November 1, 2025 • 9:45 am 2
My review of San Francisco Opera’s new production of Parsifal has been posted on the Opera Now website:
Time moves differently in San Francisco Opera’s Parsifal. Under Eun Sun Kim’s baton, Wagner’s score breathes with a kind of suspended inevitability, while movement and light unfold in ritual slow motion, evoking a theatre of Baudelairean correspondences, where sound, image and gesture seem to mirror one another in continual exchange.
Filed under: review, San Francisco Opera, Wagner
August 5, 2025 • 11:58 am Comments Off on Blood Ropes and Broken Gods: ‘Die Walküre’ in Santa Fe
Nothing like seeing Die Walküre accompanied by lightning and storm clouds @Santa Fe Opera. My review for Opera Now:
As its track record of world premieres and off-the-beaten-path repertoire proves, Santa Fe Opera has never shied away from adventurous undertakings. But with this new Die Walküre—its first venture into the Ring and only its third Wagner staging since 2022—the company takes a striking step into territory long left unexplored.
Filed under: Santa Fe Opera, Wagner
October 28, 2024 • 10:51 am Comments Off on “Tristan und Isolde” at San Francisco Opera
I reviewed San Francisco Opera’s new production of Wagner’s endlessly fascinating masterpiece for Opera Now:
An extraordinary thing is underway at San Francisco Opera: by taking on one of the major works of the wizard of Bayreuth each season, music director Eun Sun Kim has set about establishing herself as a formidable young Wagnerian….
Filed under: review, San Francisco Opera, Wagner
October 12, 2024 • 5:19 pm Comments Off on Conclusion of Dallas Symphony’s Concert “Ring”
Last May, I covered the launch of Fabio Luisi and the Dallas Symphony’s concert presentation of Wagner’s Ring cycle with performances of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre. I returned recently to attend the continuation of their bold adventure with Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. Here’s my report for Classical Voice North America:
DALLAS — Having left Brünnhilde deep in slumber at the end of Die Walküre last May, Fabio Luisi and the Dallas Symphony returned to awaken her this month with their continuation of the Ring in concert at their Meyerson Symphony Center home. They presented Siegfried on Oct. 5 and Götterdämmerung on Oct. 8, thereby scaling an Everest normally considered the domain of opera companies. Between Oct. 13 and 20, the adventure will be repeated — this time with the usual interval of just a few days separating the four operas.
Filed under: concert programming, Dallas Symphony, review, Ring cycle, Wagner, classical-music
December 13, 2023 • 11:16 am Comments Off on Tannhäuser at the Met
I reviewed the Tannhäuser production currently onstage at the Met:
Could there be something like a Tannhäuser ‘curse’? Wagner fretted until the end of his life about how to improve his first opera inspired by medieval German sources. Like a beckoning Venus, the work tempted him at various points in his life to return and tinker away at what he perceived as its imperfections. Wagner’s most significant revision, fashioned for his operatic debut in Paris in 1861, spurred the most humiliating fiasco of his mature career – not because of the ‘content’ but because of protests in part related to Napoleon III’s policies involving the Austrian Empire….
Filed under: Metropolitan Opera, review, Wagner
September 25, 2023 • 8:18 am Comments Off on Marking a Double Anniversary, Seattle Symphony Revels in Blasts from the Past
My Bachtrack review of opening night at Seattle Symphony, which paired pieces played on the orchestra’s first-ever concert in 1903 and at their concert inaugurating Benaroya Hall 25 years ago. The fact that about two-thirds of the seats remained empty didn’t dampen the musicians’s spirits, but what a pity that so many missed out on a substantial, gloriously played program — not the lineup of frothy showpieces that orchestras so often put together for their season curtain raiser.
Though it ended with the downfall of a whole civilization, the Seattle Symphony’s opening-night concert radiated the excitement of a brand new season just getting under way, with all its attendant fresh hopes.
Filed under: Ludovic Morlot, review, Schubert, Seattle Symphony, Wagner
August 15, 2023 • 6:01 am Comments Off on Seattle Opera Mines a Novel, Futuristic Rheingold
I reviewed Seattle Opera’s new production of Das Rheingold:
Richard Wagner once described his trailblazing brand of opera as “deeds of music made visible.” The new production of “Das Rheingold” that opened Seattle Opera’s 60th season Saturday adds a literal twist to that concept by having the orchestra share the stage with the singers.
Filed under: review, Seattle Opera, Wagner
August 9, 2023 • 8:28 am Comments Off on A New Rheingold at Seattle Opera
Opening Seattle Opera’s 60th season this Saturday is a new production of Das Rheingold — staged here for the first time since 2013. It’s not the start of a new complete Ring but a stand-alone production. My Seattle Times preview:
At McCaw Hall, the gods are preparing once again to enter Valhalla.
Stagings of Richard Wagner’s cycle of four interlinked operas, together known as “The Ring of the Nibelung,” are what put Seattle Opera on the international map almost half a century ago. But a full decade has elapsed since the “Ring” was last produced here. So to open the milestone 60th anniversary season, General Director Christina Scheppelmann decided to pay homage to a central part of the company’s legacy with “Das Rheingold,” the first installment of the “Ring” operas, in a stand-alone new production directed by Brian Staufenbiel. It runs Aug. 12-20.
Filed under: directors, Ring cycle, Seattle Opera, Wagner
December 23, 2022 • 5:09 pm Comments Off on Angela Merkel on Wagner’s Ring
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been channeling her passion for Richard Wagner into a podcast discussion on SWR2 in a three-episode series as part of Sprechen wir über Mord!? Merkel’s podcasts explore criminal contexts and motives in the Ring cycle. The podcasts are in German.
Episode 1: Greed
Angela Merkel: “The ring is so universally applicable to humanity that from family life to political life, you can always find things that just keep happening to us humans.”
Angela Merkel: “”If you’re so affected by revenge or retribution that you can’t get that out of your head, then you should stop doing politics.”
Angela Merkel: “To claim that anyone is completely free of vanity, well, I wouldn’t say that for me either. Vanity is something that is quite inherent in people, but it also has to be restrained.”
Filed under: music news, Ring cycle, Wagner
October 11, 2022 • 7:54 am 2
My Seattle Times story on the Tristan und Isolde production by Argentine director Marcelo Lombardero and colleagues, which opens Saturday at Seattle Opera:
Christina Scheppelmann, Seattle Opera’s general director, fervently believes that cross-cultural exchange is vital for the health of the art form. So she invited the prominent Argentinian stage director Marcelo Lombardero and his creative team to bring their vision to Seattle in a production of Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” opening Oct. 15.
Filed under: directors, Seattle Opera, Seattle Times, Wagner
Arts & Culture Stories from NPR
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 