The production was of Wagner's Das Rheingold, the first opera in his cycle Das Ring der Niebelungen. Unexpectedly for me, I was taken up with it and thought that it was very good indeed.
![[Three and a Half Stars - Very Good]](3_5star.jpg){kind=small}
Well, in the space of a few hours I got two surprises - one a disappointment and the other a refreshing fillip.
The disappointment happened in the daytime. Ross and I went to Friends' House in Liverpool to attend Be the Change Symposium which we had both thought would be about transition towns.
This is a grass roots movement which has gained a lot of support across the country. It's a response to the environmental changes which are going on and it has had little or no help from central government and little or no publicity from the centralised media machine.
Instead, we got a lot of presentations about the plight of the earth which invited us to be complicit and guilty. It was classic emotional manipulation and really had no place in a Quaker Meeting House. We left at lunchtime.
The happy surprise came in the evening when Roland and I visited FACT for the first simultaneous telecast of the year from the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
The production was of Wagner's Das Rheingold, the first opera in his cycle Das Ring der Niebelungen. Unexpectedly for me, I was taken up with it and thought that it was very good indeed.
The last time that I saw this work was at Bayreuth in July 1984 and it was the beginning of the sixth Ring Cycle which I had attended. Since then, nothing. I really have not felt like committing myself to that amount of time in the theatre. Oh, I've listened to the music on CD and have watched videos and TV versions. But, four long evenings in the theatre. No. Not until now.
Robert Lepage's high tech production had the solidly conservative virtue of sticking to telling the story. As such, it was a very helpful framework into which musical and dramatic performances could be dropped.
James Levine conducted a spirited and, for him, vigorously propulsive performance. The only time I have heard him conduct Wagner before was Parsifal at the 1984 Bayreuth Festival and that was one of the longest renditions on record. His speeds on this occasion matched the story telling of the production.
Of the singing performances I liked Eric Owens as Alberich and Gerhard Siegel as Mime and Franz-Josef Selig as Fasolt and Hans-Peter König as Fafner with Stephanie Blythe as Fricka and Patricia Bardon as Erda picking up the honours among the women. Bryn Terfel's Wotan was alright but he really is a lightweight voice for the rôle.
I'm already looking forward to Die Walküre in May 2011.