Schiller Theater, Berlin
Siegfried – Lance Ryan
Mime – Peter Bronder
The Wanderer – Terje
Stensvold
Alberich – Johannes Martin
Kränzle
Fafner – Mikhail Petrenko
Erda – Anna Larsson
Brünnhilde – Iréne Theorin
The Woodbird – Rinnat Moriah
Guy Cassiers (director, set
design)
Enrico Bagnoli (set design,
lighting)
Tim van Steenbergen
(costumes)
Arjen Klerkx, Kurt
D’Haeseleer (video)
Michael P Steinberg, Detlef
Giese (dramaturgy)
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui
(choreography)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)
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| Image: (c) Monika Rittershaus |
And so, the Berlin State
Opera’s Ring nears completion.
Nothing has changed with respect to the bafflingly vacuous production served up
by Guy Cassiers and his colleagues from the Antwerp Toneelhuis. It is not that
ideas are banal or underdeveloped; rather, there seem to be no ideas at all, a
truly extraordinary state of affairs when it comes to Wagner, of all
dramatists. The production apparently aspires to the condition of something one
might see or have seen at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, whether Otto Schenk or
the still worse Robert Lepage, albeit with refined visual taste. Quite why
anyone would think tasteful Wagner desirable is quite beyond me. There are
pretty stage effects, sometimes from video, sometimes not, but effects without
cause they remain. Oddly, given the plentiful use of video, the dragon is
conjured up by the Eastman Company – yes, I am afraid the dancers are back –
and some sheets. It starts off rather well, viewed with disinterested æsthetic
contemplation, only to degenerate into a vision more akin to a group laundry
activity. There is doubtless some enjoyment to be derived from the lithe
dancers, choreographed well enough in the abstract, but what any of it might
have to say about the Ring is not
even obscure. If Cassiers presents, as is claimed, a Ring for the twenty-first century, may God have mercy upon our culture-industry-enfeebled
souls. Politics, religion, any variety of thought, even any variety of drama,
have been banished to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it is enough to
have one wish to embark upon a spot of time travel.
Daniel Barenboim and the
Staatskapelle Berlin came to the rescue. I have not heard a better conducted,
better played Siegfried, even from
the Royal Opera and Bernard Haitink. The Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle may have offered
breathtaking orchestral virtuosity in Aix-en-Provence, but there was something
of virtuosity for its own sake in that case, partly, I think, because Rattle’s
reading failed to dig anything like so deep. This was Barenboim at his more
than estimable best. The great paragraphs of Wagner’s imagination unfolded with
unforced, unexaggerated inevitability, not monumental in, say, the
Knappertsbusch mode, but teeming with dramatic life born of the musico-dramatic
material. Scenes, dialogues, phrases were sharply, colourfully characterised,
playful yet steely Beethoven to the fore in the final scene of the first act, a
grinding sense of peripeteia
possessing us at the opening of the third. There was none of the reluctance one
encounters from lesser conductors to let the orchestra speak as Greek chorus,
no alleged ‘consideration’ for vocal fallibility. This was above all orchestral
drama, as fully achieved in a Furtwänglerian sense as I have heard from
Barenboim in Wagner.
Lance Ryan had his moments as
Siegfried, especially during the second act. Up until the scene with
Brünnhilde, I should have said that at least he did not tire – quite an
achievement in itself – but alas, a pattern of too much shouting and not enough
singing took its toll. Iréne Theorin’s Brünnhilde, by contrast, was highly
variegated in tone, at times almost too much, having one strain to hear the
words. A rather wooden Wanderer from Terje Stensvold was shown up by Johannes
Martin Kränzle’s vivid, detailed Alberich. Peter Bronder was very much the
singing actor as Mime, stronger in tone than one often hears, but sometimes
edging too much, against Wagner’s urgings, toward caricature. Mikhail
Petrenko’s voice seemed to have lost some of its darkness, but there could be
few real complaints about his Fafner. Anna Larsson’s otherworldly depth of tone
reminded us why she is very much the Erda de
nos jours. Rinnat Moriah navigated the Woodbird’s lines with admirable
ease. It remained, however, Barenboim’s and the Staatskapelle’s show.
