Wagner Society in NSW Inc
Reviews of the Adelaide/Neidhardt Ring Cycle from Australia and overseas
While there were reservations about aspects of the production and some singers (mostly the two Siegfried tenors) from most critics, their general view was that this Ring Cycle was a national and international event of major significance for Australian opera and for a new way of looking at representing the music dramas. The following quotations can hardly do justice to the nuances of individual critic's comments and analyses, but I hope they give a flavour of the excitement of the occasion. Many of the Australian based reviews are still available through the OperaCritic website www.theoperacritic.com/company.php?company=ssa&offset2=5&offset=0 , although for most of the overseas ones you would have to subscribe (usually free) to that newspaper's website.
Australia mounts its first-ever complete Ring Cycle – Sandra Bowdler
5 Jan 05 / Andante
At the conclusion [of Gotterdammerung and the Cycle] the audience rewarded singers, players and production team with a 20-minute standing ovation, with particular enthusiasm for Lisa Gasteen. It is almost unbelievable that tiny somnolent Adelaide could have produced virtually from scratch such a thoroughly conceived and executed artistic triumph, and opera in Australia will never be the same again.
Band of gold
3 Dec 04 / The Bulletin
The Adelaide production of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen began marvellously with Das Rheingold , soared to magnificence with Die Walkure and held much of that high ground during Siegfried . Praise for the management, singers, orchestra and production team respectively could overflow this page, without exhausting the superlatives.
…
Through working together over so many years, the production team have achieved a coherent vision. Michael Scott-Mitchell as set designer delivered heart-in-the-mouth effects while the lighting of Nick Schlieper supplied a metaphysical dimension. Costume designer Stephen Curtis echoed several generations of Wagnerian drag.
BBQs, balloons and paper flowers for Wagner's Ring - Jeremy Eccles
30 Nov 04 / The Opera Critic
"What's unique is that we found we weren't just doing four individual operas but four massive and inter-related operas. It meant that issues unresolved in Das Rheingold couldn't be sorted out until we got through Gotterdammerung six months later". Michael Scott-Mitchell, the set designer of Australia 's first ever local version of Wagner's Ring Cycle, reveals two things in that comment about its more than three year production process. The first is the brash, Aussie innocence with which the whole design team approached a work none of them had even seen before….The second is a complexity in the work that's unrelated to sheer length. And it's a complexity that the 'Perfect Wagnerite' audience, in GB Shaw's phrase, can mull over too as it goes through the 16 hours of music and a week in time that the experience lasts.
But that can't hope to capture the strength of this team's production….Story and motive were preferred to wacky concept. So arguably, in Gotterdammerung …we really didn't need the heavy hints we got about contemporary Iraq and the US Neo-Cons. Wagner's rich sub-text is always capable of throwing up contemporary thoughts….But then you could just wallow in the enhanced Adelaide Symphony Ochestra's performance under Maestro Asher Fisch, which went the gamut from blazingly foot-tapping to tear-jerkingly lyrical.
An Australian Ring for all humanity - Rosalind Wadley
27 Nov 04 / The Opera Critic
There is a pervading sense of relief and pride in Australia after the triumphant premiere of the Adelaide production of the Ring. It worked, Australia can do it, we pulled it off!…There's also an excitement that Australia can contribute to the world of opera at such a high level.
Local critics have been raving, and much of it really was that good. …Elke Neidhardt set out to tell the story clearly, working closely with her design team to produce a cycle with vivid characterisation and beautiful sets. The creative teamwork…has taken the production to a superior level with its dramatic synthesis of story, lighting and sets.
From the opening of Das Rheingold it was immediately apparent this would be an original and entertaining realisation of the Ring….The other highlight to Walkure was Lisa Gasteen's arrival as a thrilling Brünnhilde…she captured every shade in Brünnhilde's character….With a tone to die for (lush low register and searing high notes) and complete dramatic conviction, Gasteen has established herself as one of the great Wagnerian sopranos of our time, and one of Australia's greatest achievements.
…the uncluttered story-telling, together with a brilliant cast and plenty of room for the orchestral accompaniment to work its subliminal magic, produced a Ring that was profound and deeply engaging. The Adelaide Ring will be remembered as a fresh, humorous and beautiful production which tells Wagner's story in a way that is relevant not just to Australians, but to all humanity.
This has been an important cultural event - John Slavin
26 Nov 04 / The Age
This Ring will be remembered as an important step forwards for opera in this country for the daring of the undertaking and for its music-making. Loge (Christopher Doig) elegantly provoking his adversaries; Siegmund (Stuart Skelton) and Sieglinde (Deborah Riedel) making love beneath moonlight; the incomparable scene of farewell between Brunnhilde (Lisa Gasteen) and Wotan (John Brocheler); Brunnhilde's immolation at the end of Gotterdammerung for which Gasteen got a standing ovation.
These are the moments I shall cherish - plus the rich, moody, utterly affecting musicianship of the South Australian Orchestra under Asher Fisch….In spite of its glitches, its lack of a substantial Siegfried, this has been an important cultural event and the Wagner effect, that surge of emotion that carries the listener along on the flood of his musical genius, will echo in the memory for a long time.
Aussie Ring triumphantb - Graham Strahle
25 Nov 04 / The Australian
…this is an astonishing production and eclipses the much-vaunted Chatelet Ring, which SOSA mounted in 1998. Gloriously rich visually and musically, it simply must not be missed.
