Saved events

BBC SO/Wigglesworth

A portrait of Rachel Nicholls wearing a floral velvet blazer

Ryan Wigglesworth conducts his own symphonic shortcut through the culmination to Wagner’s Ring and Schoenberg’s seminal monodrama Erwartung.

In the last instalment of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Götterdämmerung, a world of greed and corruption ends and we glimpse a radiant dawn – the possibility of a new, better world taking its place. It is the work in which Wagner beat the ‘grand opera’ tradition at its own game and wrote the best orchestral music of his career. But at five hours, it’s also rather long. Ryan Wigglesworth conducts his own reduced symphonic journey through the opera’s essential, world-changing moments.

Before Wagner’s message of hope for a new dawn, we get a glimpse of his most intense vision of romantic love and Schoenberg’s striking mono-dramatic monument to modernism, Erwartung

The performance will finish at approximately 9.30pm. It includes a 20 minute interval.

Barbican Hall