Wagner Night
Sep. 10th, 2019 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiPeople were surprised by the short queue on Monday morning, but it was not short enough for me to be on the rail; I was in the second row of the arena, which had filled out by the time the concert started.
In the early years of the Proms, Monday was often "Wagner Night", and therefore elements of this concert, given by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with conductor Marc Albrecht, were in keeping with tradition. The first half took the slightly tangential theme of "forest", beginning with the overture to Weber's Der Freischütz, with light and dark mood swings. We moved on to the first Wagner of the evening, with the Forest Murmurs from Siegfried. Sometimes being directly in front of the cellos can hamper the sound of the rest of the orchestra; on this occasion, it allowed for extra clarity. The final piece of the first half was a novelty to me, Franck's Le chasseur maudit. Again with some quite dark moments, this was more overtly a more modern piece. I felt I heard inspiration for later works in it, such as the "Elmira" theme from the slow movement of Shostakovich's 10th symphony, and Eric Coates's The Three Elizabeths.
The second half was all Wagner, pure and simple, with excerpts from Götterdämmerung, some sung by soprano Christine Goerke and tenor Stephen Gould. The four excerpts were woven together without pauses, which was a little disorienting. The funeral march was, of course, splendid. The evening seemed an appropriate way to mark the turmoil of the past few weeks, and the shutdown of Parliament later that evening.
In the early years of the Proms, Monday was often "Wagner Night", and therefore elements of this concert, given by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with conductor Marc Albrecht, were in keeping with tradition. The first half took the slightly tangential theme of "forest", beginning with the overture to Weber's Der Freischütz, with light and dark mood swings. We moved on to the first Wagner of the evening, with the Forest Murmurs from Siegfried. Sometimes being directly in front of the cellos can hamper the sound of the rest of the orchestra; on this occasion, it allowed for extra clarity. The final piece of the first half was a novelty to me, Franck's Le chasseur maudit. Again with some quite dark moments, this was more overtly a more modern piece. I felt I heard inspiration for later works in it, such as the "Elmira" theme from the slow movement of Shostakovich's 10th symphony, and Eric Coates's The Three Elizabeths.
The second half was all Wagner, pure and simple, with excerpts from Götterdämmerung, some sung by soprano Christine Goerke and tenor Stephen Gould. The four excerpts were woven together without pauses, which was a little disorienting. The funeral march was, of course, splendid. The evening seemed an appropriate way to mark the turmoil of the past few weeks, and the shutdown of Parliament later that evening.