To Richard Wagner, Tannhäuser was the problem child in his canon, the opera he never got right. The finicky Canadian heldentenor Jon Vickers—unsurpassed in his generation as the Master’s Siegmund, Tristan, and Parsifal—studied the role but refused to perform it, regarding it as the “denial” of everything he believed in. Incidentally, it’s also a holy terror to sing. But is the medieval minstrel of Wagner’s ravishingly melodic tapestry truly so unrelatable? One the one hand, he’s a sensualist, the temporarily willing boy toy to the pagan goddess Venus. On the other, he’s in the thrall of his overlord’s niece Elisabeth, an earthly Madonna. Zurich’s Tannhäuser is the strapping former Mozartean Eric Cutler, whose transition into the heroic Wagner rep has been earning him great press. His love interests are Rachael Wilson (Venus) and Christina Nilsson (Elisabeth)—aspects of the Eternal Feminine that are sometimes effectively portrayed by a single soprano. The cult favorite Christian Gerharer appears as Tannhäuser’s good buddy Wolfram, who lacks his pal’s sex drive but chastely adores the saintly Elisabeth, whence the opera’s elegiac hit tune (cue the Song to the Evening Star). We’re on our guard about the director Thorleifur Arnasson, of Iceland, who advanced to the majors in 2024 with a symbol-clotted, barely animate Tristan und Isolde for the Bayreuth Festival. Will he notice that this opera requires a great deal more action? But we’re very interested in the conductor Tugan Sokhiev, whose biography tracks that of the Promethean Valery Gergiev in ways that are almost uncanny. Like Gergiev, Sokhiev is Ossetian, from the rugged region of the Caucasus. Like Gergiev, Sokhiev studied in St. Petersburg with the legendary maker of maestros Ilya Musin. And like Gergiev, Sokhiev skyrocketed to the top of the Russian music world at an early age. But as kingpin first of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre and now Vladimir Putin’s music czar of all Russia, Gergiev, 72, has rendered himself unemployable in the West. Whereas Sokhiev, formerly music director of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, is taking off among us like a shot. —Matthew Gurewitsch