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| Brünnhilde (Kelly Cae Hogan) Images: Clive Barda |
Royal Festival Hall
Siegmund – Michael Weinius
Sieglinde – Lee BissetHunding – James Creswell
Wotan – Robert Hayward
Brünnhilde – Kelly Cae Hogan
Fricka – Yvonne Howard
Gerhilde – Giselle Allen
Ortlinde – Kate Valentine
Waltraute – Heather Shipp
Schwertleite – Claudia Huckle
Helmwige – Katherine Broderick
Siegrune – Sarah Castle
Grimgerde – Fiona Kimm
Rossweisse – Madeleine Shaw
Peter Mumford (concert staging,
design concept, lighting, projection)
Joe Austin (associate director)
Orchestra of Opera North
Richard Farnes (conductor)
A day is now a very long time
indeed in politics; would that it were otherwise. It certainly is in the Ring, as we move forward a generation to
Die Walküre. I had two principal reservations
for the ‘first day’ proper of the trilogy ‘with preliminary evening’, the odd
minor niggle, and otherwise nothing but praise. Opera North continues to put
many starrier, yet in no sense superior, companies to shame.
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| Sieglinde (Lee Bisset) |
Robert Hayward’s Wotan was for
me the weakest link. It was not a bad performance, and his facial expressions
conveyed a great deal (at least for someone as lucky as I to be seated towards
the front of the Stalls, or indeed for those watching on the big screen in the
Clore Ballroom, for which many thanks should go to the Southbank Centre). His
vowels were often odd, though, and there was less of an expressive range than
one might have hoped for. Otherwise, there was little to complain about in the
cast, and, as I said, much to praise. I have heard more heroic Siegmunds than
Michael Weinius, but his was a thoughtful, eminently musical performance
throughout. Siegmund’s love for his sister-bride was palpable. And how could it
not be, given so fine a performance as we heard from Lee Bisset? For me, she
was the star of the show: no mere victim, but a woman with agency, however much
circumstances – and bourgeois society –might have repressed her. I cannot
instantly recall a more compleat Sieglinde ‘in the flesh’, perhaps because I
have not heard one.
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| Hunding (James Creswell) |
Yvonne Howard’s triumphant –
though for how long? – Fricka was again pretty much everything it should have
been. Her dialectical path to victory over her husband chilled as it must, not
least since the orchestra (on which more soon) told so very different a story,
a story of, in Wagner’s celebrated phrase, the ‘purely human’. Her vassal,
Hunding, was in the excellent hands – and voice – of James Creswell. Brutal
authoritarianism is the character’s stock-in-trade; so it was that of his
interpreter. Latent slavery in the
family,’ we learn in both The German Ideology of Wagner’s
contemporaries, Marx and Engels, and in Hunding’s treatment of Sieglinde, ‘is
the first form of property. … Division of labour and private property are,
after all, identical expressions.’ And Wagner never had any doubt that marriage
was slavery; nor did we. Kelly Cae Hogan made for a wonderfully impressive
Brünnhilde, her transformation as witness to the truest of love both plausible
and highly moving. Hers, moreover, seemed to be a staged performance in all but
name; this was certainly an artist who lived the role. All of the Valkyries were
on excellent form. One might have taken dictation from them individually, and
yet their ensemble was equally excellent. I doubt I have heard finer.
That other reservation was
Richard Farnes’s conducting of the first act. It certainly was not anything to
which anyone could reasonably object. However – and mine seems to be very much
a minority report here – I did not really find that it caught fire until toward
the end of the final scene, just, actually, as fire began to blaze as part of
the (now somewhat irritating) projections above the stage. As soon as we
returned after the first interval, there was, by contrast, no letting up. It is
the mark of a great Wagner conductor that he can weld the second act of Die Walküre together as not only a
convincing whole, but perhaps as the most profoundly moving act in the entire Ring (at least until one comes to the
next, and the next!) Amongst conductors I have heard ‘live’ in this work, Bernard
Haitink and Daniel
Barenboim have proved themselves true masters in that respect. Farnes now
joins their company. There was, both here and in the third act, an almost
infinite variegation of tempo, without ever losing sight of the whole.
Orchestral balances were just
as fine, likewise the often wondrous playing of the Orchestra of Opera North. If
I found the strings a little subdued in the first act, they were, by the time
of Wotan’s Farewell, not far off a match for a great Central European orchestra,
with a sheen to match. The otherworldliness of what we heard during the
Annunciation of Death could scarcely have been outdone, brass and timpani
playing their roles as the characters-cum-commentators they are. As Ludwig Feuerbach
wrote, in his Thoughts on Death and
Immortality, a crucial, acknowledged influence upon Wagner: ‘Only when the
human once again recognises that there exists not merely an appearance of
death, but an actual and real death, a death that completely terminates the
life of an individual, only when he returns to the awareness of his finitude
will he gain the courage to begin a new life and to experience the pressing
need for making … that which is actually infinite [death] into the theme and
content of his entire spiritual activity.’ The orchestra was not the least of
Wagner’s instruments on this evening in having us realise the full truth of
that message. And so, Siegmund’s heroism proved to be as much that of the
orchestra as his own – which is just as it should be.
