Wagner
David Nice
It's not so long since Daniel Barenboim sat around a table with Israeli officials telling him that Wagner couldn't be played in the homeland when someone's mobile fanfared the "Ride of the Valkyries", demolishing the opposition's case. At the opposite end of the scale to all that flash of battle-lust came last night's unexpected first encore to a Wagner second half – the Act Three Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. It foreshadows opera's most humanistic monologue, in which a deep thinking man of the people bewails the folly and delusion which so quickly knock civilization off course Read more ...
David Nice
It's not often you think you detect a future Brünnhilde in a soprano performing a great Verdi role, but that was the case when American Tamara Wilson made her UK debut last autumn as a stunning Leonora in the ENO production of Verdi's The Force of Destiny. So would she sing the Ring? Not for 10 years at least, she said. But then Mark Wigglesworth, a conductor she knew she could trust as partner, proposed the final scene of Die Walküre at the Proms, and the rest should go down in history.Not that just the last father-daughter confrontation, albeit one of the greatest in all opera, is an Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
And so it ends: Hagen drowns, Valhalla burns, and the ring returns to the Rhine, while somewhere beneath – Wagner’s dawn trumpets sounding faintly in the distance – the dwarf Alberich continues his lonely scheming. It would be hard to find a more apt conclusion to a week of power-grabbing and back-stabbing than Götterdämmerung, and harder still to see its climactic conflagration as anything other than horribly prophetic. But where politics wreak chaos, so art must console, and this Ring cycle is consolation at its absolute purest and most ecstatic.Opera North’s Ring has been such a triumph Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
For some of us, Siegfried is a perfect opera. Like L.627 it stubbornly observes the Aristotelian rules of space and time to cut a generous slice of life. There are almost no set-pieces to break the flow of one-on-one conversations, accusations, confessions, arguments. These encounters are inevitably stifled by a concert staging, where singers address themselves to us, never to each other. Peter Mumford’s video projections set the scene with trees and glowing embers like a piece of slow TV on YouTube or BBC4.Wisdom also holds that Siegfried is the Scherzo of the Ring. Maybe not only for its Read more ...
David Nice
Enter the human - and superhuman demands for at least four of the singers - in the second, towering instalment of Wagner's Ring cycle. It says so much for Opera North's achievement so far that no one fell in any way short of the sometimes insane vocal demands. There were only varying degrees of characterisation and commitment, none of them less than fine.Bad luck, perhaps, that the lower, though not exactly low, temperatures came in the first act as we meet the hero Wotan has fathered as free agent, or so he thinks, and the heroine sister whose incestuous love is a case, as the chief god puts Read more ...
David Nice
They promised Wagner for everybody at the Southbank Centre, and so far they're delivering. Community events cluster around a livescreening of each Ring instalment in the Clore Ballroom. We privileged few in the Festival Hall wondered how newcomers might be reacting out there, but there was no interval in the two-and-three-quarter-hour Das Rheingold to go and test the waters. I'm hoping that Tolkein lovers enjoyed the mythological gimmicks of the tetralogy's "preliminary evening" opera even if it offers the driest speech-song and the least knock-out impact of the four in terms of human emotion Read more ...
David Nice
As the hand-held credits popped up on screen to pianist and musical director Manoj Kamps's superb quartet arrangement of Mozart's Magic Flute Overture, the European Union's Culture Programme logo brought a spontaneous burst of applause. Not the norm for Suffolk this week, I'm told, but this audience knew how international opera is, how we're all connected in Europe's musical world.A year and a half after its inception as a collaboration between the Aix-en-Provence Festival and the European Network of Opera Academies – I was there at the very first meeting but had not seen the show until last Read more ...
Linda Esther Gray
When I sang Isolde to Alberto’s Tristan at English National Opera all those years ago, it was a joy to hear such wonderful tenor sounds in my ears, my heart and my soul. It was always difficult for him to memorise his work and up until the first night I wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen. Yet when we went into that other place of performing he became Tristan and we travelled, on the waves of his beautiful sounds, to places I have seldom been.He was a very experienced singer who had sung with many great sopranos but I always got the feeling he was enjoying his time with me as much as Read more ...
David Nice
"Bad Star Trek episodes" is how one director describes a certain unfortunate look in would-be intergalactic opera productions. The late Nikolaus Lehnhoff came perilously close to it in his Glyndebourne Tristan und Isolde but offered a coherent vision. Daniel Kramer, now ENO's Artistic Director, has a few "bad Star Trek episodes" and many good ideas that don't always join up or else outstay their welcome. Unevennness abounds: hideous costumes and makeup clash with Anish Kapoor's eventually brilliant designs, singing and conducting are only patchily inspired.Let's celebrate the best first. Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Wagner was never satisfied with Tannhäuser, and it’s not hard to see why. Essentially a study of the tension between sensual and spiritual love, it was composed at a time when, by his own later confession, he lacked the resources to deal properly (that is, improperly) with the sensual element, and even in any profundity – one might feel – with the spiritual. The piece went through numerous revisions, extensions, compressions, tinkerings of one sort or another. But what was left is a patchwork of early and late, conventional and inspired, and a sometimes painfully naïve morality which tends to Read more ...
graham.rickson
Kenneth Hesketh: horae (pro clara) Clare Hammond (piano) (BIS)Pianist Clare Hammond writes of Liverpudlian composer Kenneth Hesketh’s ‘fierce intelligence’ in her sleeve notes. He’s not yet a household name, but he deserves to be: the music on this handsomely produced disc is strikingly original. His mentors include Oliver Knussen and the late Henri Dutilleux, both composers with fastidious ears. Hesketh’s dense, complex textures never sound too congested, and many of the heavier passages have an incredible resonance – presumably harking back to the composer’s early years as a chorister in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A celebration of the power of words and music (leaving aside, briefly, that more troubling business about the Fatherland), Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is a natural opener for the summer opera season. Art triumphs over all, but in David McVicar’s production it’s a triumph of peculiarly human complication – a victory that leaves a hero in tears, that crowns some of opera’s most reactionary stick-in-the-muds with laurels, and leaves us asking: did Eva really pick the right man?It has been well over a year since Richard Jones’s Mastersingers came to English National Opera, but it’s Read more ...