Wagner
stephen.walsh
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.Might they have planned it differently had they known? Wedding marches and arrivals of queens of Sheba would have drawn the Valleys coach parties; Read more ...
David Nice
So it's official: the Metropolitan Opera is more "important" than Covent Garden - at least to the rather image-conscious Fabio Luisi, currently rated as one of the possible successors to New York's now-ailing supremo of the last 40 years, James Levine. He's ditching two performances of a musically resplendent Aida at the Royal Opera for Wagner at the Met.A notice on the Royal Opera website advises us that: “Fabio Luisi will no longer conduct the performances on 30 March and 2 April, 2011. This is to enable him to stand in for James Levine at the Metropolitan Opera conducting Das Rheingold. Read more ...
David Nice
What a versatile master is the Royal Opera’s resident dynamo Antonio Pappano. On Saturday night, he was in the Covent Garden pit getting big-band sounds and tender elegies from the whole orchestra in Turnage’s Anna Nicole. And here he was again, moving from a surprisingly fine score to a great one, the shadow-of-mortality approach to Chinese poetry that is Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, albeit in its ingenious chamber reduction by Schoenberg. Oh, and with the small detail of a mezzo’s ultimate challenge being faced by a baritone.That implies two degrees of colour-deafness before a note is Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Some of you will know that Wagner and I haven't been seeing eye to eye of late. Last year's Tannhäuser I believed was the end of the road for the two of us. Not quite. With one of the most celebrated Wagner productions of the past two decades returning to the English National Opera last night - Nikolaus Lehnhoff's Parsifal - I decided to give him a final chance. My whole mind, body and soul was primed to repel it, yet I came out almost blubbing.The revelation didn't come immediately - nothing in Wagner comes immediately - though it didn't take long for the music to start having its Read more ...
David Nice
Perhaps her greatest achievement on disc is a role she would never have attempted in the theatre, Wagner's Isolde. Supported by the great Carlos Kleiber, the sheer meaning and luminous tone colours Price brings to every line make this one of the glories of recorded history.Below, Margaret Price sings Wagner's Liebestod from Tristan und IsoldeAt the other end of the repertoire, Price excelled in Mozart. A distinguished voice coach I know singles out a radio broadcast of a Mozart mass as the most perfect piece of singing he's ever heard. The lyric quality could stretch from Susanna - on disc, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Now that The X Factor's finally over, can we please get back to heaping opprobrium on the only Wagner that really deserves it? In the coming year opera houses around the world will be deciding whether to temporarily bankrupt themselves in 2013 to celebrate the composer's centenary. Opera Australia have announced a £10 million Ring Cycle. LA Opera and the Met are in the middle of new bank-busting cycles (£20 million and £15 million respectively). No doubt ours will want in some way to follow suit. Yet they would do well to steer clear. We cannot afford it. And we should not be encouraging this Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The double standards in opera are amazing. If heldentenor Johan Botha - a man the size of a small Eastern European country - had been a woman, he would have been refused re-entry to the stage till he'd had a gastric band fitted. But his size was the least of our worries. For those of us who vainly cling to the idea of opera as a viable dramatic art form, Botha's return to Covent Garden as Tannhäuser was one of the most profoundly depressing experiences of my life.For most of the first two acts Botha might as well have been a stuffed bear on wheels. He paced from stage right to Read more ...
David Nice
Exactly an hour and a half after Wagner's first orchestral brew of sex and religion had raised the curtain on the Royal Opera Tannhäuser, the pilgrims and floozies were at it again over the other side of town. If there was hardly the whiff of elemental theatrics ahead in Jiří Bělohlávek's surprisingly staid conducting of the overture, different treats were in store: the most opulent and musicianly of all living sopranos, Christine Brewer, in cheerful love songs by a nearly forgotten Austrian composer, and a smells-and-bells pilgrimage up a mountain and down ennobling Richard Strauss's most Read more ...
David Nice
Eighty years ago yesterday, the 41-year-old Adrian Boult launched the distinguished history of what was then a 114-strong BBC Symphony Orchestra with Wagner's Flying Dutchman Overture in Portland Place. Three months later ice-and-fire Ernest Ansermet was over to conduct Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in a programme which included the composer at the piano. Both works were indispensible to last night's celebrations: crispbread and butter wrapped around an equally representative contemporary filling that spread its wow factor relatively thin.Not that the live-wire soloists weren't hugely Read more ...
David Nice
As experienced Wagnerian Jiří Bělohlávek came on to launch the BBCSO's new season in mid-air with the Tristan Prelude, I wondered whether the world's finest interpreter of Isolde's serving maid Brangäne, lustrous mezzo Sarah Connolly, was waiting to up her game, and her range, and tackle the Liebestod. Sadly not: that remained, as often in concert, Music Minus One. Connolly was there for a different kind of game-upping - a noble attempt to enter the charmed circle that's developed around the memory of the great Lorraine Hunt Lieberson with husband Peter Lieberson's Neruda Songs.Hunt Lieberson Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
This season's LSO artist-in-focus, violinist Viktoria Mullova, is an incorrigible off-roader. The rougher the terrain the better. Early, modern, rock, folk: she'll absorb their shocks, vault their bumps, relish their pitfalls and come out without so much as a scratch. So Mullova's opening concert last night was intriguing. Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto isn't exactly smooth terrain, but its roughness is pretty suburban.Mullova's approach was typically counterintuitive. There was no attempt to rough things up. She played to the work's inner shyness and tenderness. When a game of hide-and- Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
People always overlook how much of a hippie Richard Wagner was intellectually. His philosophical stance differs little from that of Neil from The Young Ones. It's a side of Wagner you can't get away from in Tristan und Isolde, with its endless railing against temporal realities and its search for universal oneness - yeah man, oneness. And it was doubly impossible to avoid these stoner-like thoughts last night at the Philharmonia Orchestra's Royal Festival Hall performance, where Bill Viola's videos - a typically elemental smorgasbord, with Adam and Eve types dressed in nappies - Read more ...