The Flying Dutchman, Wagner’s first masterpiece, has had a rough passage in the UK over the past few decades. I recall a production at the Royal Opera in the mid-1980s which revealed to me for the first time the possibility that an insensitive director can completely destroy a great work, something which is now commonplace. In between there have been further productions, in London and in Wales, which have done nothing to penetrate the work’s grandeur and freshness, so that the idea of a concert performance was even more welcome than usual. Zurich Opera came over for one night to the Royal Festival Hall and can have left no one in doubt as to the stature of Holländer or the quality of the performers, with one minor exception.
Actually, the performance got off to a shaky start, with some ragged playing and uncertain fluctuations of tempo. The conductor, Alain Altinoglu, whom I haven’t come across before, put on an elaborately balletic display, but the results he got from the Philharmonia Zurich improved rapidly, and to thrilling effect. Altinoglu didn’t have a big orchestra, and the brass and woodwind often overwhelmed the strings, but that created the right stark, sometimes raucous effect. If the timpanist hadn’t been so discreet it would have approached the ideal. Wagner does show his complete mastery of the orchestra in Holländer, but the kind of sound he creates is quite different from any of his other operas, just as they are so different in that respect from one another.
The ideal entered in the shape of Bryn Terfel, whose footsteps as he moved to near-centre stage even matched the directions in Wagner’s score. He was on the best form I have ever heard him, surpassing or anyway equalling his finest efforts in the Ring a couple of months ago.
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