2023-11-13 13:38:28
You can start Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung” scenically either way. In Brussels, the visual artist Romeo Castellucci, as his usual enigmatic and awkward arranger, gave up some erratic rebuses in “Rheingold” about golden hoops, black oil, Greek reliefs, a hundred extras, black kings, child gods.
This often leads, in a seductive, playful and intentional way, on false trails without any results. But in any case, the audience has something to marvel at, to explore, to question themselves in their “Ring” expectations of the opera tetralogy, which at the moment seems somewhat drained of meaning.
In Zurich, on the other hand, where host Andreas Homoki started in the “Ring” in the spring of 2022, you know almost everything in advance, there are hardly any surprises, and you quickly let yourself be sedated by the meaning of the goings-on between complex family-enmeshed light-people. like black alves, demigods, people and animals roam past you.
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Which is easy in that, right from the start, everything moves along in a labyrinthine, identical salon sequence between beds, chairs, armchairs, desks and cupboards – just as we are all too familiar with from the set designer Christopher Schmidt. Even the castle of the gods, Valhalla, which has apparently already been occupied, has only ironically shrunk to an oiled ham in a gold frame.
For more than 14 hours of opera, you are almost never challenged with questions because the director’s answers are obvious to the experienced “Ring” puzzler. The complex game about the ring, power and love, which can be easily unraveled here, has somehow remained at the upper bourgeois, anti-capitalist, once revolutionary reading of Patrice Chéreau for the “Ring of the Century” in 1976.
That means: sparsely furnished villa interiors, spear and floppy hat, braid coat and winged helmet, breastplate and white nightgown, even a cute dragon the size of a room. While the 150th anniversary of the festival and “Ring” is gradually approaching in Bayreuth, in Zurich, where the four-part series was largely conceived, yesterday’s exegesis is being stirred up. With a cold, manageable result.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus Zurich Opera House “Twilight of the Gods” by Richard Wagner
Source: Monika Rittershaus/Zurich Opera House
But that doesn’t matter, the current trip like the one for the complete foursome from May is definitely worth it. Because musically, another, wonderfully motivic Wagnerian world opens up here. This is also due to the general music director Gianandrea Noseda.
The Italian proves to be a competent, questioning, urgent and reserved Wagner conductor. Who doesn’t place so much value on discharge and overwhelm, mystical obfuscation and dark grandeur, but rather prefers to structure, reveal, enjoyably color, and enjoy parlando and instrumental-vocal communication in the comparatively small house with the motivated Philharmonia Zurich.
This makes for wonderfully exciting listening that constantly keeps you paying attention, sometimes makes you smile, sometimes makes you wonder in surprise. Here you can experience a conducting reading that is not at all know-it-all, humane and always stays on the sound carpet, which invites, takes you along and motivates. And that you like to follow. Because in Wagner’s delicious maze you really discover something new, hear the familiar differently, and invent new references.
Expected interactions
In addition, people tend to ignore the lazy, unambitious wasteland of the scenic, made from a directing kit for beginners, in which there is at least highly professionally crafted but to be expected personal interaction.
In addition, the cast of singers is a joy: in “Rheingold” Matthias Klink’s extremely sophisticated, rhetorically tenor-sharp fire god Loge and Tomasz Konieczny’s Wotan, whose language is much clearer here than in Bayreuth. In “Walküre” the radiant debutant Eric Cutler and the lyrical, girlish Daniela Köhler as a sisterly and not particularly close amorous Wälsung couple. In “Twilight of the Gods” the black-voiced, concentrated Hagen played by David Leight (also “Siegfried” Fafner) and the debuting Daniel Dirthard as the captivating, alert Gunther.
But above all, from the “Walküre” and “Siegfried” onwards, this new Zurich “Ring” is the brilliant debut stage for Camilla Nylund and Klaus Florian Vogt, both – one can say so – Bayreuth veterans. They did well to try out the monster roles, probably the last, really big vocal challenge for each of them as the culmination of cleverly planned careers, in the intimate Zurich Opera House in order to be ready for all the offers that will now flood in.
Andreas Homoki’s “Twilight of the Gods”
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For Vogt it was a little easier. He has proven his Wagnerian skills for decades now on the Green Hill and elsewhere around the world, organically feeling his way up the ladder of role difficulty – the silvery children’s trumpet of Lohengrin, Walter, Parsifal, as Siegmund and finally as Tannhäuser, he had a rich middle range and darker tones won.
As Siegfried, he is not only an ideal blonde hero of today, naive but not stupid, even lovable. He sings the role effortlessly, always with reserves, with organically developed vocal registers. A naturally matured performer can be heard, but in full possession of his vocal means, which is as rare as it is pleasant to hear. A pleasure, from the first to the last note, contemplating his “holy bride”.
The unsurpassable dream maiden
This applies even more to Camilla Nylund, who cleverly acquired the role in Zurich via her first Isolde. In “Walküre” as well as in “Siegfried” she is currently the unsurpassable dream maiden because she has retained her girlish, transparent, calmly trumpeting top notes. In the “Götterdämmerung” the warm middle range is occasionally washed over by the orchestra, but it is a straightforward, unfortunately misguided husband savior.
Here too, the transformation into a revenge beast and then into a wife who confidently destroys the rotten world of the gods, who only concentrates on her dead husband, who has been revived for a moment, and who cleans up where others have missed, is wonderful. And where Homoki visually chops up the end of his world with short fades of black, the golden Nylund arcs of joy linger for a long time like the garlands of pain. A “ring” of tones of longing – after all, that is a unique selling point of the Zurich tetralogy.
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