In the past decade, the Berlin Philharmonic have spent the Easter weekend in Baden Baden, where their programmes have often featured a concert or semi-staged opera as the centrepiece. Although this year saw the orchestra return to Salzburg for the Easter Festival, they continued the tradition of bringing their festival opera back to Berlin for a one-off performance at the Philharmonie. These post-Easter opera evenings have frequently been a highlight of the season – recall, for example, the excellent recent performances of Die Frau ohne Schatten and Elektra – and this year the orchestra, under the direction of Kirill Petrenko, turned their attention to nothing less than Das Rheingold, the Vorabend of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
The advantages and disadvantages of operas in concert performance are perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in Wagner. If early works such as Rienzi or Holländer were marginally more tailored to the practical realities of the nineteenth-century theatre, the later operas, with their expanded instrumental ensembles and increasingly delicate orchestration, seem to demand the reverence of a concert hall; indeed many modern opera enthusiasts who have come to know the Ring through the home stereo can well attest to the details that are often missed in all but the best staged performances. Yet Wagner himself understood that music was inseparable from drama – at Bayreuth he went to far as to keep the orchestra hidden so they would not distract from the action on stage – and he might well have viewed a performance without the spectacle of sets and costumes as fundamentally incomplete.
Of all the parts of the Ring, Das Rheingold is perhaps the one most reliant on spectacle; if the greatest scenes of Walküre and Götterdämmerung are suffused with human drama, Rheingold derives its charge from its world of gods, dwarves and giants, the dread of Nibelheim, the grace of the Rhine and the splendour of the crossing into Valhalla. For these very reasons it is frequently the most underwhelming on stage, as though all the theatrical effects of the past two centuries were still insufficient to realise the scenes described in the libretto. It is precisely because the images so meticulously illustrated in the score appear most vividly in the mind’s eye that Rheingold can survive so well in the concert hall.
Indeed, the evening’s greatest and most consistent source of pleasure was the chance to hear Wagner’s majestic evocations of his own mythological world performed by an orchestra so well rehearsed and so alert to the work’s myriad nuances. There were few passages in which one was not struck by some flash of instrumental brilliance: the concentration of the horns in the prelude; the magnificence of the Wagner tubas in the interlude between the first two scenes and again in the finale; the animation of the strings when suggesting the mercurial flicker of Loge; the shimmering harps as the gods prepared to cross the bridge; and the bracing clarity of the trumpet’s first utterance of the Valhalla theme. But more than any individual moment, it was the orchestra’s unity of purpose – their ability to capture Wagner’s most subtle flourishes while remaining absolutely devoted to the flow of the drama – that elevated the music above all but the very finest staged performances.
Nearly all of the soloists compensated for the absence of a staging by delivering vocal performances with a highly theatrical edge. It was an approach that worked better for some roles than others. The trio of Rhinemaidens – Louise Foor, Yajie Zhang and Jess Dandy – were unfailingly elegant, both at their most mischievous (their merciless taunting of Alberich) and their most exultant (their greeting of the Rhinegold). As Alberich, however, Leigh Melrose seemed too invested in the extremes of the role, occasionally crossing the line between expressive and excessive: his pursuit of the Rhinemaidens had a heightened consonantal harshness, while some of the quieter lines were delivered with a disproportionately seething fury. Although this trend continued into the third scene, especially his abusive volleys against Mime, his detailed description of how he planned to take over the world – delivered with enough malice to make Wotan justly furious – was superb.
The Wotan who appears in Rheingold – somewhat overconfident and as yet unburdened by a desire for the end of all things – is very different from the character who shows up in the two subsequent operas, and Christian Gerhaher offered a compelling depiction of the optimistic, occasionally arrogant spirit of the young god. There were a handful of moments when his delivery seemed unnecessarily busy, investing lines with an overabundance of subtle inflections. This side of his performance was most pronounced in his dealings with Fricka and the other gods: even the declamatory ‘Vollendet das ewige Werk’ at the beginning of Scene Two had hints of agitation mixed into the presiding grandeur. But as Wotan’s troubles developed from mere annoyances into existential crises, so Mr Gerhaher’s performance grew in stature. His responses to Alberich, especially the accusation of theft at the beginning of Scene Four, were wonderful moments of concentrated drama, and his reaction to the appearance of Erda was one of the evening’s highlights.
In an evening of highly expressive performances, Brenton Ryan as Loge was all the more notable for his relative restraint. Instead of playing up the character’s impish side, Mr Ryan approached the role with the clarity of a heldentenor, articulating each line with an economy of manner and generosity of tone than emphasised his command of the situation; without joking or hectoring, his finest scenes were subtly imperious, suggesting an intellectual superiority over his fellow gods. Catriona Morison’s Fricka was similarly excellent, nowhere more so than at the beginning of the second scene, in which her joint concerns for her husband’s fidelity and her sister’s freedom gave way to an increasing sense of desperation. The evening also boasted a superb pair of giants in Le Bu’s fearsomely stern Fasolt and Patrick Guetti’s warmly resonant Fafner.
Kirill Petrenko presided over the evening with customarily firm control. As with his previous opera performances, there was little in the way of indulgence, but plenty of musical excitement to be found in his purposeful direction. The tempi were generally brisk, although never oppressively so; there were only a handful of moments in which was one was aware of the singers exerting themselves to balance clarity of phrasing with pace of delivery. While such momentum might have caused problems in a staged production, in the concert setting they mostly contributed a sense of urgency to the wrangling of the gods and giants. For the most part, however, Mr Petrenko’s trust in the score and his willingness to keep obvious interventions to a minimum yielded a reading crackling with propulsive drama and punctuated by moments of satisfying grandeur.
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