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An enthralling Walküre at Longborough Opera Festival

Von , 19 Juni 2024

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.

Mark Le Brocq (Siegmund)
© Matthew WIlliams-Ellis

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.

Julian Close (Hunding), Emma Bell (Sieglinde), Mark Le Brocq (Siegmund)
© Matthew WIlliams-Ellis

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.

Paul Carey Jones (Wotan), Madeleine Shaw (Fricka)
© Matthew WIlliams-Ellis

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.

Lee Bisset (Brünnhilde), Mark Le Brocq (Siegmund)
© Matthew WIlliams-Ellis

But Die Walküre is an opera that can spring surprises on you no matter how often you see it. Here, one scene made more impact on me than ever before: Le Brocq’s “So grüße mir Walhall, grüße mir Wotan” when he explains to Lee Bisset’s Brünnhilde – his voice honeyed, his mood one of wistful resignation – that he rejects the delights of Valhalla and its wish-maidens, if Sieglinde cannot be there with him. As Brünnhilde gains the understanding of human love that has previously been alien to her, this was the emotional highlight of the evening.

Paul Carey Jones (Wotan), Lee Bisset (Brünnhilde) and Valkyries
© Matthew WIlliams-Ellis

The Ride of the Valkyries was taken in manic pace and mood – a bridge too far for the orchestra, with several orchestral lines coming off the rails before being hastily restored. Carey Jones returned to his best form in Wotan’s Farewell, overflowing with tenderness and well supported by Bisset.

Lee Bisset (Brünnhilde), Paul Carey Jones (Wotan)
© Matthew WIlliams-Ellis

Amy Lane’s staging, now seen in full after its 2021 prototype was compromised by Covid, is a mixed bag. In its favour: it follows events on stage in a straightforward manner, with Lane scrupulously avoiding anything that might distract the viewer from the singers and paying a great deal of attention to expression of character. Tim Baxter’s video projections of clouds, mountains, forests and galloping hooves worked well at creating atmosphere; Emma Ryott’s costumes hinted at Nordic story books without being over the top faux-Viking. But not everything worked, and there were moments which were exaggerated to the point of being cartoonish: the light falling on the sword in the tree drew giggles rather than awe; the Valkyries felt more like witches in the chorus of Verdi’s Macbeth than warrior maidens; lightning effects looked amateur.

These few cavils apart, however, this was an evening of Wagnerian singing and playing of such quality to be consistently enthralling and sometimes revelatory. Kudos to Longborough for pulling it off.

****1
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“an opera that can spring surprises on you no matter how often you see it.”
Rezensierte Veranstaltung: Longborough Festival Opera, Moreton-in-Marsh, am 18 Juni 2024
Wagner, Die Walküre
Longborough Festival Opera
Anthony Negus, Musikalische Leitung
Amy Lane, Regie
Rhiannon Newman Brown, Bühnenbild
Emma Ryott, Kostüme
Charlie Morgan Jones, Licht
Longborough Festival Opera Orchestra
Tim Baxter, Video
Mark Le Brocq, Siegmund
Emma Bell, Sieglinde
Paul Carey Jones, Wotan
Julian Close, Hunding
Lee Bisset, Brünnhilde
Madeleine Shaw, Fricka
Katie Lowe, Helmwige
Eleanor Dennis, Gerhilde
Cara McHardy, Ortlinde
Rebecca Afonwy-Jones, Waltraute
Carolyn Dobbin, Siegrune
Rozanna Madylus, Roßweiße
Katie Stevenson, Grimgerde
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