Wagner's Valhalla

Started by Greta, April 07, 2007, 08:09:57 PM

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uffeviking

Sean, are you judging the quality of a Wagner Music Drama by the quality of the inane female intermission announcer who can't even pronounce properly the name of one of their sponsors?  ::)

PerfectWagnerite

Quote from: uffeviking on February 02, 2008, 02:37:58 PM
Nobody listened to today's Walküre:'(
I was there. It was fabulous. Deborah Voight's Sieglinde was feminine and affectionate. Her diction and acting was excellent. Petrenko's Hunding was youthful but very convincing. He also had a very intimidating stage presence. Siegmund wasn't vocally very impressive but he and Voight had beautiful chemistry. James Morris' Wotan, well what can you say, I know you don't like him but I think he pretty much owns this role. His reading is much more subtle than 20 years ago. Now it is angst fill and much less angry and petulent. I am not in love with Gasteen's Brunnhilde, vocally her top note is about an A and she is constanly flat, and her acting is pretty superficial. But in this day and age you have her, Polanski, Eaglen, and that's about it.

Maazel's conducting was lucid and professional. Although he does miss a lot of the excitement that you get with Levine. The orchestra sounds fabulous. The winds and brasses are limpid and piquant and the strings are bass-rich and heavenly sounding in the violins.

I love the performance.

Haffner

Quote from: Sean on February 02, 2008, 11:53:00 AM
Hi Haffner

Levine's a committed Wagnerian, often shedding new light and colour, though without the most overarching mind to fully contain the great paragraphs. His Good Friday peroration music in Parsifal is superb, finding more strangeness and mystery in the fabulous harmonies than Karajan.

The Karajan otherwise though is entirely in a class of its own with no serious competitors: one of the greatest of opera recordings.


Looks like the Karajan for me (first Parsifal). I'll grab that one next month.

Sergeant Rock

Quote from: bhodges on February 02, 2008, 02:50:10 PM
How could you even arrive at such a conclusion--or for that matter, any conclusion--hearing two minutes of it?  ::)

--Bruce

He's been taking lessons from paulb  ;D

The Art of Instant Criticism 101: How to Extrapolate an Entire Performance from a 30 Second Clip

Sarge
the phone rings and somebody says,
"hey, they made a movie about
Mahler, you ought to go see it.
he was as f*cked-up as you are."
                               --Charles Bukowski, "Mahler"

Sergeant Rock

Quote from: uffeviking on February 02, 2008, 02:37:58 PM
Nobody listened to today's Walküre:'(

Unfortunately I didn't see your announcement until we'd come home from dinner. Too late to tune in. I would have liked to have heard it, especially so since I've been discussing Maazel in recent threads.

Sarge
the phone rings and somebody says,
"hey, they made a movie about
Mahler, you ought to go see it.
he was as f*cked-up as you are."
                               --Charles Bukowski, "Mahler"

PerfectWagnerite

Quote from: Sean on February 02, 2008, 02:46:28 PM
I listened to about two minutes- didn't like the conducting or the singing, or the whole attitude, and I'd say opera's in as much trouble as the rest of art. Things are on the surface, performers are melodramatic and unserious, and what's happened to the quality of the announcers, the analysis and the Texaco quiz? That quiz used to be very impressive, now its just drivel...
Oh come on ! Maazel has been conducting Wagner for 40 years for crying out loud. He was conducting at Bayreuth before you were even born. I'd say he knows a thing or two about Wagner. So he is not as over-the-top as Solti or as focused on exacting every detail of the score as Karajan. How do you come up with the performers being unserious? That is an accusation, it questions their professionalism. I can guaranteed you that every single one of the singers, Ms. Voight, Ms. DeYoung, Mr. Morris, etc, etc., plus 100+ members of the Met Orchestra worked their butts off to bring this treacherously difficult music out to be the unbearably beautiful piece of art that it is. Now you may or may not like their voices, that is your right, but please don't question their professionalism and work ethics.

Sean

Hello Perfect, well I could have listened to more than I did. I've been very disillusioned indeed in recent years with numerous Western opera productions, many being closer to musicals and promoted in terms of light entertainment by very sales-conscious managements. A week or two back for instance there was Wagner broadcast from Covent Garden under Haitink and the overall conception was very poor and superficial, as most productions from there are- and this affects the singer's approach profoundly.

In fact I walked out of a Haitink Meistersinger there a few years back, it was so offensively trivial and unrelated to the opera. Also I was at a (Welsh National Opera) Tristan revival in 2006, a horrendous experience seeing how in seven years the soul of the work had completely disappeared.

