Wagner
10 Questions for Semyon BychkovSaturday, 20 July 2013
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... Read more... |
Wagner 200: Janice Watson, Joseph Middleton, Kings PlaceFriday, 28 June 2013
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-... Read more... |
The Ring, Longborough FestivalMonday, 24 June 2013
"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... Read more... |
Siegfried, Opera NorthSunday, 16 June 2013
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... Read more... |
RLPO, Petrenko, Liverpool Philharmonic HallMonday, 10 June 2013
With the Albert Dock just a few hundred yards down the road, and Liverpool the launchpad for two centuries of Atlantic crossings, it’s perhaps not too shocking to hear Wagner’s intercontinental Ride of the Valkyries resound round Philharmonic Hall.... Read more... |
Wagner Dream, Welsh National OperaFriday, 07 June 2013
Those who knew the composer Jonathan Harvey, who died of motor neurone disease last December, will remember him as the least demonstrative, least theatrical of men. His presence was gentle, soft-spoken, essentially inward – the physical image of the... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Dresden: Wagner and Vivaldi at the 2013 Dresden Music FestivalSunday, 02 June 2013
Sitting in the concert hall in Dresden’s Albertinum – the city’s modern art gallery – is a paradoxical experience. You are indoors, but faced on all sides by external walls, framed by Dresden’s typical bourgeois 19th-century architecture but looking... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: John Adams, Dobrinka Tabakova, WagnerSaturday, 01 June 2013
John Adams: Nixon in China Peter Sellars (director), Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Chorus and Ballet/John Adams (Nonesuch)If, like me, you prefer your opera recordings to be heard and not seen, make an exception for this DVD of Peter Sellars’s... Read more... |
Lohengrin, Welsh National OperaFriday, 24 May 2013
What is one to make of Lohengrin, Wagner’s last “opera” (as opposed to music drama), in this day and age? Is it a medieval romance, like Weber’s Freischütz but with a deus ex machina at the beginning rather than the end; or is it a nineteenth-... Read more... |
BBC Proms 2013: Ring operas for a fiver eachFriday, 19 April 2013
First, the good news: you can see Wagner’s entire Ring at the Royal Albert Hall, with absolutely the world’s finest Wagner singers and conductor in concert, for a grand total of £20. The bad news is that unless you have a season ticket – in which... Read more... |
The Seckerson Tapes: Heldentenor Ian StoreySunday, 24 March 2013
In 2007 the English tenor, Ian Storey, made a dramatic and highly visible debut as Tristan in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the season opening of La Scala, Milan, conducted by Daniel Barenboim and directed by Patrice Chereau. It was seen by... Read more... |
Die Feen, Chelsea Opera Group, Queen Elizabeth HallMonday, 18 March 2013
Like Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges and Puccini’s Turandot, Wagner’s first opera – The Fairies in English – has its roots in a “theatrical fable” by the 18th century Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi. There the resemblances end. Only Prokofiev... Read more... |
