A Ring cycle to rival the Met’s
OrchestrasNo sooner has the Metropolitan Opera rolled out plans for a new Wagner Ring than the Dallas Symphony announces concert performances of all four operas (Oct 13, 15, 17, 20), as well as standalone Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (Oct 5 & 8). It is supposedly the first concert Ring cycle by any US orchestra in recent history.
The conductor is Fabio Luisi, who was passed over eight years ago as music director by the Met.
Casting includes Lise Lindstrom (Brünnhilde), Sara Jakubiak (Sieglinde), Deniz Uzun (Fricka), Daniel Johansson (Siegfried), Mark Delavan (Wotan) and Tómas Tómasson (Alberich). The staging director will be Alberto Triola.
Dallas Symphony announced this well over a year ago. And it’s already been in progress with performances last season.
This site covered the announcement back in March: https://slippedisc.com/2024/03/revitalised-dallas-gets-a-ring-next-year/
This is a tiresome, transparent attempt to needle the Met with old news.
And the delay in the Met’s new Ring Cycle had to do with it originally being a co-production with the ENO and their funding not coming through for it.
Why would the mighty Met be needled by old news?
Oh … ! Right. Because it hired a spoiled child when it could have had a gent.
Or actually because the Met saw the Jones production and how bad it was and cancelled its further participation.
Strings in Dallas can be seen as lazy and many times out of tune but they’ll be well hidden within the brass in Wagner. This will be interesting
Nonsensical comment.
Maybe a better seat is advisable next time.
At no professional level symphony orchestras that are well paid and rehearsed, are strings ‘lazy and out-of-tune’. These people know that their reputation is on the line every time they play before the public. They’re accountable to their stand partners; their section leaders, and to their conductor – guest, permanent or otherwise. And there are also far more moments where the strings are exposed in “The Ring”, than there are moments when they’re covered over. You can hear the string parts clearly throughout the entire “Ride of the Valkyries” even. Wagner knew what he was doing.
That is exactly how it is.
Dallas strings are superb although there are a couple violinists from time to time who I caught sleeping during their long rests during a performance. I think it caught the conductor off guard. I would say that their strings are similar to Naples Philharmonic.
Dallas strings are great! Obviously, not the MET strings but Dallas plays great! They are similar to Indianapolis Symphony where the current Dallas concertmaster used to be the Guest Concertmaster.
Pretentious hogwash. The musicians of the Dallas Symphony are highly trained musicians from world class conservatories. Your attempt to portray them as some pseudo professional-community orchestra is preposterous.
You must be in a group that plays everything in tune. Good for you
I’ve heard The Royal Concertgebouw and Vienna Phil at Carnegie and they’ve both had brief moments of funky intonation, the most memorable being Vienna, the low brass had some tuning issues at the end of Ein Heldenleben. And I’ve sat through numerous NY Phil open rehearsals and they’re always working on intonation, it’s a never ending process and part of live performance.
It is beyond me why anyone except for the most devoted Wagnerians would want to sit through 16 hours of Wagner’s Ring from a concert podium, without the benefit of some action on the stage…
You clearly have not seen many of the recent staged desecrations in recent years.
Since I am a very regular visitor to the many opera houses in my region (Thuringia – 9 professional full time opera houses within one hour of driving time), I have seen my share of Regietheater. And, frankly, unlike many commentators here I welcome approaches that show me something new and different. If the umpteenth Walküre, La Traviata, Nozze di Figaro does the same old, same old, I can do the staging myself. And that would be boring. Although not quite as boring as 16 hours without any theatrical action…
An interesting comment. Why would someone go to an old, utterly-familiar opera to see a new staging?
If it is the staging that is the main reason, then here we have an example of the ideal opera goer from the point of view of Regietheater directors: people who don’t care much for the music but want to see something new and different. So, compatible with the ideas of Regietheater directors who also don’t care much for the music, or for the work in question.
It does not cross these minds that it is then so much more sensible to go to a new opera.
Au contraire. This season I will have the opportunity to see operas by Antonio Soler, JC Bach and Ethel Smyth. Never seen them before. In those cases I definitely prefer traditional stagings, since all of this will be new. So, please tell the story in a straightforward manner. However, when we are talking about something just about everybody knows, please make it interesting by adding some unexpected revelations on stage. The reason to go is, of course, the music. But a staging bonus will be nice…
The main problem with most regie theatre in my thinking is that in opera all that happens on stage should come from the score. The music must come first. That still allows for an almost endless variety of stage direction. But when directors come up with a “concept” and everything we see must fit in with that concept whether or not it clashes with the music, I for one am not interested. Some years ago I saw a Cosi at the Edinburgh Festival set in Africa with the audience witnessing a rape during that gorgeous overture. I left.
Because the music is extraordinary and putting the orchestra on the stage (rather than hidden in a pit) changes the way you experience it.
I believe all that would depend upon the ‘action from the stage.’ I saw the MET’s “Das Rheingold” and watched in lurid fascination to see if ‘The Machine’ would fail and then dice, splice, and mangle the singers. That may not have been what Wagner intended but it did have the effect of causing me and plenty of other operagoers to concentrate on the action with more intensity than usual.
Just listening to the Ring can be plenty boring, especially at the first act of Siegfried. Following the libretto makes all the difference.
Speaking for myself, I find Siegfried the most challenging of the 4 to sit through. It’s long and not a whole lot happens really.
