Time & Location
Oct 07, 2021, 8:30 PM GMT+2
Paris, 221 Av. Jean Jaurès, 75019 Paris, France
About the Event
Grande salle Pierre Boulez - Philharmonie
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Duration: about 1h51 with 1 intermission
ProgramRichard Wagner
Ouverture des Maîtres chanteurs
Prélude et mort d'Isolde
INTERMISSION
La Walkyrie
Acte I
DistributionOrchestre de Paris
Jaap van Zweden, conducting
Jennifer Holloway, soprano
Stuart Skelton, tenor
Mika Karès, basse
Anyone wishing to convince themselves of the splendour of the Wagnerian orchestra need only listen to this programme displaying the very quintessence of his art.
There is a marvellous eloquence to the dialectic between, on the one hand, a majestic homage to the German masters and, on the other, a burning desire for hedonism with the Overture of The Master Singers. We are swept up in the evocative sorcery of the legendary episode of the Prelude and the Death of Isolde, with its irresistible and chromatic waves, the crescendo culminating in Eros’s morbidity up to the necro-romantic climax of love-death… In concert version, Act I of The Valkyrie also plunges us into an ambiance of mysterious fate, the fury of the elements and the heroic call competing with, again, the ill fate of incestuous union. With a cosmogony such as this, it is not surprising that so many writers, including Thomas Mann with his Blood of the Walsungs, fell under the spell of ‘the Sorcerer’.