New Perspectives on the ‘Ring’: Katherine Syer reports on a pair of cycles recently initiated in Milan/Berlin and Frankfurt
New Perspectives on the ‘Ring’: Katherine Syer reports on a pair of cycles recently initiated in Milan/Berlin and Frankfurt
Reviews of Das Rheingold, directed Cassiers, conducted Barenboim, Milan, 2010; Das Rheingold, directed Nemirova, conducted Weigle, Frankfurt, 2010.
November 2010, Volume 4, Number 3, 67–70.
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.