Deutsche Oper Berlin celebrated the opening of its new season with a special concert in Berlin's Philharmonie with two works for orchestra and voices, one familiar, another less so. Both works were by composers very much ahead of their times. Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre Act I was presented as a concert performance after an intermission and was preceded by the substantial Music of the Spheres by Danish composer Rued Langgaard.
The first act of Walküre is probably the best known and beloved of Wagner’s Ring operas; mounting a concert performance of the well-known act was a daring act as many of the Berlin audience seemed familiar with every note of the music and every word of the text. Anja Harteros, one of the most versatile and accomplished sopranos of our time, was taking on the role of Sieglinde for the first time before a full performance of the role scheduled next spring. It was a splendid first attempt. Sieglinde requires a lyric voice with gleaming high notes, and Harteros had both the purity of tone and plenty of power to push through Wagner's heavy orchestration. She was also a consummate actress. From her very first utterance “Ein fremder Mann? In muss ich fragen,” she brought us into the inner world of an unhappy prisoner of a brutal husband. Without gesture or facial expression, her voice, with its endless color and expressiveness, was enough to convey Sieglinde’s every mood. Her diction was crystal clear, and each word was imbued with emotion. It was truly a miraculous and thrilling performance.
Harteros chose to sing Sieglinde with a liberal use of legato and long pauses. She was never hurried in reaching for tricky high notes, but rather approached them slowly and cleanly, albeit carefully. She used soft singing in some of her high notes to great effect. It was at times an idiosyncratic, and certainly a unique, approach to a Wagnerian role, almost Italianate, but it opened the listeners' ears to subtitles and nuances often hidden in Wagner’s music.
Georg Zeppenfeld, fresh from his successful Bayreuth season, sang Hunding with his youthful and flexible but bass. His is a Hunding with brutish nobility, worthy of playing the third foil to the Wälsung twins. His menacing high notes rang through the hall. German tenor Peter Seiffert has been a stalwart Wagnerian hero for decades, tirelessly singing Siegmund, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser and Tristan. Unfortunately, his voice has now lost much of its former brightness and warmth, and has become grainy and colorless. He could still muster enough volume and heft for such money notes as “Wälse! Wälse!” and his experience and musicality got him through the punishing long monologue of the early part of the act. Most of his singing, however, was forte, and sometimes he fell slightly flat.