Claudio Abbado conducts a Wagner gala for the 1993 New Year’s Eve Concert

In the final years of his tenure as chief conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker, Claudio Abbado conducted acclaimed staged and concert performances of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, two operas he had never conducted in their entirety before. Abbado’s approach to the world of the musical dramatist was characterised by respect and patience, making him all the more successful in continuing the Philharmoniker’s illustrious Wagner tradition. He showed his particular flair for this repertoire from the offset with opera excerpts in a concert setting – as in the 1993 New Year’s Eve Concert.

Wagner’s scores demand transparency and highly differentiated timbres from the orchestra, while it is up to the conductor to ensure a good balance and a sensitive accompaniment. Under Abbado, the Berliner Philharmoniker succeed in both impressively. What is interesting about the programme for this New Year’s Eve is that it presents two rare phenomena in Wagner’s oeuvre in scenes from the early operas Tannhäuser and Lohengrin: While his operas are usually through-composed, Lied an den Abendstern is formally one of the composer’s few genuine arias. The duet between rivals Elsa and Ortrud in turn contains passages of vocal polyphony, which Wagner otherwise dispensed with in favour of text comprehensibility.

Without exception, the soloists of the evening were among the leading representatives of Wagner singing of their generation and highly respected guests of the orchestra: Cheryl Studer with her luminous, soulful voice, Waltraud Meier, who impressed with her slender yet expressive voice, Siegfried Jerusalem, hailed from Bayreuth to New York as a powerful heldentenor capable of subtle characterisation, and bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, whose artistry combines vocal power, warmth and precise articulation.

Berliner Philharmoniker

Claudio Abbado

Bryn Terfel

Cheryl Studer

Waltraud Meier

Siegfried Jerusalem