Word: wagnerities
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...fiscal 1985 to buy the Army's problem-plagued Sergeant York antiaircraft gun pending further tests, and indicated that the weapon might be terminated altogether. The Army had planned to buy 618 of the guns by 1987 (estimated cost: $4.5 billion). Before a Senate subcommittee, Lieut. General Louis Wagner Jr. admitted that the gun's guidance system worked so poorly in tests that it could not get a bead on a whirring helicopter even when the chopper was standing still...
This was not the first time Domingo has tried Wagner. In 1968 he sang Lohengrin in Hamburg, and in 1976 he recorded Walther von Stolzing in Die Meistersinger. Despite the beauty of the singing, his voice was too light then to be fully convincing. Today, at 43, his tenor is darker and more baritonal, and he thus is open to experimentation with new roles and even with new careers. Later this month, for example, Domingo makes his Met debut as a conductor, leading Puccini's La Bohème, and he is currently appearing...
...worthy foil for Marton's villainy was Tomowa-Sintow, a lyric soprano with a pure, unforced voice that improved after a somewhat shaky first act; her fateful exchange with Ortrud in the second act's balcony scene evoked the stark contrast of light and dark that Wagner wanted. Alas, Elsa is not the most dramatically complex of Wagner's heroines, and Tomowa-Sintow was content to play her one-dimensionally. Although somewhat uncertain of intonation and raspy of tone, Nentwig admirably portrayed Telramund's moral degeneration...
...production by August Everding, general manager of the Bavarian State Theater, follows the contemporary European fashion of outfitting Wagner's operas in morally ambiguous shades of gray. His 10th century Brabant is a dour place; pageantry blossoms only during Lohengrin and Elsa's wedding, and the famous swan is banished to the world of the imagination. While this approach has a certain intellectual and historical validity, perhaps the time has come again for a romantic, representational Lohengrin, for Everding's interpretation is fundamentally at odds with the A-major radiance of the score...
That radiance is fully celebrated by Levine. At 41 already a brilliant conductor of Parsifal, he views Lohengrin as a kind of musical prequel to Wagner's last work. He adopted a daringly slow _ tempo for the Act I prelude, letting it burn with a fervid religiosity, but gave the chorus and onstage "brass players thrilling free rein in the opera's frequent boisterous moments. Levine has mastered the sense of timelessness so crucial to successful Wagner performances in general, and static works like Lohengrin in particular; one looks forward to the day, two seasons hence, when...