Before decamping for their customary residencies in Colorado and upstate New York, the Philadelphia Orchestra ushered in the warmer months with a complete concert staging of Tristan und Isolde – a choice that gave an entirely new definition to the concept of “summer loving”. In 1934, this ensemble offered the first uncut performances of the opera in the United States, but it had only been heard in excerpted form since then. Now Yannick Nézet-Séguin, preparing to conduct Wagner’s masterwork for the first time at the Met next season, gave himself a test run that proved to be already in perfect shape. Musically, dramatically and vocally, this Tristan set a high benchmark that many opera companies, with limitless resources at their disposal, could only hope to match.

Aside from the interesting local history, the performance held a poignant emotional dimension as well. Nina Stemme, perhaps the world’s reigning Isolde, intends to retire the role after the final concert on 8th June. My initial thought at the first intermission was to wonder why she’d give it up when she still sounds this good, but there’s something to be said for exiting at the top of your game. Stemme demonstrated absolute mastery from her first entrance to her final note, entirely inhabiting the character through voice, gesture and fearless acting choices. Her room-filling soprano remains a penetrating steel beam of sound, and if the occasional high attack sounded a tad sharp, flawless legato and even tone more than compensated.

Even with minimal direction, Stemme utterly convinced the audience that she was Isolde, moving from haughty petulance in the first act to sweeping infatuation with her beloved in the second. She remained thrillingly in character when she was onstage, even making a sip from a discreetly placed water battle in Act 1 seem like a swig of the love potion that binds her eternally to Tristan. Her Narrative and Curse emerged with wild fury, which contrasted beautifully with the rhapsodic stillness of her Liebestod. She even managed a striking visual cue, changing from an austere evening dress to a gunmetal-gray sequined frock for Act 2 – a literal representation of Isolde’s glowing passion.

It surely helped that Stemme had a practiced hand like Stuart Skelton as her Tristan. With stamina to spare, he never sacrificed tonal beauty for volume or vigor, sounding as fresh as when I heard him in this role at the Met a decade ago. Particularly in the demanding third act, Skelton proved a marvel, hushing his voice to a whisper before unleashing a penetrating outburst, representing Tristan’s delirium as he waits for Isolde’s promised return. Skelton and Stemme knew when to pull back and when to explode forth in the Love Duet, holding the crowd rapt. They made an ideal pair.

The entire enterprise was cast from strength, even down to the smallest roles: Lindemann Young Artist Jonghyun Park brought a melting tone to the Sailor’s Voice and the Shepherd, while Curtis Institute graduate student Nathan Schludecker was an urgent Steersman. Karen Cargill’s high-lying mezzo made her a gleaming Brangäne, especially as it sailed from Marian Anderson Hall from her placement in the corner of the third tier during “Einsam wachend in der Nacht”. A veteran of the role, Cargill convinced absolutely as Isolde’s devoted and distraught companion.

The rich-voiced bass Tareq Nazmi made for a deeply sympathetic King Marke, his devastation at Tristan’s betrayal palpable. When Marke returned in the third act to pardon the lovers, he projected a wounded nobility. Brian Mulligan was a dignified Kurwenal, although the orchestra covered him in spots, and Freddie Ballentine deployed his zesty tenor well as the sniveling Melot. The men of the Philadelphia Symphonic Choir made a rich impression in their first-act duties, no doubt benefiting from the participation of guest director Donald Palumbo, the Met’s longtime choir whisperer.

The singers occupied a makeshift platform toward the back of the stage, keeping the orchestra front and center. Good as they were, this felt appropriate – the playing was the true star of the afternoon. After overcoming some fussiness in the layering of sections during the Vorspiel, Nézet-Séguin tapped the full power of this outfit, with waves of luscious violin tone that balanced perfectly the wine-dark, foreboding quality of the lower strings. He culled gorgeous color from the woodwinds in the second act, and English horn soloist Elizabeth Starr Masoudnia was a riveting presence in the opening moments of the third, performing her solos from the choir loft. The orchestra’s energy remained tireless across nearly five hours, and as the soft glow of the Liebestod faded to silence, I wished the music could go on forever.

