Antonio Pappano and the Royal Opera Orchestra get the Ring cycle off to a blazing start; unusually, it's Lise Davidsen and the female cast who take the vocal honours.
With Andris Nelsons' withdrawal from Bayreuth last year, the BSO’s summer home, Tanglewood, became the venue for his Wagner with a concert performance of Das Rheingold
The revival of Neil Armfield's Melbourne Ring is relaunched with a successful Rheingold, sensitively conducted by Pietari Inkinen, with an especially fine performance from Warwick Fyfe as Alberich.
Highly idiomatic and effective singing by Greer Grimsley, Denyce Graves and other cast members, coupled with inventive stagecraft wizardry, make the Minnesota Opera's first-ever Rheingold a memorable production.
In spite of some questionable staging, Lyric Opera of Chicago opened its Ring cycle on a strong note with a stellar cast, notably featuring Eric Owens’ role debut as Wotan.
Valery Gergiev conducts the Mariinsky Opera in a vocally strong Das Rheingold, a promising beginning to Edinburgh International Festival’s Ring in concert over the coming years.
Sebastian Weigle leads a somewhat light-footed but satisfying account with a fine orchestra and good ensemble of singers in an architecturally stunning production.
Opera North's cycle offers a form of personal Wagner therapy: all four music dramas in concert performances, but with carefully choreographed video and lighting effects.
Saffron Opera Group's opening salvo bodes exceptionally well for their planned full cycle of concert performances of Wagner's Ring over the next two years.
The first installment of Frank Castorf's controversial Ring is applauded on its 2015 revival at Bayreuth, but arguably the incessant visual action detracts from the appreciation of the music.
Vladimir Jurowski is a wily programmer. Pairing a concert performance of Rachmaninov's The Miserly Knight with extracts from Das Rheingold seemed a shrewd move.
In this second year of Bayreuth's bicentennial Der Ring, Oleg Bryjak shines as an outstanding Alberich. Frank Castorf's production is striking but as yet incomprehensible.
This production came together brilliantly to illustrate the story of Das Rheingold. But the star of the show was MüPa’s Béla Bartók Hall, with its extraordinary acoustic.
Fulham Opera's intense, beautiful, powerful opening to their Ring cycle at the lovely St John's Church in Fulham was a privilege to watch, and promises well for all remaining nights.
Putting on a Ring cycle is normally considered a major undertaking for any opera company. For a mid-sized provincial opera company, the idea of staging the whole cycle in a weekend seems barely short of insane. But that’s what Opéra de Dijon are doing – Das Rheingold and Die Walküre last night, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung tonight, and it just had to be seen.
Some Ring cycles are based on ideological concepts; Seattle Opera’s current Ring cycle is based on a place. That place is the Pacific Northwest of the United States, home to such extraordinary natural beauty that stage director Stephen Wadsworth has deemed it fit for the gods.
A Beethoven cycle last year, The Ring this year: what will Daniel Barenboim bring to the 2014 Proms? Perhaps, given the recent success of extracts both at the Proms and at Lincoln Center Festival, the smart money is on Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 29-hour, seven-opera cycle Licht. Then again, perhaps not.
Quite simply, it’s the largest scale event in all of opera. With 18 hours of music in a 3,800 seat house, Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Met is a giant, lavish undertaking – all starting with that famous E flat chord: starting from the quietest of pianissimo double bass notes and building for nearly four minutes before it explodes into the melody of the Rhinemaidens.
The first lesson I learnt from this evening’s stunning performance by Opera North of Das Rheingold to a completely full Hall One at the Sage is that however much you listen to Wagner's opera, absolutely nothing can prepare you for the physical and emotional impact of seeing a live performance, with the sheer power of the orchestra and the dramatic force of the music.
In the run up to their widely anticipated concert staging of Wagner's Das Rheingold this summer, Opera North are providing us with a number of events at their Howard Assembly Room which aim to explore different aspects of the Ring Cycle.
Premier volet d'une "tétralogie de concert" à la Philharmonie de Paris, par Valery Gergiev et le Théâtre Mariinsky, pour un Or du Rhin exigeant mais prometteur.
Mit Richard Wagners Rheingold hat die Bayerische Staatsoper einen soliden Auftakt für den wohl letzten Ring-Zyklus in München unter der Leitung von Kirill Petrenko abgeliefert.
Vera Nemirova inszeniert an der Frankfurter Oper ein etwas abgegriffenes Rheingold. Das Frankfurter Opernorchester unter Sebastian Weigle jedoch bereichert mit schlankem Wagner-Klang aus klaren Konturen und sicher gesetzten Effekten.
