182 pieces since 1999.
The complete RCA Furtwängler Tristan is actually my top favorite, but the Ponnelle staging in Bayreuth featuring René Kollo and Johanna Meier is my top sentimental favorite, because it was my first full Wagner performance.
Eleanor Steber and Wolfgang Windgassen in the Act III bridal chamber scene of Lohengrin.
Matthias Davids‘s reactionary new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg might be fun, but no one comes to Bayreuth for fun.
Parsifal just gives me the creeps – a muddy maundery concoction that wallows in faux religiosity, a creepy view of sin, and naïve redemption.
Kent Nagano‘s and the Richard-Wagner-Akademie‘s historically informed Ring Cycle takes on Siegfried in Dresden
According to the memoirs of Alma Mahler, her third husband, Franz Werfel used to wander around the cafés of Paris with one of his chums, singing arias from obscure Verdi operas at the top of their lungs until the management would ask them to move on.
Francesco Filidei’s new opera The Name of the Rose struggles to bridge the past and the present in Milan
Francis Ford Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now (1979) uses Richard Wagner‘s “Ride of the Valkyries” to terrifying effect, depicting the brutality and horror of impersonal aerial warfare in the Vietnam War.
Wagner is used as incidental music or background to probably more films than any other operatic composer.
Impossible to pick any one film clip, but it’s hard to imagine a more evocative use of operatic music than Lars von Trier‘s Melancholia.
Breaking the Waves and Tannhaüser at Houston Grand Opera are a can’t-miss doubleheader of sex and miracles.
This performance of Mahler’s Symphony N°8 at the Bozar in Brussels will probably be my last ever Mahler concert.
Eli Jacobson inaugurates parterre box’s new “Perspectives on the Aria” feature with a deep dive into Leonore’s “Abscheulicher!” from Beethoven’s Fidelio which returns to the Metropolitan Opera tomorrow with the Met’s current dramatic soprano star Lise Davidsen as Leonore.
Not even howling winds and thunderous rain could dampen the excitement of Bay Area audiences to experience Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen for the first time in the Bay Area at Zellerbach Hall Berkeley last Tuesday, 4 February.
John Yohalem reports from the New York Dramatic Voices performance of Act III of Die Walküre
Aside from a tour with the LSO this spring, this was, I believe, the only time Antonio Pappano would be conducting in the US this season. This made the concert at Symphony Hall a real treat.
Sparks flew when the San Francisco Opera opened their new production of Richard Wagner’s monumental Tristan und Isolde on Saturday, October 19th, at the War Memorial Opera House.
Mahler’s 8th Symphony is an enormous and enigmatic work.
Overall, this was a superb achievement and a thrilling season opener for the San Francisco Opera.
Unlike more surface-level historically informed practice which has become the norm in early music ensembles, this project stands out in its surprisingly deep engagements with the ethical and practical challenges posed by “recreating” Wagner’s sound.
In Nike Wagner’s essay “The Sounding Silence,” the German dramaturge argues that “the longing for deathrepresents the central motif” of her great-grandfather’s opera Tristan und Isolde.
At the heart of Tobias Kratzer’s incisively rollicking production of Tannhäuser lies a metanarrative that maps Wagner’s early political and artistic challenges onto its hero’s philosophical struggles.
Can György Ligeti‘s only opera be understood as the composer’s own grappling with trauma, death, and memory of a past life?
I have a confession and you may need to sit down for it: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita was one of the gateway drugs to my eventual opera fandom.
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