Readers may or may not remember the glorious ‘semi-staged’ performance of “The Magic Flute” at the Concertgebouw some years ago, where the singers were costumed, and the director used every inch of the Concertgebouw stage for the action, including the organ loft. Gerald Finlay was Papageno, and Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducted the English Baroque Soloists. The Lion (they didn’t do snakes), the Slaves, the Temple, Pamina’s Couch and the Tree from which Papageno tries to hang himself were supplied by a modern dance troupe. The audience reaction, like that for ‘Springtime for Hitler in Germany’, went from incredulity at the start to a standing ovation at the end. It was issued as a VHS tape but never made it to DVD, presumably for copyright reasons. An off-air (?) recording is available on You Tube.
Yet Phillipe Jordan conducted the 2019 Ring Cycle not Nezet-Seguin…
And magnificently, much better than Luisi in previous years.
A truly great project, with a great orchestra & conductor. The advantage of a concert performance is that the listener is not distracted by absurdist staging and can have the story unfolding in her/his imagination.
True about the staging problems nowadays. There is some attempt in Dallas though to direct stage action.
What bothers me is the casting. Dallas’s Brünnhilde, Alberich and Wotan are all past their primes, at 58, 58 and 65.
Fabio Luisi could have used his familiarity with younger singers to override the sales talk of New York agents and give Texans a fresh sound.
That would certainly have been the case in the 70s and 80s heyday of Houston Grand Opera.
An old Wotan is fine for Walkure and Siegfried, but Rheingold calls for a young Wotan.
Re: staging, concert operas nowadays try to inject director ‘concepts’ just like in opera houses; main difference is they’re not as annoying as the fully staged shows…yet.
It is a fallacy to think that an old character can be served by an old voice.
This is opera, not plain theatre; the musical line must be firm always.
I know for a fact that one of the three old Dallas voices has acquired a beat. Horrible!
Surely Delavan can’t be as bad as James Morris’ wobbly Wotan!
I’m not sure how a concert performance, by a rather good orchestra, with 4-6 dates, can possibly rival a fully staged production at one of the world’s biggest opera houses, with one of the world’s best orchestras, that may be in repertoire for many years, but sure! Good for the DSO.
Well, we will have to wait until 2028-2030 to see what the world’s biggest opera house has to offer. As to being in the repertoire for many years. The last one hardly managed to do so.
Okay, sure, but there were still many more than six performances. Did you see it? I didn’t love the production but it was still quite an event and as always the orchestra was incomparable.
Hardly anyone would have assumed that the Hong Kong Philharmonic was an orchestra capable of performing even just a creditable cycle. Yet under Jaap van Zweden and thanks to Naxos and their engineers the orchestra sounds magnificent, as indeed does the cycle. Little wonder that Gramophone magazine awarded it their ‘Orchestra of the Year” accolade in 2019 largely on the basis of this Ring.
Given the number of regie theatre-type productions one reads about, I’d rather have an excellently performed cycle in a concert hall than an opera house staging than bores me to bits. 16 hours is indeed a long time to sit through. And unless I am really engrossed in a production, the thought that a poor one will return 3 or 4 times in future years would certainly not see me returning!
It’s perhaps unfair to criticise Yuval Sharon before his Ring has been unveiled. But the New York Times has labelled him as “opera’s disruptor in residence”. The same paper described him in its review of Sharon’s Lohengrin at Bayreuth as “the closet thing America has to a genuine avant-gardist.” Let’s hope it his Ring is a success for the audiences and the Met, unlike its monstrously expensive underwhelming predecessor.
I believe the Bayreuth Lohengrin ‘concept’ had already been decided before Yuval Sharon stepped in on the 11th hour to salvage the show.
With respect it does not seem to have been the 11th hour. Alvis Hermanis who had been due to direct the new production withdrew in 2016. It’s true that work on the new designs had been started but the Yuval Sharon production did not appear for another 2 years. Plenty of time to change a concept – if not completely.
I’m glad you enjoyed that recording. A recording, similarly, is no match for a fully staged production of the entire cycle.
Apart from Andrew Clark, commentators seem to have forgotten that there is an in-between where singers in concert performances do not just stand and sing – semi-staged and costumed concert performances. Seiji Ozawa used to do these in Boston and with his Tokyo orchestra – I believe successfully.
China’s National Center for the Performing Arts will do Valkyrie and Siegfried next year as well, having just done Rheingold
Is Mark Delevan still singing?! Wow.
While I like YNS (his Parsifal was very good I thought) I wish Luisis were conducting the cycle at the Met. Outstanding Wagnerian.
This re-announcement was NOT to needle the Met, but to ensure that the same tired cynics would spit their venom at American orchestra’s and directors. Allowing them to do so occasionally keeps them on the site long enough to satisfy advertisers. Too bad direct mention wasn’t made of anything gay or progressive.
Daniel Johannson, the tenor singing Siegfried, is not to be confused with Daniel Johannsen, a marvelous Bach tenor.
Forget Dallas! You can see it staged in a little Vermont town. There is a group in Brattleboro Vermont called TUNDI that put on all 4 Ring operas in the past two summers. They have a Brit conductor named Hugh Keelan who is very ambitious! They did Walküre and Siegfried last year, Rheingold and Götterdämmerung this year. The tenor was better than the tenor they had singing in Act 3 of Götterdämmerung at Tanglewood! Check out James Chamberlain if you get the chance.
Well look at that: the puppy is back worrying that old slipper again.
This cast hardly rivals the best the Met can produce. Nor is the orchestra of remotely the same quality.
The Dallas Cycle has been in process much longer than the newly announced Met Ring. I read about the planning at least 2 years ago.