★★★★★When you consider the dismal fates awaiting its main characters — Siegmund and Hunding killed, the pregnant Sieglinde lost in a dangerous forest, Brünnhilde banished to a rock, Wotan raging at his impotence — you can’t help but be astonished at how joyous a great performance of Die Walküre can be. Especially a great concert performance, where Wagner’s miracles of orchestration can be savoured visually as well as aurally. Watching the eight horns whooping through the Ride of the Valkyries, or the baleful bass trumpet delivering another fanfare of doom, or the cellos weaving a shroud of elegiac counterpoint around Wotan’s rueful soliloquy, or the six harps evoking the rippling flames at the end — that, to me, is as theatrically gripping as any staging. Especially…

Source: The Times August 07, 2017 15:56 UTC