Rattle Strafed in Vienna’s Ringstraße: Barry Millington experiences an austere and superbly conducted ‘Ring’ production but is shocked by the reception

Review of Der Ring des Nibelungen, directed Bechtolf, conducted Rattle, Vienna, 2015.

November 2015, Volume 9, Number 3, 65–8.

The convention that directors, like performers, talk up the works they present to the public is not one which Sven-Eric Bechtolf, artistic leader of the Salzburg Festival but directing his first Ring in Vienna, felt obliged to follow. A few years ago Bechtolf recorded the complete text of the Ring, delivered by himself with no music as ‘an interesting experiment to see if an audience can just listen to the words without bursting out laughing all the time’. ‘The text’, Bechtolf told an interviewer, ‘is awful’, but at least he acknowledged that ‘a lot of people say that the music is great’. If the extent of his respect for Wagner’s Ring suggested here may not have raised hopes for his production at the State Opera, his thoughts published in the various printed programmes evidenced a deeper engagement with the work.