Cameron Kelsall | 02 Juni 2025

‘I am still looking for a work of equally dangerous fascination, of an equally shivery and sweet infinity, as Tristan. And I look in all the arts, in vain’.

So wrote Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, a reflection penned years after his break with the composer. The remark captures something essential about this Wagner opera: its unnerving beauty, its capacity to seduce and disarm, and its singular place in the emotional imagination of Western music. From the first suspended harmony of the Prelude to the final transfiguring swell of the Liebestod, this music offers not resolution but deferral – its chromatic tensions always searching, never settling.

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s concert performance of this monumental work, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, did not attempt to mitigate its dangers or soften its infinite yearning. Performed in its entirety for the first time by the Orchestra since 1934 – when the great Fritz Reiner conducted what was billed as the first uncut American performance – Tristan returned to the city in a concert staging with extraordinary immediacy. Stripped of staging but not of drama, the afternoon unfolded as an unbroken tide of harmonic ambiguity, orchestral color and psychological intensity that reaffirmed why Wagner’s meditation on love and death remains without parallel.

The drama unfolded as much from the stage itself as from a raised structure installed behind the orchestra – its bare, elevated surface faintly evoking the deck of a ship, as if recalling the vessel on which the first act unfolds. Descending onto the platform from backstage, the singers waited for their cues, paced back and forth with minimal gestures and encountered one another in a restrained but evocative staging conceived by Dylan Evans. Perhaps surprisingly, one of those conceptually ambitious productions that aim to overlay Wagner’s mythic structure with new interpretive ‘meaning’ was not missed at all. With physical action reduced to essentials, the Philadelphia Orchestra assumed the role of an emotional narrator.

Under Nézet-Séguin’s fluid, long-breathed direction, the ensemble revealed Tristan’s febrile architecture with remarkable transparency and control. The pacing was supple throughout, always responsive to psychological nuance – never indulgent, never rushed. The famous Prelude, often treated as a suspended breath, unfolded here with patient tension, each phrase tendered rather than declared. In the extended Act II love duet, the balance between stillness and volatility was finely judged, with textures that shimmered and smoldered without collapsing into inertia.

The orchestra’s expressive power was never more haunting than in the bleak desolation of Act III. From the opening bars, Wagner’s vision of inner disintegration – with the past dissolving into hallucination – found a piercing voice in the plaintive English horn solos played by Elizabeth Starr Masoudnia from the upstage platform used by the singers. Her tone – earthy, unvarnished and utterly human – seemed to emerge from silence like a memory breaking the surface of consciousness. Around her, Nézet-Séguin and the orchestra summoned a sonic terrain at once luminous and desolate, marked by half-formed harmonies and rhythmic decay.

By contrast, the Liebestod offered not catharsis but glowing suspension. The famous final chord – the long-delayed resolution of the ‘Tristan’ motif heard hours earlier – was voiced not as triumph or closure but as a kind of exhalation, tender and weightless.

Nowhere did the orchestra overpower the singers. Instead, it supported them with poised restraint and phrasing that responded sensitively to every vocal turn. In the title role, Nina Stemme offered a portrayal shaped by experience and intelligence. Announced as her final complete Tristan, this performance was anything but a farewell in decline. Stemme sang with stamina, control and dramatic insight, suggesting not fatigue but a kind of apotheosis – an artist closing a chapter on her own terms and in full possession of her powers. Her voice, though no longer in its freshest bloom, retained its core radiance and expressive flexibility, with a top that could still cut cleanly through the densest orchestral textures. What impressed most was not sheer vocal power but the emotional chiaroscuro she brought to each phrase, the way her tone could darken almost imperceptibly in moments of grief or disbelief, then soften into tenderness without losing shape. In Act I, as Isolde recalled tending to the wounded Tristan, Stemme’s lines were mirrored by Choong-Jin Chang’s solo viola, whose timbre captured the tenderness and ambivalence embedded in her memory. Isolde’s Act II entrance had the force of an invocation – quietly controlled but charged with suppressed urgency. By the Liebestod, she seemed to recede into the music rather than rise above it, her final phrases unfolding with a calm inevitability that made resolution feel both tragic and transcendent. This was not a performance that imposed itself on the role but one that revealed it from within.

