Too much Wagner? Try these instead Jul 21st 2013, 16:47
Next week, you can hear five complete Wagner operas at the Proms. But if that's not to your taste, here's an alternative listening guide
We're on a precipice, people; a precipice of Gods and monsters, heroes and dwarves, and some of the greatest/most controversial/most transcendent/most odiously grandiloquent music ever written. Yes: it's almost Wagner Time at the Proms. From tomorrow until Sunday, not only can you hear Wagner's Ring Cycle at the Royal Albert Hall when Daniel Barenboim conducts the only - as far as I'm aware - complete concert performance of the cycle this bicentennial year in the UK, but you'll also have the indecently indulgent and quite possibly nerve-shreddingly intense opportunity to hear Tristan und Isolde on Saturday night from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Semyon Bychkov. Tristan is sandwiched between the final two instalments of the Ring, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. It's a Wagnerian overload that might reduce even the hardiest Prommer and most devoted Wagnerite to a quivering, over-sensitised pulp - especially in the middle of the Royal Albert Hall's micro-climatic heatwave.
Despite the potential risks to one's emotional and physical existence, personally, I can't wait! (I'll be there for the whole week for Radio 3 and BBC4.) But if you all that churning Wagnerian emotion is not to your taste, I've come up with an alternative operatic tetralogy to help you escape that heavy Teutonic atmosphere; music and drama of surreal, satirical confection and clear-cut concision.
Your anti-Wagnerian experience starts on Monday with Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, whose gleeful spoofery will have you in stitches and doing the can-can in hell rather than plunging you head-first into that serious business at the bottom of the Rhine; on Tuesday, instead of Wagner's gloomy Valkyries, rejoice in the musical wit and exploding bosoms of Poulenc's Les mamelles de Tirésias; replace the great deeds of Siegfried on Friday with the anti-heroics of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, and swap the giganticism of the end of the Gods on Sunday for Judith Weir's King Harald's Saga, an opera that gives you a complete saga in 14 minutes sung by a solo voice, instead of five hours and a cast of hundreds. And to keep Tristan at bay (Ken Hamilton told me a brilliant Toscanini story the other day: conducting the endless pre-consummatory metaphysics of the love duet between Tristan and Isolde in Act 2, he said, to paraphrase, that "Italians would have had six children by now…"), go for the heady but brief eroticism - and clocks - of Ravel's L'heure espagnole. That all sounds like rather good fun to me… Enjoy; whether you're pro- or anti-Wagner, next week should be one to remember!
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