With Andris Nelsons' withdrawal from Bayreuth last year, the BSO’s summer home, Tanglewood, became the venue for his Wagner with a concert performance of Das Rheingold
Joining Music Director Jaap van Zweden were some familiar faces who had appeared in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre in the same or different roles, and new faces appearing for the first time.
It would be no exaggeration to say Franz Hawlata stole the show, an act of grand larceny made all the more remarkable by the strong cast which shared the stage.
Houston Grand Opera’s season-opening production of the fiery opera does it right, from lighting to set to singing, and the end result is a stunning beginning to its season.
Chicago Lyric Opera's production of Madama Butterfly is open and airy, quiet in its theatrics, and the characters move with the grace and inevitability of shadows on the wall.
On Friday, a new co-production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg opened at the Lyric. The only comedy among Wagner’s mature music dramas, its sound is very much like that of the better-known tragedies – brassy, overfull, with a core of strings teetering at vibrato’s edge.
“There was love all around / But I never heard it singing / No, I never heard it at all / Till there was you!” I vividly recall when I first heard Shirley Jones sing these touching, heartfelt lines on the beloved motion picture version of Meredith Wilson’s “The Music Man”, when both the devious Professor Harold Hill and the stingy spinster Marion Paroo discover the true meaning of love.
