Kansas City Symphony: Matthias Pintscher - Wagner's Valkyrie

Kansas City Symphony: Matthias Pintscher - Wagner's Valkyrie at Helzberg Hall - Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

Wagner wrote Siegfried Idyll as a birthday gift for his wife Cosima after their son's birth, turning private devotion into music. The Kansas City Symphony opens April 10 with Matthias Pintscher conducting the chamber version of Siegfried Idyll—intimate music whose private origins deepen the contrast with the opera to come.

After intermission, Act I of Die Walküre trades the intimacy of a birthday gift for Siegmund and Sieglinde's doomed love story. The change in scale gives the concert its charge. Soprano Natalya Romaniw, tenor Issachah Savage, and bass John Relyea step into the storm, and Wagner's music becomes huge, inevitable, and utterly merciless.

Pintscher doesn't dilute the collision. The program moves from whispered devotion to operatic catastrophe, and the contrast makes both halves hit harder. You hear Wagner at his most protective in the first half, then at his most dangerous in the second—same composer, same night, opposite ends of human feeling.

At Helzberg Hall in Kansas City, Missouri, this is Wagner in two contrasting forms: a chamber work and the first act of an opera, not the entire cycle. The intimacy of Siegfried Idyll makes the leap into Siegmund and Sieglinde's tragedy all the more dramatic. Hear Wagner's intimate and operatic sides on April 10; get tickets for the performance.