You may not see a better Walküre all year than Munich’s, conducted by Kirill Petrenko and featuring a cast of Simon O’Neill, Ain Anger, John Lundgren, Anja Kampe, Nina Stemme and Ekaterina Gubanova.
It’s being live streamed on Monday and made available for a further 24 hours.
Bookmark it here.
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Just coming back from tonight’s performance…quite wonderful from all musical points of view. Really worth watching on Monday
Worth watching, worth listentining to, or both?
It’s an AWFUL staging, part of an AWFUL Ring.
Yes – the staging – sets and superfluous movement group gyrations – is fairly ghastly. However, what worked yesterday was the interaction between the various characters. That was very well defined and often very moving.
Certainly Kriegenburg is no idiot. The Die Soldaten for Munich is actually quite good. But I wouldn’t give him much credit, Erich, for Personenregie in Die Walküre, which all the actors know so well and which is in any case easy to act.
I sat through the cycle once, when it was new and badly conducted, and would not go back even for Petrenko because of its low quality. Life is too short to waste a week having your intelligence insulted.
Then it’s probably down to the skill of the individual singers: certainly the interaction of Stemme and Lundgren (mercifully Koch cancelled) and Kampe and Stemme was very convincing.
Norman makes a bold claim there. Stemme, Lundgren, and Agner sing in the 2018 Covent Garden Ring too, and I find it hard to see how Munich’s trio of O’Neill, Kampe and Gubanova beat London’s Skelton, Magee, and Connolly.
I watched parts of this streamed performance (only parts since I had also other fish to fry) and it must be said that it is wonderful that we can watch such productions now through the net. Thank you Norman for the link. Singers were great, and they were acting very appropriately, the orchestra was wonderful, and Petrenko’s approach was classicist but expressive: clear and crisp, lyrical where it had to be, but never indulging in pathos. I think the music could have had some more mellowness in the 1st act love duet, but it came across anyway. What a great orchestra it is…. but the fire music was a bit under tempo so that you could hear all the details of the little flames, while a more ‘al fresco’ style – a little faster and more an overall effect – would be more decorative, which is obviously meant at this place. But all in all, musically wonderful production with great singing and playing.
The staging had a soft version of Regietheater with uncalled-for group additions which I could not understand, not even with explanation,but fortunately it did not distract too much from the goings-on.
Interestingly, there are things in the Ring which can never be staged satisfactorily, neither by naturalism nor by Regietheater, like the Walkürenritt, we just have to resign to some wide gap between what we hear and what we see. Maybe better is, in such cases, to just shut the curtain and let the music (including the singing) do the work. Wagner’s entirely impractical stage fantasies are an early example of ‘transgression of boundaries’ which did not work-out well. After Parsifal he dreamed of an ‘invisible theatre’….. what would that be? I think: concert music, inevitably.