Wagner Society in NSW Inc
Review

Review: February 2003 Götterdämmerung in Perth - A report by Roger Cruickshank

In his message in the programme for Gotterdammerung, Sean Doran, the Festival Director 2000-2003 of the Perth International Arts Festival says that in 1999, PIAF released in the West Australian parliament an ambitious set of aims and objectives for a four-year programme called "The Millennium Celebration Festivals 2000 - - 2003".

They had chosen two extraordinary operatic works to open and close this four-year cycle. For the Millennium 2000 PIAF, they staged the 18-hour Chinese opera The Peony Pavilion, and in 2003, as the closing event of their 50th festival, they staged two ambitious multi-media concert performances of Gotterdammerung. The first of these, on Thursday 13 February 2003, was performed on the 120th anniversary of Wagner's death in Venice on 13 February 1883.

I'm sure that the story of the selection of Gotterdammerung as the closing work for 2003, the last festival of the millennium celebration and the 50th festival for PIAF, and of the whole extraordinary four-year programme, will make fascinating reading, and I hope that someone takes the time to tell it. But my tale is about the rumours that preceded the performances of Gotterdammerung, and the performances themselves.

Let me say at the outset that I found the performances almost without exception outstanding, and in some moments, sublime. I doubt that I will hear the Brunnhilde-Siegfried prologue sung live with such power and searing incandescence as Susan Bullock and Alan Woodrow delivered in both the performances.

But let me also be candid. I did not approach the performances without some trepidation. I had never heard either of the principals live or on CD before. Browsing the internet, I found that Alan Woodrow had sung Siegfried in a live recording made in July 2000 of Gotterdammerung from the Tiroler Festspielen, with Gustav Kuhn conducting, but I could not find a review.

A review of a DVD of Woodrow as Tannhäuser recorded in the Téatro San Carlo was scathing. "Who on Earth put up the money to have this recorded and distributed? … no amount of digital wizardry exists to correct his flat shouting …" lamented the reviewer.

Another review, this time of Woodrow's Siegfried in the first cycle of the 2001 Seattle Ring, was more positive - "… he is the new tenor the Wagner world has been waiting for. John Treleaven, Albert Bonnema, Wolfgang Schmidt, Jon Fredric West, Stig Fogh Andersen, the already faltering Christian Frantz, they all seem to pale next to him." I also drew some comfort from a report that Speight Jenkins has signed him as Seattle's 2005 Ring's Siegfried to Jane Eaglen's Brunnhilde.

The internet was far less revealing about Susan Bullock, but the one Wagner review I found, written by someone who had never heard of Susan Bullock before, was exciting. "However, I was in for a revelation, as Susan Bullock, a noted Puccini interpreter, proved herself quite the best Isolde, I'd ever heard. … Miss Bullock's beautiful voice soared effortlessly above the orchestra, delivering the curse with biting venom and the love duet with melting sweetness."

Later in the same review, another of my doubts was put to rest: "Despite his advancing years, Donald McIntyre was a superb King Marke, who sang with rich and full bass tone, His monologue … was a highlight of the evening, as he endowed every word with the characters anguish and sense of sorrowful betrayal."

I had no concerns about the conductor, Lionel Friend, who was for two years part of Daniel Barenboim's Ring team in Bayreuth, and had been assistant conductor to Jeffrey Tate for the Adelaide Ring in 1998 and part of the musical team for Parsifal in Adelaide in 2001. I did however have some of the snobbery of an Eastern States concert-goer when considering whether the musicians of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra would be up to the task, both in terms of musicianship and stamina.

But I had greater worries about the indoor-outdoor staging of the concert performance. In July 2002 Bruce Hallett had written a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald under the headline "Perth plans a party for its 50th" which said "Wagner's Gotterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods) will be staged as an indoor and outdoor event. Inside the Perth Concert Hall, patrons will pay to see the concert, conducted by Lionel Friend with soprano Susan Bullock. It will be free to those who converge on Langley Park to watch on video screens, with a multimedia spectacular directed by Neil Gladwin featuring acrobats, pyrotechnics and projected images of the West Australian landscape." For example, rocks that looked like shrouded figures would accompany the Norns in scene 1 of the Prologue, scenes of the Swann and other West Australian waterways would accompany Siegfried on his Rhine journey, and so on.

