Staging a full Ring cycle over a week in a 500 seater opera house in a Cotswold garden – let alone doing three of them in successive weeks – is most opera producers’ idea of insanity. But that’s exactly what the team at Longborough Festival Opera are engaged in – and to judge by the sold out houses and the rapturous reception given to last night’s Die Walküre, it works.
Two things struck me about seeing Wagner up this close in a space so much smaller than usual. The first is how clear the music sounds in the reduced orchestration by Alfons Abbass. The leitmotifs permeate your senses as they always do, but it becomes so much easier to hear the details of the orchestral textures that support them – and in the hands of conductor Anthony Negus, those details were handled with a deft and consistently persuasive touch. In the chase scenes, the low strings bit incisively. When the fate motifs swelled in brass and strings, the accompanying lines grew out of them with character.
The main singers in this production are all experienced Wagnerians capable of filling much bigger houses, meaning that they could focus fully on intelligibility of text and representation of character rather than pure voice production. Where one often complains about too many vowels and not enough consonants in Wagnerian singing, consonants were emphasised almost to a fault, the cast spitting out their Ts and Ds at the end of words. Never have I spent so little time watching the surtitles in a Wagner opera.
Act 1 was the strongest. Mark Le Brocq was a compelling Siegmund, more the rough man of the forest that his backstory describes and less the noble knight errant that is often portrayed, closer in temperament to Hunding than anyone might like to admit. Sparks flew between him and Emma Bell’s dramatically sung Sieglinde, with Julian Close the incarnation of coarse, implacable brutality as Hunding – giving the lie to Fricka’s defence of the nobility of marriage before we even hear it, making us all the more antagonistic to her self-destructive vitriol in Act 2.
Potent as these three singers were, Madeleine Shaw stood out as the most powerful character of all. Her Fricka was genuinely terrifying – to the point that the act lost some of its drama because it became clear so rapidly that Fricka is far more of an immovable object than Wotan is an irresistible force. The dramatic arc of Paul Carey Jones as Wotan was strangely chosen: when we first see him, he is already a doddery old man, needing Brünnhilde’s youthful vigour to rouse him to action, his words hardly above a whisper as he begins his explanation of how Fricka has bested him. It’s not that Carey Jones lacked power or vocal beauty, both of which he deployed liberally through the evening: it’s that his timing of a character veering between weak and strong didn’t convince.