Wagner
Gavin Dixon
David Alden’s Lohengrin is back at Covent Garden for a first revival. The defining image the first time round, in 2018, was of the ending, a political rally for King Henry’s regime, with Lohengrin and the swan as its icons. That felt crude – a two-dimensional morality, and tangential to the story.That still smarts, but Alden’s ideas (revived without noticeable changes by Peter Relton) are more diverse than they first seemed and repay a second viewing. Musically, the revival is quite strong, with impressive leads but a weaker supporting cast; a fitful ensemble effort where the first run was Read more ...
Ian Julier
The Drama and Romance of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s promotional hook for this concert signalled a heady musical mix. Appropriate for the stark contrasts of mood central to Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, but potentially less so for Dvorák’s Symphony No. 8 that casts barely a cloud to compromise its predominantly sunny G major disposition shared with the outer movements of the Beethoven.In the event, resolution of the conflict between profane and sacred love in Tannhäuser’s ultimate salvation, together with the framing of the concerto’s central dark Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
This remarkable evening should really have been more remarkable still. The unfortunate pianist Cédric Tiberghien took an official pre-travel Covid test that obliged him to drop out at 5pm – even though, as he tweeted in frustration, three subsequent lateral flow tests came out negative. Such is concert life in the Covid era. Nobody could be expected to find a replacement to perform Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand at two hours’ notice, so the work was dropped. Still, what remained made up in sheer wow-factor what it lacked in duration. Entitled “Poems of Ecstasy”, the programme Read more ...
David Nice
That the ever-decreasing circles of Richard Jones’s first Wagner Ring instalment for English National Opera ended in a no-show for the fire that should have made former Valkyrie supreme Brünnhilde proof against all but a fearless hero – Westminster City Council poured cold water on it before this first night – is in a way the least of it.An act which has begun so searingly with a first-rate septet of warrior maidens and blazing orchestra under an ever-masterly Martyn Brabbins fizzles into some very choppy singing for the father-daughter confrontation which should make for one of the most Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
A Samoan-themed Ring cycle? Well, why not? A calculated distance has always separated its audience from the Norse and German epics of its origin.Wagner composed it once capital and technology had begun their ineluctable overthrow of gods and kings, leaving behind him a blank slate and the potential for endless reinvention. Echoes of Odin and Brynhild resound through one Samoan legend recounting The Tree of Life, so named after the miraculous redemption of a woman sentenced to burn to death in its branches.Leutogitupaitea was providentially saved by the rain of urine from thousands of flying Read more ...
theartsdesk
Few musicians get to stage-manage a dignified departure from the world. Among his last compositions, Richard Strauss set a poem by Eichendorff depicting an old couple looking into the sunset and asking “is this perhaps death?”, and towards the end he told his daughter-in-law that “dying is just as I composed it in [the symphonic poem] Death and Transfiguration". That great Dutchman Bernard Haitink, a peerless interpreter of Strauss’s music, knew when to retire: he withdrew from official engagements not long after his 90th birthday in March 2019, marked by two concerts with the London Symphony Read more ...
theartsdesk
Few singers really change your life. Norman Bailey did that for me [writes David Nice of theartsdesk]. The occasion wasn't my first experience of a Wagner opera, but it was the first time I'd been to a performance of his great human comedy Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, during the early 1980s on one of Scottish Opera's visits from Glasgow to the vast barn of Edinburgh's Playhouse.The central figure who slowly steps into the limelight is an operatic version of the real-life 16th century poet-philosopher and shoemaker Hans Sachs. Act Three changes from extrovert comedy and lyricism to Read more ...
David Nice
“Now I’ve conducted Tristan for the first time,” the 27-year-old Richard Strauss wrote from Weimar to Wagner’s widow Cosima in 1892, “and it was the most wonderful day of my life”. Robin Ticciati, over a decade older but still young in terms of his profession, has just crowned his first run of Glyndebourne Tristans with this Proms performance, and I don’t know whether he felt the same on opening night; but it’s clear that with the house’s latest music director a new golden age of Wagner conducting has begun.You could sense it in the London Philharmonic Orchestra cellos’ opening tone-swell, Read more ...
David Nice
The love of power corrupts, the power of love falters or fails. The essence of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung is also what Graham Vick communicated so stunningly in many of his unforgettable productions with his Birmingham Opera Company (Khovanskygate in a big top and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in a disused nightclub were perhaps the most revelatory experiences of my opera-going life to date).This spring he embarked on RhineGold, unusual venue then to be confirmed, but fell ill with Covid and died, aged only 67, on 17 July – the biggest personal shock of the time for many of us. Richard Willacy, Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Whatever might be said about Longborough Festival’s first live opera since 2019, the first and most important thing is to praise the company without reservation for putting on a show of anything like this quality in the face of obstacles of the sort that normally confront the heroes of Russian fairy tales.So: no kissing, embracing or even approaching within two metres in an opera that begins with twins falling passionately, violently in love, and ends with Wotan literally kissing away Brünnhilde’s immortality (pictuted below, Paul Carey Jones at the end of the opera). So: general distancing Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The team of Stephen Langridge (director), Alison Chitty (design) and Paul Pyant (lighting) produced a quietly radical Parsifal at the Royal Opera in 2013, finding both beauty and horror in unexpected corners. On the strength of its third instalment – I haven’t seen the first two – their Ring in Gothenburg pursues a no less subtle course of rebellion against some tenaciously held conventions and traditions in staging Wagner.This is billed as a “green” Ring by an environmentally friendly opera house. It’s a notion which, I fancy, would have intrigued Wagner the theorist, dreamer and pragmatist Read more ...
Robert Beale
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. They are offering not merely online musical performances but a set of newly made, highly creative films, watchable on Vimeo, built around the works they’re playing and the sight and sound of them doing so. Not less than a "live" performance, but quite a lot more.In "normal" times, you wouldn’t get as close to musicians in full flow as you do in Read more ...