And they’re off: Longborough Festival Opera’s much-anticipated Wagner Ring Cycle is underway. After building up the cycle one opera at a time over the past few years, the tetralogy can now be seen complete. It is conducted by Anthony Negus , one of today’s supreme Wagnerians: he paces the music magnificently, bringing out its sheer thrill and wonder.
What a treat it is to hear him. Das Rheingold is a prelude (if, at 180 minutes, a large one), relating the Rhinegold’s theft, the forging of the Ring and the origins of its curse. Longborough’s director, Amy Lane, plays it more or less straight.
It’s refreshing to find a Wagner production that is not overloaded with conceptual, “relevant” symbolism. There’s enough relevance already in the music and words; without extraneous point-making, we can appreciate it all the more. This production has more than one foot in a book of fairy tales.
The sympathetic designs are by Rhiannon Newman Brown (set and props), Emma Ryott (costumes) and Charlie Morgan Jones (lighting), while video projections by Tim Baxter illuminate the music’s cinematic nature with elemental images mingling the graphic and photographic. The characters’ relationships are by and large convincing, although a few moments need more “cooking” – the conceit of a romantic involvement for Freia and Fasolt, for instance. Occasionally the action seems padded in order to fill the orchestral spans; a pas de deux for two balletic Nibelungs was well execu.