Top soprano wows audiences at Shrewsbury Symphony Orchestra concert

Elinor Rolfe Johnson stunned the audience at Shrewsbury's Alington Hall, with a moving performance of Wagner's 'Liebestod' from Tristan & Isolde, accompanied by the Shrewsbury Symphony Orchestra. Review by D.S. Lewis. Images by Andy Bell Photography

There is a strange intimacy to be found in sitting silently in a crowded auditorium where all are listening to notes laid down in musical hieroglyphs by a hand and brain long since extinguished.

Yet here I am, in the Alington Hall, at Shrewsbury School, on a chilly Sunday afternoon in November, bathing in the Shrewsbury Symphony Orchestra’s delightful performance of the prelude and finale of Richard Wagner’s ground-breaking opera, Tristan und Isolde, the timeless love story where death is welcomed by the doomed lovers and thereby vanquished t