Hints and tips:
...Of course, Wagner’s music is also about eros, and it was this that dominated the concert’s short first half....
...His music is firmly rooted in Germanic tradition (Wagner, Strauss and Berg are invoked), and both his vocal writing and his orchestration are breathtakingly assured....
...Now take a class of over-enthusiastic young computer geeks and ask them to generate images loosely inspired by Wagner’s Parsifal....
...His recent production of Wagner’s Ring at The Staatsoper was unquestionably outstanding. Uwe Hostmann Berlin, Germany...
...The mood continued in Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, with Elīna Garanča as soloist....
New Berlin production has tawdry visuals and ear-splittingly loud music
...Or perhaps a prequel to Shirley Eaton’s gilded Bond girl Jill Masterson in the 1964 film of Ian Fleming’s spy thriller Goldfinger....
...Richard Wagner’s world of knights and kings, in which a mysterious stranger appears in a boat drawn by a swan to save a damsel in distress, is stripped back to the barest of essentials....
...George Shirley among them....
...Instead, we got Christian Thielemann, known for his Wagner, Strauss, Pfitzner and vocal support for rightwing political groups — an indication of just how grave Barenboim’s illness must be....
...Jacquelyn Wagner’s Elsa is a little underpowered, though she makes up for it with theatrical strength; Elena Pankratova’s Ortrud is deliciously nuanced and seductive....
...There is a passage in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde where the two lovers become so embroiled in their own thoughts that they spend a long stretch of time debating the use of the word “and”....
...Mime, dressed up as Richard Wagner, hobbles around him grimacing and gesticulating. Their hovel is made from the suitcases of refugees....
Much of the singing is good, but this production of Wagner’s opera has little else to commend it
...Along with an armoury of percussion, Neuwirth adds electric guitar and two synthesisers that play everything from microtones to the bells from Wagner’s Parsifal....
...But it leaves Senta as much of a victim as Wagner does, with less explanation for her fascination with the stranger....
...Norman might sing Wagner with young Simon on piano, but there were no parties. “Entertaining finished in 1939, anyway”, says Towneley....
...There are delicate references to familiar works — Strauss, Mahler, Bach, Wagner — more like snatches of memory than quotes; but just when things seem about to become recognisable, Abrahamsen will bend away...
...The van, now topped by a Joseph Beuys bunny, is driven by Wagner’s Venus, dressed as a member of Pussy Riot; with her are Oskar from Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, the black drag queen Le Gateau Chocolat,...
...Shirley Apthorp is the FT’s opera critic based in Berlin Go here for a list of devices on which this content is available....
...Wagner wanted Parsifal to be a religious act. It is not necessarily a bad thing when a performance is not that. But it needs to be something....
...But this is an exhibition where you are stuck on an uncomfortable wooden chair in a crowded sauna for almost five hours, staring at images while listening to Wagner....
...This is Wagner at its most risible, awkward figures in Flintstones costumes moving without purpose through meaningless (but presumably expensive) wooden sets....
...Coats in the new cloakroom are just as wet after five and a half hours of Wagner as they were at the start. This would not matter if the acoustic were now as improved as it is meant to be....
...His mother is the celebrated children’s book author and illustrator Shirley Hughes....
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