Siegfried – review

The course of Wagner's Ring never did run smooth. Before this third instalment of the Royal Opera's revival, Wolfgang Koch, the Alberich, was stricken with a voice-eradicating cold. Jochen Schmeckenbecher woke up in Vienna unaware he would be flying to London to sing that afternoon. Luckily, Alberich doesn't appear until act two: when Antonio Pappano raised his baton for act one, Schmeckenbecher was reportedly still at Heathrow. But he made it, and sang from the side while Koch acted; both did a stalwart job.

Unsurprisingly, this took some of the sting out of Alberich's scenes. More mundane glitches, such as a gliding stag with its antler caught on the set, offered brief distractions, too. But a fine supporting cast held things on course, led by Gerhard Siegel's conniving Mime and brightened by Sophie Bevan's sweet-sounding Woodbird, somersaulting on wires like a circus pro.

Atop the whirling white slab at the start of act three, Bryn Terfel's Wanderer – Wotan in disguise – provides another of the production's iconic moments. His performance throughout has been hugely involving, detailed and direct; but his baritone is higher and brighter than the classic Wotan voice, and just occasionally the orchestra has seemed as much Wotan's enemy as have the Nibelungs. Pappano continues to draw out some astonishing instrumental detail, but coordination came unstuck as Siegfried strode up to the Valkyries' Rock, taking the magic and fire out of one of the opera's climaxes.

Siegfried, the boy with the superman genes, is near-impossible to cast ideally. In the absence of an actual superhero, Stefan Vinke, energetic and bullish, will do, but his tenor doesn't ping off the walls of the dress circle. Susan Bullock's Brünnhilde, however, has hit her stride, her soprano piercing through the orchestra. Her awakening, visible only in a dim shadow-play, is another frustration in Keith Warner's patchy production: is this a show of confidence in the music telling the whole story, or a colossal cop-out?

Broadcast on Radio 3 on 21 October