Falstaff - Royal Opera House, 15 May 2012 (production premiere)
A star was born at Covent Garden last night. Poised and stately, his lean-muscled frame and liquid brown eyes drew every gaze his way. A frisson ran through the whole audience as each flick of his silky hair hinted at an impending intention to leave his mark on the stage.
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Parsifal - Bayreuther Festspielhaus, 29 July 2010
Stefan Herheim's Bayreuth Parsifal is that rare thing, a production which succeeds on just about every level. Intellectually stimulating, imaginative, theatrically compelling - and entertaining. In a single design concept he explores the work on several levels - the nominal plot, the festival's history within Germany's own development from empire to federal republic, and the religious search for salvation. It's dazzling and technically virtuosic.
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Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/Gatti/Repin - Royal Festival Hall, 30 November 2007
Many of the packed audience in the Royal Festival Hall for this Concertgebouw visit bore telltale lapel tags indicating they were guests of the concert's corporate sponsor. Perhaps that accounted for the safe programming choices. It was no excuse though for the lacklustre performance of the first item, Schumann's Manfred Overture. We are accustomed to expect a degree of polish from the Concertgebouw, and to be fair they were technically adept (though the stage's unfriendly acoustics caught them out with a couple of early ensemble lapses). But Daniele Gatti seemed content to let them drift along in workmanlike fashion, as damp, cold and grey as the weather outside.
They seemed ready to tackle Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in similar fashion, but here soloist Vadim Repin leavened proceedings with an enthusiastic and lyrical performance, even if the fireworks of the virtuosic finale exploded in a rather orderly fashion.
Gatti ventured rather more boldly with Tchaikovsky's Symphony No 5, showing with his extreme tempo shifts and daringly suspended silences a willingness to engage with its dramatic element. But it wasn't until the fabulous horn solo in the slow movement that there was a real sense of anything more than scrupulously following the dots. This seemed to galvanise the performance into real bite and drive, even in the dolce con grazia waltz which followed, sweet but not over-sugared. The grandeur of the finale unrolled inevitably.
Perhaps there was a little too much Italian flash and not quite enough Russian soul about the performance - and the Concertgebouw without maestro Jansons are like chips without ketchup - but it was an satisfying performance if not a particularly memorable one.
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