At the beginning of his tenure as New York’s Philharmonic music director, Alan Gilbert presented a semi-staged version of Ligeti’s Le grand macabre which was very well received, despite the Philharmonic subscribers’ traditionalism. He wanted to end his mandate on a similar note, scheduling Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise, but the plan didn’t bear fruits. Instead, the public was regaled with another operatic choice that nobody could really call conservative, even if the première took place almost 150 years ago: Wagner’s Das Rheingold. The first evening was a stunning success.
In the quasi absence of any props and given a very limited space where the characters could move, stage director Louisa Muller relied on the interpreters’ gestures and attitudes to help describe the narrative flux. She was greatly helped in individualizing each character by the ingenious but not necessarily congruous costumes created by David C. Wooland. The two giants, Fasolt and Fafner, wore black leather trench coats making them look like Stasi operatives. Goddesses were dressed in atemporal evening gowns. The two Nibelung brothers, Alberich and Mime, sported something evoking sanitation workers’ suits. Wotan had a sparkling satin-like vest to go with his business suit and Loge, the fire god, a blazer with red patterns.
The biggest merit of an unstaged performance of Das Rheingold is that it gives the public the opportunity to focus on the music without any distractions. On this occasion, the orchestra’s rendering of the luxuriant sonorities that take us from the Rhine to the rainbow bridge crossing to Valhalla was almost faultless. One could have expected a little more assertiveness, a few more fireworks but this is not the nature of this exact, seriously minded conductor with little penchant for gratuitous effects. Gilbert’s main concern was not to overpower at any point the soloists. He did release the full orchestral power in the E flat major prelude, where the orchestra reached climactic sonorities a little too fast, and during Wotan and Loge’s descent to Nibelheim.
However, the performance belonged to an uniformly exceptional roster of singers. Bass-baritone Eric Owens, a remarkable Alberich in the most recent Metropolitan Opera Ring, sang his first Wotan at the Lyric Opera of Chicago last fall. Here, he interpreted the role with a deep, burnished and flexible sound. Owens' Wotan is not the majestic, power-wielding ruler of the gods but a character haunted by doubts, limited in his actions by the runes inscribed on his spear. With her malleable and soaring young voice, mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton was both powerful and lyrical as Fricka, Wotan’s wife. Soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen, unveiling layers of beautiful Wagnerian color, was Freia, the goddess of youth and the anguished object of the giants’ love interest.