Wagner
David Nice
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 Orchestra the Friday before last only had to hold the spell through a Rachmaninov sequence in the middle of an all-Russian concert. For her long sold-out Wigmore Hall recital, Latvian Elīna Garanča chose a daunting sequence of song series by Schumann, Wagner and Mahler, ending the official programme with other-worldly poise in what sounded exactly as it Read more ...
David Nice
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 the cruel and tender score, the poet-composer's transformation of barbaric Northern mythology into the most essential of themes for our or any time - the power of love versus the love of power (not my coinage, but says it all) - is pure compassionate genius. It's crystallised in an interpretation as phenomenal as that of Vladimir Jurowski - too Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
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 introductory drama of Das Rheingold, which kicks off the tetralogy. Prior, though, to the ominous, mesmeric swell of the E flat chord that anchors the Rheingold prelude, Stephen Langridge’s production for Gothenburg Opera shows us a busy, dogged human world of toil. This sphere may be alien to the passions and quarrels of gods, dwarves and giants we will soon Read more ...
David Nice
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, too. Birgit Nilsson, the farmer's daughter born in rural Sweden 100 years ago, had all those qualities and many more. So, too, does her compatriot and one-time disciple Nina Stemme, making her perhaps the most appropriate laureate of the Birgit Nilsson Prize in terms of carrying on the line (the previous recipients at various intervals since the Read more ...
Robert Beale
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 conductor of their second Bridgewater Hall series concert. It was a harbinger of things to come – he said as much in the talk before the concert – in that he’s an experienced opera conductor and wants to bring the spirit of the stage, and probably the reality of more operatic performances, to the Philharmonic’s programming.So his Mozart opener – Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
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 brink – but of what? A young woman framed in the giant ring that descends in the music’s final moments suggests a hopeful new beginning, a new generation of heroes. But with the old gods burnt up in the fire, who or what will take their place?Third time round, and still things remain – for good or ill – ambiguous in Warner’s staging. Admittedly in Read more ...
David Nice
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 protagonist of his third opera in the tetralogy. Stefan Vinke, singing his 100th Siegfried during this Royal Opera run, is a true hero, still sounding as fresh as - well, not exactly a daisy, more like a magnolia grandiflora. His stamina gave us not only the most thrilling of climaxes to Act One, where the fearless lad reforges his father's Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Perched alone and fearful in her hut as the curtain rises on Die Walküre, Sieglinde clutches and then throws aside a grimy teddy-bear. Story time is over. The nymphs and gold and bickering gods all belong in the past, to the ‘preliminary evening’ of Das Rheingold, or so Sieglinde might think. The real drama of Wagner's Ring begins here. It’s a nice metaphor, one of many that Keith Warner throws into the pot for his Royal Opera staging on its final appearance.Other false comforts and dreams of dominion bind the Victorian age of the Ring’s composition to subsequent eras of industrialised Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Keith Warner’s production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen was first seen at Covent Garden between 2004 and 2006, and is now back for a third and final series of full runs, chiefly to catch the Brünnhilde of Nina Stemme in three of the operas, continuing into November. The designs (by Stefanos Lazaridis) and dramaturgy have mostly aged well, aided by Warner’s high-drama but low-concept approach. The casting for this Rheingold is less starry than before, but makes for a good ensemble – which is exactly what Das Rheingold requires.For the opening scene, the depths of the Rhine are Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
It is a pleasure to report on the continuing success of the Saffron Opera Wagner project. The organisation was formed in 2013, and since then has presented concert performances of the Ring cycle and Meistersinger, and now Parsifal, all with an amateur orchestra and chorus and a cast of mostly lesser-known professionals. As this Parsifal demonstrated, the casting choices have generally been superb, and the amateur forces all well prepared, the results dramatically convincing, even in concert performance.The orchestra here was committed and well into the style of the music. But there were no Read more ...
David Nice
It's awfully long for a fairytale in which a mystery prince helps a damsel in distress, and she asks him the question she shouldn't. Myth tends to go deeper, as Wagner did in The Ring of the Nibelung after Lohengrin. Here he captures the magic of transformation and transcendence, but in between there's too much hard-to-stage pomp. Director David Alden treats it all too predictably, with images of post-war ruin – tilted, tottering shells of buildings – and fascist paraphernalia (the swan motif in Nazi colours). The real light of the piece is there in the music, led with bright breadth by the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Brilliant and innovative though it is in many respects, The Flying Dutchman is by no means a straightforward piece to stage. It’s an odd, sometimes uncomfortable mixture of the genre and the epic. At Sadler’s Wells in the sixties they had a little ship and a big ship that hove into view, a fishing village, sailors with tankards and striped shirts, and girls at looms. At Bayreuth in the eighties Harry Kupfer set the whole piece in a lunatic asylum, which solved all dramaturgical problems, if at some psychological cost. Now, at Longborough, Thomas Guthrie and his designer, Ruth Paton, have Read more ...