Lohengrin – review

Welsh National Opera is building its summer season around the Wagner bicentenary. Next week it gives the British stage premiere of Jonathan Harvey's final opera, Wagner Dream, but most of its resources have gone into a new production of Lohengrin, directed and designed by Antony McDonald and conducted by the company's music director, Lothar Koenigs.

It is a solidly impressive, if slightly circumscribed, achievement. McDonald has transplanted the action to a hazily defined period in the second half of the 19th century, perhaps during the Franco-Prussian war. But he makes relatively little use of the time shift, except to emphasise the rather grungy, grimy ordinariness of the war-torn Brabant world into which Lohengrin is thrust, arriving in a boat drawn by a swan that seems to have escaped from Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake. The story is told clearly enough – no small achievement in this opera – and the production has no distracting idées fixes, though it does keep one subversive surprise until just before the final curtain.

Though the performance had been affected by illness – the very capable Telramund, Claudio Otelli, had come into the cast just three days earlier, and the fine, rather severe Friedrich, Matthew Best, had a throat infection – standards were high. Emma Bell's Elsa grew steadily in vocal allure, and she made a superb foil for Susan Bickley's immensely intelligent Ortrud, so wonderfully contained that her outburst before the wedding was all the more shocking. Peter Wedd is an interesting, unconventional Lohengrin, at his best in his understated final-act revelation of his origins, less convincing when a more heroic sound is required; and the WNO chorus are unreservedly glorious. So, too, is much of the orchestral playing, with trumpets arrayed around the auditorium and Koenigs marshalling it all impressively, even if he's not giving the music the visionary dimension it sometimes needs.