Supreme challenge

Any article about a production of Wagner’s Ring cycle has to begin by saying that it is the supreme challenge a company can face, and how much more so when the company is based in a remote foreign city, and flies in to mount the tetralogy a few hours after it has been performing something else in its home base. Wagner’s great epic is usually performed, even in Bayreuth, with two breaks of a day each between the second and third and the third and fourth parts. The Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg, however, arrived last week in Cardiff to perform the Ring on four consecutive evenings, as Wagner originally hoped; but it’s almost never done that way, in the first place because of the immense strain that it puts on the singers of the three largest roles, Wotan, Siegfried and Brünnhilde.

Valery Gergiev has a way of handling such problems, as he does of handling all problems, it seems.