The festival booklet and website also promised that this would be "a world premiere multi-media simultaneous indoor-outdoor realisation of Richard Wagner's Gotterdammerung', and that the crowds outside would see the Swann River turned into the Rhine, fireworks, and the illusion of the Perth CBD burning when Valhalla burns. Crowds inside the hall would see all this relayed into the hall and shown on giant screens (but probably without sound).

Tickets were sold on the basis that a ticket to a performance indoors entitled you to attend the other performance outdoors. I thought about what "acrobats, pyrotechnics and projected images of the West Australian landscape" would mean in the heat of a Perth summer afternoon and evening, and chose instead to book indoor tickets for both performances.

It is a tribute to the quality of the first performance that many of the Society members there decided to buy seats indoors for the second performance instead of watching it free in Langley Park. But it is a sad reflection of the support that these performances received that there were plenty of seats unsold at both performances.

The English text for the surtitles would be based on an "adapted" translation by West Australian poet John Kinsella, designed to bring out themes relevant to West Australia - ecology, de-afforestation, salination, colonization etc. This adaptation, which would be used for the surtitles, would follow the structure of Wagner's story, but expand the text to bring out these issues and in effect become a separate work of art in parallel with the drama on stage and outside.

With these thoughts drifting through in my head, along with the distinct suspicion that I was grotesquely overdressed in a dinner suit, I sat in the Perth Concert Hall and waited for the performance to start.

Almost as soon as the orchestra began, I knew that Lionel Friend had worked the same magic with the West Australian Symphony that Jeffrey Tate had with the South Australian in 1998 for the first Adelaide Ring. The reading was spacious and deliberate, and finely paced. The rests at the end of each opening phrase, which often pass quickly by, were real moments of complete silence. (According to my counting, they're in bars 8 and 16 of the score.) I was a little ashamed to have thought of this as a provincial orchestra.

Liane Keegan's rock-steady First Norn sonorously pronounced the work's first words, followed by Elizabeth Campbell's Second and Leanne Kenneally's brilliant Third Norn. Overhead on screens behind the orchestra, John Kinsella's adapted translation was projected between two small screens: one showing the film of the orchestra and singers which was being projected outside, and the second showing the photos and film of West Australian images which told a story parallel to the text. Similar images were shown on two other small screens, at the very front of the hall to the left and right. Sometimes these images were the same as the images projected overhead, sometimes they were shown slightly in advance or behind them.

From the outset you were immersed in four parallel stories, the sound-stories of the music and the singing, and the visual-stories of the adapted text in the surtitles and the pictures projected onto screens. The newness of the words and images was often unsettling, and the comfort of the known music and sung German text never completely dispelled this.

There were moments for me in the Norn's prologue when music and singing seemed to disappear in the disturbance of a jarring image or an unexpected piece of text, and it took some time to get used to this. But by the time Brunnhilde and Siegfried stepped up for their dawn and duet, I felt I had this as much under control as it would ever be.

In a performance of Gotterdammerung as part of a Ring Cycle, the Brunnhilde and Siegfried who emerge from Brunnhilde's cave in the second part of the prologue are usually known quantities, the same Brunnhilde and Siegfried who rapturously entered the cave at the end of Siegfried the previous day. But in a concert performance of Gotterdammerung alone, they arrive on stage strangers to the audience.

I have already said that I doubt that I will hear the Brunnhilde-Siegfried prologue sung live with such power and searing incandescence as Susan Bullock and Alan Woodrow delivered in both these Perth performances, and I will say it again. Each in turn stood and sang in strong clear tones, glancing occasionally at each other as if they wanted to act their roles more than they were allowed in this concert performance. Their voices soared clearly above the orchestra, which at times seemed to be engaged in a battle to drown them out, playing louder and louder as the singers poured out reserves of sound.

