Siegfried Review – An invigorating and enchanting staging, with vacant brilliance as Wagner’s hero | Opera

TThe first thing we see is the feet. They sway gently, back and forth, as the curtain slowly rises on the third installment of Wagner’s Ring cycle to reveal their owner, who is seated on a swing suspended from a gnarled tree. Sitting precariously in its scorched branches is the treehouse where the dwarf Mime raised the hero-in-waiting Siegfried.

Who are their feet? If you’ve been following Barrie Kosky’s production of Ring since it began with Das Rheingold two and a half years ago, you don’t need me to tell you that they belong to Erda, the goddess of the earth. Once again, she has a muted but charming presence thanks to octogenarian actress Ilona Linthwaite. And again she is on stage, naked, for most of this four-and-a-half hour opera: smiling at Siegfried as sparks fly from the sword he reforges on Heath Robinson’s furnace in Act One; He quietly tends to the flowers that cover the meadow where he eventually awakens Brunhild in the final act.

For her scene with Wotan – an aggressive confrontation, the tension heightened by the orchestral turmoil that Antonio Pappano stirs up in the pit – she generates a younger, singing version of herself. There is now a suggestion that Erda is not only witnessing the events, but actively directing them to defeat Wotan. Could she be about to topple the old regime, armed only with a watering can and a handbag full of feathers?

Only with Götterdämmerung – the final part of the tetralogy, due out next year – will we know what Koski has in store. But for now, Erda’s ubiquitous presence lends a mythic aura to the scenes set, on the set of Rufus Didoiszos, on a very human level. A stellar cast of singing actors carry the long dialogue scenes that make Siegfried the most conversational episode in the Ring – and thus, likely the hardest to pull off.

First among equals here is Christopher Maltman’s velvet-hued Wotan; Once an arrogant CEO, he’s let himself go and now looks like Jackson Lamb in a Mac and a dirty cardigan. He’s almost as impolite as silent actor Peter Hoare, who attacks his trademark rhythm on his tinfoil hat. As they wait in the snow outside Fafner’s lair in the sepia-gray second act, Wotan’s bitter Alberich and Christopher Purvis argue like vagrants on a park bench. It’s a stark contrast to Solomon Howard’s Fafner, who is dressed as Victoria Bear, wearing a magnificent suit of shimmering stalagmites, as if Rheingold were growing on him in crystals. It looks as if he covered himself in glue and wrapped it in Christmas decorations.

Wiebke Lehmkuhl gives Erda a resonant voice, and when Brünnhilde finally awakens, Elisabet Strijd sings her in a bright soprano voice, sounding fresh if a little earthbound. However, all of this was overshadowed vocally by the extraordinary debut in the title role of Andreas Schager, whose clear voice seemed to be calibrated to a higher, freer, clearer setting than anyone else’s. It’s refreshing: he sings tirelessly, and there’s never a sense that Pappano is having to constrict the orchestra to accommodate him. On the contrary, the playing captures all the complex colors of Wagner’s music, highlighting the moments of light but never diminishing the areas of shadow. Pappano and Koski seem to be completely of one mind here, and it’s a joy to see and hear the unfolding of a Ring cycle that’s so serious in its aim but so deft in its touch.