Die Walküre
Longborough
Not having been to Longborough and its opera festival before, I was bowled over by it in all respects. The much-referred-to extended garage is an extremely comfortable theatre, with more than 400 seats, and with plenty of space in the foyer to make intervals a far more agreeable affair than they are in London’s two major opera houses. The setting is, of course, enchanting, the trimmings slightly playful, no hint of pretentiousness such as one finds in several other country-house operatic establishments, and no lengthy hectoring before the performance gets under way. However, none of that would count for anything if the performances weren’t well worth the trouble of getting there.
I went only to Die Walküre, and it was a knockout. Martin Graham has made no secret of his overriding ambition: to mount Wagner’s Ring cycle — the ambition that also animated John Christie when he founded Glyndebourne, but which was soon abandoned. Longborough has already had one shot at the Ring, which I saw when it came to Cambridge in 2004, but that was in Jonathan Dove’s chamber orchestration, and with as much of the work cut as presented, so that for a Wagner-lover it was a matter of waiting tensely for the next cut. What is in progress now is a completely different affair, and one that can stand comparison, in terms of musical interpretation and commitment, to any Ring one might see in the world.
The orchestra is more than 60-strong, the singers are an impressive team, some of them very experienced, and above all Anthony Negus, the conductor, gave as ardent, penetrating and concentrated an account of the astonishing score as any I have heard in decades. He was a colleague of Reginald Goodall, the last supreme Wagner conductor, and he learnt many vital lessons from him, while not adopting Goodall’s often very broad tempi, which often worked for him but not for anyone else. This Walküre was marked throughout by urgency. Although this part of the cycle is the most reflective, with the characters spending much of the time justifying themselves to one another, and in the process finding out a great deal about themselves, they are always animated by the need to take drastic action: the peculiarly Wagnerian atmosphere of incessant momentous crisis here receives its first perfect realisation. At the same time, if Die Walküre is about one thing, it is tenderness, its inception and growth in loveless lives, and its savage extermination at the hands of hostile forces, most notably conventional morality. The extraordinary way in which, in Act I, Wagner unprecedentedly portrays sympathy between two desolate people burgeoning into desire and fully fledged passion, with lengthy orchestral passages alternating with brief vocal exchanges, is transporting if done rightly, otherwise halting or even desultory.
Negus’s conducting here was inspired, but so were the acting and singing of Andrew Rees, the handsome, haunted Siegmund, with a ringing voice which was only rarely overtaxed, and of Lee Bisset, whose passionate, vulnerable Sieglinde should ensure that she is soon on the international circuit. The production, by Alan Privett, is here at its best, every movement by the singers suggested by the orchestra. The only pervasive irritating feature of the production is the ubiquitous Norns — they have nothing to do or sing, of course, Wagner having overlooked their presence in this work, so they throw the Rope of Fate around and concentrate intently on what is going on.
Could Act II be as successful? It is the moral and psychological core of the whole Ring, with one momentous scene after another. It was a triumph. The Brünnhilde is in the Rita Hunter mould, but Alwyn Mellor’s voice sounded excitingly enormous in the small theatre. And the Wotan of Jason Howard, though that role is indefinitely explorable, is already a searching reading, with the immense monologue compelling in the way few things are in the whole of opera. Alison Kettlewell’s Fricka was imposingly sung, though unnecessarily bitchy: and in her scene the colloquial vulgarity of the surtitles was painful: they need to be redone throughout, in a different idiom.
Act III began with an exhilarating Ride, the eight Valkyries all excellent, and for once convincingly differentiated, the orchestra thrillingly urging them on in their bloodthirstiness and then their panic as Wotan appears in vindictive mood. Howard gave unsparingly of his voice in the great agonised denunciations of Brünnhilde, but in the last intimate scene he lost his eye-patch, seemed consequently to lose his concentration, and it was mainly thanks to Mellor that tension didn’t altogether drain from the scene. In any case, it wasn’t enough to damage the overwhelming force of a great evening. I can only hope that the Grahams have a Siegfried lined up who can maintain the exalted standard of this cast, so that Longborough becomes, as it deserves to, as unlikely a success story as Bayreuth once was.
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