Prom 14 - 22.07.13: Wagner – Das Rheingold

[amac4165]

R3 presenter Sarah Mohr-P has written in a national newspaper blog that she is s 'Ring Cycle Virgin'.

I went to the pre performance talk - and she confessed all then! The somewhat surprising choice for presenting a discussion programme about the Ring cycle - although she did say she had heard a lot of although just not a complete cycle.

I have to say having heard it twice I'm very taken by the interpretation of Rheingold which will never be to everyone's taste. (see previous posts !)

excellent cast throughout - always the hallmark of good performance when even the lesser parts are excellent. (I think Anna Larsen did have a bit of a wobble )

Certainly looking forward to tomorrow - although I rather wish we had Stensvold or Pape or Thomas Mayer as Wotan

[Bert Coules]

The subtleties of translation into English. This reminds me of "Figaro's Wedding".

The good thing about "Figaro's Wedding" is that it makes you think about what the original title really means. Titles can so easily become no more than mantras, just strings of sounds that get spoken with no thought behind them. Actually, Figaro's Wedding is a more accurate translation too: the opera is, after all, about the wedding, not about the marriage (which doesn't exist at all until after the final curtain).

The Nibelung's Ring goes a little way along that path, but nowhere near as far. To make an audience really think anew about the work you'd need to get a lot more drastic (and a lot further from Wagner's own title). I think it was William Mann who once suggested Alberich's Ring but I don't like that very much. If it hadn't already (almost) been taken, The Lord of the Ring might serve - and Andrew Porter brilliantly gets the phrase into his Rhinegold script - but that's out.

There have been several cut-down Rings attempted over the years with varying degrees of success and there will surely be more: perhaps a new version could be given a new title. How about simply The Twilight of the Gods which is wonderfully poetic and dramatic and accurately reflects what the entire work is about.

[Il Grande Inquisitor]

I gather that Donner's hammer worked for London late last night after Das Rheingold. Can you direct him towards Hampshire now, please?

My review of Prom 14 now online:

http://www.opera-britannia.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=970:prom-14-das-rheingold-22nd-july-2013-&catid=10:concert-and-recital-reviews&Itemid=16

[Bert Coules]

I gather that Donner's hammer worked for London late last night after Das Rheingold.

Remarkably so, given that the climactic sound of his striking the rock to initiate the storm was completely missing from the performance.

But alas here in Kent at least the thunder, lightning and deluge brought us no subsequent clearing of the air, no rainbow bridge, no promise of immediate respite: it's as hot and unpleasant this morning as it has been for the last week or so.

Thanks for the review and in particular for your comments on the staging or lack of it. If there were any dramatic benefits from the singers' placings to be had in the hall they all seemed to be smoothed out in the R3 balance: Erda in particular sounded as though she was standing cheek to cheek with all the rest of them, any sense of mystery and other-worldliness being completely absent: one of many missed opportunities.

[slarty]

Oh, it's not just Wagner. I freely admit that it's a highly personal reaction but for me Barenboim coats everything he conducts with a blanket of blandness.

I humbly suggest that if you found last night's performance bland, then you may have a problem with the music itself.
Bland , it certainly was not! As a performance, it was a model demonstration of how to conduct it. The orchestra played superbly. One does not normally get the chance to hear an opera orchestra of this calibre in Britain. So to have these players for the whole cycle is a joy. Barenboim has transformed this orchestra into a world class outfit.
Paterson as the young Wotan sang superbly (he reminds me of Hermann Uhde in timbre) and his interpretation will only grow in the future. I look forward to hearing him singing more of this in the coming years. The rest of the cast sang equally well and I would say that it was one of the best sung Rheingold's I have ever heard, and I have over 150 performances of it on tap.
When Solti conducted the Rheingold at the Proms on the 6th September 1970 it was 153 minutes. When he conducted it at the ROH Covent Garden three days later it was almost 4 minutes faster. this is all to do with the ambience and acoustic differences of an older style concert hall and an opera house. A good conductor will always take the acoustics of the hall into the equation when performing a work as a concert and not in the opera house. Solti's commercial Rheingold should not be used in comparison, he had,not yet conducted the work in the opera house and he deferred a great deal to Culshaw's ideas during those recordings. His Ring tempi were very much more consistent once he began to conduct them at CG.
The Royal Albert Hall is a superb venue (I have played there many times) but it's acoustics are totally different to the ROH and even more different to the Staatsoper in Berlin and the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. With a flat opera house type of acoustic, the music can generally be played at faster tempi without losing clarity, at the RAH, with it's much more reverberent acoustic, most experienced conductors will adjust their tempi accordingly and relax the pace slightly, especially when dealing with a large orchestra and voices.
Another example of different timings was a 1971 Prom where Alexander Gibson and the SNO performed Acts 1 and 3 of Siegfried. I had already seen it performed in Glasgow in May that year with the same cast and Gibson(an old hand at the proms) conducted at the RAH a tad slower than at the King's Theatre.
Furtwängler's Rheingold from La Scala Milan 1950 and from the RAI Rome radio studios in 1953 were also very different performances, one theatre, one concert.

To have one of the great Ring conductors of the past 50 years plying his trade at the Proms this week is such a great bonus for wagnerians. It is no accident that CG scheduled their Ring last year and not now, during the bi-centennary. It would not want too much adverse comparison with Pappano's Ring.
It will be a very long time before we hear a Ring of this calibre of playing and conducting in London again.