I admire some of Maazel's work (eg Mahler), and I'm ready to explore his Wagner more. He definitely did not give a good account of his understanding of Wagner in the interval interview however.

PerfectWagnerite

#347
Well the MET is probably the final front against mindnumbingly bad modern opera productions. Nobody goes to the MET looking for Rheindaughters on motorcycles. I probably wouldn't pay the amount of money they are asking for tickets if the production is similar to what you get at some European opera houses. I understand what you are talking about. There is a picture in the guide I got before the opera with some of the Seattle Ring Cycle. Wotan looks like David Spade with an eyepatch (at least they kept the eyepatch). Now that is pretty revolting, even before I have heard one know of that production.

Well anyways I don't think you'll see Maazel there too often. Even the final perfomance of Die Walkuere is not conducted by him.

I am going back there again next Month for Tristan, and I expect the same kind of professional high standards that I have heard and seen yesterday. The cast for Tristan should be excellent with Voight, Heppner and DeYoung.

Sean

That's interesting.

Best of luck with the Tristan. As the central work in Western art it needs a very understanding and serious mind to do it justice. I saw it in 1999 and that remains one of my most significant life experiences, but I'm not expecting to have that repeated. Would be nice to go to the Met someday though.

PerfectWagnerite

Quote from: Sean on February 03, 2008, 11:30:27 AM
That's interesting.

Best of luck with the Tristan. As the central work in Western art it needs a very understanding and serious mind to do it justice. I saw it in 1999 and that remains one of my most significant life experiences, but I'm not expecting to have that repeated. Would be nice to go to the Met someday though.
Where did you see Tristan in 1999?
James Levine is conducting the performance next month, and I am really looking foward to it.

Sean

I saw it in Birmingham, central England. It was a WNO production, from a period when this company was probably unmatched in the country. I saw the same thing, twisted and garbled, about 18 months ago.

PerfectWagnerite

Was it sung in German or English?
It is almost an impossible opera to stage. If you think about it nothing really "happens". Unless you have two great (not good but great) singers taking on the leads you might as well bag the entire production. From what I have heard both Heppner and Voigt should shine in their roles?

Who sang the leads when you went? And who conducted?

Sean

I'm sorry I don't remember the singers names, both were extremely well drilled though and obviously and knew the enormous parts very well; the conductor was Carlo Rizzi- a little Italianesque at times but in the zone on that night. What made it was the surreal sets and the seriousness and inwardness of the stage action- for instance when people were to keep still, they kept absolutely still: they believed in what they were doing in a way those in the revival I mentioned perhaps couldn't do, in present deleterious cultural conditions.

The final act is an incredible thing. Wagner taps into something primeval as the characters die and lie strewn on the stage, while the music explores the final sections of its material, leading in some kind of monstrous downward spiral, a decent into the maelstrom, to the death of Isolde. This is sex and death at its most fundamental- something to do with these experiences being on the edges of what it is to be human and the transcendence in them. I try to post my thoughts here sometimes, but the repressed psychos in charge don't much like it (I do have many more notes I think are worth something on Tristan and Wagner and sex, but perhaps another time.)

By the way in 2003 or 04 I went to a superb and endlessly imaginative WNO Parsifal, with a stunning and Callas-like Sara Fulgoni as Kundry.

Sean

And it was in German of course. I wouldn't bother with anything else, especially as the words are so integrated in the music, even affecting the harmony at times.

M forever

Quote from: Sean on February 03, 2008, 01:18:20 PM
And it was in German of course. I wouldn't bother with anything else, especially as the words are so integrated in the music, even affecting the harmony at times.

How do you know? You don't understand German. Because you read that somewhere? You shouldn't blabla about stuff you don't understand. Well, OK, that's all you do all the time. Schwachkopf.

Sean

Yeah you're right, maybe it was Poynesian.

max

Quote from: M forever on February 03, 2008, 10:16:17 PM
How do you know? You don't understand German. Because you read that somewhere? You shouldn't blabla about stuff you don't understand. Well, OK, that's all you do all the time. Schwachkopf.

Until I read this, I never realized that being a consummate idiot requires talent!

(poco) Sforzando

"I don't know what sforzando means, though it clearly means something."

(poco) Sforzando

Quote from: max on February 04, 2008, 01:43:54 AM
Until I read this, I never realized that being a consummate idiot requires talent!

It is harder than it looks. I have tried to do it several times and always failed.
"I don't know what sforzando means, though it clearly means something."

M forever

Quote from: Sean on February 04, 2008, 01:36:49 AM
Yeah you're right, maybe it was Poynesian.

Exactly my point. To you, it wouldn't make a difference. Don't you feel like a complete idiot when you pontifcate about stuff you don't even understand?