IN the audacity of its programming, Donald Runnicles's launch concert on Thursday night to his new season with the BBC SSO is unmatched.
Opening a season with a concert performance of an opera is not new. But to open a season with the first act of Wagner's music drama, Tristan Und Isolde, with acts Two and Three to follow at intervals, is a challenging stroke of planning. Will they remotely cohere, with Act Two following in November while the great climax of Act Three sits in the wings for five months? And does it matter?
I think it does, given the shattering performance of Act One on Thursday, where Runnicles's structural and emotional powers were focused on the music with such concentration and intensity that it was utterly coherent and almost demanded that the music drama proceed quickly to its next stage. That can't happen; so will the effect of this magnetic performance dissipate by November?
If any of the glue seeps into the next instalment, then that will be due in part to the gripping quality of the performance by the singers, every one of them making a debut with the SSO, and by the band itself, with high-voltage playing all night.
Ian Storey and Nina Stemme, in the title roles, were made for each other: expect meltdown in the erotics of Act Two. I have not heard a more impassioned account of the role of Brangane than that by Tanja Ariane Baumgartner. And the men of the RSNO Chorus sang so lustily I think they'd discovered the acoustic from heaven. The whole thing was prefaced by a surging account of Rachmaninov's Isle Of The Dead.
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