Tonight brings a return to the Proms, to hear Midori, Andris Nelsons, and the CBSO (Strauss, Walton, and Prokofiev). Tomorrow morning, at some unearthly hour, I shall be off to Heathrow to catch a flight to Munich, and thence to the Bayreuth Festival, where I shall be seeing four of this year's five productions: this year's new offering Tannhäuser as staged by Sebastian Baumgartner, Lohengrin (Nelsons again, in Hans Neuenfels's production, new last year), Parsifal (I cannot wait to revisit Stefan Herheim's production, again conducted by Daniele Gatti), and finally Tristan (Christoph Marthaler's staging).
In the meantime, here is an excerpt showing that, whilst we may never hear this conductor's like again, bronchially-challenged audiences are nothing new. Yet listen through, and marvel at the magnificence of the brass. The chorus is not bad either...:
