| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 31-May-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Wilde Headonism: Strauss’s Salome at the Royal Opera House |
 BARDA.jpg) Few live events could offer a more intense, visceral, grotesque experience than witnessing a performance of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome translated and adapted for the opera stage by Hermann Lachmann and set to music by Richard Strauss. Wilde’s decadentist retelling of the biblical tale takes no prisoners, rejoicing in hedonism, passion, corruption and depravity, pouring over with lust, guts and gore. Similarly, Strauss’s score is relentless in its fin-de-siècle, over-ripe Romanticism; its raw, wriggling lasciviousness; its constant, compulsive excessiveness.Read full review... | |
| 16-Jul-2011 Bridgewater Hall | Hallé and Sir Mark Elder: Die Walküre |
 The Hallé Orchestra, led by Sir Mark Elder, followed their award-winning 2009 Götterdämmerung with a concert performance of Die Walküre over two nights, prefaced by Gerard McBurney’s new work, The Madness of an Extraordinary Plan. With an array of famed soloists, Elder masterminded a triumph, with the magnificent Hallé showing their quality on the concert stage.
Read full review... | |
| 15-Jul-2011 Bridgewater Hall | Die Walküre in concert |
 Wagner's Die Walküre was split into two concert performances over two days, the first on one evening and the second on an afternoon and an evening. This review is for both.
A spot picks out a man in the Bridgewater Hall’s front row, who steps up to stand by a table in front of the Hallé Orchestra, which is ready to begin. He puts on a braided coat to become Richard Wagner. Played by Roger Allam, his lines are taken from the master’s theoretical writings, letters to the likes of Franz Liszt and King Ludwig II of Bavaria and quotations from reported conversations. He is joined by two choruses, spectral women in white - the excellent Deborah Findlay and Sara Kestelman - who provide background and pass comment. We are watching The Madness of an Extraordinary Plan, written by Gerard McBurney and directed by Neil Bartlett as a contextualising prologue which draws wittily on sources from Bakunin to Dickens and from Nietzsche to Wagner’s first wife. It is a concept pioneered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with its Beyond The Score programme.Read full review... | |
