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Wagner

Nicolas Mansfield 'Dutch Travel Opera still needs €500,000'

The past and future of the Netherlands Reisopera are dominated by money worries. Nicolas Mansfield, director, during the season presentation on 20 April last in the foyer of Theatre Carré, stressed not only the necessity of a national opera company's existence but, above all, the necessary quality requirements to keep attracting audiences. And quality cannot exist without decent... 

Scenefotos_Bromance_Foto_Sanne_Peper

Stagehands, stay away from that theatre!

The longer I walk around in the theatre industry, the more I find out that these so-called crisis in the performing arts is not down to the people who make theatre, nor to the people who may or may not come to watch it. Good will is omnipresent. The only real cause for a breach of trust between actors and audiences that I can point to is the nineteenth-century invention we call 'theatre'. Let me explain.

Peter Sellars: 'This opera is a paradise on earth.'

What does the future of opera look like? The National Opera tries to answer this in the Opera Forward Festival: new visions new voices, organised for the first time this year to mark its 50th anniversary. The ten-day festival kicks off 15 March with the world premiere of Only the Sound Remains by Kaija Saariaho. About... 

De Vriend leaves Orchestra of the East, former chief Van Zweden new boss New York Philharmonic

It is not often that Norman Lebrecht, author of the globally widely read blog Slipped Disc, covers conductors of the Orchestra of the East two days in a row. First on the departure of principal conductor Jan Willem de Vriend, then on the appointment of former principal conductor Jaap van Zweden to the world-famous New York Philharmonic. Naturally, Lebrecht brought both... 

Forever waiting for Godot: Pierre Boulez died

He would have turned 91 on 26 March, but died Tuesday night, 5 January, in his hometown of Baden-Baden. Pierre Boulez was the last surviving composer of the group that changed the direction of music after WWII. His fellow maestros preceded him: Karlheinz Stockhausen died in 2007, Luciano Berio in 2003, Karel Goeyvaerts in 1993 and... 

Franz Liszt: from virtuoso keyboard lion to ascetic innovator

Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was revered in his own time as a true devil's advocate, whose virtuoso piano playing set many a woman's heart racing. But above all, he was an innovator, whose ambition was to "hurl a spear into the infinite space of the future". The Concertzender highlights life and work for two hours on Wednesday, 2 December 

People are interested in people. 4 Essential lessons in master class by Pierre Audi.

In a full University Theatre on Tuesday 6 October, Pierre Audi gave a master class for young singers, dramaturgs and directors. Three scenes had been prepared by the students and were then expertly filleted by Audi. "Sorella, que dici?.... Prenderò quel brunettino", from Mozart's Così fan tutte began as a scene of two punk girls gripped by consumerism. The director and trainee dramatists... 

Foto: Viktor Vassiliev

Russian Cherry Garden in Amsterdam: 5 important things learned #HF15

There was an air of more expensive perfume in the foyers than at a Dutch gala premiere. The women were younger and smoother, or had a better botox doctor than usual. The jewellery looked very expensive, as did the dresses. Russian sounded everywhere. It seemed as if Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg had been moved for a while to PC Hooftstraat, a few hundred metres away.... 

Gorky Theatre tramples on Nibelungen

Der Untergang der Nibelungen - The Beauty of Revenge at Berlin's Maxim Gorki Theatre on Wednesday, 10 June, with its duration of 2.5 hours - without intermission - did quite an assault on the sitting flesh. Granted, Wagner spared four complete operas for his version of the medieval Nibelungenlied and director Peter Jackson devoted three full-length films to the also... 

Jens Hillje van het Gorki Theater Berlijn (Foto Wijbrand Schaap)

Play 'Nibelungen' debunks modern Europe at Holland Festival

Berlin's Gorki Theatre won a prize this year: it was named the best theatre in the German language area by the German-language press. The company won the award partly because it employs many actors of immigrant origin. With its performance Der Untergang der Nibelungen, which can be seen in this year's Holland Festival, the group also thematises the... 

Pierre Boulez is alive!?

He is the last surviving avant-gardist, and it will not have escaped new-music lovers that he turned 90 on Thursday, 26 March. I mean, of course, Pierre Boulez, the composer and conductor who once declared Schoenberg dead and suggested that perhaps opera houses should be blown up because of their moldy programming. The same man then tirelessly broke a lance for the music of Arnold Schoenberg ... 

Forget that swan. But where is Lohengrin? ****

Those stars at reviews. Now I'd like to know how you got those. Explain.

Good. The first 30 minutes of Wagner's Lohengrin at De Nationale Opera are unforgettable. First the Vorspiel with the curtain closed, played heartbreakingly beautifully by the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra which, under Marc Albrecht's direction, does justice to every nuance. We haven't heard it this impressive and...

