Ride the Machine: The high-tech set for the Met’s ‘Ring’ begins to prove itself, reports Wayne Gooding

Review of Die Walküre, directed Lepage, conducted Levine, New York Met, 2011.

July 2011, Volume 5, Number 2, 70–74.

It seemed odd for the Metropolitan Opera to raise the curtain on a major Wagner production that isn’t Parsifal on a Good Friday, but even odder to sandwich the new Walküre between the madcap bel canto bravura of Rossini’s Le Comte Ory the night before and Richard Strauss’s Capriccio the following afternoon. But such are the vagaries of the Met’s high-octane programming, and the context wasn’t completely bizarre. Superb vocalising in the dramatically inane Rossini raised expectations for the high-profile Walküre cast to set an analogously high bar in Wagner singing. And Strauss’s conversation piece about words, music and good theatrical practice proved a nice reflective lens to filter impressions of the second instalment of the unfolding new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen.