The Met's "Das Rheingold' in HD-Live (2nd review)

My expectations for the Metropolitan Opera’s new Das Rheingold were high. After all, I am a fan of the opera, as I wrote in my BSR series last year about Wagner’s Ring. And I cherish the work of director Robert Lepage– his innovative theater pieces, his spectacular KA for Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, and his high-tech The Damnation of Faust in the Metropolitan Opera house. Also, I adored many of the Met HD transmissions that I’ve seen, particularly the close-up approach of the recent Carmen.

Given this background, Das Rheingold scored only a middling success when I saw its live transmission in High Definition. (It will have encore showings in numerous movie theaters on October 27.) The staging looked expensive but failed to achieve the magic of Lepage’s earlier productions. I found nothing offensive, but nothing breathtaking either.

Stacked how high?

Lepage missed some golden opportunities, if you’ll forgive the pun. Take the gold. Or as Henny Youngman might have said: Take the gold, please. Alberich’s assembly line produced a drab collection of objects like necklaces and breastplates that looked like discards from pawnbrokers.

And when the gold is supposed to be stacked high so that it hides the goddess Freia, the effect was inexplicably bland. Lackluster would be an appropriate word here. Lepage had Freia lie prone in a hammock-like net. Surely the giants wouldn’t permit this. Their deal with Wotan was that gold should be stacked high enough to cover her entire body, especially her eyes. Clearly, Freia should be standing. Then the gold tchochkies were piled in front of her. Yet still Freia’s body remained visible— a violation of the giants' ransom agreement with Wotan.

Other moments proved disappointingly bland. Lepage’s production of Damnation of Faust provided more wizardry, including projections of galloping horses. I hope we’ll see something similar when the Valkyries enter in Die Walkure next spring.

Technicolor ladder

The descent into the gold mine was a good effect, as Lepage gave audiences an overhead perspective on a long staircase. On the other hand, the Technicolor ladder that represented the entrance to Valhalla was tepid.

The technical stuff never dwarfed the action of individual players, and that’s a plus. The characters remained downstage during most of the opera, where the HD cameras got excellent close-ups of them. Still, nothing was as exciting as the chemistry between Elena Garanca and Robert Alagna in Carmen.

Bryn Terfel as Wotan was adequate but not riveting. His singing was warm and rich, as we would expect from this fine artist, but it lacked the dark weight that’s ideal for Wotan. His interpretation failed to supply an individualistic point of view. His voice sounds young, so I wish his acting had projected a young Wotan who was imperious and arrogant.

The sweet-voiced tenor, Richard Croft, as Loge, god of fire, stood out on the movie screen by virtue of his subtly insinuating singing and acting. Yet the audience in the opera house booed him— because, I’m told by a friend of mine who was there, his voice was almost inaudible over the orchestra. Eric Owens, whom Met fans saw as General Groves in Doctor Atomic, made an excellent Alberich in his acting and his singing. Stephanie Blythe used her notable contralto voice to make Fricka memorable. The rest of the cast was fine as well.

The orchestra, under James Levine, was superb. His conducting is impelled by his love of orchestral sound and his affection for singers’ voices. It’s not as heavy as many of his predecessors, nor as gossamer as Herbert von Karajan— rather, a convincing middle road.♦





To read another review by Dan Coren, click here.