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2024-03-28
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Royal Opera House (The Guardian)
2022-04-20 12:22:22
Royal Opera House, LondonA revival of David Alden’s war-torn staging of Wagner’s early opera finds disturbing new resonance with current events; in the pit Jakub Hrůša has an unerring sense of the work’s structure It is only four years since the director David Alden placed Wagner’s Lohengrin firmly inside an oppressive and febrile wartime setting for the Royal Opera. Today, Alden’s approach, now in the hands of Peter Relton in this first revival, feels disturbingly prescient in light of current events in Europe; the opera’s setting in a divided society threatened by war from the east has shed its historical trappings and instead become unexpectedly contemporary. Not everything works entirely persuasively in Alden’s visceral presentation of Lohengrin’s Brabant as a quasi-fascist society, its public square dominated by an Albert Speer-style swan monument. Not least Lohengrin’s own music, especially in act three, which shows him to be anything but a fascist […]
2021-05-20 12:02:00
[…] Capitol worked well enough, so far as it went. Like the spareness of much of Mozart’s score—so different from that heard in the more-or-less contemporaneous Magic Flute—there was potential not only to frame, but also to propel, the drama before our eyes. Except it did not. Jones seemed on auto-pilot, offering little beyond a vague ‘look’ of fascism and football: a combination that might have been productive yet was not. Was the architectural model a Speer reference, imperial counsellors’ tailoring suggestive more of Berchtesgaden than south of the Alps? Perhaps, yet if so, it again went for little. Italian graffiti seemed not so much evocative of emptiness as merely empty. Why did a silent Berenice traipse around the set early on? Vitellia’s piece-by-piece destruction of her garland in ‘Non più di fiori’ could have been a model for careful attention to text not as artefact but as living drama. Much […]
2020-07-18 23:00:00
Wagner: Die Walküre & Götterdämmerung excerpts (Covent Garden 1937) -- Furtwängler
[…] I Sc 3: Höre mit Sinn (Waltraute)03 Götterdämmerung Act I Sc 3: Ha! Weisst du, was er mir ist (Brunhilde)04 Götterdämmerung Act I Sc 3: Brünhild! Ein Freier kam (Siegfried)05 Götterdämmerung Act II Sc 4: Heil'ge Götter (Brunnhilde)06 Götterdämmerung Act II Sc 4: Helle Wehr! Heilige Waffe! (Siegfried)07 Götterdämmerung Act II Sc 508 Götterdämmerung Act II Sc 5: Welches Unholds List liegt hier verhohlen? (Brunnhilde)09 Götterdämmerung Act II Sc 5: Und dort trifft ihn mein Speer! (Hagen)10 Götterdämmerung Act II Sc 5: Doch Gutrune, ach! (Gunther)11 Götterdämmerung Act III Sc 3: Schweigt eures Jammers (Brunnhilde)12 Götterdämmerung Act III Sc 3: Starke Scheite schichtet mir dort (Brunnhilde)13 Götterdämmerung Act III Sc 3: Mein Erbe nun nehm' ich zu eigen (Brunnhilde)14 Götterdämmerung Act III Sc 3: Fliegt heim, ihr Raben! (Brunnhilde)
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Faces of classical music
2019-01-05 07:26:00
The Faces of Classical Music Choose the 20 Best Albums of 2018
[…] compositions for the unaccompanied violin, much of which remains little explored. On this recording Augusta McKay Lodge, hailed as "the real thing, a true virtuoso" (Seen and Heard), explores masters of the genre such as Biber, Locatelli and Pisendel but delves deeper to include the impassioned works of Nicola Matteis, the Franco-Italian warmth of Thomas Baltzar and a series of other long-overshadowed works by their contemporaries.14. Johann Sebastian Bach – St John PassionGeorg Poplutz, tenor (Evangelist)Yorck Felix Speer, bass (Jesus)Julia Kleiter, sopranoGerhild Romberger, altoDaniel Sans, tenor (Petrus)Matthias Winckhler, bassVictoria Braum, soprano (Ancilla)Erik Reinhardt, tenor (Servus)Bernd Sucké, tenor (Servus)Christian Wagner, baritone (Pilatus)Bachchor Mainz | Bachorchester Mainz | Ralf Otto, conductorJohann Sebastian Bach's St John Passion is, along with the St Matthew Passion, without doubt one of the most important works he ever composed. It established a new tradition for Good Friday vespers in Leipzig, and with sublime skill Bach managed to retain a […]