A new recording has been released of one of the more remarkable treatments of Wagner’s music: “Wagner for Brass” performed by the Neos Brass and arranged by Herman Jeurissen. (Not to be confused with the Philips CD of the same name featuring the Canadian Brass and members of the Bayreuth orchestra.) Jeurissen explains in the liner […]
The Wagner Society of New York — the largest in North America — reserves its Anton Seidel Award for the rare artist whose achievements in Wagner’s music have reached historic status. Past honorees have included James Levine, Birgit Nilsson and Plácido Domingo. This week the Society has announced a new honoree: The orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera. And well-deserved...
As part of its series of Wagner works conducted by Marek Janowski, Pentatone Classics has released a recording of a live concert performance of Tristan und Isolde that took place in the Berlin Philharmonie on March 27, 2012. I enjoyed all of it very much and a great deal of it was revelatory. Janowski seems to […]
Considering that Francesca Gaetana Cosima Liszt Bülow Wagner was the person most responsible for framing the role of Wagner in 20th Century German cultural and political life, it is remarkable that Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth, by Oliver Hilmes, is the first serious academic study of her life. On that ground alone the volume […]
In his recent book, Sorcerer of Bayreuth, Wagner expert Barry Millington comes down hard on Wagner the anti-Semite. He rejects the “misapprehension that Wagner’s anti-Semitism is like a superfluous integument that can be peeled away from his oeuvre without leaving a trace, when in fact it is so intrinsic to his aesthetic that it is no […]
The Wagner Blog is a forum for discussion of contemporary themes arising from the works of Richard Wagner. Discussions relating to Wagner’s musical, literary, theatrical, philosophical, political and theoretic work are all appropriate for this forum.
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