See monumental visual art? Go to the opera!

For fine art, you go to the museum, especially in Amsterdam and especially now that all the museums have reopened. But there is also another option: the opera. There you see visual art that doesn't fit in any museum, not even in the largest room of the Rijksmuseum. Take the Greek sculptor Jannis Kounellis. From today, his work is a... 

Scenic world premiere Gurre-Lieder is triumph for Pierre Audi and Marc Albrecht

More than a century we had to wait, but at last Arnold Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder also to be seen. Surprisingly, it is not. Reportedly, the composer was against it, as it concerns a cantata. However, director Pierre Audi and conductor Marc Albrecht show very convincingly with this scenic world premiere that Gurre-Lieder hid an opera that yearned for the stage light.

Aufführung der Komposition " Delusion of the fury " von Harry Partch in der Musiktheater Inszenierung von Heiner Goebbels mit dem Ensemble musikFabrik in der Jahrhunderthalle Bochum im Rahmen der Ruhrtriennale 2012-14 am Mittwoch, 21.08.2013

Seeing music (and not hearing it?)

Because of my fascination with the complex relationship between listening and watching, I decided to visit three performances at the recent Holland Festival and experience what happened when I tried to pay equal attention to ears and eyes. The first was "Delusion of the Fury" (1966) by American composer Harry Partch, the second a concert performance of Philip Glass's opera "The CIVIL warS" (1983), the third a performance of Franz Schubert's "Die Winterreise" (1827) in which twenty-four short films by South African artist William Kentridge were shown.

Strauss evening of unprecedented height: Arabella as vorspiel of Scenes from a marriage

To perhaps the most beautiful music written by Strauss, Arabella descends the stairs and hands Mandryka a glass of water. Their engagement is thus sealed. Behind the loving couple, however, an inky black space opens up into which both disappear.

Reinbert de Leeuw defies limits of orchestra in Saturday Matinee

Reinbert de Leeuw turned seventy-five last September, but already in May the VPRO honoured him with three full-length broadcasts on Radio 4. Together with Aad van Nieuwkerk, I made a selection from his best recordings of Kagel, Ustvolskaya and Louis Andriessen, among others, about which I also let him speak. This was followed in September by a real Reinbert festival and his own magazine. The magazine not only highlighted him... 

Figaro! Figaro! Figaro! Reisopera on tour with Rossini's masterpiece on order

'Give me a shopping list and I will set it to music,' the Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini is said to have said. Perhaps apocryphal, but fitting for the man who composed faster than musicians could rehearse his scores. Where Wagner needed a lifetime for 14 operas, Rossini wrote triple that. In barely fifteen years.

Everything, everything I know. Rest, rest then, rest you god. With Götterdämmerung, the Amsterdam Ring approaches its final end.

Forget the hours that preceded, don't think about the two hours to come. This is the moment. The Nibelungenhaat motif and the Hagen motif resound, but distorted. They clash. They cannot agree, We hear something vaguely triumphant, but at the same time threatening.

It's raining at Amsterdam's Muziektheater. Armide impresses at De Nederlandse Opera.

It's raining at Amsterdam's Muziektheater.

When Crusader Renaud sings of an idyllic landscape half an hour after the performance begins, the curtain rises deliciously slowly. It adds a breathtaking dimension to the opera, which until then had been set on a small and sparse landscape on the front stage.

Tristan und Isolde at Reisopera, something special happens here

A Brünhilde who does not burst into flames but endures the Götterdämmerung with a baby in her arms, a Senta who does not jump off a cliff but is shot by Erik together with the Holländer. No one really looks surprised anymore. And Isoldes who do not die in the Liebestod are no exception, but Tristan who rises from the dead, as it were, by Isolde's notes reaching into heaven, stands diagonally behind her and sings along soundlessly?

Yannick Nézet-Séguin turns Rotterdam Doelen into a swirling sea of sound

In a letter to Franz Liszt in 1852, Wagner stressed that in his Der fliegende Holländer should be shown as realistically as possible, full of violent waves. One hundred and sixty years later, Yannick Nézet-Séguin takes that advice very much to heart in port city Rotterdam. Nothing about this Holländer ripples, from the first notes it storms, culminating in a third act at hurricane force, with a leading role for the Netherlands Opera choir.

Meistersinger @HollandFestival convinces musically only

Holland Festival Holland Festival

Cowardly knight defeats untalented rule fetishist with help from wise cobbler and wins singing contest and the hand of coquettish goldsmith's daughter. Or: boy meets girl on the streets of Nuremberg and decides to enter the local version of Nuremberg's got talent. The judges send him away, but he gets the audience vote. Wagner wouldn't be Wagner, however, if he didn't take about five hours for this story.

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