I wondered whether Woodrow, a Canadian, is ever compared with Canada's great and much-recorded Wagnerian tenor, Jon Vickers, in particular because Woodrow's voice at times had that metallic edge to his voice which was Vickers' trademark.

Then, to pictures from a helicopter skimming over the surface of stretch of water, Siegfried began his Rhine journey. Pictures of Perth announced his arrival at the hall of the Gibichungs, and we met the work's darker characters.

The first of these was Harry Peeters' Gunther. For me, Peeters' hunky appearance and strong vocal characterization were at odds with my view of Gunther's nature, shallow and venal. That said, his singing was strong and faultless, and with Alan Woodrow in the Blut-Bruderschaft duet in scene 2, spine-tingling.

The second was the brilliant Hagen of Phillip Kang, who would dominate the opera with his presence and singing. Although a concert performance, two large throne-like wooden chairs were included on-stage, and Kang was often left sitting in one of them, brooding over the actions of other characters. His almost-permanent sly grin gave his on-stage presence real menace, and while the dawn in the prologue may be Siegfried's dawn, the day at its end clearing belongs to Hagen.

The third was Margaret Medlyn's Gutrune, whose Kundry in the 2001 Adelaide Parsifal I have already praised in these pages. Oddly, I found her performance unsatisfying, despite her fine singing, perhaps because her role seemed to me the least suited to the motionless concert performance format. For example, while Gutrune's action in handing the potioned chalice to Siegfried, to make him love her and forget Brunnhilde, is pivotal to the story told on stage and in the text, it only happens in the surtitles of a concert performance.

By now (scene 2 of Act 1) I found that actively watching the stage, text and videos, and listening to the singing and music, was beginning to tire me, and I had started to lapse into the lazy habit of concentrating more on the music and singing on-stage, and less on the Kinsella surtitles and the video footage projected onto the back of the hall. Others I spoke to afterwards had found the same thing happening to them at different times.

Because of this vast array of stories some of the audience, unfamiliar with the work, entirely missed the surtitles which alone told them that Siegfried had taken the love-potion from Gutrune and drunk it. Kinsella's text (available in a separate book) is absolutely clear about what is going on at this crucial moment. Gutrune offers the drink with the words:

"Welcome, guest

of the house of Gibich!

This drink is offered

by his daughter"

and Siegfried responds

"If all else you gifted

vanished from my mind

one memory would never be

erased - this first drink,

this libation to love…

But if you missed these words the story descended into nonsense, and that is what happened for some.

Elizabeth Campbell then returned as Waltraute. Handled badly, the Waltraute - Brunnhilde scene can hold back the music and (to put it bluntly) drag like a bad King Mark's monologue, but in Campbell's and Bullock's hands, aided by Friend, this scene impelled us breathlessly towards the climax of Act 1 - Siegfried's betrayal and violation of Brunnhilde.

Bullock conveyed her contemptuous dismissal of Waltraute, her joy at Siegfried's return, and her horror at Siegfried's betrayal perfectly. Woodrow, wearing Peeters' black sports coat in lieu of a tarnhelm, mimicked Peeters' voice in a flat baritone before returning to his steely tenor to address an invisible Notung.

And thus, to rapturous applause and relieved and even bemused looks from the orchestral players, ended an outstanding prologue and first act, exceeding every expectation I had. It was time for dinner. People spoke about Bullock and Woodrow being better than the Brunnhilde and Siegfried currently singing at Bayreuth. They praised the orchestra. They hated the surtitles, and were ambivalent about the images. But there was almost no doubt; this would be a triumph.

Intervals are strange things. When Act 2 began an hour later it was clear that the brilliant edge which Friend and the orchestra had maintained untarnished throughout most of Act 1 was going and eventually, that it was gone. This isn't to say that they played badly, only that they did not play as well as they had in Act 1. Later, there were some moments when it was not clear who was in charge, especially where the volume was concerned. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Act 2 began with Sir Donald McIntyre's Alberich's unashamedly ham-like acting as he met Phillip Kang's Hagen, eyes closed in one of the wooden thrones, waiting for the dawn of his great day. Sir Donald is one of the few basses still singing who could realistically pass himself off as Kang's father, and he did it spectacularly well. Bayreuth's centenary Wotan had come full circle and debuted as Alberich at PIAF's 50th festival.

