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Articles tagged with: Richard Wagner

Sex and the single troubadour: Lyric Opera turns heat up in earthy take on Wagner’s ‘Tannhäuser’

Feb 11, 2015 – 5:08 pm | 2,602 views
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Review: It’s a bleak, war-torn world that greets Wagner’s prodigal troubadour in the Lyric Opera’s potent, sensual and yet strikingly unromanticized production of “Tannhäuser.” Typical of a current trend, the Lyric version – created by Covent Garden’s Royal Opera and now seen in Chicago for the first time – brings the story into a timeless present. Though generally dark, this treatment also energizes, and vibrantly colorizes, the prologue’s protracted sex romp at the Venusberg. ★★★★

Vienna Aisle: Inside reeling mind of Tannhäuser via a bold psychological thriller at the Staatsoper

Oct 31, 2014 – 4:20 pm | 2,117 views
Tannhauser (Robert Dean Smith) finds a sympathetic spirit in a young shepherd (Annika Gerhards). (Michael Poehn)

Review: Serendipity delivered me to the Vienna State Opera on Oct. 30 to take in director Claus Guth’s surprising, indeed completely out of the box and captivating production of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser.” It wasn’t just that the Wiener Staatsoper was in play on a night when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra – the object of my week in Vienna – wasn’t performing one of its four concerts at the Musikverein: The opera at hand was “Tannhäuser,” which the Lyric Opera of Chicago will be mounting later this season and which I had not seen in some time. ★★★★

Cornwall’s Kneehigh troupe revisits ‘Tristan’ with antic comedy and double take on Yseult

Apr 3, 2014 – 6:01 pm | 5,405 views
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Review: Imagine that consummate romantic legend of heroic Tristan and beautiful Isolde, thrust together into illicit love by circumstance and a potion, as a tragi-comedy. No? Can’t conceive of that? Then you have yet to see the visiting Kneehigh theater company’s outlandish “Tristan & Yseult,” which now bounces about the boards at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. ★★★

Showing 2020 vision, Lyric Opera reveals plan for new production of Wagner’s ‘Ring’ Cycle

Jan 17, 2014 – 11:08 am | 10,296 views
Dramatic soprano Christine Goerke will star as Brünnhilde in the Lyric Opera of Chicago's new Ring Cycle (Arielle Doneson)

Report: With headliners Christine Goerke and Eric Owens — two breakthrough American Wagner singers that everyone is seeking – Lyric Opera of Chicago announced Friday that it will embark on a new David Pountney production of the “Ring” Cycle starring Owens as the great god Wotan and Goerke as Brünnhilde, his beloved Valkyrie daughter. The cycle’s four operas are to be unveiled one by one in consecutive seasons beginning in 2016-17, and then in total-immersion festival form, over the course of three weeks in April 2020.

In tributes to ‘Tristan,’ Salonen and CSO lack forces and focus to embrace Wagner epic

Feb 23, 2013 – 10:22 am | 6,581 views
Esa Pekka Salonen conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra 2013 credit Todd Rosenberg

Review: Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen once undertook total immersion in the music of Richard Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde,” an opera of lasting influence and extraordinary musical language, newly coined to express ecstatic, forbidden love and its all-consuming anguish. Today Salonen’s enthusiasm for exploring this operatic icon is undiminished. In addition to two concert performances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra of “Tristan’s” mesmerizing second act, he led “Beyond the Score” performances that explored the controversy over Wagner’s musical nugget, the Tristan chord, and its breakthrough potential to lead the ear beyond traditional harmonic bounds. Neither effort proved entirely successful. Through Feb. 24.

Chicago Symphony’s 2012-13 plans highlight Wagner, Stravinsky and waterway themes

Feb 6, 2012 – 7:38 pm | 6,449 views
Riccardo Muti Orchestra Hall credit Todd Rosenberg

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