Too Much Gold, Too Few Norns and Too Many Maidens: Chris Walton samples the first instalment of Bern’s first-ever ‘Ring’
Too Much Gold, Too Few Norns and Too Many Maidens: Chris Walton samples the first instalment of Bern’s first-ever ‘Ring’
Review of Das Rheingold, directed Marciniak, conducted Carter, Bern, 2022.
July 2022, Volume 16, Number 2, 66–9.
The advertising campaign for Das Rheingold in Bern has emphasised that this is the first-ever time that Wagner’s Ring is being performed in the City Theatre. That seems surprising, as I thought that every house in the country, big or small, had tried its hand at the Ring over the past century-and-a-quarter. Wagner is nothing new to Bern – I vividly remember attending Parsifal there as a student back in the 1980s (with Yvonne Minton a wonderful Kundry). And the size of a pit or stage never used to be a hindrance to the Big Works in Switzerland, where ninety years ago it was considered par for the course to replace absent woodwind instruments with a harmonium. But a cursory search on my part hasn’t turned up any previous Rings in Bern, so it looks as though the operatic authorities there have indeed done their homework.