Then, after Siegfried's vocally energetic and youthful return from Brunnhilde's night of desecration, Hagen summoned the Vassals, made up of contingents from the West Australian Opera and the State Opera of South Australia. In unison they were a magnificent chorus, menacing and jovial in turn, and their scenes were, like so many of the set pieces of the performance, breathtaking.

Brunnhilde's arrival with Gunther and her recognition of the drugged Siegfried lead to another spine-tingling moment, the oaths sworn on Hagen's Heilige Waffe. Here, both Bullock and Woodrow sang without restraint, soaring above the orchestra over which, it seemed, Friend had again lost control as far as the volume was concerned.

Brunnhilde, Hagen and Gunther darkly plotted Siegfried's death, and Hagen's great day, and the second act, ended with further rapturous applause and more relieved looks from the orchestra members. They were after all going to make it, and it was indeed going to be a triumph.

Act 3 introduced us to three more vocal strangers, the Rheintochters, Merlyn Quaife, Nicole Youl and Kathryn Dineen, whose bright new voices almost made you forget that it was their careless guardianship of the gold at the start of the Cycle that was responsible for the whole mess which this last act was about to resolve.

Woodrow's voice was now in full bloom, alternately dismissive with Gunther, and tender as he told the Vassals of the woodbird, and of his awakening and wooing of Brunnhilde. Hagen's fatal blow, delivered to a straight translation of the libretto, was followed by a vocally glorious "Brunnhilde, heilige Braut", with Friend and the orchestra as tightly-controlled musical partners.

Triumphant musical set-pieces are following one upon another, in the Italian operatic way. It is Siegfried's funeral march, and superlatives have deserted me. What can I now say about Susan Bullock's "Immolation"? We have become so used to hearing sopranos in ideal studio conditions knocking off great chunks of music that we can mistake these freakish performances for the real thing. Bullock stood and delivered the real thing without any hint of the supreme physical effort and voice and breath control that must have been required to produce such a seemingly effortless stream of sound and vocal colour. Bullock in full flight was as strong and fabulous as she had been when we first heard her and Siegfried in scene 2 of the prologue, over six hours earlier. She soared effortlessly above the orchestra, over whose volume by now Friend seemed to have only nominal control. Her voice rang through my head long after she had stopped singing, as the orchestra gave us the Ring's final redemptive message, and the physical effect of her singing remained with me after I had returned to my hotel.

The second performance, on Saturday 15 February, was even more triumphant than the first, and the orchestra much more tightly under control.

Comparisons are odious, but the two Perth Gotterdammerung concert performances invite comparison with the two Sydney concert performances in August 2000 with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under Edo de Waart, which formed part of the Olympic Arts Festival. Unfortunately, like their Sydney counterparts, the Perth performances were not sold out, and I suspect that both relied heavily on free or heavily discounted tickets to fill seats to a respectable level. Even so, the Perth performances were probably not much more than 80% full, reinforcing the lingering impression of great courage shown by Mr Doran and the PIAF team in choosing Gotterdammerung to close both their 50th festival and their cycle of millennium celebration festivals.

Overall, for me the Perth performances, with their triumphs and their flaws, were more satisfying musical experiences than their Sydney counterparts, and will be the benchmark against which I will measure future performances.

And flaws there were, both in the orchestra, and in the style of presentation. As well as the constant battle which seemed to be waging between Lionel Friend and the orchestra over volume - especially in Thursday night's performance - there were some very prolonged unattractive sounds, especially from the brass. Every performance has its share of wrong notes, fluffed entries, and so on, but consistent poor playing is another matter.

