This new recording of excerpts from Wagner’s Der Ring des Niebelungen is quite exceptional – and very unusual for this kind of disc. The words might be missing, but the fact they are proves to have rather the opposite effect. It is one of the most operatic of orchestral Wagner discs I have come across.
Category: Reviews
Wagner: Die Walk¸re, Symphonieorchester Des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Simon Rattle, BR Klassik
Simon Rattle has never particularly struck me as a complex conductor. He is not, for example, like Furtw‰ngler, Maderna, Boulez or Sinopoli – all of whom brought a breadth of learning and a knowledge of composition to bear on what they conducted.
Dvo?·k Requiem, Jakub Hr?öa in memoriam Ji?Ì B?lohl·vek
AntonÌn Dvo?·k Requiem op.89 (1890) with Jakub Hr?öa conducting the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. The Requiem was one of the last concerts Ji?Ì B?lohl·vek conducted before his death and he had been planning to record it as part of his outstanding series for Decca.
Philip Venables’ Denis & Katya: teenage suicide and audience complicity
As an opera composer, Philip Venables writes works quite unlike those of many of his contemporaries. They may not even be operas at all, at least in the conventional sense – and Denis & Katya, the most recent of his two operas, moves even further away from this standard. But what Denis & Katya and his earlier work, 4.48 Psychosis, have in common is that they are both small, compact forces which spiral into extraordinarily powerful and explosive events.
A new, blank-canvas Figaro at English National Opera
Making his main stage debut at ENO with this new production of The Marriage of Figaro, theatre director Joe Hill-Gibbins professes to have found it difficult to ‘develop a conceptual framework for the production to inhabit’.
Massenet’s ChÈrubin charms at Royal Academy Opera
“Non so pi˘ cosa son, cosa faccio … Now I’m fire, now I’m ice, any woman makes me change colour, any woman makes me quiver.”
Bluebeard’s Castle, Munich
Last year the world’s opera companies presented only nine staged runs of BÈla BartÚk’s Bluebeard’s Castle.
The Queen of Spades at Lyric Opera of Chicago
If obsession is key to understanding the dramatic and musical fabric of Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades, the current production at Lyric Opera of Chicago succeeds admirably in portraying such aspects of the human psyche.
WNO revival of Carmen in Cardiff
Unveiled by Welsh National Opera last autumn, this Carmen is now in its first revival. Original director Jo Davies has abandoned picture postcard Spain and sun-drenched vistas for images of grey, urban squalor somewhere in modern-day Latin America.
Lise Davidsen ‘rescues’ Tobias Kratzer’s Fidelio at the Royal Opera House
Making Fidelio – Beethoven’s paean to liberty, constancy and fidelity – an emblem of the republican spirit of the French Revolution is unproblematic, despite the opera’s censor-driven ‘Spanish’ setting.