Nothing’s Stirring in the Forest: Jurowski’s magnificent conducting did not make up for visual shortcomings in his semi-staged ‘Siegfried’, finds Niall Hoskin

Review of Siegfried (concert perf.), conducted Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall, London, 2020.

July 2020, Volume 14, Number 2, 66–9.

What a strange hybrid the opera-in-concert/semi-staged version is! It seems an uneasy compromise, nowhere more than in performances of Wagner. The programme for Vladimir Jurowski’s Siegfried was peppered with special pleading for the format, with two assertions from the conductor making considerable claims and flying in the face of the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk: ‘experiencing these operas in imaginative concert stagings is a hugely powerful and fulfilling way to enjoy Wagner’s magnificent scores’ and ‘the main interest is in the music itself’.

The absence of a credited stage director ensured the primacy of the conductor, to be sure, and it chimed with Richard Fairman’s comment, quoted in the programme, that ‘a concert performance seems to be the only way of putting the spotlight back on the orchestra and singers’; but it left a hole in the middle of the audience experience. The success of that spotlight depends of course on the quality of the musicians it shines on; and the London Philharmonic Orchestra and most of the singers were more than equal to the demands of the score and of Jurowski’s approach to it. Their efforts were vitiated, however, by some technical shortcomings and an uneven cast.