| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 2-May-2013 Lincoln Center: Metropolitan Opera House | Götterdämmerung at the Met |
 The word Götterdämmerung contextually translated becomes “twilight of the gods”, and Thursday night’s story was indeed full of endings: the conclusion of the saga of the ring and the end of several lives, human and god alike.
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| 29-Apr-2013 Lincoln Center: Metropolitan Opera House | Flashes of brilliance in the Met's Siegfried |
 Each of Wagner's Ring Cycle operas offers conductor and performers a continual stream of opportunities for "wow" moments. There are moments of humour, bars of intense power in the music, crises in the drama or passages of intense vocal lyricism - there are so many possibilities that it's impossible for any one performance to capture them all. One way of evaluating a Ring Cycle opera is to consider how many of these fleeting instances were seized upon by orchestra and cast with enough impact to make a lasting impression in your memory.
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| 26-Apr-2013 Lincoln Center: Metropolitan Opera House | Die Walküre at the Met |
 You can summarise the plot of Die Walküre in three sentences: Siegmund and Sieglinde fall in love and elope; Fricka coerces Wotan into killing Siegmund; Wotan punishes Brünnhilde for trying to save him. But within that simple framework lies a vast gamut of human distress, striving, redemption - and, make no mistake, Wotan may be notionally a god, but Norse gods are made in man’s image: extensions of humanity rather than abstract spirits.
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| 25-Apr-2013 Lincoln Center: Metropolitan Opera House | The Met's Ring Cycle begins with an impressive Das Rheingold |
 Quite simply, it’s the largest scale event in all of opera. With 18 hours of music in a 3,800 seat house, Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Met is a giant, lavish undertaking – all starting with that famous E flat chord: starting from the quietest of pianissimo double bass notes and building for nearly four minutes before it explodes into the melody of the Rhinemaidens.
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