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Showing posts with label Amber Wagner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amber Wagner. Show all posts

Deborah Voigt deserts Strauss for an affair with Wagner, but then Wagner jumps into bed with Strauss?

Written By The Wagnerian on Tuesday, 19 July 2011 | 2:09:00 am

As reported in todays Suntimes

Voigt leaves Strauss for Wagner, and Wagner steps in for Strauss.

Or something like that.

In a surprise move that could portend other changes in upcoming seasons at the Civic Opera House, Lyric Opera of Chicago announced Monday morning that star soprano Deborah Voigt, who has figured prominently in marketing for the company’s 2011-12 season, has withdrawn from the revival of “Ariadne auf Naxos” by Richard Strauss. The demanding title role in this combination comedy-fantasy long has been a signature part for the star American soprano who turns 51 next month.

Lyric said that Voigt, who opened a run in the very different title role of Irving Berlin’s “Annie Get Your Gun” at Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, N.Y.. Saturday night, wants to focus on her upcoming debuts in the lead role of Bruennhilde in the third and fourth installments of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Lyric said.

The six November-December “Ariadne” dates in Chicago fall between the Met’s performances of “Siegfried” and “Goetterdammerung.”

The choice was Voigt’s, Lyric said, but the Illinois native made no mention of this plan in a backstage conversation after her July 9 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert at Ravinia in which her Strauss numbers were the highlight.

A number of industry observers have said that Voigt has been losing the lyric sound that was a trademark of hers for years and that she is shifting to roles calling for a more dramatic style such as Wagner, or lighter work such as musical theater. New management led by general director-designate Anthony Freud and artistic consultant Renee Fleming takes over at Lyric on Oct. 1 and has been examining all short- and long-term commitments the company has made.

A request for a direct comment from Voigt or her publicist had not been returned by press time.


In her place, a true rising star, Amber Wagner (no relation to the composer) will make her full-run major role debut at Lyric. Wagner received raves when she was a last-minute substitute in the part for the opera’s opening night this spring at Toronto’s Canadian Opera Company. Lyric music director Andrew Davis conducted that production as he is to at Lyric.


Amber Wagner in Performance

Wagner, 31, an alum of Lyric’s Ryan Opera Center, has been a standout since her first days in the training center. A winner of the 2007 Met National Council auditions, and numerous other awards, Wagner was featured in the 2009 hit documentary on the Met competition, “The Audition.” In her scheduled closing night performance as Elsa in Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at Lyric in March, the singer “achieved a total triumph,” the Sun-Times’ Laura Emerick wrote.

“Throughout the evening Wagner displayed the presence and command of an artist of twice her experience,” Emerick wrote. “Her voice poured forth rhapsodically in exquisitely phrased lines while she more than matched the intensity” of her “formidable” fellow cast members.

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2:09:00 am | 0 comments | Read More

Wagner On Screen. The strange relationship between Richard Wagner and Film

Written By The Wagnerian on Sunday, 5 June 2011 | 10:26:00 pm

There seems to be an endless supply of articles and books on how Wagner influenced the film sound track: from Loony Tunes to Apocalypse Now,  from Star Wars to The Lord of the Rings. Less in evident are articles that describe Wagner's treatment directly in film - how he and his music is presented. This article from the Guardian 2007 (to accompany an BFI season entitled "Wagner On Screen) addresses both issues but with emphasis on the latter. I


Continuous melody

From Fritz Lang to Bugs Bunny, countless movies have taken inspiration from Wagner. But how well has film served this most cinematic of composers, asks Ronald Bergen


Ronald Bergen
The Guardian, Saturday 6 October 2007


Sergei Eisenstein
In 1940, the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow invited the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein to stage Richard Wagner's Die Walküre. He eagerly accepted the new challenge, as it presented him with an opportunity to apply Wagner's ideas of combining theatre, music, literature and myth in one medium, which concurred with his own vision of film as synthesis.

