It’s now 3:ooam, and I’ve just finished listening to Tannhäuser.
The music, the orchestra, the singers… Marvelous orchestration, pitch-perfect singers, with the orchestra accompaniment that’s so sensitive, this must surely be one of the highest-levels of performing: doing such a tiring programme (stretches as long as 5 hours or more) and being able to successfully capture the attention and emotion of the audience! To think that playing a 45-minute long recital concert is tiring, what more a 5-hour long opera of Wagner? Such a pity that it’s only an audio broadcast, not the entire staging. Not having the libretto or the score to follow, and also having had a long and tiring day, I was at first a little hesitant to start listening. (Perhaps it was also because at the back of my head, I knew that there was a possibility of being hooked =P) This website provides a pretty reliable libretto, in German and English. One little warning though: the intermissions last 1 hour.
I was enchanted by Wolfram’s monolouge in Act 3 Scene 1, von Eschenbach’s singing was just so charming, so full of emotion. The choir did really well too – the harmony of the voices and the lightness just seemed so ethereal. I thought that Tannhäuser’s song for Wolfram in Act 3 Scene 3 was great, but Frank van Eken seemed to sound a little tired towards the end.
The above-mentioned are just my thoughts in an awe-filled, delirious, tired, brain-fried, sleep-deprived state that I’m currently in. I shall stop here and let professional critics do the job of describing the performance 🙂
On a lighter note, they’re playing Tchaikovsky’s Waltz from his only string serenade now, it’s a welcome change from the Wagner, hee…
**the author wishes to express her views on the music but it is simply not possible to put it into words – doing so would just be doing injustice to the music, it’s simply wunderbar.**