Wagner treat

Michael Tanner

Wednesday, 13th May 2009

Götterdämmerung
Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

Don Carlos
Opera North

Manchester has a long and exalted history of service to Wagner, with Hans Richter, first conductor of the Ring, the chief conductor of the Hallé from 1899-1911, and Barbirolli a great Wagnerian, though there are lamentably few records of him in this repertoire. Mark Elder has for some time been showing that he is a fully worthy successor to them, and last weekend he conducted a concert performance of Götterdämmerung over two evenings which was in many respects a triumph, and was certainly received as such. The Hallé itself was the star of the show, playing unfamiliar music with passion, enormous variety of tone and colour, and almost always with precision. The orchestral set pieces, such as Siegfried’s Rhine Journey, the black Prelude to Act II, and especially the Funeral Music, were stunning, the brass above all covering themselves with glory; only the upper strings were less full than I would sometimes have wished. Now all we want is to hear them in a complete Ring cycle.

The soloists were probably almost as good as you could hope to hear in a performance these days, but that is a somewhat sad commentary on the Wagnerian singing situation. Both the lead singers had small voices for their parts, in the case of Katarina Dalayman’s Brünnhilde seriously so. She is fine, gracious and dignified to look at, she seems involved in the role, she lets forth some strong high notes, but the middle of her register, where so much of the music lies — for instance, the last note — is simply not there, and Brünnhilde’s sublime benediction on Wotan was barely audible. Another Swede, Lars Cleveman, as Siegfried is a more resourceful artist, making a fairly ordinary voice go a long way, and building his interpretation, so that Act III, where Siegfried at last becomes heroic, in his acceptance of death, and in his overwhelming Narration, where he comes to terms with what his life has been, was unreservedly successful for him. But I must mention the outstanding vocal performance: on the first evening Susan Bickley, the extraordinarily versatile — and strangely underemployed in the big houses — mezzo, delivered the most moving and eloquent account of Waltraute’s narration that I have ever witnessed in a concert hall or theatre. This was truly great singing, with a use of the words which no one else emulated, and a dramatic intelligence which meant that, as Wagner intended, the distinction between narration and presentation vanished, and we witnessed what Waltraute was telling us about. One rarely, now, comes across such a performance, which takes its place in the grand tradition of artists who have made this scene the most deeply affecting of the whole work.

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