It’s more than three years since there was a production of Wagner’s ultimate masterpiece, Tristan und Isolde, in the UK, and I have been looking forward eagerly to Welsh National Opera’s revival of the one they share with Scottish Opera. Yannis Kokkos, who was the original designer and director, pays tribute in the programme to the great Swiss designer Adolphe Appia, and his sets, spare, concentrating the action and suggesting a lot that isn’t to be seen on stage, are rather similar to the ones that Toscanini used in La Scala in 1923. For me, they are virtually ideal, lovely to look at and enabling the singers to move freely but ensuring that every gesture they make tells. Unfortunately, the revival director Peter Watson didn’t make much of his opportunities, so the performers behaved very much as they would on any stage with any setting. The first performance, though no disaster, felt as if it was the trial run for something that will be much more successful after about another five.
The most consistent source of satisfaction was the orchestra, playing with great warmth, the horns at the start of Act II outstanding, the lower strings in the prelude to Act III growling with frustration and torment. But the conductor, Mark Wigglesworth, was all too considerate of his singers. There comes a point in any performance of Tristan where, if the leading pair don’t have very powerful voices, the only thing is to let them be drowned by the amazing orchestral swell, or else to sacrifice Wagner’s most intensely symphonic textures in the interest of getting the words across. Neither Annalene Persson’s Isolde nor John Mac Master’s Tristan has a heroic voice, yet Wigglesworth scaled things down so that not a sound they managed to make was inaudible.
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