With this expansive new production of Tannhauser, Melbourne Opera takes not just a great leap forward but a hop-skip-and-jump across the road: from its normal cosy home at the Athenaeum to the ...

THE final arrivals from the Deutsche Oper Berlin were just a nail-biting few hours before this performance of Wagner’s four-hour epic began, a train journey from London replacing a cancelled flight.

Of all the mature operas of Richard Wagner, “Tannhauser” requires perhaps the greatest indulgence from all but the most uncritical of Wagnerites. For one thing, it is long and repetitious, lasting ...

This stellar evening was about this near legendary conductor and one of the world’s great orchestras. It was sophisticated music making that inhabited these first moments of the Wagnerian maturity.