Proms 2013: Wagner – Das Rheingold, review

Daniel Barenboim makes a glorious start to Wagner's supremely challenging Ring cycle, says Rupert Christiansen.

Daniel Barenboim conducts on the first night of Wagner's epic Ring cycle
Daniel Barenboim conducts on the first night of Wagner's epic Ring cycle Credit: Photo: BBC/Chris Christodoulou

There’s always a danger that judgment of Daniel Barenboim’s conducting can get clouded by admiration for his ambassadorial work in the Middle East, as well as his status as a public spokesman on the state of classical music within western culture.

A concert performance of Wagner’s supremely challenging Ring cycle, with an orchestra and several soloists imported from his home at the Berlin Staatsoper provides the ideal opportunity to put his forcefully expressed views to one side and concentrate instead on his music-making.

Barenboim has over many years conducted complete Wagner operas at Bayreuth and La Scala as well as in Berlin, but this is his first time he has done so in London: as a great admirer of Fürtwangler, immersed in the German tradition, he takes a stately view of the Ring’s opening episode, emphasizing depth, weight and refinement of orchestral sound and keeping the pace measured (by my reckoning the duration was just about 150 minutes, perhaps ten minutes slower than Solti or Pappano have made it).

The pay-off is that the orchestral playing was simply glorious throughout, even if the total assurance with which every phrase was shaped – with immaculately smooth crescendos and flawless intonation – left edges and corners rubbed down Karajan-smooth and sheer visceral seat-of-the-pants excitement wanting at the climaxes.

Or did that last spark of spontaneous energy fall victim to the intense heat in the Hall – humidity through which the jacketed musicians (and the unjacketed Prommers) struggled with dauntless courage?

First of this Ring’s three Wotans was Iain Paterson, heir apparent to Bryn Terfel in this repertory: he sings the music with great nobility and sensitivity, but as yet his stage presence is too introverted to make the character’s authority and power credible. There’s too much elevated thought in the interpretation, not enough low cunning.

His Fricka was Ekaterina Gubanova, so warmly eloquent and poised as to make one warm to her moral cause, in strong contrast to the jumpiness of Stephan Rügamer’s vicious Loge and Johannes Martin Kränzle light-voiced but marvellously foxy Alberich. A decorously seductive trio of Rhinemaidens and a fearsome pair of giants (Stephen Milling and Eric Halfvarson) also made their mark.

But ultimately this was not a performance in which the singers could dominate: Barenboim and the orchestra ruled, transmuting what can seem some of Wagner’s most drily discursive quarts d’heure into tone poems of ravishing beauty.