Something New, Something Borrowed: Michael Fuller enjoys a Konwitschny ‘Ring’ in Dortmund, while not being entirely persuaded

In an innovative experiment around the turn of the century, Oper Stuttgart staged the Ring cycle with a different production team and cast assigned to each part of Wagner’s tetralogy, to enable audiences to experience the Ring in a fresh way through the disassociation of its component parts – for reviews of the subsequent DVD releases, see TWJ ii/1 (2008) and iii/2 (2009). On that occasion Götterdämmerung was entrusted to Peter Konwitschny. Two decades later, this experiment has been re-visited in Dortmund: Konwitschny now directs the entire cycle, but with different collaborators for the staging of each work, and with the order of the works changed in order to underline the deconstructionist approach being taken (in a programme note Konwitschny refers to this as ‘alienation’, reflecting his Brechtian influences).