Valkyries at large in Munich
The warrior women gallop through the Englische Garten in Tobias Kratzer's new production of Die Walküre. Plus this week’s roundup with Ruth Gipps, a musical novel and Sundaynightis
Our Bavarian runaround was planned around the opportunity to hear Vladimir Jurowski conduct Wagner’s Die Walküre at the Bayerische Staatsoper. Tobias Kratzer’s new Ring cycle for the pre-Bayreuth capital city of Wagner performance began last season with a staging of Das Rheingold that had everyone reaching for the upper shelf of superlatives. This most imaginative and probing of German directors did not disappoint in episode 2.
These myths are modern. The legends are alive and on horseback. Past and present exist together, in headlong and sometimes delicious collision. Startled 21st-century townsfolk in central Munich watch as the Valkyries ride through the Englische Garten, hover above in a helicopter or haul the victim of a bicycle accident onto a horse; opera-goers find that they themselves have just been walking through Valhalla; and the person usually thought to be the villain(ess) may turn out to have been even more vindictive than we’d previously imagined.
There are other modes of transport too. Even now, audiences still can’t resist guffaws whenever anybody drives a car on to a stage. Come on, there are bloody thousands of them outside. Still, it’s a relatively unorthodox way for Hunding to come home to his mountain chalet - especially as he then hauls a dead ram out of the back, a sacrifice to the gods - and later for Siegmund and Sieglinde to escape, at least until the engine packs in.
Kratzer’s masterstroke is, at least in my view, his use of leitmotifs, which he discovers visually in the drama as well as in the music. There are motifs for the twins, who hold hands from the different levels of their bunk beds as children, then rediscover the ritual as lovers. There’s also fire. Lots of fire. It is poignant indeed that Siegmund and Sieglinde’s Act 2 final encounters unfold alongside the remnants of their burned-out childhood home in the forest. Such recurring visuals bring a subconscious unity to the mingling of score and story. This is valuable; too often nowadays we leave theatres feeling that the evening’s disparate aesthetic elements have somehow parted company.
The use of video in split-stage format and as projections on a scrim are effective, used sparingly for maximum impact; they can conjure the tender family life of Wotan and his human family before the hut’s destruction, or help to show him and Brünnhilde walking together through the forest. Their destination is a small chapel; in this stage world, the Norse gods are accorded the accoutrements of Christianity. Again, it’s a motif that allows ancient and modern to elide psychologically; but also, we watch as Wotan himself surveys, distraught, Sieglinde’s smashing of her household shrine. The gods, we sense, are becoming irrelevant. Yet just because we don’t believe in them, that does not mean they are not there, watching, moment by moment, their own destruction.
The car engine may overheat, but in the Staatsoper’s generous and unusually open pit, the opera’s own driving force is the orchestra, which Jurowski often unleashes to play at what feels like full pelt. The moments of stillness - deep, concentrated woodwind solos, exquisite lead cello, a featherbed of Wagner tubas - contrast with visceral power against the impacts of the thunderstorm, the Ride and the Magic Fire music. Jurowski matches Kratzer’s forensic eye and ear; they’re a formidable pairing.
Miina-Liisa Värelä as Brünnhilde has developed considerably since I last heard her (as Isolde at Glyndebourne), acquiring the shining-sword edginess that the role demands. Nicholas Brownlee as Wotan is a supreme power both in presence and vocal capacity; even over such a full-blooded orchestra he is never subsumed by the sound. Ekaterina Gubanova shines as a cold, unshakeable Fricka, gutting the sacrificed ram on Hunding’s dining room table and forcing the squeamish Wotan to swear upon the animal’s extracted heart.
Siegmund is the Swedish tenor Joachim Bäckström, a noted Lieder singer; what he may lack in sonic heft he more than makes up for in beauty of tone and sensitivity to text. Irene Roberts sings Sieglinde, a warm, soaring soprano with sympathetic presence and all-out commitment to the work’s overwhelming emotions. Ain Anger as Hunding is dark and ferocious in both tone and presence. The Valkyries form a magnificent, compelling ensemble.
One quibble: a lot of tidying up takes place on stage. Brünnhilde first has to put away a heap of knives and sword fragments (this ash trunk is not a tree); later she continues busily dressing zombie heroes for their afterlife while Wotan is telling her she’s going to be de-goddessed and put to sleep. He must take her Valkyrie uniform to the side of the stage after she removes it. The zombie heroes in armour must come in to remove the wooden trestle tables on which they’ve previously been arrayed entirely starkers. And so on.