I often tell people - only half in jest - that the way to encourage French Horn players to desist from producing those awful bleary sounds that habitually come from their section is to line the players up and shoot one, as a warning to the others. It may seem cruel to the players, but in the end it will be a kindness to audiences. The SSO's players are particularly susceptible to producing vile sounds when playing Wagner, and one thing the 1998 Adelaide Ring showed was that these sounds are not mandatory; if orchestras we in the East regard as second tier can produce such ravishing sound, what excuse does the SSO have? One unexpected legacy of this Perth Gotterdammerung is therefore a lingering feeling that the full potential of the SSO has yet to be realised. Edo de Waart leaves the orchestra a far finer instrument than he found it 10 years ago, but there is clearly room for much more improvement before they are consistently of the standard achieved by the West and South Australian symphonies.

The major flaw in the presentation was, for me, not the music but the multi-media. The promise of the outside being inside, through televising the fireworks and showing them inside the hall, was I understand dropped because of the cost. But the dramatic images and footage I expected to see in a parallel visual story to the singing, music, and text failed. One small screen on the left of the surtitles, high at the back of the hall above the orchestra and Vassals, simply didn't work. This may also have been a question of cost, but this deserved a massive screen behind the orchestra, or a series of split screens, ten times or more the size of the screen that was used. These images ranged from majestic landforms and spectacular flypasts to banal footage from a Coca Cola factory, and they needed impact vastly beyond what was available on these meagre screens to draw the audience into this parallel story.

And then there is the text. Having had the opportunity since these performances to read John Kinsella's adaptation in full, and his lengthy introduction and explanation, I'm sorry I wasn't able to do that beforehand.

I'm also somewhat puzzled by the vehement reactions of some in the audience to Kinsella's text, which was used as the surtitles. I was not sure at the time whether the adaptation would make it difficult for someone unfamiliar with the work to follow it, but having read it through I am sure this wouldn't have happened. Just as innovative producers can enhance the meaning of the Ring in performance by using staging and production techniques which contradict Wagner's stage instructions, so too can innovative translations and adaptations enhance the meaning of the sung text - which was sung in German as written and orchestrated by Wagner.

Some people, who loathe traditional productions with their winged helmets, gods in furs, elementals in mud, dragons and giants, found the shock of this new adapted text not at all to their liking. But if the production instructions can be overthrown to bring out a new meaning relevant to a new audience, why not the translation of the sung text as well?

Once I was immersed in the adaptation and accepted its unfamiliarity, I enjoyed the experience. Kinsella makes new words by stringing old words together, in a very Germanic way, producing concatenated words like "world-ash-weaving". Then there we modern idioms which clashed with the old translated Wagner verses, such as Waltraute telling Brunnhilde to "Get a grip, keep it under control, and listen closely to me", or Siegfried telling Hagen that "I took off like a rocket" up Brunnhilde's rock and "penetrated the firewall", or Brunnhilde telling Gutrune to "Quieten down, sad specimen of woman!"

The opening prologue was particularly challenging, with the Norns' utterances expanded far beyond their sung equivalents. Normally, surtitles abbreviate, but in this case a few sung words could result in hundreds of words in their surtitle. The problem for me was that the effort needed to read all the words, watch all the pictures, and listen to the singing and the orchestra all-at-once was overwhelming. But as a book, the expanded and adapted text presents no such problems. In his introduction, John Kinsella says that he will provide adaptations of all four Ring Cycle works. I wish him well.

I seldom read reviews of performances which are over because, if they were outstanding, I always regret that I didn't go. I particularly loathe reviewers who adopt a rather precious approach ("I shall never see the like again ….") or over-gild the performances ("If you only see one work by Wagner this decade …."). This, alas, is exactly what I have done. If you didn't have the stomach for these paeans of praise, you would have stopped reading long ago. If you are still with me, I hope you have enjoyed the flavour of one of the most challenging live performances I have attended and one which, warts and all, will remain with me as a benchmark for (I suspect) some years to come.

Elke Neidhardt and her production team for the 2004 Adelaide Ring's Gotterdammerung have been given a real challenge.

And a final point. There may exist, somewhere in PIAF's vaults, the video and sound tracks of two remarkable performances of Gotterdammerung which were filmed and broadcast live to the outdoor audience in Perth this February. Will anyone, I wonder, consider taking these recordings and producing from them a video or DVD of all, or part, of those extraordinary events?

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