Iréne Theorin as Brünnhilde with members of the San Francisco Opera Chorus in Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung.” Photo: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera
Here’s the final installment of my coverage for Musical America of San Francisco Opera’s extraordinary Ring cycle.
SAN FRANCISCO—If Siegfried highlights Zambello’s ability to tease out vital, three-dimensional characters from a deceptively simple surface, Götterdämmerung shows her clarifying the most complex component of the entire cycle–an installment which introduces an entire generation of characters new to the Ring–with a gripping theatrical momentum. The night/day dichotomy of the Prologue aptly summed up the diametrical viewpoints of this staging…
The conductor Donald Runnicles concluded his tenure with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra on the last day of the 2016 Edinburgh International Festival with a performance of Schoenberg’s epic Gurre-Lieder at Usher Hall.
The gargantuan forces needed bring to mind the festival atmosphere Mahler’s Eighth Symphony also evokes. Here’s a sampling of the reviews:
And so this concert summed up the kind of playing that he and this orchestra have developed together – a rich glow at the heart of the strings and a capacity to turn on a dime and power up almighty sounds.
Runnicles is particularly well known for his interpretations of the core Austro-German Romantic repertoire, so Gurrelieder plays to his strengths. Under his baton Schoenberg’s ripe score yields up its influences. There is Wagner in the love music, of course, but also Bruckner in the solemnity of the Wood-Dove, Beethoven in the nature-painting and, of course, Mahler in the scale and structure. That scale could be pretty overpowering at times, and not just in the final, overwhelming greeting to the sun that ends the work. The sweep and surge of the love music was intoxicating, as was the wall of brass and percussion that accompanied the chorus’ romping as the hellish riders. What was most striking, however, was the way Runnicles repeatedly brought out the delicacy of the orchestration.
[Schoenberg’s] mega-cantata Gurrelieder, was the vehicle chosen to whisk us off on such a glorious journey, driven by the massively-inflated forces of the BBC Scottish Synphony Orchestra, a male-dominated Edinburgh Festival Chorus, five soloists and speaker, all under the towering leadership of maestro Donald Runnicles, and formulated by a musical language gathering up the scraps of Wagner, colouring them with whole-tone harmonic treats from Debussy, sweeping up Mahler in its tracks before opening the gates to teasers of the world-changing Schoenberg-to-come.
The seven plaintiffs, which include all of the publishing industry's Big Five, say the audiobook company is violating copyrights with a planned feature that would transcribe audiobooks for listeners.
Nominated for a ninth Emmy Award in acting, the star of Veep and Seinfeld talks about getting her first laugh, her rocky start at Saturday Night Live and the #MeToo movement.
The Oscar-nominated actor and screenwriter, who died Aug. 16, spoke to Terry Gross in 1998 about Ulee's Gold, Easy Rider and his acting philosophy of "doing less — and making more of it."
In 1577, King Philip II of Spain wanted to know whom he was ruling and where in his vast kingdom they were. So his viceroy asked the indigenous groups in what is now Mexico to draw some maps for him.
A new film chronicles what happens when a Chinese billionaire reopens a former General Motors plant in Ohio. John Powers says it's an old-school observational documentary in the very best sense.
Rion Amilcar Scott's second story collection returns readers to his fictional town of Cross River, Md., site of America's only successful slave uprising, and God is one of the best-known residents.
James Gregor's novel about a gay man who falls into an intense relationship with a woman mixes old-fashioned style and contemporary setting. His observations on human nature are precisely rendered.
Eighteen years after the short-lived series premiered, Invader Zim is back with a one-off special that lacks the edge of the show's best episodes, but recalls what made it so fun.
A young Russian-American (Chris Galust) drives a beat-up medical transport van full of demanding, quirky passengers through Milwaukee's backstreets in this funny, authentic film.
The film, based on Eileen Atkins' play about the correspondence between Virginia Woolf and Virginia Sackville-West, is a standard British period drama that tries, and fails, to be something more.
