ConcertPulse
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Gewandhaus Leipzig, Großer Saal (Leipzig)
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According to Theodor Fontane, happiness lies in small things, which could also describe songs. Soprano Sarah Wegener explores this happiness in her Cologne concert. She performs songs like Richard Strauss's "Traum durch die Dämmerung," which questions where happiness lies. Wegener, known for her intense performances, joins pianist Götz Payer in this pursuit of happiness.
Richard Wagner’s opera »Die Walküre« is a passionate exploration of big themes such as love and betrayal, loyalty and rebellion. The god Wotan wanted to rule through contracts rather than violence but, as a result of broken promises, becomes increasingly entangled in problems until blood begins to flow. Finding no solutions, Wotan finally cries: »One thing alone do I want: the end!« But his daughter Brünnhilde thwarts his plans… At the Hamburg International Music Festival, there is an opportunity to experience the opera in historical original sound for the first time under conductor Kent Nagano. At the festival, Kent Nagano is not conducting »his« orchestra, the Hamburg State Opera, but rather the Dresdner Festspielorchester, Concerto Köln and a top-class cast of soloists, who explore the playing and singing techniques of the 19th century. »More intimate tone colours, a more multi-layered and transparent sound, freed from the ballast of the centuries,« say the performers about the project, which seems to have been tailor-made for the transparent acoustics of the Elbphilharmonie Grand Hall. One of Wagner’s most famous pieces, the »Ride of the Valkyries« – famously used by director Francis Ford Coppola as background music to a helicopter attack in the anti-war film »Apocalypse Now« – thus sounds altogether different.
This all-Strauss programme spans the composer’s entire life, from the intoxicating vitality of Don Juan, composed at the age of 24, to the melancholy retrospection and farewell that he transmuted into beauty in the Four Last Songs in 1948, a year before his death. The third piece on the programme, Thus Spake Zarathustra, is perhaps the most ambitious of Strauss’s tone-poems: the clash of two disparate tonalities (C major and B major) and the juxtaposition of rigorous musical forms and philosophically-tinged intertitles lend a spellbinding force to this Nietzschean homage. Even without specific references to the historical Zarathustra, Nietzsche and Strauss did much to make Zoroastrianism better known in Europe.