“You think you’ve seen it all when you see mountains rising over the stage of Kleinhans Music Hall,” writes Mary Kunz Goldman in last Monday’s (5/8) Buffalo News (N.Y.). “How about a huge horse, striding in from the wings? … Perhaps prettiest of all was a sparkling, shimmering river. The images were the work of the local company Projex. Projex collaborated with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra for a condensed, narrated performance of orchestral excerpts from Richard Wagner’s opera cycle ‘The Ring of the Nibelungs.’ The images—the technology is called light-mapping—don’t use a screen. Instead, it bathes the entire stage area. Music Director JoAnn Falletta … has written the narration. Between excerpts, it tells the complex opera plots, stories from ancient Teutonic mythology. … The audience the night of May 6, from the groups of students to veteran concert goers, seemed caught up in the spectacle…. [When narrator] Douglas Zschiegner had to break the bad news, ‘Siegfried is murdered,’ a terrible gasp went up from the school crowd…. You don’t hear [Wagner’s] music much at Kleinhans … and the orchestra clearly embraced the music—its power and its delicacy…. The cathartic ‘Siegfried’s Funeral Music’ jolted the audience with its raw emotion.”
Posted May 16, 2017
