There's a tendency to treat Weber's opera Der Freischütz as though it's just a step away from Wagner, even though, at its 1821 premiere, Wagner was still two decades away. Conductor Tomás Netopil seems to have made a specialty of this work -- he led a new production in Vienna in 2018, as well as this live performance at the Aalto Theater in Essen, Germany -- and he resists the Wagnerite tendency. It's natural enough, given the supernatural and sometimes gory subject matter, to make the work sound like psychological late ...
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There's a tendency to treat Weber's opera Der Freischütz as though it's just a step away from Wagner, even though, at its 1821 premiere, Wagner was still two decades away. Conductor Tomás Netopil seems to have made a specialty of this work -- he led a new production in Vienna in 2018, as well as this live performance at the Aalto Theater in Essen, Germany -- and he resists the Wagnerite tendency. It's natural enough, given the supernatural and sometimes gory subject matter, to make the work sound like psychological late Romantic opera, but its appeal lies in the relative restraint of Weber's music, and a lighter touch, such as Netopil brings here with the Essener Philharmoniker, yields big dividends. Focus in sampling on the numbers for Agathe, the figure at the center of the gunplay, who here gets not a Wagnerian soprano, but the delightful, Schubertian voice of Jessica Muirhead. Netopil matches her with slimmed-down string sound and a lively mood that matches the folk derivation of the story. The...
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