Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Christine Brewer

A performance of Wagner’s epic Tristan und Isolde, a testimony for all-enduring love, is a welcome event anywhere in the world. 

The wide variety of music Vienna has provided over the last couple of centuries was effectively on display here in Auckland.

The BBC Symphony Orchestra and Christine Brewer close Wagner bicentenary celebrations at the Barbican by showing his influence on Strauss, Webern and Berg on December 20th.

After a concert last week made inaudible by thunder and a very heavy rain storm, The Cleveland Orchestra and its music director Franz Welser-Möst returned to Blossom Music Center this past Saturday in much more auspicious circumstances – a gorgeous, warm, non-humid evening – for a generous helping of excerpts from the operas of Richard Wagner, in celebration of that composer’s bicentenary.

On 29th September 1973, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra performed an all-Wagner program in Sydney’s Opera House. This was the first concert ever heard in this most iconic of concert halls.

While Weber is widely acknowledged as being of historic importance as the link in the German operatic tradition between Beethoven and Wagner, his operas are rarely staged in England, and even in concert remain a relative novelty. Curious because this is music of the utmost vitality and beauty and at times he surely borders on genius.

Before the concert began, Yannick Nézet-Séguin gave a short introductory speech that, in effect, would have the Royal Festival Hall consecrated for the evening as a place of worship.

It is always exciting to witness the birth of a new piece of composition, all the more so when the soloist is the inimitable Yo-Yo Ma.