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Review
Opera North's Die Walkure is vivid and thrilling - review
You can often assess the temperature of a performance of Die Walküre from the sound of the prelude to Act 1, depicting Siegmund’s desperate flight from nameless hostile pursuers. Some conductors set the pace at a jogtrot, as though the terrain traversed is muddy and marshy; others tear across it as though it’s a racetrack.
But Richard Farnes does something more with this music; he makes you feel Siegmund’s breathless anxiety as he stumbles blindly through the dark thickets of a damp forest, hounds barking in the distance and no end in sight – a fight for survival.
This enthralling scene painting sets the bar high for what unfolds as a taut, vivid and cogent reading of the score, alive at every point to the twists and turns of the drama. I’ve heard more sumptuously beautiful performances of this opera (Haitink’s, for instance) and more viscerally exciting ones (Solti’s), but for sheer immediacy of storytelling, Farnes’ would be hard to beat. And he should not take all the credit: the orchestral playing is first-class.
Opera North semi-staged concert version of Wagner’s Ring cycle has turned into something very special indeed, and before praising the cast, I think insufficient tribute for its success has been paid to Peter Mumford, who has designed the lighting and the visual concept of three large screens, on to which are projected a summary of the plot, surtitles and evocative visual images.
Never distracting, always enhancing, it’s an idea which perfectly complements the lightly stylised illustrative gestures that the half-costumed singers present on the platform. How much better opera singers act when they aren’t being bullied by directors with dotty notions!
Without London budgets to feed it, Opera North’s casting committee has done its work most resourcefully. Kelly Cae Hogan is a shining Brünnhilde, secure in pitch and bright of tone, in sharp contrast to Susan Bickley’s resolute Fricka. Lee Bisset – a soprano unaccountably neglected by English National Opera – gives her all to Sieglinde, her tone hardening at the climaxes but her characterisation radiant and warmly felt. The octet of fearsome Valkyries makes magnificent mayhem as it goes about its gruesome business.
Watch the Die Walküre teaser trailer:
Among the males, James Creswell is his stalwart self as Hunding and a rock-solid Swedish tenor Michael Weinius proves a real find as Siegmund. The disappointment is Robert Hayward’s Wotan, whose woolly singing suggested that he might have been suffering from a cold. Hangdog in manner, his Wotan is more a disgruntled don than a brute of a CEO – one sensed the self-disgust but not the stop-at-nothing ambition and cruelty of a man for whom power is life.
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Touring: until 10 July