Strauss
David Nice
As a town of 70,000 or so people, Bamberg boxes dazzlingly above its weight in at least two spheres. The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, risen to giddy heights under its chief conductor of the last 14 years Jonathan Nott, is decisively among Germany’s top five, and acknowledged as such in its substantial state funding (to the enviable tune of 80 percent, a figure known elsewhere, I believe, only in Norway). And a galaxy of great buildings has won the place UNESCO World Heritage status. Strange, then, that the British don’t seem to realise, as do the Americans, Chinese, Japanese and Italians – Read more ...
David Nice
So here’s where I join the ranks of Old Opera Bores by declaring this Salome, Nina Stemme, the best I’ve seen since Hildegard Behrens in 1978, and this Salome as in Richard Strauss’s Wilde opera from Donald Runnicles and his Deutsche Oper Berlin ensemble categorically the most near-perfect. It’s also the first time I’ve had a group of very loud, rude people behind me shouting “sit down” when I stood at the end (and John the Baptist’s God knows I don’t do that often). To which the only answers were “stand up yourselves” and “what does it take?” Most of the arena stalls eventually followed suit Read more ...
geoff brown
Some things that spread like wildfire, like ebola and wildfire itself, are not good news at all. But performing Nielsen’s symphonies? That’s another matter entirely. In the next concert season, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia both begin Nielsen symphony programmes, while the LSO several years ago cycled through one of their own with Sir Colin Davis. Yesterday, the BBC National Symphony of Wales and their current Danish conductor – will it ever be someone Welsh? – bit off one of the mightiest in the set, the battle-scarred Fifth, with its disruptive side-drum. At this rate, Read more ...
David Nice
A monstrous celebration prefaced by thunderous organ chords is always going to be more the Albert Hall’s kind of thing than a comic opera viewed through the wrong end of the telescope. So Strauss’s Festival Prelude kicked off a first half of 150th birthday celebrations in more appropriate style than last week’s Der Rosenkavalier. Unfortunately what it ushered in worked less well up to the interval; but then there was Elgar’s Second Symphony to redeem all with heart and soul, the best possible visiting card for a golden-age Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko.You could Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
If last year’s Ring cycle triumphantly proved that world-class opera can be done at the Albert Hall, this Rosenkavalier suggests that the less epic end of the repertoire isn’t such a sure thing. That is not to say that this performance was dud, far from it; rather that its few problems were venue related. Balance was the main issue, though Robin Ticciati did a great job of whipping the London Philharmonic Orchestra into a passionate frenzy in the Prelude and then taking things down a notch and keeping them there to avoid engulfing the voices. The audience will have had a different experience Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This was a rare outing by the World Orchestra for Peace, which has performed fewer than 20 concerts since the death of its founder Sir Georg Solti in 1997. UNESCO had designated this BBC Prom as "The 2014 Concert for Peace", the definite article implying a uniqueness which - according to rumour - is because concerts planned for Munich and Aix failed to get beyond the planning stage. It drew a respectable house to the Royal Albert Hall, which looked about three-quarters full.This has been a week in which world peace has seemed like a very distant ideal indeed, in which the news has been Read more ...
David Nice
Can it really be 12 years since Antonio Pappano inaugurated his transformative era as the Royal Opera’s Music Director conducting Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos? Christof Loy’s production seemed so radical at the time. We were put off our guard by seeing opera stars in the backstage Prologue preparing for an 18th century opera seria – to be famously interrupted by common or garden song and dance in poet-librettist Hofmannsthal's ingenious misalliance – but what we actually got in the "performance" was a modern Ariadne slumped on a dressing table in a hotel room the walls of which only suggested Read more ...
David Nice
Richard Strauss was born in Munich 150 years ago today. Christian Thielemann is celebrating the fact by conducting the Staatskapelle Dresden in the juiciest of all-Strauss operatic potpourris, a festive concert to be held in the city’s glorious Semperoper. What wouldn’t I give to hear Anja Harteros, alongside Anne Schwanewilms the loveliest of Strauss sopranos, and chaste nymph Daphne’s metamorphosis into a laurel in a peerless operatic epilogue? In fact the Dresden Music Festival, my host, ended yesterday and seems to function as a separate entity with its own period-instrument orchestra. I Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
If the Hungarian State Opera wanted to demonstrate that it is now back on top form, it could not have chosen a better way than this six-opera celebration of Richard Strauss’s 150th anniversary. Mahler conducted here before moving to Hamburg, Vienna and New York. Filled with new ambition, after a contractual shake-up under General Manager Szilveszter Ókovács, Budapest displays revitalised strength and amazing depth in all departments.The 2014 Strauss showpiece was a national premiere: Hungary’s belated first staging of Die Frau ohne Schatten, the fairy-tale opera with which Strauss and Read more ...
David Nice
A trio of Rosenkavaliers: what more could one want as we near Richard Strauss’s 150th birthday? Well, more of the less often performed operas, for a start. But as this is the Straussian cornucopia, it’s not going to tire those of us who love it beyond reason, and Andris Nelsons’ concert performance with his devoted City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra eventually delivered as much in its rather peculiar way as the Barbican excerpts earlier this month and Richard Jones’ gobsmackingly original, disciplined take at Glyndebourne.So it was time again to forget the wigs, and at first it looked as Read more ...
caspar.gomez
It’s certainly different from the Glastonbury shuttle, I’ll tell you that. I’m sitting with Finetime on the minibus that takes festival-goers from Lewes Station to the opening day of Glyndebourne Opera Festival 2014.Finetime’s looking very much the peacock today, a suit of many colours and he’s even wearing an earring with a blue feather. I clank my Asahi beer against his.“The first of too many,” I say.All around us the full minibus is silent but not unfriendly. Opera people do anticipation differently from us rockers and ravers. A man of 50-ish in a kilt sits down next to us, smiles and asks Read more ...
David Nice
What spontaneous use might a silver rose take on after its formal presentation by a chubby cherub of a cavalier to a bartered bride-to-be? This and a thousand other score-co-ordinated details are things you never can predict in the hands of that chameleonic yet rigorous director Richard Jones. He throws out most of the meticulous stage directions in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s rococo libretto for Richard Strauss and finds his own. You may not like them – I mostly did – but you can’t say that this isn’t quality work in tandem with a team of near-ideal Glyndebourne singers and beautifully if often Read more ...