Wagner
David Nice
Should you not have caught one of the 20th century’s handful of greatest Wagnerian singers live - I did, just once, in a Prom of uneven excerpts - chances are that you first heard Birgit Nilsson in Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene from Götterdämmerung on Sir Georg Solti’s Vienna Philharmonic Ring recording. The distinguished President of the Birgit Nilsson Prize who lives in the orchestra's wonderful city, physicist, economist and Nilsson’s biggest if always most respectful fan Professor Doktor Rutbert Reisch, insists that the connection was never a criterion behind the bi- or triennial prize of Read more ...
fisun.guner
And so, I finally come to write of Anselm Kiefer, and with something of a heavy heart, as heavy, I’d vouch, as one of his load-bearing canvases. In 2007, I was left breathless by the German artist’s new paintings at the White Cube gallery in Mayfair: huge, spectacular churned-up poppy fields, whose sweetly blushing poppy heads were drooping from blackened stalks erupting from deeply encrusted, scorched, scraped and furrowed earth. To make such grand statements about the piteous nature of war, about the recklessness and hubris of humanity, about the hope that only rarely deserts us, and Read more ...
David Nice
A full day began and ended with Elgar the European, or rather the citizen of the world. After all, the Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, played with panache by 180 young musicians in a morning meet-up, owes its swagger to the "Cortège de Bacchus" from French petit-maître Delibes’ ballet Sylvia, while the First Symphony can hold its head high alongside very different masterpieces from the early 1900s by Mahler and Sibelius – though it needs a lift and a shape, which it got in excelsis from the consummate Mark Wigglesworth (****).It’s good to be reminded how Elgar lavished orchestral and Read more ...
graham.rickson
These annual treks to Leeds Town Hall on muggy June evenings have become a bit of a tradition. Going to see Opera North’s Ring feels increasingly like attending a fan convention, though instead of wearing tight lycra and assorted helmets, attendees tend to sport sensible footwear, smart trousers and blue blazers. Would Wagner have approved of this performance of Götterdämmerung? His theatre at Bayreuth was designed so that the musicians would be hidden. The Leeds Grand Theatre pit is too small for a Wagnerian orchestra, so Opera North have upped sticks and moved a few hundred yards west to Read more ...
David Nice
She is now the world’s leading interpreter of Richard Strauss’s Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, the aristocratic thirtysomething once forced into marriage with a far from ideal husband and determined not to let it happen to the sweet girl who falls for her own much younger lover on first sight. As a happily married woman, Anne Schwanewilms has no need of 17-year-old boys, and in her vocal prime she can have no regrets about ageing beautifully, but she shares both the Marschallin’s wit, with a wicked line in impersonating certain conductors, and her natural charm.Schwanewilms first beguiled Read more ...
David Nice
Arise, Sir Edward – Gardner, not Elgar, whose First Symphony the former conducted last night. Well, maybe a knighthood’s too premature; although the daft honours system has rewarded others in the operatic world for less, and Gardner has already served two brilliant terms at Glyndebourne Touring Opera and ENO, there was just one aspect of the symphony that he didn’t seem quite to get last night.It was the visionary gleam, its flipside the pain of the composer’s tortured introspection, which he missed by a centimetre and which knights of greater experience like Sirs John Barbirolli, Adrian Read more ...
David Nice
This is great news. It should have been great news back in 2006-7, when Wigglesworth – Mark, not to be confused with the young, photogenic Ryan, composer and, when I last saw him, barely competent baton-wielder - was among the contenders for the post of Music Director at English National Opera. As it happened, the then relatively unknown Edward Gardner sailed into the job with precocious assurance and versatility.Gardner leaves at the end of the 2014-15 season to take up a post with the world-class Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. Only his Mozart has been uncertain; but he has given us, among Read more ...
theartsdesk
“It is at the end that a composer can achieve his finest effects,“ declared Richard Strauss. He was thinking of his great operatic and symphonic epilogues, but apply that to the art of conducting, adjust the “at” to “towards”, and it applies supremely well to Claudio Abbado, who has died at the age of 80.Having undergone radical surgery for stomach cancer in 2000, Abbado not only lived to tell the tale but went on to what he, the most modest and objective of men, would have been the first to admit were even greater heights and depths. No one would have thought he could do better than with the Read more ...
David Nice
Which musical calendar year isn’t laden down with composer commemorations, too often a pretext for lazy and unimaginative planning? The last 12 months, with Verdi, Wagner and Britten as the birthday boys (in case you failed to hear), have raised the stakes.It looked on paper as if the BBC Proms were going for the obvious: all the major Wagner operas except The Flying Dutchman and The Mastersingers in semi-staged versions.The execution exceeded everyone’s wildest hopes (there, I’ve snuck in a collective top choice already). Now, it seems, is the time when opera is becoming the designer’s Read more ...
David Nice
Is anyone else sick of creepy brotherhoods skewering the transcendent in Mozart’s and Wagner’s late operas? Both Sarastro’s cult and the company of the grail are in sore need of change - "fresh blood" would be an unfortunate term under the circumstances - when we first encounter them. But both Simon McBurney’s production of The Magic Flute at English National Opera and now Stephen Langridge’s unleavened Royal Opera Parsifal suggest that these are sects not worth joining or saving. If I were Wagner’s hero in this unholy hall, I’d get the hell out of there and call the police.Langridge, who Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The last act of the Wagner bicentenary is upon us as a new production of Parsifal is unveiled at the Royal Opera House. There has been plenty to savour and ponder. The BBC Proms staged concert performances of seven of the operas. Opera North got on with their Ring cycle and Longborough Opera completed theirs. There was a Lohengrin from Welsh National Opera, an acclaimed Flying Dutchman from Zurich Opera at Festival Hall, while various orchestras dipped into various parts of the repertoire and Simon Callow wrote and performed Inside Wagner’s Head.But this is just in the UK. Elsewhere Wagner Read more ...
David Nice
It has to be partial, because out of the 10 opera productions from the iconoclastic French actor-director, who died yesterday of lung cancer at the age of 68, I’ve seen but two, on screen only – but a big two at that – and only three of his 11 films. Yet they all had a tremendous impact, one way or another.Not in a good way - let's get this over with first - as far as Intimacy is concerned: on a blistering hot summer day in Paris, "film by Patrice Chéreau"’ on the poster outside a small cinema in the Beauborg – a poster, moreover, showing a gathering at a cocktail party, suggestive of Rohmer Read more ...