Music pulsated with drama and was a sonic spectacle

YOU couldn't expect a season finale to pack a bigger punch than the one delivered in Nottingham by The Hallé on Tuesday night. Wagner's Tannhäuser Overture followed by Beethoven's 9th Symphony: music which pulsates with drama and sonic spectacle.

- By WILLIAM RUFF

Wagner's opera is all about a young knight who is torn between a selfish life devoted to all sorts of sinful, sensuous pleasures (represented by the goddess Venus) and a life of spiritual purity (embodied in his beloved Elizabeth). The fact that Tannhäuser only achieves salvation through Elizabeth sacrificing her life for him makes the opera somewhat hard to take these days.

Luckily, Wagner sums up the story in the Overture, one of the great orchestral showpieces, which is dominated by Tannhäuser’s Ode to Venus; the whirling, orgiastic Venusberg music and (especially) the Pilgrim’s Chorus, the sort of music for which the term “tingle factor” could have been coined.

Kahchun Wong paced the whole Overture beautifully: the opening quiet, contemplative, mirroring the Pilgrims heard in the distance. The huge climaxes were massive, the mighty chorale theme made resplendent by trombones and trumpets whilst the strings cascaded around them. The Venusberg music, by contrast, had lightness and fluidity, a wicked allure which made sinful pleasure seem highly attractive.