There were polonium-210 jokes too, so let's try to find some perspective. Encouraged by Glyn Pursglove's reviews of Die Walküre and Siegfried I had high hopes of this Götterdämmerung and no, Viktor Lutsyuk isn't the worst Siegfried ever - that honour goes to a German tenor at the Metropolitan some years ago, to my mind - but he certainly isn't wonderful. His voice is so markedly baritonal that I thought he was in the wrong fach for a while and his singing was under considerable strain through its upper reaches. This Siegfried was also characterless, neither consumed with love for Brünnhilde in Act I nor particularly heroic elsewhere. It was a lacklustre performance, not helped by a peculiar costume, and evidently inferior by some margin when compared to Leonid Zakhozhaev on the previous evening.

 

My prize for wobbly screeching has gone to Susan Marie Pierson's Helsinki Brünnhilde for the past few years (see review) and at least she's good value for money; you get two notes for the price of one from her much of the time and she can be extraordinarly powerful. By contrast, Olga Sergeyeva wasn't powerful on this occasion and it may well be that she had simply tired after her performance in Siegfried. Here, she had a decent enough lower register but as she moved upwards, she became increasingly less secure, more uncertain in pitch and ran all too rapidly out of volume. While calling her the new Foster Jenkins is more than a tad unfair, on this showing she simply couldn't be counted as a serious Brünnhilde. In the Act II vengeance trio and in the Immolation scene, she ran out of steam too quickly and too obviously.

 

 

If Siegfried wasn't helped by his costume, then Gunther and Hagen were similarly hampered and each might have done better if their roles had been reversed. Both men have fine workmanlike voices but Nikitin's Gunther sounds and looks bigger - and a good deal more masculine - than Mikhail Petrenko does, with his curiously light toned though genuine bass. Although impressive as Fafner according to Glyn Pursglove's review of Siegfried, Petrenko's slimline Hagen (Nikitin is several sizes larger physically) dressed in what seemed at first sight to be a lace trimmed organza ball gown, looked and sounded weedy by comparison. If you're used to Matti Salminen in this role, he was difficult to take seriously.

 

The poor vocal characterisation that has beset so much of this Ring was redeemed only by Larissa Diadkova as Waltraute. Glyn Pursglove thought her an outstanding Fricka in Die Walküre and it was easy to see why. Her vocal and dramatic performance was exemplary once again and, of all the principals, she alone seemed capable of first rate Wagner singing. Given the adverse audience comment about pronunciation standards in this production - Alberich sang 'Schläfts du, Hagen mein 'Sun'' first time round, and the Norns had a lot of trouble with 'Schwester' - it could well be that Ms Diadkova understands the text more deeply than most of her colleagues, and so can project meaning more capably. Whatever the case, hers was a compelling performance.

 

 

 

In the Rheingold review I said that 'Asia may be nearer than we think as the rest of the cycle unfolds.' This has proved true and nowhere more clearly than in Götterdämmerung. The men's curious long skirted costumes are obviously modelled on Eastern dress, like dervishes or Thousand and One Night potentates and the Gibichung vassals' uniforms (and unintentionally comic style of marching as it happens) seem to be influenced by Turkish Janisseries. It's all a bit of a mish-mash though, with a great deal of superficial busyness and too many extraneous characters who do things that bear no apparent relationship to the dramatic action. It looks cluttered and confusing for too much of the time.

By and large, George Tsypin's setting with its ubiquitous giant statues and the combined Gergiev-Tsypin 'Production Concept' of recreating a world of archaic Russian barbarism doesn't quite come off, simply because much of it is incomprehensible to people who don't share its cultural base. What the whole thing needs is proper direction of the singer / actors rather than a filled up stage with Rhinemaidens with fluorescent hair, crowds of women apparently doing semaphore for the Sun's benefit in Götterdämmerung and the rows of small Russian doll-shaped objects that bear more than a passing resemblance to jelly babies quite a lot of the time. It's pretty to look at because of the lighting but the settings make little sense to a non-Russian audience.

 

 

 

Valery Gergiev's distinctly Slavic reading of the score has proved to be very popular overall, although I have been less captivated by it than some. Having adjusted my expectations after Das Rheingold, I found much of what he did in Götterdämmerung perfectly satisfactory but with some important exceptions. There were some great and thrilling moments - Siegfried's Funeral Music was immensely satisfying for example - but there were other points of high drama that had much less emotional impact than they actually need. Partly because of the lack of vocal heft and characterisation, the vengeance trio at the close of Act II seemed less gut-wrenching than it should do and the Immolation scene and finale felt... well, underwhelming, neither loud nor cataclysmic enough for me by half. The commentator in the foyer was surely wrong: it is the end of the world (or of one world at least) and we should come away feeling it.

 

If there are criticisms to be made of this Ring as a whole, then one is that Die Walküre and Siegfried came off far better than Rheingold or Götterdämmerung by consensus opinion. To be uniformly successful, the cycle clearly needs more than a sketchy and largely unexplained 'Production Concept' and an 'Assistant' Stage Director, particularly since it is presenting a difficult cultural viewpoint. More importantly however, it seems very likely that the company just needs more settling-in and rest time when it tours a work of this complexity.

A compacted four day Ring must be immensely tiring for everyone involved and I understand that Valery Gergiev arrived only on Thursday shortly before the Rheingold performance began. It would be a pity if Mariinsky standards should fall in the future because of the company's enormously pressurised work load and the conductor's habitual 'shuttle diplomacy' lifestyle. Let's hope most sincerely that this doesn't happen and that its next big production will also come to the enterprising Wales Millennium Centre. Like the curate's proverbial egg, this Ring was really very good in parts.

 

 

Bill Kenny