Rheingold is shrunk to just 18 musicians
OperaWagner wrote the opera for an orchestra 85, but 18 is all Edmonton, Canada, can summon in a chamber version by Jonathan Dove and the late Graham Vick, set in London’s present-day East End.
The audience sits three-quarters of the way in the round and there is no orchestra pit.
Report by Tom Murray here.
Better than nothing
Virginia Opera has been doing what I believe is this same production the past several years. This year they did Siegfried and Gotterdammerung is still to come. Admittedly it’s no match for the real thing but it’s still interesting to hear it this way, at least once.
Corrections of Wagner’s scoring are to be welcomed….. A string quartet version of Götterdämmerung would certainly bring-out the intimate aspects of that work.
Once Rozhdestvensky told he heard Shostakovich’s ‘The Nose’ being rehearsed by the orchestra of 12 once in the 1970s in the USSR, it was considered to be a farce then…
Baroque soloists then to match the sound! None of this cut down stuff in this country by more than three-quarters of its players is what Wagner ever intended and it’s just plain disrespectful towards Wagner. It really isn’t better than nothing. Others of course will disagree.
Yes, indeed, most critics and commentators on Wagner who have heard this version (which has been performed many times around the world since the 1990s) would disagree.
I once heard a recording of a performance, from the Hoffnung Interplanetary Music Festival, of the Tchaikovsky 4th, performed by a recorder ensemble. [It was beyond hilarious.] This strikes me as being in the same vein.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ryHx2Krbh0
Dove’s arrangements of Das Rheingold and Die Walkure were already done in NYC in 2002 and 2004, directed by Christopher Alden.
It also works the other way round: Schubert’s Unfinished under Solti with ten double basses. In both cases one simply wonders: Why?
If I am not mistaken, Karajan may have said that he did Lohengrin and Salome (or was it Elektra?) with some 20 or so musicians at his first post in Ulm, because that’s all what he got.
Necessity requires inventiveness.
Do something else instead! Benjamin Britten wrote for smaller forces, but each to their own as we say in Britain. No one is forced to go and spend money on half a performance.
Britten was a teenager when Karajan was in charge of the Ulm Theater.
The only two Britten works that Herbie conducted were the Frank Bridge Variations (in London, Turin and with the Vienna Symphony, but never in Berlin) and the War Requiem – a series of two concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic.
Jonathan Dove’s ingenious and effective reduced version of The Ring was already done some 25 years ago at the Longborough Festival, conducted by no less a figure than Anthony Negus. There is nothing wrong with doing these smaller versions in places that do not have the resources to do the gigantic originals.
Like so many of the stories on this site, this is not news.
It was commissioned and premiered by City of Birmingham Touring Opera in the early 1990s, Simon Halsey conducting. I was there to review it. You do Longborough an injustice. It boasts a pit a la Bayreuth which can now accommodate a 70+ orchestra.