Wagner
David Nice
This summer, the Royal Albert Hall became the centre of the Wagnerian universe. No one was going to ignore Bayreuth, where Frank Castorf‘s new Ring gave plenty of fuel for column inches; but somehow the singers and the orchestra seem to have got lost there among all the apparently uninterpretable stage paraphernalia. Here there was a unique context for the personenregie, the crucial relationships highlighted in Wagner’s many one-to-ones, as memorable as the spotlight on the music.Sir John Tomlinson, whose thoughts specifically about the Prom Parsifal in which he sang the role of Gurnemanz Read more ...
David Nice
So for one last time this season the impossible colosseum of Albertopolis became the Wagnerian holiest of holies – to be precise, the Cathedral of the Holy Grail - and once again I fell in love with the beast transfigured. Justin Way, the one artist common to all seven Wagner operas as their subtle semi-stager, should be the delegate to receive the award the Proms deserve for highest achievement of bicentenary year; and it seemed right to have Sir John Tomlinson, albeit by dint of another bass’s indisposition, giving his benediction as the witness of a final miracle.No mere ghost of Wagnerian Read more ...
David Nice
Prokofiev’s Fifth is a symphony for which the conductor’s setting tends to be turned to either bright and light or dark and heavy. Perhaps because of the composer’s perceived joker role as set against Shostakovich the symphonic chronicler of Soviet tragedy, Vassily Sinaisky at the 2005 Proms made a glib, glossy showpiece of it. Valery Gergiev has always veered to the black side. But last night Yannick Nézet-Séguin worked sympathetically with the humane inscaping of the orchestra Gergiev did so much to mould, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, to give the best of all possible worlds, emphasising the 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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
David Nice
It only takes a few great Lieder by Schumann and Liszt to show the kinds of songs Wagner didn’t, or couldn’t, write. Very well, so the rarities in this programme were whimsies he composed in his youth, but even the Wesendonck Lieder, sole voice-and-piano masterpieces of his maturity, don’t show much concern for the little details of humanity. Fortunately Janice Watson rose to great form to show us what, quite apart from the two "studies" for Tristan und Isolde, their opulent generalities are all about. And her pianist in a thousand, Joseph Middleton, treated Wagner’s phrase endings with as Read more ...
stephen.walsh
"This," Lizzie Graham writes in the programme book of the current Longborough Festival, “is definitely the test of whether or not it is possible to put on a convincing Ring in a small, privately-owned country theatre.” I don’t think Lizzie or her husband, Martin, the festival’s founders and owners of the theatre, can have seriously doubted that the answer would be yes. Serious doubts seem not to be part of their entrepreneurial make-up; or if they are, they suppress them. But the noisy acclaim of the far from provincial or rustic audience at the end of Götterdämmerung on Saturday must all the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Newcomers to this ongoing Ring cycle would be wrong to imagine that a series of semi-staged concert performances represent a downsizing, a half-hearted stab at Wagner production. The decision to perform the operas in Leeds’s vast Town Hall was made in part for practical reasons, namely that the Grand Theatre’s orchestra pit is too small to accommodate the large forces required. One or two minor niggles aside, Opera North’s approach has been a consistent triumph.The physical impact of Wagner’s gargantuan orchestra operating at full stretch in plain sight is startling. The players are beaming. Read more ...