In the role of Tristan – a quintessential heldentenor part – Stuart Skelton did not rely on sheer sonic force or clarion brilliance. Instead, he shaped the role with warmth of timbre and an unusually refined sense of phrasing, bringing a quieter intensity to the character’s unraveling. His top was present and secure, but what lingered most was the way he tapered lines, shaped dynamic shifts and allowed vulnerability to emerge without vocal strain. The long association between Skelton and Stemme – they have portrayed the couple on multiple occasions, including the 2016 Metropolitan Opera production – resulted in a duet of uncommon dramatic cohesion. Their Act II exchange unfolded with natural fluency, each singer attuned to the other’s breath and phrasing. In the long soliloquy of Act III, Skelton’s soft-edged diction and gradual decrescendo into near-whisper suggested a man suspended between consciousness and death, still clinging to a remembered voice. His performance, like Stemme’s, conveyed not just endurance but interpretive maturity – a fitting counterpart to an Isolde on the verge of farewell.

Karen Cargill was a compelling Brangäne, her mezzo-soprano rich and steady with a natural warmth that projected effortlessly from her position in the upper balcony during Act II. Singing from above heightened the scene’s tension while allowing her voice to float across the hall with a haunting clarity. She shaped her lines with care, imbuing Brangäne’s warnings with both urgency and restrained compassion. Tareq Nazmi brought a dark, resonant bass to King Marke, and his long monologue in Act II unfolded with nobility of line and quiet gravity. If his portrayal didn’t fully explore the emotional fracture beneath the character’s dignity, it nonetheless offered a poised, measured response to the chaos around him – rather less personal anguish than solemn reckoning.

Brian Mulligan brought a grounded presence to Kurwenal, though his baritone didn’t always rise above the orchestral texture – particularly in the outer acts, where greater vocal projection was needed. Among the supporting cast, Freddie Ballentine made a strong impression as the scheming Melot, singing with bright, incisive tone. Jonghyun Park delivered the Young Sailor’s lines and later the Shepherd’s plaintive Act III calls with lyrical poise, while Nathan Schludecker as the Steersman offered a sturdy contribution.

For all its minimal means, this Tristan left a lasting impression – not through spectacle, but through conviction, precision and emotional depth. Yannick Nézet-Séguin will lead a new staged production at the Metropolitan Opera next season. If this performance is any indication, it will be outstanding, at least musically.

Edward Sava-Segal | 03/06/2025

Höchste Lust!

The announcement that the Philadelphia Orchestra would do two performances of Tristan und Isolde at the close of this season took many of us by surprise. Not because it’s an opera—the Orchestra has done a number of concert and semi-staged performances (La bohème last year), and of course we share our Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin with the Met.

But Tristan isn’t just an opera. For many it’s the opera, and to undertake it is a Gradus ad Parnassum for sure. And for those who want to cut to the chase: it was a glorious success on virtually level. I’m going back in a few days for the second and last performance. For those who want details, read on.)

The near-capacity audience for last Sunday’s performance, the first of two, felt more than usually charged-up, and an atmosphere of gravitas radiated from both the house and the stage. Gravitas is not a term one would usually apply to Yannick, universally known by his first name here in Philly, where he’s become something of a favorite son. His devoted audiences here know to expect a few distinctive things about him:

One is his loquaciousness—it’s very common for him to begin concert by bringing out a hand-mic and chatting with the audience. (A few days before, he’d introduced a program that culminated in the Beethoven 9th by talking about the new restaurant in the Kimmel Center.) The other main feature for which Yannick is known is more musical—it’s his preponderance for fast tempi.

