Siegfried/ Götterdämmerung review – not just praiseworthy but wonderful

Opera North, Royal Festival Hall, London
The epic power of Wagner’s Ring has rarely rung more true than in this imaginatively staged and beautifully played production

As Richard Farnes urged his Opera North orchestra into the final redemptive bars of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, one half expected the Festival Hall to burst into flames, the Thames to flood its banks and the lofty City of London Valhalla across the river to crumble to the ground as the composer more or less intended. Rarely can the worldly context of a Ring Cycle performance have better matched Wagner’s epic of power, greed and expiation than in these lurching catastrophic days of economic and political crisis. Wagner’s incomparable achievement felt more genuinely contemporary and immediate than ever.

Yet Opera North’s central achievement in this semi-staged concert hall cycle is to bring the focus emphatically back to Wagner’s music, not to his literary ideas. By the second half of the cycle, the rippling video backdrops that had seemed a promising expressive device in Das Rheingold had run out of originality. One was left to focus on the words (though there were complaints about the legibility of the surtitles), on the pared-back but imaginative staging by Peter Mumford and, above everything else, on the music, in particular the orchestral writing.

Continue reading...