Teodor Currentzis acclaimed in May

Teodor Currentzis does not finish joining his musicAeterna Orchestra on stage, and immediately screams of admiration and ecstatic acclamations rise from the packed audience. After Brescia and Modena, Currentzis and musicAeterna also reached Florence, Italy, the Teatro del Maggio Musicale (present here for the first time), proposing the Ring ohne Worte, that is, Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung 'without words', without singing; a compendium of excerpts from the Ring tetralogy entrusted solely to the orchestral dimension, as Lorin Maazel stitched them together almost forty years ago, in response to a request from a well-known record label to make a CD demonstrating the technical marvels of recording at the time, with the participation of the Berliner Philharmoniker. From the Prelude of Rhinegold to Brunhilde's Holocaust, an hour and a bit more of a Wagner for everyone. An operation not unlike what the legendary Leopold Stokowski used to do in the 1950s and 1960s with his 'symphonic syntheses'.

(Credit Gianluca Monasta)

Listening to the wordless Ring from Currentzis and animAeterna is like witnessing a collective magic ritual. And Currentzis, this conductor of Greek origin but with Russian training and heart, idolised and debated, is the bewitching sorcerer who celebrates it. On the podium, the thick score squared off on the music stand, a distant and enigmatic rock-star aura envelops him; he wears a sleeveless dark jacket, to the benefit of his biceps, and leather leggings. His whole body participates in the ritual: his hands, which renounce the baton, seem to mould the sound like a master potter does with fresh clay; his arms stretch, sway, spread as if mimicking the wingspan of a seagull.

(Credit Gianluca Monasta)

And so the Prelude from The Rhine Gold is like an immense sea, the hammer blow of the god Donner has the crash of a cataclysm, the Calcade of the Valkyries gallops as wildly as can be, Siegfried's F funeral March also knows a Yankee exuberance, the death of Brünnhilde is rendered with emphatic violin arches. However, the Wotan's Farewell, rendered with slender sound planes, is almost moving. The musicAeterna professors, a legion of a hundred or so elements and perhaps more, are a truly portentous machine: they play like invaders, they participate in the ritual complicitly, compactly, generously, dazzlingly, satisfying Courrentzis' highly personal reading in every way. A reading of undeniable and, indeed, witch-like virtuosity, which is, however, all too often played on extreme excesses, in the dynamics, in the timing, in the sound, and aims at a rhetoric of effect that is often an end in itself. With the risk, averted a few times, of slipping into kitsch and turning Wagner's music into a mere, exaggerated soundtrack. Which is such, however, as to send the audience into raptures.

(Credit Gianluca Monasta)

Wagner / Maazel, Der Ring ohne Worte, Teodor Currentzis, musicAeterna Orchestra. Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Theatre