It was always going to be the hottest ticket of the season — appropriately enough in the sauna that was the Albert Hall last night. This is the first complete Ring at the Proms and the first opera of Wagner conducted in Britain by Daniel Barenboim, widely regarded as his greatest living interpreter. It’s fitting that the Proms should land this coup in the Wagner bicentenary year and all four nights of the cycle have been sold out for months.
The cast comes largely from productions under Barenboim in Berlin and at La Scala. In Milan, Barenboim’s conducting was inordinately sluggish, but in last night’s Das Rheingold, with his own dependable Staatskapelle Berlin, he was back on scintillating form. Not only did the duration (two hours, 29 minutes) match precisely that of his classic Bayreuth recording of 1991, but within that taut framework he brought an expressive latitude. Particularly noteworthy was his sensitivity to the role of Wotan’s persistent wife Fricka (no shrew in Ekaterina Gubanova’s sympathetic account) and to the lovelorn giant Fasolt (the superb Stephen Milling).
Iain Paterson’s Wotan was intelligently sung if not yet a towering performance, while Anna Larsson as Erda dispensed her Earth Mother wisdom from the organ loft with portentous eloquence. Best of all was Johannes Martin Kränzle, who explored the complexity of the Nibelung dwarf Alberich in a subtle, multi-dimensional delivery.
The only real advantages to a semi-staging (Justin Way’s is very minimal) are pragmatic; the downside is the lack of dramatic engagement that for Wagner himself was crucial. There would have been space to create a more theatrical element, but here singers generally stood in a line across the stage, sometimes stroking a chin or mopping a brow (the latter, one assumes, a response to the tropical heat rather than a dramaturgical gesture).
More imaginative use might have been made also of the illuminated panels behind the performers. We had green for Erda and a reasonable attempt at a Rainbow Bridge, but everything else was blue, whether under sea, up in the mountains or down in Nibelheim.
The hall still declines to install surtitles, so those without either programmes or German are left to flounder. A shame, because not only is this top-notch Wagner, but there’s also a new audience for it here. And the best is still to come.
Available on BBC iPlayer; The Proms runs until Sep 7 (0845 401 5040, bbc.co.uk/proms)
