Wagner's storytelling shines brightly with the aid of a cast well out of the ordinary. Vinke, Stemme, Siegel and Lundgren make part 3 of The Ring an unforgettable evening of opera.
We start with a triumphant Royal Opera debut from Stuart Skelton, we close with Nina Stemme at her finest; a thrilling orchestral performance links the two. A memorable Walküre.
Claus Guth’s grandiose production of Parsifal made major headlines in Zurich in 2011. With its new cast of principals, this revival is no less a sensation.
Under Mariss Jansons, the Vienna Philharmonic are on top form in Shostakovich's opera; together with a top class cast of singers, they create sonic and emotional intoxication.
Director Mariusz Treliński’s previous work at the Met, in conjunction with Boris Kudlicka’s sets and Bartek Macias’ videos, was a double bill of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle.
The late director Patrice Chereau's last work, Elektra, was brilliantly realized at the Met, with special credit to conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and soprano Nina Stemme.
In Zurich, a dazzling production of Puccini's great Turandot gives us the stuff of torment, torture and all the other idiosyncracies of love at the executuve level.
When one of the most sought-after sopranos of our time slips into the role of her most famous countrywoman, the foundations for an eventful evening of opera have already been laid. The Swedish world première Notorious, after Alfred Hitchcock's film of the same title, shows in an all-round successful production that contemporary opera can have a promising future.
Riccardo Chailly kicks off his interim role as Principal Director at La Scala with Turandot, featuring Luciano Berio's ending, a score he knows like the back of his hand.
Nina Stemme's domination of the heaviest dramatic soprano repertoire continues with an outstanding Isolde at the Zurich Opera House, ably assisted by Stephen Gould, Matti Salminen, and other notable performers under John Fiore.
First class performances from Stephen Gould and Nina Stemme are backed by a magnificent orchestral performance in the Royal Opera's revival of Christof Loy's spartan production.
The Royal Swedish Opera's Salome, directed by operatic first-timer Sofia Jupither, is dramatic, and its strong directorial concept does not get in the way of the story. Nina Stemme sings astoundingly, and gives a nuanced portrayal of the title character.
Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, in its new production by Marco Arturo Marelli, features excellent singing from top to bottom, tight orchestral playing, beautiful lighting, and a decisive lack of cowboys, saloons and other “Wild West” clichés.
The world ended again last night. It ends fairly frequently in performances and in recordings, and that schedule tends to innoculate us against Richard Wagner’s political and philosophical messages. If ever there were to be a performance to transcend that, it would come at the Proms, at the conclusion of its first full performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen.
The third part of Daniel Barenboim’s Ring cycle at the Proms proved to be similarly successful to the first two operas of the cycle, leaving both audience and conductor apparently delighted at its conclusion.The chief justification for “semi-staged” productions such as this is that they encourage greater focus on the music, and particularly on the orchestra.
Dipping my toes into the murky waters of the Wagner-fest at the Proms this year for the first time, I found myself confronted with the monumental second installment of the Ring cycle, Die Walküre.
Think of all the adjectives typically used to report on the best of female Wagner singing; add lyrical phrasing and imagine the absence of any shrillness, and you have come as close as possible to a description of the perfection that Nina Stemme achieved in her first Isolde for the Wiener Staatsoper.
An obsessively man-hating princess, a slave girl who really needs to open up a bit more about her feelings, a prince who actually fell in love at first sight, and an unhealthily large dose of exoticism? Why, it can only be Puccini’s Turandot.
Strauss’ Don Juan has a long tradition as one of the Vienna Philharmonic’s more dazzling curtain-openers but a recent tendency, even with Gustavo Dudamel, who conducted this work with the orchestra last autumn, has been for more subdued accounts which downplay the brilliance and virtuosity of the orchestral writing.
“When I looked at you, I heard secret music,” says Salome in her monologue to the severed head of John the Baptist. Richard Strauss’s opera trades in the unseeable and the unknowable—from the range of metaphors applied to the moon to the nearly impossible staging of a ten-minute striptease performed by a dramatic soprano—which makes it unusually well suited to concert presentation.
Two of the world’s most sought-after opera singers giving Lieder recitals on the same night. The kind of painful choice which Viennese musical institutions and their chaotic schedules throw up all too regularly. I went for Nina Stemme over Jonas Kaufmann on the basis that she gives fewer solo recitals, despite harbouring reservations about how her big voice would fare in this repertoire.
Fidelio, Beethoven's only opera, is on the most universal of themes: the oppression of the innocent by the powerful and the virtue of the struggle for a loved one. It could be set at any time in any place, from Ancient Rome or China to our modern world.
Ein herausragender Kirill Petrenko und eine exzellente Besetzung machen auch den letzten Abend von Wagners Rings an der Bayerischen Staatsoper zum hörenswerten Erlebnis.
Die Bayerische Staatsoper hat mit Richard Wagners Siegfried in der Inszenierung von Andreas Kriegenburg den Ring-Zyklus mit fabelhafter Besetzung fortgesetzt.
Die Bayerische Staatsoper hat den zweiten Teil des Ring-Zyklus mit exzellenter Besetzung unter der Leitung von Kirill Petrenko wahrlich meisterlich zurück auf die Münchner Bühne gebracht.
In dieser Inszenierung funktioniert nicht alles, doch sie bietet reichlich Anregung zur Diskussion und einen Gurnemanz, der wohl jeden zum rechten (Wagner-)Glauben führt.