It says something about Tristan that neither of these was in evidence on Sunday. Entering quickly, after an appreciative nod to the audience, Yannick got things started without a word. And while the performance had forward momentum—comparing him to famous predecessors, it would be closer to Solti than Furtwängler—it too had gravitas, as well as a level of cohesiveness that belied his relative newness to the score. Only in a couple of places did he register as notably fast. One was a portion of the initial prelude, where the beauty of Philadelphia’s strings entering the music is something I will never forget. (Throughout, they played tirelessly and like gods!)

The other was the final “Mild und Leise,” which here emerged as surging and orgasmic, rather than reposeful. (Again, though maybe not for everyone, I found it spellbinding.) I wonder if the faster tempo was perhaps because it suited the Isolde of soprano Nina Stemme, whose presence—perhaps even more than Yannick’s—defined this event. Stemme, who for more than two decades has been the world’s preeminent Isolde, recently turned 62, and she had announced to the press that these two performances would be her farewell to the role.

Stemme’s thrillingly sweeping, dramatically detailed acting and textual specificity were no surprise, but what was even more gratifying is how much sheer voice she still has. The theater-filling amplitude, broad tonal color palate (from glowing top notes to sepulchral darkness in the low range), projection at both forte and piano – all this remains.

Tonal beauty also often does, especially in floating pianos and trumpeted upper-middle range tones, though the highest notes are now cut off quickly. Time has not completely stood still; it isn’t always beautiful, there can be a beat in sustained notes, and her legato line is now suggested more through canny artistry than seamless steadiness. (As I said earlier, Yannick’s orgasmic Liebestod tempo suited her very well.) At times, she reminded me of a great Isolde from the past—Martha Mödl, who is more noted as a singing actor than flawless vocalist. In short, it’s wise of Stemme to say farewell to this role now—which she did with consummate class and virtuosity.

Her Tristan here, as he was memorably also at the Met nearly a decade ago, is Stuart Skelton. He is not as specific or comfortable a stage performer as Stemme (while this a concert production, there as a fair amount of movement on a raised platform), but he has a genuinely beautiful voice — a treasurable rarity in this role!. Tristan’s ranting narrative passages in Act III were actually sung with beautiful tone, clear diction, and touching sincerity… and in so doing, what is often the least persuasive section of this opera became a highlight.

Karen Cargill was a vocally glowing and dramatically engaged Brangäne. Her lovely, blonde-toned mezzo has the open upper register this role needs, and though she didn’t quite float “Einsam wachend” as I wished, it was still very effectively delivered, shimmering forth from the top-tier of Marian Anderson Hall, high above the stage. (Intriguingly, Cargill’s tone—vocally “blonde” rather than “brunette”—often sounded more soprano-like than Stemme’s. Cargill made me wonder if she could successfully take on Isolde herself, as I recall thinking years ago of another great Brangäne, Florence Quivar, who was superb in an otherwise mediocre Tristan in Los Angeles.)

Tareq Nazmi’s towering physical presence and enormous, darkly compelling bass made for a near-ideal King Marke. As with Skelton, he took a passage—what’s often called, not entirely flatteringly, “King Marke’s Harangue”—that can feel over-long, and made it a highlight. Kurwenal can be a fairly thankless role, but especially in his Act III interactions with Tristan, baritone Brian Mulligan made them musically and theatrically compelling.

The smaller roles too were cast from strength. Tenor Freddie Ballentine (Melot) imbued the morally complex character with seriousness and a strong vocal presence. Nathan Schludecker’s secure baritone as a Steersman bodes for a strong career ahead. (He is currently pursuing a graduate degree at Curtis Institute of Music.) Tenor Jonghyun Park doubled as the Shepherd and as the Steersman who opens the opera—his fresh, gleaming tone in the latter’s opening unaccompanied song set a high standard for the rest and as he was situated in the second tier above the stage, gave it a thrilling sense of perspective. The Philadelphia Symphonic Choir, led by Donald Palumbo, were superb as always and as they had been just days before in the Beethoven 9th.

While this Tristan was a concert presentation, and wisely without some of gimmicks that have hampered previous semi-staged productions, director Dylan Evans provided some dignified, basic but effective moves that were enough to convey the story’s basics. (After all, Tristan isn’t exactly action packed).

