The glories of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra's concert performance of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde were Christine Brewer's Isolde and the playing of the orchestra, conducted by an inspired Jonathan Nott. Tristan is an opera in which, famously, little happens - it's as much a philosophical discourse on the transcendent power of erotic love as it is a dramatic narrative - and is a piece that's well served in the concert hall. But the brilliance of Nott's interpretation was its expressive and emotional completeness; the way that he and the Bamberg players conjured the mythic universe inhabited by Wagner's exalted lovers.
Right from the start, this was a performance of extremes. The prelude began with aching, pregnant pauses between its phrases, but grew into a torrent of overwhelming passion, as if containing in microcosm the expressive dualities of the opera: night and day, love and death, reality and illusion. The climax of this flexibility, the sense that every emotion could turn into its opposite in an instant, was the act two love duet, in which Christian Franz's raw-voiced but psychologically acute Tristan conjoined with Brewer's Isolde in Wagner's most rapturous music. At the peak of the whole scene, as the lovers consecrated their love under the cloak of night, King Marke's arrival shattered their reverie, and heralded the onset of day, sealing their fate.
John Relyea was an outstanding King Marke, and his long monologue had a moving nobility as he lamented Tristan's betrayal. Jane Irwin's Brangäne was a worthy foil for Brewer's Isolde, especially in their fraught exchanges in act one, and Juha Uusitalo was a bluff, imposing Kurwenal. Franz's gruff Tristan struggled through a cold in the long soliloquies of act three - he looked and occasionally sounded like he might genuinely expire, popping pills and drinking medicine on stage - before Isolde at last arrived. Brewer's final transfiguration had a vivid, hallucinatory power, and Nott's fleet-footed conducting created a gossamer web of sound around her voice: an effect as transitory and indelible as a dream.
