Next month, Andris Nelsons makes his debut at Bayreuth, conducting the new production of Lohengrin that opens the festival. The Birmingham audience that has supported Nelsons so well during his first two seasons as the City of Birmingham Symphony's music director got a preview of what will be the next milestone in the young Latvian's burgeoning career, as he signed off with a concert performance of that work.
The cast was entirely different from the one that will be on stage in Bayreuth, where Jonas Kaufmann, no less, will take the title role. But there was still more than enough evidence of the sweep and dramatic excitement of Nelsons's Wagner conducting. Hearing that score in the marvellous Symphony Hall acoustic – with the CBSO on top form and its adult and youth choruses combined with the men of the London Symphony Chorus arrayed behind it – was a sumptuous treat in itself.
Some of Nelsons's tempi were dangerously slow, but other sections fizzed with energy, the huge dramatic spans of each act were effortlessly sustained, and the dramatic climaxes vividly realised.
The cast was generally a fine one, too. As Lohengrin, Lance Ryan made up in reliability what he lacked in tonal allure and subtlety, with any quiet singing strictly reserved for his final-scene narration. For beauty of tone, one had to look elsewhere, especially to Hillevi Martinpelto's exquisitely musical Elsa, giving shape and meaning to every phrase, and to Kosta Smoriginas's sonorous Herald.
Gidon Saks's King was tremendously authoritative, Eike Wilm Schulte's Telramund wonderfully judged and articulated. Lioba Braun's sexy, scenery-chewing Ortrud threatened to steal the show, but in the end it was Nelsons's vital control of every element that left the biggest impression.
