My own, my preciousssss (Wagner, not Tolkien! Honest!)

[tamaranth]

The ENO production of Das Rheingold (Wagner) is the sort of thing that gives opera a bad name. This production has, to put it bluntly, disappeared up its own bottom.

To be fair, ladymoonray and I mainly went to check out the revamped Coliseum, and very pretty and clean and full of light it was too. We paid £5 each for seats in row B of the balcony, with slightly restricted view. (If I'd realised that the opera was 2 and a half hours with no interval I would have thought twice about it: all my malfunctioning joints were spasming by the end). We didn't explore the whole building, but there is now a cloakroom behind the Upper Circle, as well as one in the foyer. Balcony audience can use the foyer like everyone else, too, rather than entering and leaving via a side door in the alley around the corner. They have replaced the curtains and reupholstered the chairs, though not enough for Wagner productions: and half of the percussion section was in the lower box area, though this may have been more to do with the extra Wagnerian brass (who we could see sneaking back in just before each crescendo) than general policy.

I don't object to the Rhinemaidens (Linda Richardson, Stephanie Marshall, Ethna Robinson) as pole-dancers -- whether or not they have the physique for it -- or the Rhine represented as a shiny bead curtain, which was actually quite effective and beautifully lit. And I could have tolerated the day-glo orange dance shoes. Their singing was splendid, after all. But after that, things started to deteriorate. Valhalla seemed to consist of a bathroom and a bare space: admittedly they had just had the builders in. And the builders (the giants Fafnir -- Gerard O'Connor, complete with dragon-tattooed skull -- and Fasolt, sung wonderfully by Iain Paterson) came calling for their payment: Freia (Claire Weston), Wotan's sister-in-law, who shrieked a lot. This scene felt more like a Mike Leigh play than Wagner: very suburban. And impenetrable. I know the plot, and I revised it via the programme synopsis, and I was still confused.

Then Wotan (Robert Hayward, not at all bad but often inaudible) and Loge (Tom Randle, previously utterly ravishing as Oberon [The Fairy Queen] in velvet frock coat, leather, etc: now underused in jeans and jumper, not a convincing firegod) descended to Nibelheim. Nibelheim (ruled by evil Dwarf Alberich, who has renounced love after rejection by all three Rhinemaidens) looked like a bad 50s SF movie. We could not see one of the special effects (the dragon-breath): but the other (jumping frogs, according to the programme, though Alberich in fact transforms himself into a toad) was very effective and possibly the high point of the evening. Much better than the invisibility conferred by the Tarnhelm, which did look as though it might have been made out of a hub-cap a la Plan Nine from Outer Space.

More impenetrable goings-on in Scene 4, with the Gold of the Nibelungs delivered and removed via violently-yellow neon hoses, and Fafnir (having killed his brother and covered the walls of Valhalla with blood) hauling the hoard off in a bathtub. How aggravating to make such a splendid story so inaccessible. (Ah well: at least Alberich -- sung very splendidly by Andrew Shore -- did get to call the Ring his precioussss. Though I was horrified to find that Will Hutton [The State We're In], who wrote programme notes on the parallels between the Nibelung and big business, cannot spell Tolkien.)

Whoever it was (Bizet?) who said "Wagner has beautiful moments, but terrible quarter-of-an-hours" was wrong. The bad bits are much longer than that. There are some truly gorgeous moments, musically, in Das Rheingold -- the opening notes of the Rhine, Donner (Darren Jeffery) calling up a storm at the end, the Rhinemaidens bewailing their lost gold -- but unfortunately we had to sit through the rest of it to get to them.

And Wagnerian brass not only pushes the percussion section out of its usual corner: it's loud, and several of the voices had no chance of competing. I don't think it was a case of poor acoustics where we sat. Vocal volume varied but a lot of the singing was effectively inaudible. Before it started, we'd wondered why they had a surtitle machine if they were singing in English (ah, but there's English and then there's impenetrable operatic translation). In fact, it was there to display the runes on Odin's -- sorry, Wotan's -- spear (so that's what the extended character set is for!).

Am now waiting until the ENO put on something I like ... Meanwhile, Royal Opera House on Thursday, where you cannot buy a sandwich for a fiver but where we confidently expect Samson et Dalila to be nice and traditional and much more enjoyable.

Comments

[brisingamen.livejournal.com]

No sympathy; what do you expect with Wagner! However, do keep me posted on sensible ENO productions as I'd like to see the revamp.

[lproven.livejournal.com]

Poledancers++

Thomas Randle? Not impressed by Thomas Randle? I am appalled. You've been doing too much Viggo Bloody Mortenson. [Aside: who gives me a terrible start every time I visit Century House]

[drpete.livejournal.com]

who gives me a terrible start every time I visit Century House

I think tamaranth's put him there for a reason... Made me and mmcpoland jump too.

[lproven.livejournal.com]

I have to sneak around there alone, in the dark, sometimes, fixing PCs. And suddenly this dirty great Dûnedain Ranger pops up!

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

So more "ring-piece" than "ring cycle".

[timill]

Whoever it was (Bizet?)
Usually attributed to Hector Berlioz, IIRC.

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