| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 5-Apr-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Waves of Wagner: Gatti and DeYoung with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall |
 The Wagner bicentennial marches on, bringing grand sounds from practically every corner of the musical earth. What appear most frequently on concert programs are various extracts from the operas, such as the collection of preludes, overture, and vocal and orchestral excerpts offered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Daniele Gatti at Carnegie Hall. This kind of programming runs the risk of coming across as a tasty but haphazard smorgasbord; composer and musicologist Sir Donald Francis Tovey denounced these “bleeding chunks of butcher’s meat chopped from Wagner’s operas”.Read full review... | |
| 15-Feb-2013 Lincoln Center: Metropolitan Opera House | The music redeems unanswered questions in the Met's beautiful new Parsifal |
 Before the music in the Metropolitan Opera’s new Parsifal starts, a black but reflective curtain drapes the front of the stage. It is dim enough not quite to show the audience, but it picks out the chandeliers. As Daniele Gatti coaxes the orchestra through the opening lines of the score the tableau becomes translucent, first seeming to mirror the front rows of the stalls, but slowly revealing the chorus, sitting in rows. Parsifal stands, in the centre, chosen. The men slowly remove their workaday suits, socks, and shoes, while the women turn.Read full review... | |
| 6-Apr-2012 Birmingham Symphony Hall | Gergiev and the Mariinsky excel in Wagner's Parsifal at the Birmingham Symphony Hall |
 Why attend a concert performance of an opera? What is the point without the action and the spectacle collectively resulting in, hopefully, the awe-inspiring whole? In answer to this I should like to suggest that concert performances of opera are the perfect opportunity to really ‘get under the skin’ of a work, for two principal reasons. Firstly: scenery, costumes, props, lighting effects, choking dry-ice and even pungent aromas used to aid the action are absent, and thus one may connect with the music and plot completely free of distractions. Secondly: why not just listen to a recording?Read full review... | |
| 24-Mar-2012 Oper Leipzig | Redemption and Renewal for All in Oper Leipzig’s Parsifal |
 Leipzig routinely honours its native son with performances of Parsifal scheduled on and around Good Friday, which tempts a state of ritualized enactment best confined to the opera itself. (Vienna maintains the same tradition and is a magnet for self-appointed enforcers of the Bayreuth applause customs and their confrontational silencing of the ‘transgressors’.) The permissive atmosphere in Leipzig was a great deal more pleasant, with much of the audience applauding at the end of Act I and those with a need for solitude just quietly slipping away.
Read full review... | |
