the evening are not going to be ideal incarnations of the stroppy adolescent who learns and fights his way through an often... Read more... |
Ted Gioia: Music: A Subversive History review – an informative, giddying rideSunday, 17 November 2019
People who derive comfort from Classic FM’s strapline that European classical music is “The World's Greatest Music" are going to have a major problem with this book. American music historian Ted Gioia has marshalled 25 years' worth of his own life... Read more... |
Prom 68: Goerke, Gould, RPO, Albrecht review - the art of transitionTuesday, 10 September 2019
Known as "Heldenmommy" to her fans on Twitter, Christine Goerke is a Wagner soprano of and for our time. You won’t find her recordings on the major-label behemoths but her reputation is built on two decades of producing the goods night after night... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Dalarna: Rhinegold in a Swedish barn by a lakeSaturday, 27 July 2019
Anna Larsson's fellow Swedes can count themselves lucky that the worldwide first choice to sing Wagner's Erda and the midnight song in Mahler's Third Symphony has made so much of her Dalarna inheritance. In what's called a "Concert Barn" (... Read more... |
Das Rheingold, Longborough Festival Opera review - more Wagnerian excellence in a Gloucestershire barnThursday, 06 June 2019
The whole raison d’être of the Longborough Festival was always the performance of its founder Martin Graham’s beloved Wagner. So it’s perfectly natural that the twelfth anniversary of the start of the festival’s original Ring cycle should be marked... Read more... |
Elīna Garanča, Malcolm Martineau, Wigmore Hall review - towards transcendenceMonday, 18 February 2019
It seems an almost indecent luxury to have heard two top mezzos in just over a week with so much to express, backed up by the perfect technique and instrument with which to do so. Georgian Anita Rachvelishvili with Pappano and the Royal Opera... Read more... |
Die Walküre, LPO, Jurowski, RFH review - love shines outMonday, 28 January 2019
Harpers on the undeniably offensive aspect of Wagner the man might question attending a concert performance of his second Ring opera on World Holocaust Day. Fortunately there's nothing anti-semitic to be found anywhere in Die Walküre. As embodied by... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Gothenburg - Wagner's gold turns greenThursday, 29 November 2018
Before we hear a note, extras dressed as maintenance staff potter about the stage. They try to erase a scrawled slogan on a wall that reads “Hur allt började”: how it all began. “It” is the story of Wagner’s Ring cycle as presaged in the... Read more... |
