The first evening of Opera Australia's Ring cycle raised more questions than it answered. Had director Neil Armfield and designer Robert Cousins treated Das Rheingold the way Wagner himself envisaged it, as a "preliminary evening" before the three main days, a tragicomic satyr play - in the terms of Greek drama - before the weightier tragedies to come? Or had they seen it as part of an integrated whole in which the main dramatic and visual ideas of everything that would follow were revealed for the first time?
After Die Walküre the answers to both questions might, it seems, be yes. The variety-show allusions of Rheingold may be nowhere to be seen, but some visual ideas are common to both - the mass of humanity that represents the Rhine in the very first scene of the tetralogy returns briefly at the beginning of the third act of Walküre as the Valkyries descend to harvest their latest crop of fallen heroes, while the collection of stuffed animals that accompanies Wotan's first appearance and apparently symbolises Armfield's idea of the Ring as an eco-parable, hangs in the air throughout the second act, while the action takes place on a helical roadway around it.
Other elements, though, are quite new. There's a naturalistic hut for Hunding and Sieglinde in the first act that is straight out of Little House on the Prairie, and a snowstorm to go with it, while, at the other extreme, a bare, raked stage for the opera's final scene with a ring of magic fire like a giant gas-cooker could have come from an abstract Wieland Wagner production half a century ago. Once again, though, the ideas seem piecemeal, disconnected responses to individual dramatic situations rather than elements in a coherent vision of the cycle as a whole.
When the performances are involving much of that hardly matters, and through the first act of Walküre the protagonists do make it all hang together. Stuart Skelton's thrillingly ardent, impulsive Siegmund is nicely contrasted with Miriam Gordon-Stewart's smaller scale but touchingly vulnerable Sieglinde, while the pair are sharply counterpointed with Jud Arthur's menacingly controlled Hunding. Elsewhere, though, that sense of involvement is more fleeting, and the response of singers to each other far more approximate. During the second act it does snap into focus as Jacqueline Dark's Fricka unloads a marriage's-worth of furious resentment and infidelity onto Terje Stensvold's still stolid Wotan, but as Susan Bullock's Brünnhilde delivers it, the Annunciation of Death hardly seems to faze Skelton's Siegmund at all. Here and elsewhere conductor Pietari Inkinen's slow tempi and calculated detachment hardly help matters either.
It's virtually impossible for Wotan's farewell not to raise the emotional temperature at least a few degrees, however. Bullock and Stensvold certainly do make something involving out of those final pages, even if the orchestral sound ideally needs more radiance, and the distracting echo caused by the theatre's electronic enhancement that affects all the singers when they stand in a particular spot downstage surely should have been ironed out before now.
Further performances 29 November, 9 December. Box office: +61 3 9685 3700.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion