New Perspectives on the ‘Ring’: Katherine Syer reports on a pair of cycles recently initiated in Milan/Berlin and Frankfurt

Although the stark economic shift of recent years has slowed down Ring production plans in Washington, Riga and Florence, while casting a harsh spotlight on the Los Angeles enterprise, the building up of new cycles nevertheless continues at an unprecedented pace. The solution for La Scala, where a full Ring has not been mounted for decades, is a co-production with the Staatsoper in Berlin, where Barenboim’s earlier Wagner collaborations with Harry Kupfer are gradually being retired. The Belgian director Guy Cassiers, a newcomer to opera, tackles the Milan/Berlin project with an intensely multimedia approach that is more inventive than most. In Frankfurt, Peter Konwitschny’s protégée Vera Nemirova contributes to a house whose last two Rings (that directed by Ruth Berghaus in the mid-1980s and the revival of Herbert Wernicke’s Brussels production in the mid-90s) both flaunted their irreverence for traditional staging solutions.