Dream team

Opera: Das Rheingold; Die Walküre

Halfway through the second cycle of the Ring at the Royal Opera, I’m feeling far more positive than I could have expected. When I saw the separate parts of the work I found Keith Warner’s direction cluttered and confusing, Stefanos Lazaridis’s sets ugly and evidently unsafe, Antonio Pappano’s conducting wayward and sacrificing the grand design to fussing with details, and much, even most of the singing barely adequate, sometimes calamitous. Admittedly it was the latter half of the cycle where the singing was weakest; but I have found that in both the first two dramas there is now such a strong sense of teamwork among the performers that one is much more absorbed in the interplay between Wagner’s characters than in the specific vocal qualities of the singers. And though I still find that Pappano can be exasperating, especially in his inability to convey Wagner’s transitions smoothly, for long segments I have found him cogent, and getting quite magnificent playing from the orchestra at every point. The prelude to Rheingold augured well, with a superb opening quiet growl, and with the arpeggios and finally the scales emerging almost unnoticed from the texture, and, most importantly, without building to the huge climax which contradicts Wagner’s markings and makes the first entry of the voice sound silly. My only general complaint would be that one rarely hears any of those telling touches of colour from the percussion which make such a difference to Wagner’s textures, and which one finds in all the greatest Wagner conductors; and the horrible rasping of the muted horns during Alberich’s curse on the ring was drastically underplayed. Whatever any conductor might think of Goodall’s Ring recording, they should listen to it and see that he makes every last note count, which is why it doesn’t seem as slow as it is — usually.