Wagner
Siegfried, LPO, Jurowski, RFH review - an incandescent journey to the mountain topSunday, 02 February 2020
Of Wagner's four Ring operas, Siegfried poses the biggest casting problem. Most heroic tenors with the lungs to last the evening are not going to be ideal incarnations of the stroppy adolescent who learns and fights his way through an often... Read more... |
Ted Gioia: Music: A Subversive History review – an informative, giddying rideSunday, 17 November 2019
People who derive comfort from Classic FM’s strapline that European classical music is “The World's Greatest Music" are going to have a major problem with this book. American music historian Ted Gioia has marshalled 25 years' worth of his own life... Read more... |
Prom 68: Goerke, Gould, RPO, Albrecht review - the art of transitionTuesday, 10 September 2019
Known as "Heldenmommy" to her fans on Twitter, Christine Goerke is a Wagner soprano of and for our time. You won’t find her recordings on the major-label behemoths but her reputation is built on two decades of producing the goods night after night... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Dalarna: Rhinegold in a Swedish barn by a lakeSaturday, 27 July 2019
Anna Larsson's fellow Swedes can count themselves lucky that the worldwide first choice to sing Wagner's Erda and the midnight song in Mahler's Third Symphony has made so much of her Dalarna inheritance. In what's called a "Concert Barn" (... Read more... |
Das Rheingold, Longborough Festival Opera review - more Wagnerian excellence in a Gloucestershire barnThursday, 06 June 2019
The whole raison d’être of the Longborough Festival was always the performance of its founder Martin Graham’s beloved Wagner. So it’s perfectly natural that the twelfth anniversary of the start of the festival’s original Ring cycle should be marked... Read more... |
Elīna Garanča, Malcolm Martineau, Wigmore Hall review - towards transcendenceMonday, 18 February 2019
It seems an almost indecent luxury to have heard two top mezzos in just over a week with so much to express, backed up by the perfect technique and instrument with which to do so. Georgian Anita Rachvelishvili with Pappano and the Royal Opera... Read more... |
Die Walküre, LPO, Jurowski, RFH review - love shines outMonday, 28 January 2019
Harpers on the undeniably offensive aspect of Wagner the man might question attending a concert performance of his second Ring opera on World Holocaust Day. Fortunately there's nothing anti-semitic to be found anywhere in Die Walküre. As embodied by... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Gothenburg - Wagner's gold turns greenThursday, 29 November 2018
Before we hear a note, extras dressed as maintenance staff potter about the stage. They try to erase a scrawled slogan on a wall that reads “Hur allt började”: how it all began. “It” is the story of Wagner’s Ring cycle as presaged in the... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Stockholm: the Birgit Nilsson Prize unites two great Wagnerian sopranosSaturday, 20 October 2018
Why are great Wagnerian singers the most down-to-earth and collegial in the world of opera? Perhaps you have to be to master and sustain the biggest roles in the business, ones which can't be performed in isolation, and a strong constitution helps,... Read more... |
BBC Philharmonic, Wellber, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - new conductor’s debutMonday, 08 October 2018
Two days after announcing his appointment as their next chief conductor (he takes the reins officially next summer, in time for the Proms), by remarkable good fortune the Manchester-based BBC Philharmonic was able to present Omer Meir Wellber as the... Read more... |
Götterdämmerung, Royal Opera review - a fiery finale to this ambiguous cycleTuesday, 02 October 2018
And so it ends. Flames give way to water, and as the Rhinemaidens resume their naked dance we come full circle – quite literally in Keith Warner’s Wagner Ring – back where we began, on the banks of the Rhine. Once again we find ourselves on the... Read more... |
Siegfried, Royal Opera review - a truly fearless heroSunday, 30 September 2018
Siegfried is usually the problem with Siegfried. Even Stuart Skelton, top Tristan and currently singing an acclaimed Siegmund in this last revival of Keith Warner's rattlebag Ring, won't touch the longest, toughest heroic-tenor role in Wagner, the... Read more... |
