Campus to contribute to Wagner's Ring Festival LA
For the first time since the Olympic Arts Festival in 1984, Los Angeles is the site of a major, citywide cultural event. Ring Festival LA is a celebration in honor of the LA Opera’s first complete presentation of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and UCLA has planned several programs that highlight the strength, emotion and continuing relevancy of the composer’s epic work.
From the LA Opera's production of "Gotterdammerung," one of a series of four operas in Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle.
“Der Ring Des Nibelungen” is a series of four operas — “Das Rheingold,” “Die Walkure,” “Siegfried” and “Gotterdammerung” — that tell a mythic story intertwining the Norse Gods and the heroic lovers Siegfried and Brunnhilde. Composed to be performed either as stand-alone operas or in a “cycle” lasting more than 15 hours, the Ring Cycle is one of the most famous and contentious pieces in operatic history.
The LA Opera will perform four complete ring cycles between May 29 and June 26, but Ring Festival LA began April 15 and will continue until June 30. Composed of concerts, film screenings, panel discussions and art showings, Ring Festival LA is a collaboration between the LA Opera and more than 75 city institutions, including UCLA.
James Conlon, music director of the LA Opera, will direct a May 27 concert by the UCLA Philharmonia, the University Chorus and the Chamber Singers.
“UCLA is an integral part of the infrastructure that makes it possible for us to have great art — the university itself creates the great artists, audiences and critics that are necessary to the ‘formula,’ or perhaps I should say the ‘chemistry’ that make a great city and great art,” said Maestro James Conlon, the Richard Seaver Music Director of the LA Opera.
“We are honored that UCLA and the Hammer Museum have responded to the Ring with some of the most vigorous, probing and provocative Festival programming,” Conlon said.
Two major events in the works highlight the multidisciplinary interest in Wagner: a concert to be performed on campus and a conference held at the Hammer Museum that will examine social concerns related to Wagner.
The Thursday, May 27, concert will be held in Royce Hall and will be a joint effort among UCLA Philharmonia, the University Chorus and the Chamber Singers. Conlon will be guest-directing them in their performance of pieces by three “recovered voices” composers.
Neal Stulberg, director of orchestral studies at UCLA, worked closely with Conlon to develop the program for the May 27th concert.
“James Conlon has long championed the works of the “recovered voices” composers — composers who were persecuted by the Nazis and whose artistic voices, and, in some cases, whose lives were cut off by the Nazi regime,” said Neal Stulberg, director of orchestral studies at UCLA.
Conlon explained that people do not realize how rich the musical tradition of the time period truly was: “With its racist ideology and systematic suppression particularly — although not exclusively — of Jewish musicians, artists and writers, the Third Reich silenced two generations of composers and, with them, an entire musical heritage.”
He sees it as vital to restore these composers to the acclaim that they so richly deserve, and to restore the musical continuum that he feels was ruptured by Nazi suppression. Part of this restoration is accomplished through musical performances like the one he and Stulberg have planned for May 27.
Stulberg explained that he and Conlon worked closely together to develop a unique program consisting of five works, including two pieces each by Franz Schreker — “beautifully light and transparent” — and Alexander Zemlinsky — “colossally powerful.”
But the emotional center of the evening will be Arnold Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw,” which Schoenberg composed here in Los Angeles in 1947. “Warsaw” was inspired by accounts Schoenberg heard from concentration camp survivors, and Stulberg, who will be narrating during the performance, described the piece as “searingly powerful.”
Although Conlon is a Grammy Award-winning conductor who has worked with opera companies all over the world, including Milan’s Teatro alla Scala and New York’s Metropolitan Opera, this will be his first time working on campus with UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music.
“LA Opera and UCLA have a great deal of ‘DNA’ in common—many of our artists, coaches, donors, directors, designers and administrators are Bruins,” Conlon said. Although Stulberg has been bringing students to visit the opera for years, Conlon noted that the chance to conduct UCLA students would be “an irresistible lure to get me to travel to Westwood!”
Placido Domingo In "Die Walkure."
Then from June 1-2, the Hammer Museum will host a two-day conference, “Wagner in L.A.: The Opera of the 21
st Century?” The conference has been planned by Kenneth Reinhard, associate professor of English and comparative literature. Reinhard has arranged for a variety of speakers from diverse backgrounds, including musicology and philosophy.
The conference will be split into two parts, the first of which will deal with the question of Wagner’s influence on Los Angeles and cinema, and the second of which aims to reconcile the artistic tradition of the composer with modern theater, philosophy and political theory.
UCLA’s involvement with Ring Festival LA not only demonstrates the continued relevance of classical art on modern society, but also the university’s dedication to owning its role as one of the city’s leading intellectual and cultural institutions.
