Finally some video of Stefan Herheim‘s Salome production shows up on YouTube. Read more »
As with all good myths, certainly all the myths at the heart of Wagner’s operas, the juggling of symbols and archetypes and themes in Parsifal opens the piece to a great variety of interpretations. Many recent productions have twisted things in a way that seemed to strain or defy Wagner’s intricate libretto and lush, meticulous score: gray springtimes in a world beyond nuclear or environmental holocaust, that sort of thing. But the world of Wagner’s tale is, like our own, a world in crisis, on a razor’s edge. That’s bound to resonate with contemporary directors. They then have many options in setting out the workings of the crisis in this fable of a solution to whatever may be broken. Read more »
“Like the hero of Parsifal, who finds the Holy Grail after a lifetime of frustrated wandering, the Met’s audience was finally rewarded for its patience: On Friday, after seasons of mediocrity, the company delivered a magnificent new production of Wagner’s valedictory work.” [New York Post]
Wagner is becoming an important calling card for Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theatre.
Leave it to a cat to transform a Wagner festival into the Jellicle Ball.
Certain opera productions become the stuff of legend as much for the circumstances surrounding the performance as for the musical results.
“Now that it has become apparent that Robert Lepage‘s production of the Ring at the Met is a fiasco (too soon? Nah.)… well, anyway, since arguably the production is a dreary, unworkable, overpriced mess whose primary (perhaps only) virtue is that it actually hasn’t killed anyone yet, and since, let’s face it, the Machinecentric show turned out to be so mind-bogglingly expensive (all those Sunday tech rehearsals with stagehands being paid, no doubt, in solid platinum ingots!), something has to be done. In this article, I intend to propose that ‘something’.” Our Own JJ gets prescriptive at Musical America. (Image based on photos by Ken Howard)
From the Met press office: “Jay Hunter Morris will sing the role of Siegfried in Siegfried on April 21 matinee and April 30, 2012, and in Götterdämmerung on May 3, 2012. He replaces Gary Lehman who has withdrawn due to illness.”
Cher Public