Opera
David Nice
On the one occasion I went to Bayreuth, I made the mistake of seeing The Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin after the best of Ring cycles. At the Proms we’ve had a week of serious Wagnerian withdrawal symptoms, so Tannhäuser was never going to feel like too much or too little of a good thing. In any case, this always fascinating if dramatically primitive early clash of sex and religion is shot through with later passages composed in between work on the Ring, most of them included in last night's 1875 hybrid version. And Donald Runnicles is not a conductor to stand in the shadow of Daniel Barenboim Read more ...
Alexander Robinson
I'm a great fan of the BBC, I really am, but it pains me to say that its coverage of the arts on TV often leaves a great deal to be desired. A case in point is Sarah Montague's recent (29 July) HARDtalk interview of opera singer Thomas Hampson, which I watched via the HARDtalk YouTube page.Should opera companies receive public subsidy? Could they do more to diversify the demographics of their audiences? How can opera be made to appeal to modern listeners? These are all valid questions which have been posed before, from Yes Minister to the BBC News website, and which will no doubt continue to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A lot has changed in the 10 years since Serge Dorny arrived at Lyon Opera. Attendance in a supposedly dying art form has risen to 96 per cent, and no charges of elitism or unfashionable nostalgia have deterred the 25 per cent of Lyon’s audiences who are now under 26 – Europe’s youngest opera-going crowd. But how has Dorny managed this, and at what cost? Is he really the Opera Whisperer or are his innovations just gimmickry, shiny bandages temporarily plugging a fatal wound?It’s a question that UK audiences will soon be able to answer for themselves as Dorny brings his latest and most Read more ...
edward.seckerson
And so Wotan’s ravens flew home and at the twilight’s last gleaming the immortals were consumed by fire and water. All was finally and irrevocably redeemed by the power of love, and the most beautiful of all the leitmotifs in Wagner’s Ring rolled out across the Albert Hall like a benediction. It was a defining moment in Proms history, no doubt, and was greeted with a few moments of perfect - and I mean perfect - silence.After minutes of rapturous applause, Daniel Barenboim spoke spontaneously and without a microphone to the huge capacity audience (pictured below). He talked of the way Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Such has been the justifiable flow of superlatives this week about the Berlin Staatskapelle's Ring conducted by Barenboim, the centrepiece of the BBC Proms' Wagner bicentenary celebration, it would have been easy to forget that the 2013 Proms season contains not just those four, but seven complete Wagner operas.Last night's performance of Tristan und Isolde was placed – respecting the chronological order in which Wagner composed them - between the Berliners' Siegfried on Friday and Götterdammerung on Sunday.The performance which Bychkov coaxed from all sections of the BBCSO was a fabulous Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The transformative power of the Royal Albert Hall at Proms-time never ceases to amaze me. Here is Siegfried, the third in Wagner’s Ring cycle, sprawling in length, not over-strong in characters, yet in the Proms setting the rather over-extended character scenes cede to the extraordinary scene-painting, the noise of Mime’s metal-working, the inky mystery of Erda’s cavern, the bloody terrors of Fafner’s cave, the forest full of birdsong. Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin made sure last night that five and a half hours very nearly sped by, so sumptuous and yet delicate was their Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
Garsington Opera, now based at John Paul Getty’s countrified home, the Wormsley Estate near Henley, has nipped a leaf out of Glyndebourne’s book and embarked on its first full-blooded Community Opera: a far cry from Vivaldi and Rossini, but not from Janáček (Garsington will stage The Cunning Little Vixen next season). Road Rage has a shiveringly well-turned, witty, singable text by Sir Richard Stilgoe, and a score by Orlando Gough, who was behind Glyndebourne’s big hit Imago.Featuring a "green" script that suggests Rome drove its famous viae stratae through helpless peasant smallholdings (cue Read more ...
David Nice
Things may be falling apart, a storm now rages but new broods of humans and demigoddesses have been fathered by chief god Wotan, who has undergone a Doctor Who like transformation from Iain Paterson into Bryn Terfel. Four new top singers appear on the scene after Monday night’s Rheingold superhumans, but Daniel Barenboim is still very much in control to colour and shape another deluxe semi-staged narrative in his Ring epic, this time about the steely warrior-maiden Valkyrie who came to know love.You’d expect Nina Stemme, many people’s favourite Wagnerian soprano, to dominate the picture Read more ...
David Nice
Swimming around in the Rhine is what most of us wanted to be doing on the hottest day of the year. A cooling, riverbed low E flat from Daniel Barenboim’s Berlin double basses, and then the staggered horn entries announced we were going to be in the finest sonic hands for two and a half hours – or nearly 15, if the colossal Proms Ring is to be accounted in its full, four-night glory. And glory it will be in the casting, too, if the flawlessly full, rich voices in the large Rheingold cast are anything to go by.Among the line-up were three singers in the leading men's roles I’d be happy to Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Having spent most of the summer on Wagner’s Ring, Longborough are now giving, as a kind of bergamasque, an opera whose entire length would fit into the first act of Götterdämmerung. La Bohème is everything The Ring is not. It is concise, melodious, playful, sentimental and weepy. Yet oddly enough, it could never have been written without Wagner. Puccini’s ears were open to every kind of influence, and quick to transform everything into a personal expression. So Bohème thrives on leitmotifs, skilfully worked transitions, complex simultaneities, and thematic orchestration – all those devices Read more ...
David Nice
Richard Strauss’s lavish postscript to 50 years of music theatre is about so much more than the theme of its source, Salieri’s Prima la musica e poi le parole ("first the music and then the words", with a big invisible question mark). Its overall subject of rival claims in opera also embraces spoken drama, poetry, dance and specific bel canto, all of them marshalled by the most experienced of theatre directors. And a director is what this concert performance probably needed to bring its cast members into dramatic harmony. Different levels of experience may have been at play, but at least the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
By the time silence descends on the Royal Albert Hall at five o’clock in the afternoon for a performance that will end six hours later, Semyon Bychkov will have been rehearsing for 60 hours. It breaks down into four days of orchestra readings, with tutti and sectional sessions for each act, then two days of the singers and a pianist, followed by six days of everybody together. And all for one performance of Tristan und Isolde with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.Bychkov has a long relationship with Tristan. He first conducted a concert performance of the second act in Turin, and the whole staged Read more ...