A hole-hearted Siegfried

Everything is there – except the central character

English Wagnerians really can’t complain about what they’ve been offered this year, so long as they can get around the country, and particularly around the countryside. In London we have only had ENO’S Parsifal, but that was musically magnificent. Many of us found Glyndebourne’s Meistersinger tremendous both musically and as a production, and in the north there have been acclaimed performances, with more to come, of Das Rheingold in concert, a treat I have still in store; and a memorable Walküre, also in concert, in Manchester three weeks ago, which introduced a potentially great Wotan, Egils Silins.

Just before that there was a dramatically strange though sometimes effective, and musically mainly superlatively fine Tristan und Isolde at Grange Park. And now, conveniently but accidentally, the third part of the Ring cycle, Siegfried, the penultimate stage of Longborough’s complete Ring, to be performed, if things go according to plan, in 2013, the bicentenary of Wagner’s birth.