Die Walküre blazes at Bayreuth

By Matthew Rye, 28 July 2016

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“The final scene has rarely come closer to drawing tears”

Reviewed at Bayreuther Festspielhaus, Bayreuth on 27 July 2016

Wagner, Die Walküre

Marek Janowski, Conductor

Frank Castorf, Director

Aleksandar Denić, Set Designer

Adriana Braga Peretzki, Costume Designer

Christopher Ventris, Siegmund

Georg Zeppenfeld, Hunding

John Lundgren, Wotan

Heidi Melton, Sieglinde

Catherine Foster, Brünnhilde

Dame Sarah Connolly, Fricka

Caroline Wenborne, Gerhilde

Dara Hobbs, Ortlinde

Stephanie Houtzeel, Waltraute

Nadine Weissmann, Schwertleite

Christiane Kohl, Helmwige

Simone Schröder, Siegrune

Wiebke Lehmkuhl, Grimgerde

Alexandra Petersamer, Roßweiße

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Rainer Casper, Lighting Designer

Staatsoper Hamburg's new Boris Godunov traverses Russian history

Alexander Hall, 16th September

Opening the new opera season, Kent Nagano powerfully directs Mussorgsky's great psychodrama about a famous tsar, marred only by Frank Castorf's visually confusing and symbolically overweighted production.

****1

Méphistophélès steals the show in Staatsoper's Faust

George Jahn, 4th November

Adam Palka shines as the devil in this revival of Frank Castorf's multimedia staging that relocates the work to mid-20th century Paris, around the end of the Algerian War.

****1

Gounod in the Time of Corona: Frank Castorf's many-layered Faust

Chanda VanderHart, 29th April

Faust and Méphistophélès pal around like buddies in Castorf's multi-media staging, the devil here less diabolical and more anarchistic party-boy.

****1

Verdi Wars: Frank Castorf’s Forza del destino at Deutsche Oper

Hugo Shirley, 14th September

Audience uproar brings a much needed sense of theatre to a disappointing production of Verdi’s middle-period epic.

**111

House arrested: Janáček's last opera in Munich

Matthew Rye, 26th May

The profusion of images and ideas in Frank Castorf's Bavarian Staatsoper production of From the House of the Dead threatens to rob Janáček's opera of its humanity.

***11

Devil in the detail: Gounod's Faust in Stuttgart

Matthew Rye, 3rd November

A thrilling new staging of Gounod's opera from the team that brought Bayreuth its current Ring, with musical rewards to match.

*****

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Matthew Rye

Matthew read music at Oxford and worked in music journalism for 30 years as a writer, critic and editor. He wrote numerous programme and CD booklet notes, spent 13 years as a Daily Telegraph critic, worked at BBC Music Magazine and was reviews editor of The Strad. He also wrote for The Wagner Journal and Opera and blogged at ferneklang.blogspot.co.uk. He was general editor of 1001 Classical Recordings You Must Hear Before You Die (Cassell Illustrated, 2007) and was the author of a new series of eBooks, Masterpieces of Music (Erudition).

Magic fire: a blazing account of Die Walküre at Bayreuth