The St Petersburg Ring
It was a crisp, sunny June day when my
Group of 10 Wagner lovers arrived in St Petersburg. The city was looking
its best with bright beds of tulips and lilac trees of all colours
everywhere. Most of the important buildings have been restored as
the city celebrates its 300th anniversary.
The Mariinsky Theatre is soon to be modernised
and extended but the auditorium remains one of the most beautiful
in Europe: white, gold and blue with a wonderfully painted ceiling
and individual red and cream chairs. The auditorium was abuzz with
excitement and expectation as we waited for the curtain to rise for
Das Rheingold. The upstairs foyer offered challenging glimpses
of what we were to see. Large fibreglass figures and scenes in an
abstract style provoked much discussion.
The Cycle evolved over four years but
effectively this became a little over six months. Das Rheingold
was premiered in 2000 but a dispute between the Company and the Director
led to another Director producing Die Walküre in 2001. Further
disputes resulted in another change when George Tsypin devised a "production
concept" with Julia Pevzner taking responsibility to redo the
first two works and Vladimir Mirzoer doing the others, with Maestro
Valery Gergiev as Supervising Artistic Director.
The primary concept was a perceived commonality
between Wagner's mythological sources and those of a remote region
of the Caucuses. The stage, throughout the Cycle, was dominated by
enormous fibreglass figures, or parts thereof, and numerous small
amorphous bodies about a metre tall.
Rheingold's opening scene was
very dark with about 20 or so small fibreglass figures arranged in
rows and four huge ones suspended horizontally above the stage. Some
10 "dancers", clad in black with luminous white hair to
the floor engaged in a series of exercises while the Rhinemaidens
and Alberich sang.
It soon became apparent that very
little effort was being made to match the production to the words
and the stage directions appeared to be completely ignored. For instance,
the Niebelungen gold was a mesh sphere so there was no relevance in
the demand for the Tarnhelm or Ring to fill the chinks and cover Freia
(Tatiana Borodina).
Fricka (Svetlana Volkova) and Wotan
(Mikhail Kit) were dressed in classical style but for obscure reasons
donned large Egyptian godhead masks for the walk to Valhalla. The
singing was excellent with Erda (Zlata Bulycheva) being outstanding.
The orchestra was very good, though it did seem to rather under-rehearsed.
Walküre began well with Sieglinde
( Mlada Khudoley) and Siegmund (Alexie Steblyanko) singing strongly
and lyrically, though Sieglinde's dress of leaves and branches did
seem a bit insecure. Hunding (Gennardy Bezzubenkov) was accompanied
by five "dancers" dressed as hunting dogs and though he
sang very well the dogs were a distraction.
Fricka and Wotan (Vladimir Vaneyev)
were dressed in Russian folk costumes and Brünnhilde (Olga Savova)
in a glorious black gown with a radiating silver headdress reminiscent
of the Queen of the Night. One odd thing was that Wotan had his patch
on the wrong eye.
The singing was beautiful and very
moving, but the entrance of the "dancers" during the Annunciation
of Death, together with the red lights that throbbed in the bodies
of the fibreglass figures on the stage, spoiled a very poignant scene.
In the last Act there were 17 Valkyries as all the parts except Brünnhilde
had been doubled. While the sound quality was marvellous, they all
stood in a row at the front of the stage paying no heed to the actions,
or reaction, demanded by the words they were singing. Wotan's farewell
to Brünnhilde was very moving despite the ubiquitous "dancers",
this time dressed as flames, who climbed all around Brünnhilde long
before Wotan had summoned Loge
Siegfried started badly when the bear
appeared rolling onto the stage in a double hoop. Neither Siegfried
(Leonid Zakhorzhaev) nor Mime (Nicholi Gassier) was outstanding, but
The Wanderer ( Mikhail Kit) did manage to bring some emotion and tension
to his scene with Mime. However, this very idiosyncratic production
had more surprises, as there was no attempt to forge the sword; rather,
Siegfried wandered around the stage. It came as no surprise then that
there was no dragon though there was a visible Woodbird. In Act 3
Brünnhilde (Larissa Gogolevskaya) sang strongly.
Götterdämmerung started well with
the Norns acting and singing very convincingly. Siegfried ( Sergei
Lyadov) and Brünnhilde (Olga Sergeyeva) were excellent and our hopes
were raised for a strong finish, but it was not to last. The scene
in the Gibiching Hall was not convincing with the vassals giving the
impression of an Impi army. By Act 3, the strain on the voices was
showing. After Siegfried's death, he was placed - with his active
participation - in the bear's double hoop and rolled off stage only
to reappear in a coffin at the front of the stage while a number of
people filed passed dropping salt? on the body. Brünnhilde's
farewell was an anti-climax and the whole scene petered out without
fire or any suggestion of renewal.
It was a disappointing Ring for me
and indeed for most of the group. We had expected so much and while
the orchestra was always very good and there was some wonderful singing
the sheer perversity of the production was the overwhelming factor.
Just as you became totally absorbed in the singing there was some
distraction which could not be ignored. It certainly provoked continuous
discussion within the Group as we tried to rationalise what we had
seen. Interestingly this discussion continues whenever we meet.
Barbara McNulty. October 2003
This Page was last updated on:
20-Oct-2004
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