Yannick will of course be conducting next year’s highly anticipated Tristan production at the Met. I’m guessing that part of the appeal of his doing it here in Philly was to gain further experience. If so… mission accomplished!

It’s also touching to realize that this represents a rite of passage. Stemme and Skelton have reigned supreme in these roles; now we await the passing of the torch to Lise Davidsen and Michael Spyres.

I feel optimistic about what’s coming. Meanwhile, as I said earlier, I’ll be attending again at Sunday’s final performance. If you’d told me a month ago that I’d be spending 10 hours with Tristan und Isolde, I wouldn’t have believed you, but such is the magic of this event.

David Fox | June 6, 2025

A Generous Gift of Profound Feeling and Pure Beauty

This is Yannick Nézet‑Séguin’s year for Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. This month, the indefatigable conductor and artistic director, who commutes between the Philadelphia Orchestra and New York City’s Metropolitan Opera, is leading two performances of the complete concert version in the City of Brotherly Love. The performances feature the warmth and power of the Philadelphia Orchestra (some 100 musicians), 40 men’s choristers from the Philadelphia Symphonic Choir (Donald Palumbo, director) and a spectacular cast of singers led by Nina Stemme.

Leaping ahead to next season at the Met, Nézet‑Séguin will conduct a new production of a fully staged version in March and April of 2026, at that time with Lise Davidsen as Isolde.

The Philadelphia event represents Yannick’s first time conducting this opera in its complete form, and the last time that soprano Nina Stemme—one of the great Wagnerian sopranos of the past half century—will sing the part of Isolde in the uncut edition.

One of those Philadelphia performances is already past (June 1) and the subject of this review. Concert versions of operas can be dreary affairs if the lead singers are huddled around the conductor, without significant movement or expression, and uninspired by the lack of staging, costumes, and colorful props. This is not the case with this production, permeated with a depth and warmth that is all‑enveloping.

The absence of scenery became an asset rather than a liability, as the clutch of lead singers was poised on scaffolding above the orchestra, allowing audience members to see and hear the vocalists completely. The scaffold provided a kind of walkway for characters to change position, to advance or recede as suggested by the music, to sit until their moment in the sun arrived. Here, the music came alive in a most vivid fashion, for there were no distractions to stand between audience and performers, but rather a direct encounter of singing and orchestral richness.

And what music it is. Yannick is sometimes accused of being too flamboyant or excessive in his conducting style, but this is Wagner, it cries out to be emotionally riveting, even taxing. Wagner’s music—and this is especially true of this particular music drama—is not something to be passively listened to, the way we might hear the ocean while lying on a beach. Instead, it demands advance preparation, participation and responsiveness, a union of the listener with some greater truth. In a word, it requires that the listener put in the work to complete an aesthetic experience.

In this production, the conductor maintains an energizing presence throughout three acts which, including two intermissions, come close to five hours of concentration, absorption, and (for many) pure rapture. The Philadelphia Orchestra surely has never sounded better, meeting and exceeding its own high standards through what must be an unusually long and demanding performative process.

But we come for the singing, and it was extraordinary. Stemme was a magnificent focus point, the polestar of this medieval tale of revenge and romantic love. She is leaving this role at the height of her powers, which include a tessitura that reaches deep, almost into the realm of the contralto. While she did overshadow her on‑stage partner, Stuart Skelton, in Act II, he rebounded in Act III, brilliant as the conflicted Tristan, his tenor voice clear and resilient. Karen Cargill as Isolde’s servant, Brangäne, gave a rich, evocative performance, adding another level to the meaning of love that is explored in this dramatic work.

So many wonderful moments adorn this production, including the evocative Shepherd’s Tune played with fluidity and ambiguity on the English horn by Elizabeth Starr Masoudnia. Truly, in these short measures, Wagner has created a miniature world of sound and mystery, and Masoudnia transformed this melody into a cry of the heart.

Hearing the Liebestod as sung by Stemme and Skelton, and later by Stemme alone, is an experience I will not soon forget. Hearty thanks to all involved for this generous gift of profound feeling and pure beauty.

Linda Holt | 06/01/2025