I missed out on Paul Lewis and Mark Padmore performing Schubert's song cycle Winterreise on Tuesday.
Having already seen Das Rheingold, Die Walküre and Siegfried, I wasn't about to miss out on the final part of the epic, Götterdämmerung.
As with Das Rheingold, there is enough movement and action in the piece for the flexible, moving set to come into its own without the distractions of incessant, moving computer generate images which, for me, marred Die Walküre and Siegfried. Fabio Luisi's conducting was swift and elegantly beautiful. He gave the thing Italianate, human passion rather than heavyweight Teutonic gravitas and I liked his interpretation.
Of the singers, Jay Hunter Morris's Siegfried is a marvel and Hans-Peter König's Hagen is stupendous. Iain Paterson was allowed to make more of Gunther than is normally the case and Wendy Bryn Harmer gave the cipher role of Gutrune as much as she could. I can't make my mind up about Deborah Voigt's Brünnhilde; it was a very human presentation just not very captivating or alluring.
Overall, it was very good.
![[Three and a Half Stars - Very Good]](3_5star.jpg){kind=small}
All said, I am glad to have spent four separate evenings at FACT over the past eighteen months taking the project in.
I simply cannot imagine a circumstance in which I would want to travel somewhere to spend a week attending performances of the complete cycle. Those days are well and truly behind me.