[grandchant]

Can't resist saying how brilliant I found this performance. Those who saw it... how much acting was there if any? Did the male singers wear DJs or something more appropriate?

[DracoM]

I'm afraid I'm with Bert Coules on this. I've been to the Staatsoper Ring in Berlin with DB conducting, and it was more engaging, if rather more variably cast, than this. Delighted to have a Ring, delighted to have distinguished orchestra and opera company, and on paper, this should have been more over-than underwhelming. But for me it just wasn't. Maybe you had to be there.

[Bert Coules]

I humbly suggest that if you found last night's performance bland, then you may have a problem with the music itself.

Thanks for the thought, but with (almost) equal humility I tell you that I do not. I've known and loved the Ring - and not merely the music, since there's far, far more to the work than simply that - since my student days. I've written about it, lectured about it and taken part in performances of it for something like forty years. I've seen it, in whole or in part, all over the world. And believe me, by now I know a tedious, undramatic outing when I hear one.

But - as I was at pains to say - these things are highly subjective. If you enjoyed it and think that a static, inconsistently cast Barenboim Ring at the Proms is an event to treasure, then I'm glad. I only wish I could too.

[slarty]

I too was at the Staatsoper, but the difference is what we saw in Berlin as against what we heard in London.
I said in my earlier post that I thought that the performance was generally well sung by everyone, but apart from the Wotan, I could not single any one else out.
This is a problem with Wagner singing today. Singers don't learn their craft as they used to. Wagner voices have become lighter than before and that in itself takes a great deal of character from the performances. So it would be fair to say it was way under characterized. Whereas in the opera house we are much more involved with the action, whether it is well or badly produced.
However, Das Rheingold is not and should not be an over-whelming experience, it is the vorabend or prologue to the Ring proper, and should be judged as such.
I like the description that the Ring should be played like a symphony in 4 movements.
This was just the first movement and judgement should not be made until the performance is over next sunday.

[Bert Coules]

I like the description that the Ring should be played like a symphony in 4 movements.

An interesting point, though I'm tempted to point out that this is the Proms, where judgement of, and reaction to, first movements is increasingly commonplace, to the horror of some.

Certainly Wagner himself disapproved, initially at least, of separate performances of the Ring operas. But all other considerations apart, the inconsistent casting of this particular Ring makes it harder than it sometimes is to see it as a whole rather than four disparate parts. And the bizarre decision to stick a Tristan into the middle of the show doesn't exactly help.

[slarty]

Thanks for the thought, but with (almost) equal humility I tell you that I do not. I've known and loved the Ring - and not merely the music, since there's far, far more to the work than simply that - since my student days. I've written about it, lectured about it and taken part in performances of it for something like forty years. I've seen it, in whole or in part, all over the world. And believe me, by now I know a tedious, undramatic outing when I hear one.

But - as I was at pains to say - these things are highly subjective. If you enjoyed it and think that a static, inconsistently cast Barenboim Ring at the Proms is an event to treasure, then I'm glad. I only wish I could too.

I am just glad that we can get a Ring at all at this time of year at the proms, when most of the best of the singers around are not available due to other festivals and such.
I still say it was well sung/performed, however no one in the cast(except Patterson) would get anywhere near my top twenty Rheingolds. But as for conductors.......
From 1967 until today (my first ring - it was a combination of Solti and Downes) purely from the complete Rings that I have seen, the conductors were(chronologically) -
Solti/Downes 1967-71 - Gibson 1971(SO) - Hollreiser(Berlin and Vienna) -Leitner(Stuttgart) - Goodall 1976 - Davis 1978(CG) -Horst Stein(Many times)- Boulez - Sawallisch - Wallat - Janowski - Peter Schneider -Günther Wich - Armstrong - Haitink - Muti(saw it in bits over years at La Scala) - Mehta(munich) - Levine - Barenboim(Berlin and Bayreuth) - Thielemann.
This does not include performances of the individual Ring operas I have seen with other conductors (Mackerras would definitely come into this, Kempe also.)
Of all of the above I would put Barenboim of today's conductors with Gibson(a great Wagner conductor) and Solti as the best I ever saw.
As you say, that there is more to it than just the music - Well, if you take away just the music, what have we got? nothing.
As for casting, tonight should be a different matter. The BBC seems to have blown a large part of the casting budget on this cast.

[Bert Coules]

I said nothing about taking the music away, though in fact that has been done with some success since the text, the drama, the action, the characters, the settings and more all remain and are all perfectly performable, giving an experience which is far from "nothing".

What I said was that the music wasn't the whole of the work, and neither is it.

[Sir Velo]

Why do we have to call the Ring THE RING CYCLE ?

Think yourself lucky that Andrew McGregor wasn't presenting, otherwise we would have had to endure a "traversal" of the Ring Cycle.

[slarty]

Ah well let us agree to disagree -It may not be the whole of the work, but it is the greatest part of it. I for one would not give it five minutes without the music, whatever can be performed without it. I doubt that the RAH would sell out to a performance of the Ring without music.
Each to his own.

[kernelbogey]

A shame that this is available on iPlayer for the usual 7 days, and that no one thought to extend the after-life of the earlier episodes to to a replay date similar to that of the later ones, as is often done with television series.