We’re heading back to Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts for this week’s Sunday Opera (11/26 3:00 p.m.) and the Bayreuth Opera's visiting production of Richard Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman.”
Their production is a long one-act (well over two hours) that tells the story of Senta (Elisabeth Teige) the daughter of a Norwegian sailor named Daland (Georg Zeppenfeld). Daland wants Senta to marry, and the hunter Erik (Tomislav Muzek) is happy to oblige, but Senta is in love with the fabled stories of ‘The Dutchman” who has been cursed to sail the seas of the world until he finds a faithful wife.
Senta decides that she will save The Dutchman, but he doesn’t believe her after overhearing a conversation between Senta and Erik. The Dutchman sullenly departs, not believing Senta, and to prove her faithfulness, she throws herself into the sea and to her death.
The cast is joined by Nadine Weissmann as Mary and Attilio Glaser as Daland’s steersman. Oksana Lyniv leads the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra and Chorus.
After the opera, we’ll stay down at the sea as Michael Kownacky brings you Ralph Vaughan Williams’ one-act opera “Riders to the Sea” based on the play by John Millington Synge about an Irish mother who loses all of the male members of her family to the sea. After that, it’s two more works about the briny by Frank Bridge and Henry Hadley.
We’ll wrap up our time together with an absolutely charming piece arranged by Paul Hindemith based on Wagner in the chamber work with the mindboggling title, “Overture to the Flying Dutchman as Played at Sight by a Second-Rate Spa Orchestra at the Village Well at 7 o’Clock in the Morning” which is delightfully played by members of the Berlin Philharmonic in a live recording.
We won’t be heading to the sea in ships, but we will be going there with some excellent music!