Siegfried – Wagner - Liceu
The hero of last night’s performance of Siegfried was not the eponymous hero, it was the orchestra. Conducted by Josep Pons, from the atmospheric
opening moments of the music to the last ecstatic chords the playing was
superb, I have rarely heard the Orquestra Simfònica del Gran Teatre del Liceu
on such form. I cannot pick out any
section of the orchestra for special mention because this was an ensemble tour
de force!
But the
opera does have a name and, as part of The
Ring Cycle it is a barrier that every Opera House has to respond to,
knowing that many of the customers will have seen other productions and will
certainly have heard any one of the myriad majestic versions easily available
in our technological age.
So how does
this one stand up to the competition?
Five hours is a long time to demand from even the most compliant of
backsides! In a word, for me, it was
OK. And if that doesn’t sound amazingly
enthusiastic, then neither was the audience at the end of the performance. Polite?
Yes. Enthusiastic? No.
The
positively magical orchestral opening promised much and when we finally got to
see the woodland glade we were presented with a junkyard in which a
broken-down, dilapidated caravan was the main feature. Mime, Peter Bronder, was presented as a
slovenly, vest wearing caricature constantly keeping his comb-over in place –
but he sang with authority and his mannerisms with constantly amusing. I don’t know if the caravan was meant to
bring the word Traveller to mind, to match the character of The Wanderer? Or am I reading too much into the setting?
Stefan
Vinke was to have sung the title role, but he was replaced by Lance Ryan. This Siegfried was played with insouciant
gusto by Ryan but his voice was not at home in the character. I felt that he came into his own in Act III
when his lighter lyrical tenor was more at home in the mawkishly embarrassing
scenes with his aunt/lover. For too much
of this opera Ryan’s voice was overwhelmed by the orchestra, and not because of
the inconsideration of the conductor.
Helden tenor Ryan is not and we needed one to match the other sung
performances during the long night!
Greer
Grimsley as the angst consumed Wotan, impeccable in neat suit, coat and hat
with his silver topped cane/spear, gave a magisterial performance with a voice
powerful, yet nuanced. He managed to
convey a sort of sense of power-overload, of someone bored with his own
capabilities and looking for change, any change even if it meant destruction. His scene with Era, Maria Radner, in the
ruined sitting room of a chaotic castle was finely sung and a masterpiece of
existential emptiness made musical!
As far as
scene setting was concerned the re-forging of Nothung was competently done, but
Siegfried’s demonstration of its power by smiting the caravan and having the
whole of one side fall off was, to put it mildly, slightly absurd.
I liked the
use of slight and smoke to convey the power of the dragon and I liked the
theatricality of a pair of well lit bulldozer claws as the mouth, beneath which
the giant/man that was always the base of Fafner, Andreas Hörl, was able to
appear.
Alberich,
Oleg Bryjak, was played with some style and vocal satisfaction and the
antagonism between Alberich and Mime brought out the underlying theme of Waiting for Godot that pervades the
feeling of this production.
The Liceu
likes fire. That is not a reference to
past destructions, but rather to the number of times that real flames light up
the stage in various productions. This
opera was meant for this opera house and it used fire interestingly, from the flames
of Mime’s smithy to the magic flames keeping everyone but a hero away from the
sleeping Brünnhilde, Catherine Foster, it always played a justified role in the
action.
Foster was
at home in her role and sang with passionate beauty. Act III had some of the most touching music
making in the whole opera and, even with the strange situation and the even
stranger words that they sing, there was real passion and a sense of excited
exploration in the ending to the opera.
Did the
staging make sense? Not entirely for
me. This production was full of good
ideas: I liked the concept of Siegfried played as a bizarre mixture of the
incomprehensible innocence of an Oliver Twist under the tutelage of a
Fagin-like Mime, yet also with some of the amorality of The Artful Dodger as
well! But I found myself wondering, too
often, about some of the concepts and just how they satisfyingly tied in to a
unity in the piece that could give it strength through the radical reworking of
traditional ideas.
This was a
production largely drained of primary colours, but there were some spectacular
scenes in spite of the sub-fusc palette used.
And there
was always the music!
