SIEGFRIED:

Lohengrin is staged by the enfant terrible Hans Neuenfels, and offers a thought-provoking production of brilliant visual clarity. The performance with Klaus Florian Vogt in the title role is staggering and impressive. There is beauty and purity in his voice, but in this role in particular, one truly senses something other-worldly, which fits superlatively both with the work and the production. Conductor Andris Nelsons brings out the best in the festival chorus and orchestra. It is a Lohengrin one does not easily forget and puts Bayreuth back in the vanguard of Wagner interpretation. "Great Wagner performances such as this give the sensation of looking down at the world from a sadly omniscient height... Vogt...gave a dreamlike performance... Dasch... was sweetly impassioned throughout. Petra Lang was a properly searing Ortrud... Andris Nelsons... conducted with blazing intensity." (Alex Ross, The New Yorker) ‘‘A magic moment of music theatre.’’ (Handelsblatt) ‘‘Bayreuth's incomparable chorus really deserves a medal for its performance here.’’ (International Record Review) ‘‘All six solo singers are musically excellent and dramatically persuasive, with Petra Lang's excoriating Ortrud and George Zeppenfeld's grave yet warm-toned King Henry particularly memorable...’’ (Gramophone)

Jan Philipp Gloger’s controversial Bayreuth production of Die Fliegende Holländer was greeted with huge acclaim. He translates the Dutchman’s tale of travail and redemption to a future where part-human/part-cyborgs grind out an existence in a world completely subservient to business and commerce. The production stars Samuel Youn, Ricarda Merbeth, and Franz-Josef Selig, and is conducted by Christian Thielemann. ‘‘…Mr. Youn…sings with dignity touched with anguish.’’ - The New York Times

*** This Blu-ray Disc is only playable on Blu-ray Disc players and not compatible with standard DVD or HD DVD players. ***

Richard WAGNER (1813-1883)
Lohengrin (1850)



WAGNER Lohengrin • Kent Nagano, cond; Klaus Florian Vogt ( Lohengrin ); Solveig Kringelborn ( Elsa ); Tom Fox ( Telramund ); Waltraud Meier ( Ortrud ); Hans-Peter König ( Heinrich ); Roman Trekel ( King’s Herald ); EuropaChor Akademie Mainz; Lyon Natl Op Ch; German SO Berlin • OPUS ARTE 7026 (2 Blu-ray Discs: 279:00) Live: Baden-Baden 6/2006


& Documentary: Never Shalt Thou Ask of Me


I enthusiastically welcomed this 2006 performance back in Fanfare 30:5, and my regard for it has only increased since then. The Opus Arte DVD set made my 2007 Want List and I’ve returned with pleasure to stage director Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s view of Lohengrin many times. There’s no point in rehashing a detailed account of the joint Baden-Baden/Lyon/La Scala production—subscribers can go to the Fanfare online Archive—but I will reiterate that the cast is pretty much perfect. Solveig Kringelborn’s soprano is small, sad, and pure when we first meet her in act I; she becomes warmly womanly as she begins her ill-fated wedding night in act III. No one’s better at representing Wagner’s Bad Girls—Venus, Ortrud, and Kundry—than Waltraud Meier, who radiates a Haganesque malevolence at the outset of the second act. Tom Fox portrays a remarkably sympathetic and powerfully sung Telramund; Hans-Peter König is an authoritative yet immensely likable Heinrich. There’s even the luxury of a singer of Roman Trekel’s stature for the not-exactly-critical part of the King’s Herald. Topping off this stellar ensemble is Klaus Florian Vogt: his gleaming (but never steely) and yielding (but firmly supported) tenor is ideal for the title role. Kent Nagano conducts a youthful Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin with élan and sensitivity. The chorus is outstanding.