That’s life. There’s enough to marvel at in this production and its performance without it having to be a hundred per cent perfect. Five and a half hours? Surely it was only minutes? That’s how the greatest Wagner always feels.
I’ve been reading…
Duet for One, the second novel of the award-winning American novelist and critic Martha Anne Toll. Fiction in which the author clearly knows music, musicians and the music world inside out is a rare gem, and this, from a writer who was a violist herself, is one of the most thorough I’ve seen, besides being beautifully written.
Adele, half of the husband-and-wife piano duo Pearl and Pearl, has died of ovarian cancer. Her husband, Victor, must come to terms with the loss and find a way to rediscover his love and need for music. Their violinist son, Adam, faces a reckoning; as a child he always had to play second fiddle to his mother’s musical career. Perhaps only after she is dead can he build the life he longed for with the woman he really loves.
Along the way, Juilliard gets a drubbing; a seriously unpleasant viola teacher bears the onomatopoeic surname Hissle; and perhaps it is not as strange as it might at first seem that Adam is able to continue performing in a trio with his ex-girlfriend. I suspect this probably happens all the time.
Resonating with gentle yet profound insights into love and loss, this book has stayed with me for days on end after I finished it.
I’ve been hearing…
Goblin Market, the cantata by Ruth Gipps (1921-1999) based on Christina Rossetti’s poem, had its first complete performance in some 70 years last Friday in Guildford. The concert was the brainchild of conductor Amy Bebbington and her choir Corra Sound, accompanied in the Gipps by the strings of The Great Little Orchestra, an ensemble of professionals local to Surrey.
I knew of this piece’s existence years ago - I think I may even have heard about it from Gipps herself, in the days when she used to ring up Classical Music Magazine to bend our ears - but of course I’d never heard the music before. Glad to report that it is enormously enjoyable. Gipps’s teacher, Vaughan Williams, has left more than a little impact upon its English folksong modes, the opulence and sensuality of the textures and the incisive melodic writing.
It’s an extraordinary creation for 1954 - bringing into those austere, repressive postwar years Rossetti’s high-octane poetry full of irresistible fruit, desire, danger, violence and oak-solid strength. Gipps creates a distinctive and magical aura through the timbres of strings, women’s choir and two soprano soloists, with seductive dances and characterful world-painting that even extends to whistling and a distinct miaow (Gipps was a cat fan). Perhaps the score slightly underplays the dark side of the narrative, but the celebration of sisterhood and redemption is beautiful. It needs to be heard.
Is it true that Gipps, as one person there who knew her suggested, was possibly ‘her own worst enemy’ for her frankness, outspokenness and uncompromising attitude? For instance, she once said that serialism amounted to a deliberate ‘conning’ of the audience. Still, doesn’t that say more about the insincerity of the British musical world in her day - the notion that being silky, smarmy and polite counted for more than speaking up about institutional attitudes that were, sure enough, critically reducing potential audiences for contemporary music? She once submitted a symphony - which represented years of work - to the BBC, only to be told: ‘Oh, we don’t do music like that any more’. No wonder she was furious. But the music business has always been good at shooting its messengers; it’s easier than facing their inconvenient truths. How I wish Gipps could have seen Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conduct her Symphony No. 2 at the Proms in her centenary year.
I did a pre-concert interview with Gipps’s daughter-in-law, Victoria Rowe, who is in the process of transcribing the manuscripts onto computer to make them widely available for performance. The Gipps revival is off to a strong start and the only way is up.
Sundaynightis: three of the best this week
• The Spitalfields Festival is currently in full swing. Two of the most intriguing evenings are on Tuesday 7th and Wednesday 8th July. The first is Emily Levy & Matthew Bourne’s Mercury Songs, celebrating the activist and feminist social reformer Julia Varley through British folk music. It’s a co-commission from the festival and the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. The next evening, we can hot-foot it to the Tower of London and its Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula to hear Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcellae sung by The Choir of the Chapels Royal, HM Tower of London, with director Colm Carey and organist Daniel Greenway. Booking here.
• At the Royal Opera House, there’s a steamy Italian summer underway with bel canto galore alongside the inevitable La bohème. Bellini’s I Puritani has returned after an absence of some three decades, starring Lisette Oropesa. It runs alongside Donizetti’s La fille du régiment in Laurent Pelly’s effervescent production that stars Sara Blanch as Marie and, as Tonio - as it originally did way back when - Juan Diego Flórez, king of all the requisite high Cs. Booking here.
• More Wagner! Next Sunday, 12th July, Antonio Pappano and the LSO reprise the Tristan und Isolde concert performance that has already had rave reviews from the other day. It’s sold out, but check the Barbican website for returns.