New Palace Opera concert performance: 6.30pm, Sunday 17 November 2024, St John’s Waterloo, London SE1 8TY
Click here for tickets (an early-bird discount ends on 31 October)
Wagner – Wesendonck Lieder, with soprano Anna Loveday
Finney – In Memoriam – A Funeral March (first performance)
Wagner – Die Walküre, Act III
New Palace Opera presents a concert performance of the glorious final act of Die Walküre, which, after the magnificent Ride of the Valkyries, portrays the final confrontation of Wotan and Brünnhilde, before father and daughter are reconciled in the opera’s justly famous Farewell scene, in music of heart-melting beauty.
Wesendonck Lieder is the set of five songs, here arranged for orchestra, in which Wagner indiscreetly set the poems of his lover Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of his then patron, Otto. Two of these songs allude directly to Tristan und Isolde, the opera he was composing at the time, which, among other matters, is a story of love and betrayal.
The funeral march In Memoriam, which receives its premiere at this performance, commemorates the tenor Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who died aged 29 in 1865, a year after creating the role of Tristan in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. During lockdown, Jonathan Finney noticed a 13-bar fragment in The Diary of Richard Wagner, 1865–1882 that he didn’t think he had ever heard. Wagner went to his desk on hearing of the death of Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, his first Tristan, in 1865 aged 29, and dashed off this sketch. Finney suggests it sounds a bit like Tristan and a bit like the grail knight music of Parsifal. As the fragment doesn’t really end, it lends itself to a speculative composition on where it might go, and so Finney has composed a funeral march (some ten minutes) in the manner of Wagner. Listen here to it sketched in piano score on YouTube.
For this perhaps reckless enterprise Finney has drawn on his experience of making chamber-orchestra arrangements of The Flying Dutchman and Die Meistersinger von Nϋrnberg for Fulham Opera and, last year, orchestrating and performing Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht for full orchestra. Finney composed his own opera, A Kind Man, which was performed at Hoxton Hall in 2022.
Die Walküre, Act III
Brünnhilde – Shannon Roberts
Wotan – Gerrit Paul Groen
Sieglinde – Anna Loveday
Gerhilde – Charlotte Richardson
Ortlinde – Claire Filer
Waltraute – Grace Maria Wain
Schwertleite – Gráinne Gillis
Helmwige – Corinne Hart
Siegrune – Claire Williams
Grimgerde – Wendy Silvester
Rossweisse – Caroline Carragher
Jonathan Finney conducts the New Palace Opera Orchestra