The opera was shot live on high-definition film and, in my Want List entry, I wondered, “dare we hope for an HD DVD or Blu-ray release?” Two years later, here it is. Good as the DVD was, visually, the Blu-ray is an order of magnitude better. Watching the original release, one thought, “this is an awfully good-looking DVD.” Watching the Blu-ray is more like looking through a clean rectangular window into the actual event; the colors are richer and the amount of natural detail is amazing. (Maybe we get a little more detail than is strictly necessary—for instance, the spittle that issues forth from Roman Trekel’s mouth when he commands “Come forward!” in act I.) Sonically, the 5.1 surround program is in better-than-CD quality 48 kHz PCM. Off-stage instruments are convincingly distant and the relationship of the singers to the orchestra is equally realistic. The most complex passages—act I’s pre-sword-fight quintet with chorus, for instance—are exceptionally intelligible. Opus Arte gets the entire opera, plus the 68-minute Reiner E. Moritz documentary Never Shalt Thou Ask of Me onto two Blu-ray Discs, as opposed to three conventional DVDs for the original release. We get the same five subtitle languages, illustrated synopsis, and superfluous “cast gallery” as the DVD set. Should you unwrap a new Blu-ray player this holiday season, Opus Arte’s Lohengrin should be among your very first software acquisitions.


FANFARE: Andrew Quint
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Elsa: Solveig Kringelborn (soprano); Ortrud: Waltraud Meier (mezzo); Lohengrin: Klaus Florian Vogt (tenor); Heinrich der Vogler: Hans-Peter König (baritone); Telramund: Tom Fox (baritone); Herald: Roman Trekel (baritone)
EuropaChorAkademie Mainz
Chorus of the National Opera of Lyon
Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin/Kent Nagano
Nikolaus Lehnhoff (director)
Stephan Braunfels (set design)
rec. Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, June 2006

Picture: 16:9; 1080i
Region code: 0 (all regions)
Sound: PCM 2.0 and 5.1
Subtitles: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian

Classical Music

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Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

The latest in their highly regarded Wagner opera series, Halle presents the live recording of their acclaimed Bridgewater Hall performance. Das Rheingold stands as the Varabent or "Preliminary Evening" of Wagner's epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, designed to be free of the traditional operatic concepts of aria and operatic chorus, and presented as the more epic Buhenfestspiel or "stage festival play," with the linking of dramatic elements through the use of musical motifs. The album was recorded at the Bridgewater Hall, capturing all the drama of the acclaimed live performance. The release was produced by Halle's award-winning engineer Steve Portnoi. "The Halle were the stars, responsive to every nuance of Elder's direction." (The Times on Halle's performance of Das Rheingold) "Elder's interpretation combined lyricism with drama in a way that only the greatest Wagner conductors can realize." (Opera Magazine on Halle's performance of Das Rheingold)

WEBER, LUDWIG SINGT WAGNER: HO

For a fleeting moment of eternity at the end of his life, Richard Wagner experienced the deep happiness he had been seeking throughout his life. The last words he wrote in his treatise On the Feminine in Human Nature, on February 13, 1881, were ''love - tragedy''. Although it is usually far too simplistic to interpret works of art purely in the context of biological information, several of Wagner's compositions really do have a dairy-like nature, with the character of personal revelations. One such work is the Siegfried Idyll, a symphonic overture from 1870 that Wagner wrote for his wife Cosima to remember the birth of their eldest son. Another is the song cycle Wesendonck Lieder, which Wagner wrote in stages over 1857 and 1858. Less well-known are the sonate fur das Album von Frau M.W. from 1853 and a ''musical letter'' to Mathilde, entitled Sleepless.

An overall glance at the history of opera shows that in many ways, the growth of multinational record companies after the end of the Second World War has had far-reaching effects. Up till then the national singing schools controlled the scene and nothing could have been more logical than for Italian, German, Russian and French singers to perform mainly in their own language. The language an opera was staged in depended on where the opera was being performed. For example: Boris Godunov wasput on in Russian at the Bolshoi, in Italian at the Scala, in French at the Opera, in German at the Staatsoper in Vienna, in English at Covent Garden and in English or Italian at the Met, depending on which company was performing. This release, despite it's 1962 recording, follows that same tradition of singing the presented opera in the language of the country in which it is being performed. In this case, Italian.

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PARSIFAL

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Wagner: The Flying Dutchman, WWV 63