Fearlessly Australian - John Slavin
The AGE: December 29, 2004
The Berlin-based opera critic Shirley Apthorp recently declared that the Adelaide Ring Cycle was a very Australian affair. Speaking on Radio National, she praised Elke Neidhardt's production for provoking in audiences "an uncritical openness and eager engagement like nothing the Old World could produce". Quite a few members of the Ring's audience found the remark patronising and somehow dismissive.
There is a moment in Neidhardt's Siegfried that goes some way to providing an answer. The young heroic brat, Siegfried, the man who knows no fear, goes to the lair of the dragon Fafner who, as dragons do, is sitting on a hoard of gold. Formerly, Fafner had been a giant builder's labourer sporting a spectacular claw-like glove for grabbing metal bars and opponents' throats….Now the unseen dragon is roused to fight the boy, and one of the difficulties of Ring productions is how to represent a live, feisty dragon on stage…..Set designer Michael Scott-Mitchell settles for a metonym, a part representing the whole. Only Fafner's gigantic dragon's claw thrusts down onto the stage like a cat grabbing at an irritating mouse in its hole. When Siegfried stabs it to death, the claw goes into its death throes, and just as the audience thinks it's all over, it starts into life long enough to give everyone the finger. The audience recognises the larrikin irreverence and laughs…..I don't want to make too much of a gesture that has no dramatic relevance to the scene in which it appears. The purists will take care of that.
Opera is about creating a parallel universe where emotion is not repressed in the name of civility. Even in its tragic aspects, it is a glimpse of utopia.
Adelaide runs Ring round UK - Hugh Canning
The Sunday Times 31Dec 2004
TO make a pig's ear out of one Ring cycle may be a misfortune, but to produce two looks like more than carelessness: it's a dreadful waste of resources and talent….After Phyllida Lloyd's pallid Ring visions for English National Opera, the Royal Opera launched its own version of the tetralogy with another botched staging of Wagner's Das Rheingold.
My disappointment stems partly from having seen a more theatrically engaging Ring in Adelaide , where State Opera South Australia has just staged Australia 's first home-generated production of the cycle. I went primarily to catch the Brunnhilde of Lisa Gasteen, who will be Covent Garden 's Brunnhilde and, if nothing goes wrong, one of the world's….
The production…was one of the most visually resplendent Rings of recent times, with spectacular use of water …and fire, as well as fresh, witty insights. Neidhardt's Rheingold, staged as the Ring's satyr play, is the funniest I've seen. The Ride of the Valkyries, with boozing Rocky Horror amazons carousing raucously at a comic-fascistic Wunder Bar, was an unforgettable coup de theatre, too.
What made Neidhardt's Ring so memorable, however, was the intelligence and distinction of her Personenregie (direction of the actors). Neidhardt may have concentrated on old-fashioned narrative values, but her production looked modern and felt contemporary. Gasteen's Brunnhilde looks set to storm the world. At least she, and Terfel, are two things to look forward to in Royal Opera's Die Walkure next March.
Witty approach gives retelling a certain Ring - Martin Ball
The Australian November 19, 2004
SOMETHING unexpected has been happening at the Ring cycle in Adelaide -audiences have been laughing. Laughing at the humour in the story and at the wit in its telling. And they have been standing and cheering for this new production directed by Elke Neidhardt for the State Opera of South Australia.
Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen is not usually discussed in terms of humour, but as Neidhardt has been telling everyone this week, it is there in the text. And this production is all about the text: it's about telling the story in a direct and uncluttered way.
Neidhardt's achievement has been to create a Ring that is clear and accessible to those who are new to the operas, as well as refreshing and entertaining for those with a dozen (or in one case 70) cycles notched up. The sets are sparse yet powerful; the lighting vivid and focused.
But the last word to
Crikey - From the brunnhilde of Moe - Thalia Meyerhold
Crikey.com.au
Ravenous for some solid operatic fare and deeply cheesed off at the stale, cheap canapés served up by Opera Australia during its current dismal season in Melbourne, Thalia quit downtown Moe and headed for the City of Churches, temporarily metamorphosed into Bayreuth-on-the-Torrens, for a sixteen-hour, four-course Rabelaisian feast of protein-packed red meat in the form of Wagner's Ring cycle, opera for grown-up's as opposed to the insubstantial nibbles on offer at the Arts Centre.
What with watching and listening and gaping at celebrities, not to mention paying attention to Wagner 's complex tale, by the end of Gotterdammerung Thalia was tuckered out. But en route back to Melbourne she couldn't help pondering a few unpleasant facts. Little old Adders brought off this internationally-acclaimed cultural coup against all odds. The State Opera of South Australia operates with a full-time staff of three. A salutary lesson here for the lavishly supported Opera Australia which has constantly shied away from mounting a Ring. No wonder its audiences are slipping away,
especially in Melbourne where we are fobbed off with mouldy productions, third rate singers and fourth rate conductors.
As the Rhinemaidens lament when they lose the gold "Weh! Weh! Weh!" so Thalia, condemned to a life of CD's
and cable with the only light at the end of the tunnel the faint glimmer of hope that Adelaide's triumphant show might be revived in a few years time and she can again hear some real opera….
And to remind us that there was a significant downside to the production – that it was not telecast by the ABC!
Aunty baulks at opera fees - Matthew Westwood
T he Australian: November 15, 2004
THOUSANDS of people will miss out on the classical music event of the year because the ABC says it is too expensive to broadcast….The station's program manager, John Crawford, said it was disappointing that plans for a broadcast had fallen through…."The ABC is the appropriate organisation to broadcast it," he said. "(But) the artist fees are so high. There are more musicians working in an opera than any other (musical) ensemble."
This Page was last updated on:
25-Feb-2005
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