Wagner
Adam Sweeting
The one thing you can rely on when a programme is billed as "The Real" something-or-other is that that is exactly what you won't get. This film, commemorating the centenary of the birth of the great Hungarian conductor, did a thorough job of tracing his career through the great orchestras, concert halls and opera houses of the world, pulling in various stellar musical names and bags of excellent archive footage en route. But anybody already familiar with Sir Georg's life and works would not have come away a great deal wiser.Fortunately it's a great story, however you tell it. A gifted pianist Read more ...
Helen Meany
Irish theatre generates high expectations. So much so, that if there isn’t a premiere of a play by one of Ireland’s leading playwrights – Sebastian Barry, Enda Walsh, Marina Carr, Frank McGuinness, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson or Mark O’Rowe – the annual Dublin Theatre Festival tends to be viewed by regular Dublin theatregoers as somehow deficient. But while this year’s festival didn’t offer a singularly brilliant piece of new Irish playwriting, in its range and diversity it posed a series of very provocative questions.Now in its 55th year, Dublin Theatre Festival 2012 ran for over two- Read more ...
David Nice
The prospect of adventuring from one unpredictable day to the next in the course of Michael Tippett’s Triple Concerto, and from dawn to twilight in just over an hour’s orchestral music from Wagner’s Ring, seemed very much weighted in the English composer’s favour. Frankly, had Mark Wigglesworth only conducted Siegfried’s Funeral March in this concert’s second half, he would have consolidated an already glowing reputation as a top-notch Wagnerian. That he and the BBC Symphony Orchestra burned their symphonic way through Dutch percussionist Henk de Vlieger’s audacious, unbroken “orchestral Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It is considerate of Manchester’s two professional symphony orchestras to have organised their opening Wagner celebration salvoes so that they dovetail so neatly. The BBC Philharmonic opened their season three weeks ago with the Wesendonck Lieder, famously inspired by the composer’s infatuation with Mathilde, the wife of his wealthy sponsor Otto Wesendonck, and featuring those two well-known studies for Tristan und Isolde, "Im Treibhaus" (In the Hothouse) and "Traume" (Dreams). Last night came the Hallé with the Prelude and Liebestod of that very opera.With principal guest conductor Markus Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Wagner was not averse to highlights being plucked from the mighty Ring, even though it is an all-encompassing drive-through drama. Perhaps it’s as well, since the bicentenary celebrations of his birth are getting up steam and concert planners are at pains to pull out a few plums. After all, we can’t wallow in the whole of the cycle all of the time.For the start of his second season as Chief Conductor of the BBC Phil, Juanjo Mena (pronounced Huanho Mayna, he being a proud Basque) chose favourite dramatic excerpts from Götterdämmerung. Not a choice for the fainthearted, featuring the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Every production of Wagner’s Ring is a challenge. But to stage it in a smallish converted barn seating 500 with little or no stage machinery, which is what the Longborough Festival plans to do in a year’s time, might strike one as a particularly refined form of lunacy. The omens, nevertheless, could hardly be better. The final wing of the edifice, Götterdämmerung, is complete; and in almost every way it’s a remarkable, memorable achievement, a triumph of sheer enthusiasm and dedication – a rare victory for the fools rushing in ahead of the timid angels.No need to dwell on the obvious Read more ...
graham.rickson
This works as well as it did last year – a no-frills approach to Wagner that helps far more than it hinders. Forget fat ladies wearing Viking helmets. Here the intimacy, the surprising humanity of Die Walküre come to the fore in what seems more and more like an opera cycle narrating a complex, tragic family saga, focusing on a father’s inability to control his daughters.Practical considerations, namely an orchestra pit too small to accommodate Wagnerian forces, have led Opera North to mount their Ring Cycle as a semi-staged production in Leeds’s spectacular Victorian town hall, after which it Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Welsh National Opera has a good track record with Wagner. Its Meistersinger of two summers ago is already the stuff of legend (and alas not likely to return to reality); farther back one recalls a more than respectable Parsifal, a notable Ring cycle, and an old Tristan under Goodall that’s still talked about in hushed whispers.This more recent Tristan, itself almost two decades old, belongs strictly to a new era. Nowadays WNO does original language and books international singers, which in theory – if not always in practice – lifts its productions out of the provincial league. It also has the Read more ...
charlotte.gardner
Obsession and redemption, the twin themes of Wagner's ghostly earliest masterpiece, are two words that could just as pertinently be applied to Jonathan Kent's new production for English National Opera. Obsession is how many non-diehard Wagner opera-goers will view Kent's decision to stage this opera as a continuous pieceit' of drama with no interval. Sure, Wagner originally considered a single-act work, but he quickly dropped the idea. He never conducted or endorsed a staging without a break. So, the fashion for running all three acts together almost feels like obsession in its unwillingness Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Is it my imagination, or are we getting more Wagner in concert than we used to? It could be a welcome development. How marvellous not to have to tremble at the thought of the latest flight of directorial fantasy: Isolde pregnant, Siegfried as an airline pilot, the Grail temple transformed into the Reichstag (no prizes for guessing which of these is a real case). Instead you can enjoy what Stravinsky called “the great art of Wagner from the direct source of that greatness and not through the medium of pygmies swarming around the stage”.This was a level-headed, well-prepared, if not always Read more ...