The “Ring,” given its measurement and prominence, is a logo of an opera home’s values, and the lean vitality of Kosky’s imaginative and prescient, which is able to unfold in London over the approaching years, appears proper for an period of funds and programming cuts.
On the Royal Opera, Pappano and the orchestra match Kosky with fiery however by no means overblown enjoying, particularly from the luxurious but biting strings, their intimacy startling. It is a “Rheingold” that, at the beginning, helps its singers.
Wotan, the king of the gods, and Alberich, the dwarf who steals the gold from the Rhine, are right here virtually brotherly figures, each with bald heads and durable our bodies, they usually share sure qualities, too. Christopher Purves’s Alberich has aristocratic reserve, whereas Christopher Maltman’s booming, tight-smiling Wotan is able to feverish aggression; it’s surprising however not shocking when he cuts off Alberich’s finger to take the ring.
But the tenderness with which Maltman embraces the delicate Erda, because the voice of the goddess is heard warning him to surrender the ring, is simply as indelible, and feels simply as true. As Fricka, Wotan’s spouse, Marina Prudenskaya sings with slicing anxiousness; Sean Panikkar is a charismatically grinning, cackling playboy as Loge, the anarchic fireplace god; Insung Sim is unusually agonized as the enormous Fasolt.
This isn’t an ostentatious manufacturing. However the finale, which shouldn’t be given away, is proscenium-filling spectacle, and classic Kosky, in that it makes use of one among theater’s easiest, most conventional gadgets with unforgettable showman aptitude, conveying all of the glittering glamour and basic vacancy of the gods’ ascent to their new residence — a triumph as hole as the enormous tree.
Das Rheingold
By way of Sept. 29 on the Royal Opera Home, London; roh.co.uk.
