Die Walküre
Mariinsky Opera at Covent Garden
When the Mariinsky Opera, under its ultra-hyperactive chief Valery Gergiev, brought its touring Ring to Cardiff in 2006, it was the low point of my life as an opera-goer, with, it is fair to say, no redeeming feature. After strong criticism from many people in many places, the production has been considerably altered, but since Gergiev makes a point of performing the cycle in four days, there are still many changes of cast for the main roles, and the singers involved are not, mainly, Wagnerians, nor German speakers. They have to live at the hectic pace that Gergiev insists on, decisions as to who will sing in which performance are left till late in the day, and the whole thing has an improvised feel. I couldn’t face going to the complete cycle, so I chose Die Walküre on the basis that it is the least likely to be an utter fiasco.
And it wasn’t. Act I, alas, was. This miraculously new music is extraordinarily hard to bring off: when it is successfully performed, it is overwhelming, but I have only heard three or four conductors, in the theatre or on record, who have managed that: Furtwängler, on his EMI studio recording, remains the unsurpassable master. This music of hesitation, anxiety, slowly growing desire and ecstatic release is full of pauses, intense silences, sudden surges and withdrawals. It can easily collapse a dozen times in just over an hour, and under Gergiev it collapsed two dozen times. Orchestral balances were bizarre, there was a wildly over-enthusiastic timpanist, and raucous climaxes came from nowhere and soon retreated nowhere too. The singers needed all the help they could get, but received none.
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