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OPERA REVIEW
Sing Me a Simple Ring
November 14, 2001
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By Janos Gereben
DRESDEN — Against a Semperoper audience as cold to music director Semyon Bychkov and the orchestra as the German winter winds that just blew into town Wednesday night, I felt flushed with the pleasure of a Die Walküre, unique in my two-score-plus live Der Ring des Nibelungen experience.
Check this out for a confident minority report: four hours of Wagner with every word of the text, each phrase of the music coming across with clarity, caring, involvement and passion.
If this, the second performance of the second opera in the Ring, is any indication of what the full cycle will be like when it arrives in 2003, the place for true Wagnerites to be is Dresden — the city which has been waiting for a Ring of its own since 1943. (A city as well of the most amazing blending, no, clash of neo-Baroque and post-Stalinist architecture.)
Bychkov not only gave a performance similar to the chamber-music like Boulez approach, supporting voices above all, but he also parsed phrases in a very different way from the usual interpretations. He seemed to rethink the work and present it as a "musical" — that is, music theater — not as an "operatic," "big-time symphonic" performance. Wagner himself, music director of this very house in 1843, would have approved, I think. The great climactic moments were still there, but not even these "stepped on" the text. I cannot understand how Bychkov succeeded where just about every other conductor fails in holding the huge orchestra to a whisper, and yet not throttling it. Still, there it was: a Walküre clear and simple, communicating consistently and fluently, hours of music coming across as an integrated structure — absolutely wonderful, and if Bychkov is not a prophet in his own home, so much worse for them. This quiet, low-key approach also did wonders for the uneven cast, especially the Wotan, who sings a good portion of those four hours. Peteris Eglitis, a bass-baritone perhaps at the beginning of a Wagnerian career, is precisely the kind of music-theater singer who fits in perfectly with this production. He has a warm, beautiful voice, great diction — and a range of about five notes.
In the long Act 2 dialogues with Fricka (the tonight-fabulous Iris Vermillion) and Brünnhilde (Deborah Polaski, in fine form), and then in the heartbreaking Magic Fire finale with Polaski, Eglitis was superb; when it was time for music in the high range of the role — there was trouble. Also, if he had to run the usual struggle against the 100-piece band, Eglitis would have been a disaster. Instead, Bychkov embraced and supported the voice, and the result was outstanding — a believable, clearly communicating Wotan. Help too came Robert Gambill's way. He is a fine "baritenor" whose Siegmund had nothing helden in strength or character, but he fit into the ensemble just fine. Evelyn Herlitzius' Sieglinde seemed vocally and dramatically overwrought to me. There is no reason to huff and puff if there is no wall of sound from the orchestra to blow down. The other singers, especially Eglitis and Vermillion understood this well; Polaski belted it out at times (while blending her voice with the others most of the time) simply because she can. Another big voice, Kurt Rydl (Hunding) did his part of belting, but for the bad guy, it's OK. I am not sure if it was just tonight or if it happens frequently, but the quality in Rydl's voice seems to have gone down several notches. In the really bad news department: eight terrible Walkyries, a bunch as bad as I have heard, including one who was bleating hideously. Unfortunately, Bychkov was so consistent in his approach that he didn't drown out even the "Ride" — I wish he had. The strings and woodwinds of the orchestra, by the way, were consistently wonderful, but the brass of the world's oldest orchestra could use some new blood; some appeared as tired as if playing nonstop since the mid-17th century.
The physical production marches in step with the music — Willy Decker's direction and Wolfgang Gussmann's sets are simple, striking, in service of the text and of the work. Some two decades ago, I saw Albert Takazauckas' Carmel Bach Festival production of The Magic Flute where the set consisted of six chairs; it worked very well, but I never dreamed of coming upon a Ring with chairs. Welcome to Dresden. Yep, it's chairs, lots of them, in changing configurations, used simply and imaginatively. It is startling only when the curtain goes up for the first time, and the stage appears as the continuation of the auditorium, rows of empty chairs taking up about half of the stage's depth. Wotan is sitting in this "extended audience," reacting to the story, taking part in it, eventually leaving. The set itself is a shallow, striking room of bleached wood, a mirror for the door, a wedding picture (of Hunding and Sieglinde) on the back wall. When Winterstürme arrives, instead of the door flying open, the back wall disappears . . . revealing more rows of chairs going upstage into infinity. The rows are later configured to be the battlefield or the rocky mountain. In Rheingold, according to photos, the chairs made a pretty good river. Still, everything is kept clear and simple. Weird stuff — the bread-and-butter of contemporary Ring productions — is at a minimum, but when Gussmann is having fun, so does the audience. The Walkyries, for example, descend on gigantic silver arrows pointing downward, a bit like an old Monty Python sketch — and it's memorable mostly because there are few other shticks or tricks. Thank Walhalla for that and for a Walküre where the entire production team refrains from showing off, in favor of presenting the work as that old Semper Opera music director would have wanted it.
(Janos Gereben is arts editor of the Post Newspaper Group and technology editor for www.the451.com. You can contact him at janos451@earthlink.net.) ©2001 Janos Gereben, all rights reserved |