Wagner
David Nice
Two birthday parties kept me away from the Albert Hall yesterday (though I'll confess that in the end I treacherously skipped the second and stayed glued to the TV's delayed relay). That, and a slight fear that the concert performance of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg from the BBC Proms couldn't match up to the original Welsh National Opera production of the decade.In fact, from what I saw, it did wonderful things in quite a different way, even if when left to their own devices the singers became a tad more conventional in their very exposed acting-out, for all the eloquent hand Read more ...
David Nice
Bit of a tizzy in Cardiff after Welsh National Opera decided to push the boat out for its biggest show in years. Richard Jones's new production of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg starring Bryn Terfel in his toughest challenge to date wowed most of us, and we hardly felt over-schmoozed in being well fed and watered in two separate functions during the long interval of this five-hour event.The South Wales Echo reports different sentiments in the form of grievances from smaller arts groups who felt WNO were fiddling while their own much smaller grants might well be going up in smoke. Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Watching and hearing this revival of WNO’s now eight-year-old production of Verdi’s Rigoletto, it’s hard to remember he composed it only a year or two before La Traviata, that most psychologically believable of all his operas. In Rigoletto nothing makes sense: the hunchback’s pretty daughter, her apparently willing incarceration, Rigoletto’s hoodwinking (literally) into helping her abduction, her final self-sacrifice – all palpable nonsense. Yet the piece never seriously fails. In a sense it’s music drama at its purest: the plot is an appendage to the music, what Wagner later called “deeds of Read more ...
David Nice
Only those who think the burnt-out question of Wagner and the Nazis can still be brought to bear on his operas could be disappointed by Richard Jones's life-enhancing new production. Not a swastika in sight, not a hint of anti-semitic caricature for the fallguy who was never intended for it in the first place, only affirmation of the opera's central message that great art can bring order and understanding to society.It launches with a masterstroke: a dropcloth collage portraying German-speaking genius from Bach and Mozart to Pina Bausch and Michael Haneke, embracing all creeds and persuasions Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month’s selection includes a flamboyant fin-de-siècle Italian symphony that could give you a nosebleed. A little-known American band provide a fresh take on a British 1930s warhorse, and classy Viennese musicians play some delectable Schumann symphonies. Everyone’s favourite Latin American youth orchestra give us a Stravinsky classic, coupled with a fascinating Mexican rarity. Contrast is provided by two wonderful discs of more intimate music-making - Zoltan Kodály’s magnificent solo cello sonata and some lesser-known songs by Britten. Finally we dip our toes into the world of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Istanbul, Turkey, 3-30 JuneThe 38th annual music festival in the jewelled city of culture-clash continues its strong classical showing with Radu Lupu and Lang Lang, the Borodin Quartet and Riccardo Muti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. Equally attractive is the chance to hear a lively ethnic and folkloric music programme. www.iksv.org/english/Leipzig, Germany, 11-20 JuneThe 85th annual Bach Festival in his home town also features his two great champions Brahms and Schumann. The Gewandhaus Orchestra and Leipzig Ballet get involved in ballet to Bach by Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, Philippe Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is there anywhere Stephen Fry will not go? I mean in documentaries. We’ve had Fry on depression and Fry on America, Fry on HIV and Fry on endangered species. Movingly, we’ve had Fry on who he thinks he is, an odyssey in which he discovered that much of his family fetched up in the gas ovens. Fry on Wagner? Admit it, you weren’t surprised. You didn't think, not another bloody comedian investigating, in pursuit of ratings, a subject of which he knows next to nothing. Fry, as everyone knows, knows everything. “My love affair with Wagner”, he began, “began when I was a child.” Of course it did, Read more ...
David Nice
Was Rossini, credited with the unsinkable comment that Wagner had "beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour", hoist by his own petard in his last and grandest opera? For while Wagner, at least in performances as well-paced as the one I heard of Siegfried in the hands of last night's valiant field marshal Dominic Wheeler, really ought to have no dull moments, Rossini's Guillaume Tell offers many stunning quarters of an hour but just a couple which are so-so. In Chelsea Opera Group's blazing concert performance, however, none of it was less than compelling.All three and a half hours of it Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month the selection varies from sackbutts to serialism, by way of condensed Wagner, Elgar conducted by the much-missed Vernon Handley and music from both Shostakovich and a disciple of his. Among contemporary music there is Osvaldo Golijov’s lively setting of the Passion story and the young German composer Thomas Larcher and the great Henri Dutilleux. There are also more delights from Swiss master Frank Martin. Violin pyrotechnics are supplied by Ysaÿe. But we begin with vintage Gershwin, and that famous looping clarinet.FEELGOOD CD of the MONTH
Gershwin by Grofé: Symphonic JazzHarmonie Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's amazing to think that Marcel Proust first heard Wagner's four-and-a-half-hour opera Die Meistersinger down his telephone. That same day, in 1911, he also ingested three hours of Debussy's Pélleas et Mélisande. We learn all this from Edward Seckerson's brilliant new Radio Three documentary about the remarkable world of the Théâtrophone, a device that used telephone transmitters to relay operas - and later news and sermons - live from wherever (the Opéra Comique to begin with) to hotels and houses around Paris. By 1893, this prototype radio had 1,300 subscribers; takers included the King Read more ...
David Nice
It used to be a treat saved up for the end of the season, when a Christie of Glyndebourne would step before the curtain and announce the next year's operas. Now, like everyone else, Glyndebourne is jumping in quick with its plans, partly, I guess, to raise money for its most expensive project yet - Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as next year's very festive opening gambit.The good news is that it's going to be conducted by resident powerhouse Vladimir Jurowski, who's already turned in an unforgettable Tristan und Isolde there. The unknown quantities are director David McVicar - when Read more ...
David Nice
"Madness! Madness! Everywhere madness!" The unsung words of cobbler-philosopher Hans Sachs in the third-act prelude to Wagner's Die Meistersinger might seem like an odd opening manifesto for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra's annual May Day ceremonial concert this morning, hosted this year by Oxford in the gorgeous venue where the Berliners had last played under Karajan a very long time ago. But there was method in it. Whether or not Oxford's traditional May Day eve revels last night had any drunken brawl as threatening as the one which set Sachs meditating on human folly there was certainly Read more ...