Eisenstein wanted "The Ride of the Valkyries" to "envelop the entire audience via a system of loudspeakers reverberating as if in flight from the rear of the stage to the back of the auditorium and back. And roll around the auditorium, up the steps and along the aisles and corridors. But I was not able to overcome the traditions of the opera theatre!" Eisenstein was anticipating "The Ride of the Valkyries" as used in the stereophonic Dolby system by Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now (the background to American helicopters bombing the hell out of the Vietcong) almost four decades later.

According to the American director and screenwriter Harmony Korine: "If Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the Great Art Form would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about."

It could be argued that if film resembles any other art form, it is closer to opera than theatre or literature; of the operatic composers, Wagner could lay claim to being the most "cinematic". For example, in the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, the theatre built by Wagner specifically to present Der Ring des Nibelungen, a hidden orchestra was conceived so that the music could be heard like a soundtrack. Wagner also had all the house lights turned off, unusually for the 1870s. In addition, an illusion was created by a dual proscenium which, according to Wagner, "allows the performers to appear enlarged and on a superhuman scale" - the theatrical equivalent of the close-up.

A multitude of film scores rely on Wagnerian leitmotifs - a musical phrase, associated with some particular character or idea - and the edited flow of images could be likened to Wagner's "continuous melody". More comparisons could be made between Wagner and film, and there have been learned treatises on the influence of Wagner on movies from Fritz Lang's early epics, Die Nibelungen and The Testament of Dr Mabuse, to Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. However, though bleeding chunks of his music have been heard in hundreds of movies, particularly the over(mis)used "The Ride of the Valkyries", the composer has been rather ill-served by the cinema. But, as Mark Twain once quipped, "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." In films, at least.

In 1960, Luis Buñuel added a musical soundtrack to his silent surrealist masterpiece, Un Chien Andalou (1928), including the mystically rapturous "Liebestod" from Tristan und Isolde. He used it again, even more brilliantly, in L'Age d'Or (1930) as accompaniment to a woman performing fellatio on the white toe of a marble statue and to a couple in the throes of "l'amour fou".

Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours has a famous conductor (Rex Harrison) imagining, while conducting three different works, three different ways of taking revenge on his wife, whom he suspects of infidelity. The nature of his imaginings is dictated by that of the music: during Wagner's reconciliation theme from Tannhäuser, he fantasises about forgiving his wife and allowing her to run off with her young lover.

Naturally, Hollywood, always deeply suspicious of "high art", would mostly caricature Wagner's work. Whenever there is an opera scene in the movies, it's more than likely to show a giantess wearing a horned Viking helmet and belting out Wagner at the top of her lungs. In What's New, Pussycat?, Peter Sellers as the crazy psychiatrist Fritz Fassbender has to cope with "the wife that ate Europe", who is depicted as the stereotypical Wagnerian soprano.

10:26:00 pm | 0 comments | Read More

A Wagner Concert Including Die Walküre (Act 1) with the Colorado Symphony - June 11 &12

Christian Arming joins the Colorado Symphony for a season finale featuring:

Prelude to Act III and Bridal Chorus from "Lohengrin"
Chorus from Act II of "Der Fliegende Holländer" ("The Flying Dutchman")
Prelude and "Wach' auf!" from "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" ("The Mastersingers of Nuremberg")
Act I from "Die Walküre"


Guests:

Christian Arming first came to public attention when, at just 24, he was appointed chief conductor of the Janácek Philharmonic in Ostrava. Other European positions followed, and since 2003 he has been music director of the New Japan Philharmonic in Tokyo. Arming's career successfully spans both the orchestral and operatic worlds. Opera highlights have included new productions of Britten's "The Turn of the Screw" in Cincinnati and "Rosenkavalier in Triest" as well as "La Bohème" in Lucerne, "Salome" and "Elektra" in Verona, and "Der Fliegende Holländer" and "Jenufa" for Frankfurt Opera. Arming has made a number of recordings including works by Janácek, Schubert and most recently Brahms Symphony No. 1 and Mahler Symphonies Nos. 3 and 5 with the New Japan Philharmonic on Fontec.

5:38:00 pm | 0 comments | Read More