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Articles tagged with: Camilla Nylund

Vienna Aisle: Inside reeling mind of Tannhäuser via a bold psychological thriller at the Staatsoper

Oct 31, 2014 – 4:20 pm
Tannhauser (Robert Dean Smith) finds a sympathetic spirit in a young shepherd (Annika Gerhards). (Michael Poehn)

Review: Serendipity delivered me to the Vienna State Opera on Oct. 30 to take in director Claus Guth’s surprising, indeed completely out of the box and captivating production of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser.” It wasn’t just that the Wiener Staatsoper was in play on a night when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra – the object of my week in Vienna – wasn’t performing one of its four concerts at the Musikverein: The opera at hand was “Tannhäuser,” which the Lyric Opera of Chicago will be mounting later this season and which I had not seen in some time. ★★★★

Riccardo Muti’s starry Beethoven Ninth opens Chicago Symphony season in cosmic fashion

Sep 19, 2014 – 10:08 pm
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Review: The cantata Beethoven composed to Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” – that is, the grandiose finale to the Ninth Symphony – may be a rousing crowd-pleaser, but it’s also a good deal more. It’s the peroration of a sweeping dialectic on man’s fate, a closely and tumultuously argued essay spun out in wordless majesty for three-quarters of an hour before the first syllable is uttered.Such was the sum and the magnificence of music director Riccardo Muti’s season opening performance of the Ninth Symphony with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Sept. 18 at Orchestra Hall.