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The Washington Post, 04/25/11 |
By Anne Midgette |
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Wagner: Die Walküre, Metropolitan Opera, 22. April 2011 |
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Music review: Metropolitan Opera’s ‘Die Walkure’ is hollow at high-tech core
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NEW YORK — Stage directors and opera lovers often coexist in a state of
enmity. The director wants to reinterpret; the audience wants to see the
piece as the composer intended it.
Robert Lepage, the Canadian stage
director, offers a compromise with his production of Wagner’s “Ring” that
the Metropolitan Opera is unfolding piece by piece, at tremendous expense
and with much fanfare, through next season. He focuses his high-tech concept
on the staging and leaves the singers lots of room to do what they want.
So why is his “Ring,” which continued Friday night with the premiere of
the second of the four operas, “Die Walkure,” so far such a disappointment?
Like “Das Rheingold,” which opened the Met’s season in September, “Die
Walkure” is centered on a set (by Carl Fillion) that’s supposed to be a
miracle of technical wizardry. It’s a stage-filling unit made up of 24 bar
elements, like giant piano keys, mounted on a central axis that enables them
to rise and fall and rotate, transformed by projections now into a forest of
silvery tree trunks (where Siegmund flees his pursuers), now into a rocky
crag veined with molten lava (where the god Wotan and his wife, Fricka,
argue about the laws of matrimony). At the start of the third act, eight of
the bars stand in for the horses of the Valkyries, thrusting and bucking
under the singers’ legs with downright phallic abandon.
But the set
feels monolithic and limiting. As Lepage uses it in “Walkure,” it imposes a
relentless symmetry on the stage picture that isn’t that interesting to
watch. It’s also not very singer-friendly. At her entrance Friday, soprano
Deborah Voigt, singing her first Met Brunnhilde, slipped and fell. After
that, every time a singer ascended the curving construction, there was a
certain nervousness about whether someone else might slide off.
Another problem is that, because the set represents the most creative part
of Lepage’s concept, we have a work of kinetic sculpture rather than a piece
of theater. As much as some opera-goers may think of “concept” as a dirty
word, the absence of one in this “Walkure” leaves the singers unsure about
what they’re supposed to be doing. It’s one thing to put on a concert
performance of a Wagner opera with singers who have spent years with their
roles — as Washington National Opera demonstrated in November 2009 with its
fantastic “Gotterdammerung,” starring Alan Held, Gidon Saks and Gordon
Hawkins. It’s quite another to create dramatic effect with singers who are
newer to their parts — Voigt as Brunnhilde or Bryn Terfel as Wotan — without
strong direction.
This team had the raw material to do
better. When Jonas Kaufmann, the heartthrob German tenor, and Eva-Maria
Westbroek, the Dutch soprano making her company debut, made their entrances,
it felt as if it would be a terrific evening. Kaufmann has a shining lyrical
voice and the aura of a hero; Westbroek (who last sang the role of Anna
Nicole Smith at Covent Garden) made some big, full, warm sounds that augured
well.
But Kaufmann’s voice seems light for this repertoire; the
effort involved in filling out the role and being heard led to a
disappointing, interpretive sameness, emotionally and musically. And
Westbroek became unsteady and patchy — due, it turned out, to illness. In
Act 2, Margaret Jane Wray stepped in to pinch-hit, respectably, as a
Sieglinde with considerably more mettle in her voice.
Voigt
simply sounded miscast. I’ve never been convinced that hers is a dramatic
soprano, and she did nothing Friday night to change my mind. She hit the
notes but offered none of the stature, vocal resonance or interpretation to
make a distinctive Brunnhilde. Indeed, when she sang with the other eight
Valkyries in Act 3 — decked out in shiny, Halloween-silver lame costumes
courtesy of Francois St- Aubin — she blended in all too well with the
crowd. (To their credit, the other Valkyries, starting with Kelly Cae
Hogan’s Gerhilde, were very well sung.)
As for Terfel, he showed that
he has the goods to be a fine Wotan. Unfortunately, he didn’t really show
this until the very end of the opera, when he decreed in a voice that
emanated from the heavens that only a hero without fear could win his
daughter Brunnhilde. But for too much of the evening, he relied on stock
gestures and stock sounds, often leaning on his spear as if relying on a
crutch. Perhaps more than any of the singers, he might have benefited from a
director’s help in interpreting the complex role of a flawed god.
One
of the most moving episodes in “Die Walkure” comes when Wotan, obliged to
witness Siegmund’s death, reveals himself to his dying son. You couldn’t
miss it here because Wotan grabbed Siegmund and cradled him in his arms. The
god then looks up at Hunding, Sieglinde’s husband who dealt the deathblow
(played by the stentorian Hans-Peter Konig as a doughty villain from central
casting), and dismisses him with the word “Geh!” (go), at which Hunding
drops dead. Terfel veritably telegraphed the moment by holding out the word
in a kind of strangled yodel.
It was one of many illustrations of how
the requisite elements of an opera’s plot can be represented accurately,
yet without much dramatic insight or distinction. It isn’t enough just to
sing the notes and put on a spectacle; it takes more to bring a piece to
life. Stephanie Blythe’s powerful Fricka, clearly sung and emoted and felt,
showed how it should be done. Much of the rest of Friday’s performance
showed what was missing.
“We’re dealing with space,” Lepage said in
an interview in the program. “Maestro Levine deals with time.” In short, it
was up to James Levine to fill in the gaps that Lepage’s concept left. But
even Levine couldn’t quite do it. Despite his recent health difficulties,
including back surgery that left him downright tottery when he took the
stage for his curtain call, his conducting sounded articulate, energetic and
communicative. But it was also sealed off in its own world, as if he were
taking refuge in the pit from the production’s lack of heart.
The
heart is, of course, in the music, and Levine kept finding it and bringing
it out. But without singers who were able to bring it across, or a
production that really represented the fruits of the kind of collaboration
Levine excelled at in his heyday, his high points only added a sense of
poignancy to a well-intentioned but ultimately hollow evening.
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