Welsh National Opera Orchestra, Koenigs, St David's Hall, Cardiff | reviews, news & interviews
Welsh National Opera Orchestra, Koenigs, St David's Hall, Cardiff
Welsh National Opera Orchestra, Koenigs, St David's Hall, Cardiff
An idyll and a symphony, chamber music versus cathedral organs
Saturday, 30 April 2011
Lothar Koenigs: A master at pacing as well as spacingChris Christodoulou
Popping up on royal wedding day from the Niebelheim where they spend most of their working life, the WNO Orchestra brought with them a birth-and-death programme: hatch and dispatch, rather than match. Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll was a thank-you present to Cosima for their baby son, born out of wedlock; Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony turned into an epitaph for Wagner when he died in 1883, though most of it was written while he was still alive but ailing.
Popping up on royal wedding day from the Niebelheim where they spend most of their working life, the WNO Orchestra brought with them a birth-and-death programme: hatch and dispatch, rather than match. Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll was a thank-you present to Cosima for their baby son, born out of wedlock; Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony turned into an epitaph for Wagner when he died in 1883, though most of it was written while he was still alive but ailing.
Bruckner scored like the cathedral organist he had been, pulling out stops and pressing pistons, then letting rip
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