Judgment of the four performances of Wagner’s Ring Cycle will resonate internationally for State Opera of SA. Our critics offer their views.
  

DAS RHEINGOLD By Michael Morley
WHEN THE GREAT designer and theorist Adolphe noted the discrepancies between conventional 19th century stagings of Wagner and what the music conveys, he went on to suggest that each work calls for an individual style of staging – what nowadays in either its persuasive or soi-disant version is known as a “concept”. Recently, however, Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, in which music, drama and text combine, has often been replaced by stagings in which music, design and narrative turn into yet another trip on the pomo/decon railway to nowhere. Elke Neidhardt’s and her design team’s take on Das Rheingold sets out to embrace this approach, with varying degrees of success. The Gods seem marooned in a white space, dressed in white/cream costumes from some high-class op shop; Donner sports one white boxing glove and an under-size cricket bat; giants Fafner and Fasolt are dressed in luminous green road workmen’s oufits; and Fricka and Freya flounce around in teased-up blonde wigs, 1950s cocktail frocks and tops that echo the cover of The Female Eunuch. Such a medley of sign systems speaks not so much of coherent contrast with the music and narrative as a latter-day Autolycus snapping up unconsidered trifles. Far better, then, to concentrate on the music and individual performances. And here John Wegener’s richly characterised and superbly sung Alberich carried all before him. His 1998 performance as Wotan stood out in a strong cast: if anything, his riveting, three-dimensional depiction of this frustrated, malevolent yet human figure is even more memorable – part Richard III, part Rigoletto, and wholly compelling. Similarly impressive is Richard Greager’s spirited Mime, avoiding false histrionics and despatching the often cruel vocal line with ease and style. In the key role of Wotan, John Bröcheler seemed a touch underpowered at times, the voice focussed and true, the characterisation a work in progress (though it is clear from the dress of Walküre that the character gains significantly in stature and vocal presence). On the other hand, Christopher Doig as Loge is, alas, over-parted: the character’s mercurial shifts and raisonneur insights go for little, and the voice is too often ragged and inflexible. No trace of inflexibility in the performances and singing of the Rhine Maidens, whose teasing and toying with Alberich was seductive and droll enough to (almost) offset their rather rum outfits (blue wetsuits, with identification down their thighs.) At this stage the goddesses, (Liane Keegan’s imposing Erda aside), seem somewhat peripheral – vocally secure but occupying no real place in the work’s power dynamics. The other hero(es) of the afternoon are conductor Asher Fisch and the ASO. Fisch’s view of the work affords an interesting contrast with conductor Tate’s from the 1998 Ring Cycle. He favours long lines and clear textures, with a sure sense of how to pace both paragraphs and longer sections, and is always attentive to his singers. This is not Richard of the Heavy Hand, but the Wagner admired by Fauré and Chabrier, and whose seductive influence Debussy sought to exploit and exorcise in Pelléas.

DIE WALKÜRE By Roger Knight
SUPERLATIVES LAVISHED ON this new Ring Cycle have entered the history books. And deservedly so: the sets by David Scott Mitchell for Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the second of the four Ring operas, were indeed resplendent and the audience’s reaction almost unprecedentedly ecstatic. The famous 15-minute standing ovations will pass into the stuff of legends, along with the Wunder Bar set, with its cast of punk Valkyries, that served as backdrop for the famous “Ride”. And in Lisa Gasteen, this Adelaide Ring found a leading woman in a thousand; a figure that multiplied by 10 and turned into dollars would give you some idea of the nightly fee that this vocally and dramatically fabulous Brünnhilde henceforth commands on the world’s opera-house stages. In the circumstances, even with its $15 million price tag, Adelaide still got its Ring fairly cheap – and it can always hire out the Wunder Bar for parties to recoup any shortfalls. But there’s the odd thing – and it’s a tribute both to Elke Neidhardt as producer and the singers involved – that the truly great sections of this sometimes infuriatingly uneven work were when little or no stage spectacle was involved. Neidhardt has done some very questionable things on the Australian operatic stage in the past, and signing her seemed a quixotic gesture on the part of Stephen Phillips, State Opera’s general director. Yet she has matured and he was vindicated. Her handling of quieter, more inward scenes of Walküre was simple (concealing a wealth of finely-honed professional experience), singularly un-quirky and deeply moving. Take the incestuous brother and sister, whose encounter and mutual recognition dominates the first Act. On previous experience, Stuart Skelton might be presumed to make an eloquent Siegmund, but Neidhardt succeeded quite beyond expectation in drawing a dramatic, deeply affecting and “right” performance from the vocally radiant Deborah Reidel. The same applies to the great duets and solos for Brünnhilde and Wotan (John Brocheler, vocally secure and dramatically more interesting as the night wore on) that brought Act III to a properly anguished close. Neidhardt is on record saying that she feared her production of The Ring would get a poor reception in Germany – where the style dubbed “Eurotrash”, complete with knickers-dropping Brünnhildes, is still the tacky fashion. The international audience gathered in Adelaide obviously thought differently. The Wunder Bar may have had them in fits of laughter but what got them on their feet was a production of Walküre true to the essentials of Wagner.

