Wagner: Siegfried

“Deborah Voigt's Brunnhilde is attractively lyrical. Jay Hunter Morris's stand-in Siegfried is a discovery, a handsome, extrovert giant.” BBC Music Magazine, June 2013 ****

“highly recommended, a refreshing antidote to leaden Teutonic representations. Wagner responds best to Romantic imagery, but this gives it a vividly original twist.” BBC Music Magazine, May 2010 *****

“…excellent orchestral playing and decent sound to match…a striking and often absorbing experiment” Gramophone Magazine, June 2010

“…excellent orchestral playing and decent sound to match…a striking and often absorbing experiment” Gramophone Magazine, June 2010

“highly recommended, a refreshing antidote to leaden Teutonic representations. Wagner responds best to Romantic imagery, but this gives it a vividly original twist.” BBC Music Magazine, May 2010 *****

“The first of several wonders in this new set, collated from three cycles in the early summer of 2006, is the intuitive performing skill of a genuine house ensemble. Even the 'borrowed' Swedish and Norwegian artists, including the Brünnhilde and Hagen, are regulars in a company which inevitably casts the most demanding repertoire from its own – Copenhagen has achieved a class Ring with just one guest, James Johnson's Walküre/Siegfried Wotans. Moreover, if Stockholm is the Venice of the north, the Royal Danish Orchestra must be the Vienna Philharmonic of the north with its forward, rich woodwind timbres (a Nielsen sound, wholly suitable for Nibelung music) and cool-sweet string tone, the whole integrated, balanced and paced with a Kempe-like swiftness and attention to rhythmic detail by their chief Michael Schønwandt.
The assembled cut from the filming of the live performances (Uffe Borgwardt is the credited director of photography) is quite radical for a record of live opera. Like the curious spectator, these cameras want to look up the Rhinedaughters' flapper skirts, focus on props or the aftereffects of violent action, or wonder how a scene looks from behind, from the wings, or even from beneath stage level in the orchestra pit. So the visual editing is busy, justifying allusions to the hand-held operation rediscovered by Danish art cinema directors. It gives the films a breathless close-up quality, the absolute inverse of the accustomed best-seat-in-the-stalls approach.
Kasper Bech Holten's production doesn't intentionally disturb realism and story-telling.
There is a frame story – Brünnhilde is seen researching, in some giant sidestage Valhalla library store, the events of the past from the moment she betrayed Siegfried. But, in principle, this Copenhagen Ring follows a linear narrative.
It's costumed and situated between (approximately) 1920 and the 1990s, and – through ever-ingenious lateral thinking – finds latter-day equivalents for Wagner's geography, properties and dramatic violence. Thus the Rhinegold itself is a beautiful, golden, naked swimming boy, whose heart is bloodily torn out by a serially drinking, lecherous Alberich when he is rejected by les girls. Once captured in Nibelheim, Alberich is chained up in a scary whitetiled torture room, surrendering the ring only when Wotan literally hacks off his entire lower arm. Loge, knowing too much at the end of Rheingold, is murdered by Wotan; Erda's lifesupport is turned off, sorrowfully, by Wotan in Siegfried; Alberich, having worn out Hagen, is dispatched at the end of their colloquy in Götterdämmerung; and, later in that same act, hostages are executed by Hagen in 'celebration' of Gunther's wedding.
But don't get squeamish at the horror, or sniff at Quentin Tarantino-influenced trendiness.
See instead how this director finds more heartbreaking emotion in Wagner's drama than almost any since Patrice Chéreau. In the last scene of Walküre Johnson's Wotan – a characterisation admirably unafraid of appearing less than godlike – searches the whole scene for a way out for Theorin's emotionally mobile Brünnhilde but has to end up (at that huge climax between the 'verses' of the Farewell) by tearing off her Valkyrie's black wings. Stig Andersen's Siegfried, sung with lyrical beauty, is seen desperately alone in the 'forest', stroking the bodies of Mime and Fafner whom he has killed and thus left himself stranded. Kasper Bech Holten is astute too at those potentially awkward moments of embarrassment and waiting and watching – watch the superb detail in the playing of his ensemble stars like Andersen (as both the Walsungs), Theorin, Byriel's unclichéd Alberich, Peter Klaveness's terrifying SS officer of a Hagen (although the voice cannot always equal his dramatic presence), Randi Stene's Fricka (Hillary Clinton with humour) or Guido Paevatalu's multifacetedly lazy, brutal coward of a Gunther.
In addition to the sheer zip of performance and filming, the sound picture is warm, resonant and true, the English subtitles give an unusually revealing and detailed insight into Wagner's text, and, winningly, the 'extra' item consists of a discussion between the stage director and his country's opera-loving head of state. But finally, can these performers, only some of them known on main stages outside Scandinavia, cut the mustard alongside the more international competition on six rival DVD productions? They most certainly can.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“The central part of the Ring tetralogy is precisely this: a hero has been created who would actually have had all the attributes of freedom, but nobody remembered to tell him…so Siegfried remains unaware and incomplete… Mime has to be both funny and tragic – a clown like Chaplin and pathetic like a downtrodden people” (Patrice Chéreau)