Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Wagner: Der fliegende Hollander

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

My Halloweentide offering tells the tale of the cursed and storm-tossed Dutch sea captain whose tortured soul is redeemed by the sacrificial love of a merciful young woman. As with all his operas, Wagner wrote his own libretto for "The Dutchman," taking elements from a gothic romance about a phantom ship. (An English language play on that subject seems to have inspired the German poet Heinrich Heine.)

This is one Wagner opera that is not too long for my 210 minute timeslot. It was only three years ago at Halloweentide that I last broadcast "The Dutchman," employing one of the German Pentatone label's issues of all the famous Wagner operas in celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the composer's birth in 2013. All those Pentatone releases were recorded as concert productions at the Philharmonie hall in Berlin, with Marek Janowski conducting the musical forces. These productions were broadcast over Radio Berlin.

Now listen to another recent concert production of Der fliegende Hollander from the Concertgebouw hall in Amsterdam. It was recorded live in performance there in May of 2013. Thinking of the phantom ship's docking at Sandviken in Norway, it's a Norwegian baritone Terje Stensvold who portrays the Dutchman. A young Latvian conductor, Andris Nelsons directs the famous Concertgebouw Orchestra, joined by the combined choruses of Bavarian Radio, West German Radio Cologne and North German Radio. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of the Netherlands issued the opera under its own RCO label on two compact discs.