Category Archive: OPERA
Simone and the Valkyries
Die Walküre, Sydney Opera House, 15 November 2024 (Simone Young, Conductor /Sydney Symphony Orchestra/Stuart Skelton, Siegmund/Peter Rose, Hunding/Vida Miknevičiūtė, Sieglinde/Tommi Hakala, Wotan/Alexandra Ionis, Fricka, Roßweiße/Anja Kampe, Brünnhilde/ Helena Dix, Helmwige/Madeleine Pierard, Gerhilde/Natalie Aroyan, Ortlinde/Deborah Humble, Waltraute/Margaret Plummer, Siegrune/Kristin Darragh, Grimgerde/Liane Keegan, Schwertleite) The Sydney Opera House does not have the capacity to mount a proper Ring Cycle, but its beautiful concert hall can put on a brilliant concertized version, and Die Walküre offers a chance to savour the key spoke in Wagner’s wheel without the distractions of the monumental amount of staging required for a full-scale production. Instead there were…
Continue Reading →The Ring in Brisbane
(Lyric Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Second Cycle: 8, 10, 12, 14 December 2023) Like Wagner’s monumental work, the first ever staging of The Ring in Brisbane grew in the telling. It was commissioned in 2017, and advertised in early 2019, with bookings in a ‘shuffle format’ scheduled from 13 June of that year, for performances in November/December 2020. Then a Sino/American research project let a bat loose from Hell, and gross inconvenience, and death, ensued. The Ring was set aside, although not as long as Wagner did while he fretted, and tinkered, and researched. With a revised cast, it was…
Continue Reading →Barrie Kosky’s Das Rheingold
(Palace Nova, October 2023) Reviewed by Philippa Thomas Barrie Kosky’s Das Rheingold worked superbly in the live screened London Royal Opera performance seen by some lucky Adelaide Wagner lovers at our Palace Nova Prospect cinema this month. The screening included a short explanatory interview with Kosky and conductor Antonio Pappano, where Kosky explained that his own planned Ring cycle deals with “recognisable human beings with all their flaws” within a context of “the unexplained“. His stress is on the origins from Greek tragedy rather than Norse mythology. Many opera critics have reviewed this production positively – both Pappano’s conducting and…
Continue Reading →Richard Wagner: “The Ring” Reprise
The Ring on TV and in Adelaide On Sunday 28 May 2023, the Richard Wagner Society SA celebrated the Maestro’s birthday with a cake cutting, and an array of Wagner accoutrements (see below). And President Geoff Siedel introduced two documentaries on that well known “story of a man who buys a house and can’t keep up the payments”, the first concerning the televised premiere of a Bayreuth Ring in 1980; the second concerning the mounting of the Adelaide production in 2004. These items above were from the sublime Adelaide Ring. As we have written, with Asher Fisch rehearsing at great…
Continue Reading →The Ring Without Words
(Der Ring ohne worte) (Richard Wagner Society SA @ the Grainger Studio, ASO, 10 July 2022) And we thought trying to present Every Musical Ever in an 80 minute show was audacious: in 1987, conductor/composer Lorin Maazel, one of the few Ukrainians we’ve heard of, created a “symphonic synthesis” with the Berlin Philharmonic of Wagner’s Ring Cycle (the tetralogy taking about 16 hours in full), reduced to a 77 minute recording. The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s Conductor Laureate Nicholas Braithwaite, a great friend of the RW Society, gave a very informative and entertaining talk (with musical and visual demonstrations) deconstructing how…
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