SIEGFRIED By Michael Morley
OVER THE YEARS, commentators have devoted much effort to the question of whether Siegfried is a genuine hero, a holy fool or a slightly dimwitted equivalent of Monty Python’s “naughty boy” Brian. There can be no question, however, that the Siegfried of State Opera SA’s third opera of Wagner’s tetralogy displayed heroism and real valour under fire – in this case, singer Gary Rideout had the unenviable task of stepping in at six days’ notice to take on this demanding role and perform it without the opportunity of a full stage rehearsal with the orchestra. Though perceptibly tiring at the end of a long evening, Rideout displayed musicianship, real steel in the voice when called for, and a fine understanding of the character’s journey. Equally commendable was that he managed to negotiate the moves and blocking while hampered by a frankly ridiculous outfit – floppy T-shirt, baggy shorts and equally baggy trousers – that looked like some hand-me-down from an amateur beach blanket musical. While there can undoubtedly be productive debate over some of the design elements and the direction of this Ring, it is hard to know what to make of the confused array of costumes and often screaming colours. Why, for instance, the Woodbird sports green shorts and a screaming pink fright wig, while she cartwheels on to the stage, and intermittently waves around a large balloon set of pink lips might be a question best left to connoisseurs of unco-ordinated colours. And what to make of the glaring contrast between the austere, elegantly burnished walls of the design for Act III and Wotan’s off-white, seemingly all-in-one outfit (complete with unmatching pink plastic visor), that might not have seemed out of place in a D-Grade, sci-fi horror film? Is a puzzlement, as Oscar Hammerstein observed. Although the design for Act I suggested nothing so much as a backyard badly in need of one of those TV blitzes, the sets for Acts II and III offered – along with Nick Schlieper’s glowing and superbly atmospheric lighting – the most memorable and unfussy images of the production thus far. The use of dozens of green/dark green balloons floating above the stage, like so many airy stalagmites, to suggest both a spreading tree and a forest is an inspired touch: shimmering, floating and providing a wonderful visual correlative to Wagner’s musical scenic suggestions. And the image that opens Act III – the spear set in a shaft of light in the middle of a bare stage, with Wotan and Erda positioned beside it, is a genuine coup de theatre, which found its equivalent in John Bröcheler’s powerful and moving exchange with Liane Keegan’s equally impressive Erda. This scene featured some of the finest singing in the production, along with Richard Greager’s outstanding (both vocally and dramatically) Mime in Acts I and II. Inevitably, (given what had already been heard earlier in the cycle) Lisa Gasteen’s Brünnhilde carried all before her in the love scene with Siegfried: this is a towering performance, especially in vocal terms. While the orchestra sounded a little unsettled in Act I, it dispelled all sense of this in Act II, with some sensuous, beautifully measured playing. If Rideout was the actual hero of the evening, he could not have done it without support offered by the orchestra under Ascher Fisch’s responsive direction.

GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG By Roger Knight
THE GIBICHUNG’S PLACE is somewhere scenic on the Rhine. German war-lords built big in those days. The huge stage of the Festival Theatre is opened up right to the back. Much of Götterdämmerung, the final opera in Wagner’s cycle, is either set there or in close proximity, which is where the famous immolation scene, complete in Adelaide with water-curtain and fire, takes place at the very end of the opera. Any producer worth their wage can make something of this, particularly if they’ve got a dramatic soprano even half as good as Lisa Gasteen (Brünnhilde) – in absolutely radiant voice despite a wretchedly damaged ankle. The crowning achievement of Elke Neidhardt’s Ring, however, lay earlier in evening, in the scenes that culminate in double marriage chez Gibichung at the end of Act II. Musically speaking, much of the act is second-rate Wagner, but what Neidhardt did was to turn a dramatic farrago into an electrifying piece of theatre that held the audience riveted from end to end of this act’s 60-odd minutes. She was aided by a cast that included, along with the serviceable Siegfried of Timothy Massard, not only Gasteen – singing at times with almost total abandon – but also the awesome Hagen of Duccio dal Monte, marvellously apt performances from the Gibichung head honcho Jonathan Summers and his hapless sister Joanna Cole, and a gloriously full-throated male chorus of Adelaide’s finest. The outcome was one of the most convincing operatic rescue operations that I have ever experienced. Then, of course, there was that final scene of flames and water. For this, I’d found a seat at the back of the theatre, seated quite literally between two Valkyries. Götterdämmerung is their night off, and what better way to spend it than to check on big sister’s attempts to burn the house down when she sets alight to Siegfied’s corpse and rides off into the fire? Gasteen’s performance hereabouts simply took the house by storm. And so did Wagner’s music, music that from Hagen’s murder of Siegfried onward takes on an dimension that makes you realise yet again why the old monster was such a spell-binder. Yet it’s a spell so effective in musical terms that all the heavily hyped high-tech, as elsewhere in this production, seemed largely an irrelevance to an imaginative world so well served not only by Gasteen but also by an ASO playing at Götterdämmerung’s end like angels incarnate under Maesto Fisch’s inspired direction. Nothing more was needed. Perhaps, however, I’ve missed something in State Opera’s clever market strategy: a Ring not only for those who have imagination but also for those who haven’t. No wonder they’re playing to packed houses.

THE MUSIC By Graham Strahle
IN THE SAME WAY that Elke Neidhardt’s production is outstanding for its story-telling clarity, conductor Asher Fisch imparts to this Ring Cycle a most supple, responsive clarity to the orchestral playing. The ASO sounds surprising small and chamber-like in his hands, and it would appear that he is at great pains to allow the singers to come through clearly. At times he goes a little too far, for although there is hardly a moment when the singers are not completely audible, the orchestral tone sometimes lacks solidity and sheer visceral weight. But what Fisch and the ASO achieve is an unusually beautiful, breathing lyricism: particularly from the strings, the playing is distinguished by a gently pulsing, floating quality. The feeling early on is that here are two Rings – one the bold, freely interpretative version of Neidhardt, who sees the work as primarily a piece of theatre (which, according to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk or “total artwork” concept, it is not), and Fisch’s more sympathetic version. Certainly the humour and irreverent cheek are entirely hers, not his, and Fisch is clearly more concerned with adjusting to the individual needs of the singers, working in with their different approaches to tempo, than to responding to Neidhardt’s stage ideas. The visual kitsch, for example, that so spectacularly transforms the Ride of the Valkyries in this production, might have been correspondingly souped up musically, but it isn’t. In the end though, a unity is achieved, and this is because Neidhardt does not attempt to upstage the music with theatrical invention but rather allows it full space to play its full and ample part. Notably in Götterdämmerung, in which music becomes the main transportative ingredient, she dispenses with complexities of set design and rather presents a purified human drama of character and chorus, allowing Wagner’s richly embroidered score to do the communicating. While the ASO sounds overly soft and restrained in Das Rheingold and the early part of Die Walküre, its playing gathers warmth by the close of the first act of the latter opera, and sounds magnificent by Act II. By the time of Hunding’s slaying of Siegmund, it acquires a satisfying, brute-nosed power. The playing is finest in Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, reaching a full lyrical flowering in those operas. The key is Fisch’s ability to lengthen out string sound while keeping pace to phrases: the result is a delicate pliancy that enables the orchestra to perfectly partner the singers. Tempos are fast in places – even Siegfried’s funeral music has uncommon push – but Fisch varies the speed considerably in his handling of individual scenes, and sometimes he drops the pace right back, most notably in Das Rheingold. Throughout, tempos feel alive and keenly responsive to the drama. Fisch superbly accommodates the production’s three star singers, Duccio Dal Monte (Hagen), John Wegner (Alberich) and Lisa Gasteen (Brünnhilde). The only casting problem concerns the central figure of Siegfried, as neither Timothy Mussard nor substitute Gary Rideout quite hold the role convincingly. Even so, strengths abound everywhere in this Ring, both visually and musically. It is a magnificent triumph.