Two years after the debut of the Bayreuth Festival’s first female conductor, Nathalie Stutzmann became the second to lead a Richard Wagner opera in the Festpielhaus' famous covered pit. The 58-year-old former contralto, fresh off her first season as Atlanta Symphony Orchestra music director, drew a luminous performance of “Tannhäuser” on Friday night in a revival of the Tobias Kratzer 2019 production — the one featuring the title character in a clown suit and a murder in a Burger King parking lot. “It’s good news to be second,” Stutzmann said.
During times of war, can you still make music? Can you enjoy being celebrated in Bayreuth while bombs are falling in the Donbass? Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv is caught somewhere between art and war.