Royal Festival Hall
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| Images: Simon Jay Price |
Woglinde – Sofia Fomina
Wellgunde – Rowan Hellier
Flosshilde – Lucie Špičkova
Freia – Lyubov Petrova
Fricka – Michelle DeYoung
Erda – Anna Larsson
Froh – Allan Clayton
Loge – Vsevolod Grivnov
Wotan – Matthias Goerne
Donner – Stephen Gadd
Fasolt – Matthew Rose
Fafner – Brindley Sherratt
Mime – Andrew Thompson
Alberich – Robert Hayward
Malcolm Rippeth (lighting)
Katie Thackeray (deputy stage
manager)
Ted Huffman (consultant)
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)
It is, of course, quite an
achievement in itself for a symphony orchestra to perform Das Rheingold or indeed any of the Ring dramas. It does not happen very often, not nearly so often as
it should; for given Wagner’s crucial musico-historical position, this is music
that should stand at the very centre of their repertoires – just as Beethoven
should at the centre of opera orchestras’. One can envy the practice of many
German orchestras, which play for both opera house and symphony hall, but envy
does not necessarily take us very far. (Actually, as Alberich will show us, it
does, but perhaps not in the best direction.) In a closer-to-ideal world,
admitted Vladimir Jurowski in the programme, there would have been a theatrical
production, but the Ring ‘would be
the end of Glyndebourne as a venue – it would simply fall apart if we tried to
squeeze the orchestra into the pit!’ Why an achievement to perform it, though?
Because Wagner’s dramas offer a standing rebuke to neoliberalism. It is not
that there is any lack of ‘demand’; look how performances, especially in
Wagner-starved Britain, will often sell out within a few minutes. But however
great the demand, they will not ‘pay for themselves’. They are a communal
undertaking, explicitly intended and functioning as heirs, political, social, religious,
and dramatic – the distinctions make no sense – to the Attic tragedy of
Aeschylus and Sophocles. (For more on that, please click here.)
Moreover, for the London
Philharmonic Orchestra to give such an outstanding orchestral performance, in
what must be the first time many of its players will have performed the score,
is again cause for thanks and rejoicing. The LPO strings could hardly have
proved more protean, the variegation of their tone a challenge to many an opera
orchestra, that variegation surely born in part of Jurowski’s strenuous demands.
Detail was present and vivid to what sometimes seemed a well-nigh incredible
decree. For instance, the brass spluttering as Alberich floundered in the Rhine,
for instance, looked forward suggestively to Strauss’s critics in Ein Heldenleben. If the anvils did not
sound as they might in one’s head, when do they ever? That was no fault of the
excellent nine players on three sides of the stage. The Prelude sounded – and,
given the pipes behind the stage – unusually organ-like: not just the timbres,
but also the insistence on the E-flat pedal, quite beyond any I can recall
previously having heard. Such was the revealing side of Jurowski’s tight leash
and rhythmic (harmonic rhythm included) exactitude, Bruckner coming strongly to
mind.
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| Fasolt (Matthew Rose), Freia (Lyubov Petrova), and Fafner (Brindley Sherratt) |
And yet, as so often, Jurowski
himself proved too unyielding, almost Toscanini-like, if on a lower voltage.
His again was quite an achievement, given that this was the first time he had
conducted the score. There is no reason to think that subsequent performances
will not reap rewards. By the same token, however, it would be idle to think
that this compared to a Daniel
Barenboim or a Bernard Haitink, although it certainly knocked spots off the
incoherent incompetence Wagner generally suffers under Haitink’s
successor at Covent Garden. To Londoners who hear little or nothing else, this
would rightly be a cause for rejoicing. Moreover, the sometimes almost
caricatured formalism of Jurowski’s approach – I wondered at times whether he
had been reading Alfred Lorenz! – was not without its rewards. Was structure,
however, too clarified, even simplified? For every revealing instance of
opposition between different varieties of thematic material – Fricka’s
disruptive, recitative-like ‘Wotan, Gemahl’, for instance, amidst Wotan’s
orchestral dreaming of Valhalla – there were at least two passages that were
distinctly subdued, almost as if concerned that the orchestra would threaten
audibility of the singers. (It never did, by the way.) It was wonderful to hear
so much harp detail as the gods crossed the rainbow bridge, and there is
certainly good, Feuerbachian dramatic reason to emphasis the unreal beauty of
the fortress and the path thereto. It need not, though, and surely should not
come at the expense of its sacerdotal power. Novelistic, almost domesticated
narrative sometimes threatened, in a dialectical turn, the integrity of musico-dramatic
form. Yes, this is epic, yet it is anything but undisciplined. Das Rheingold, however, is a very
difficult work to bring off: in some ways more so than the subsequent Ring dramas. Even Barenboim
has sometimes erred a little too much towards Neue Sachlichkeit here. That there was a good deal to engage with
critically, however, the foregoing merely illustrative, suggests that Jurowski’s
Wagner is and will continue to be something to take seriously.
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| Alberich (Robert Hayward) and the Rhinemaidens (Sofia Fomina, Rowan Hellier, Lucie Špicková) |
Vocally, as will almost always
be the case, the bag was mixed. I could not resist the sense that, to a certain
extent, at least Matthias Goerne’s Wotan was a little too much reliant on stock
emotionally stunted sociopathy. Only towards the end, after the arrival of Anna
Larsson’s typically excellent Erda, did he seem more truly ruminative. That is
a crucial moment, of course, in his road towards Schopenhauerian conversion,
but Wotan is never merely a figure of force. ‘Nicht durch Gewalt!’ is, after
all, his injunction to Donner. Robert
Hayward’s Alberich went awry a few too many times; at his best, however, he
proved darkly impressive. The giant pair of Matthew Rose and Brindley Sherratt
also duly impressed as Fasolt and Fafner, the lovelorn brother genuinely
moving, the sheer malevolence of Fafner at and after his death chilling indeed.
Vsevolod Grivnov and Adrian Thompson offered detailed, dramatically alert ‘character
tenor’ portrayals of Loge and Mime respectively, Allan Clayton’s light,
bright-toned Froh a proper contrast. Michelle DeYoung’s Fricka, often
imperious, was sometimes a little on the wobbly side, but there was little harm
done in that respect, nor in the not dissimilar case of Lyubov Petrova’s
cleanly sung Freia. Above all, there was a fine, almost Mozartian sense of
conversation in passages of much dramatic to-and-fro. If only there had been a
little more conventional drama. There nevertheless remained much to admire –
and far from only because it happened at all.
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| Loge (Vsevolod Grivnov) |
