The Kirov RING at the Met.

By Graham Bruce

I was looking forward to my fifteenth RING. After all, it was certainly going to be something unique to see one of the two great Russian companies playing at that bastion of the American bourgeoisie, the Metropolitan Opera at the Lincoln Centre. Sadly, the event was quite disappointing.

The “Production Concept” was attributed in the programme to conductor Valery Gergiev and set designer George Tsypin. This concept seemed in fact to be simply a design-concept rather than one which also governed the stage direction. Tsypin is a sculptor and this was very evident in the sets which consisted of massive rock-like figures suspended from the flies, while surrounded by blank back and side flats which received most of the lighting and projection effects. The publicity material suggested that the concept was based on “Ossetian folk myths and Sythian artifacts” and one certainly got the message of a mythical context of gigantism and primitivism. It reminded one reviewer of the Flintstones ’abode. But perhaps as a result of years of touring, much of this looked simply ugly and awkward. In DAS RHEINGOLD, the massive stone figures, looking like rough hewn sarcophagi, were suspended precariously over the action, and wobbled downwards in the last two scenes; the giants were costumed as great piles of stone wheeled about by extras, the singers’ tiny heads protruding from the rocky mass. Most puzzling was the Rhinemaidens’ gold: a large lattice-work orb which was pushed on stage; this, at least, looked beautiful .

  Even more obscure was the group of small, upright mobile rocks, tiny versions of the suspended figures. These were useful as anvils for the Nibelungs to hammer upon, but also continued into the next three operas lying down or even attached to the suspended figures. In DIE WALKÜRE, four massive figures, in sitting position were suspended from above, with a massive stone table below at which Hunding (accompanied by 4 or 5 hounds, no doubt a punning stage-realization of his name) gnawed at his food, an outsized lamb shank. By the third act, there were different suspended figures with heads like horses’ skulls.

The Valkyries guided one of these as it wobbled to the ground and became a “rock” for Brünnhilde’s sleep.  In SIEGFRIED, the four monolithic figures continued to dominate the stage: in the first act, one was in a recumbent position forcing most of the action downstage; by the second act the configuration had changed so that the figures formed a kind of stony dragon for Siegfried to attack, the multiple pieces glowing from within. In Act 3, one of the stone figures was replaced with a figure with bizarre spiky protrusions which lit up and rotated .

Now one can search for meanings in all of this (and indeed one reviewer suggested that a set of “Coles Notes” would be desirable); however, the point is surely that if the significance, real or symbolic, is not reasonably obvious, the concept has failed. To this one can add the aesthetic question, the fact that, in contrast to the publicity photographs, most of the sculptural sets appeared quite ugly on the Met stage and looked like the budget traveling production that it in fact was.  GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG continued this impression with most of the action on a platform lowered with a precarious wobble to the stage. Throughout, the lighting effects were often effective in an obvious way. The meanings here were at least clear:  bright red lighting for the bloody deaths of Siegmund and Siegfried. Unfortunately this same bright red was used for Brünnhilde’s fire, making us feel a little anxious for the outcome of her sleep.

But many a good production has survived ugly, inappropriate sets or minimal, even bare settings; indeed, many have made a virtue of an uncluttered stage in an attempt to shift the emphasis to the direction of the stage action.  The real disappointment of the Kirov’s RING was the lack of any firm direction of the singer / actors. Since Chéreau’s landmark Bayreuth RING, and even more so, the Berlin and Bayreuth productions by Harry Kupfer,  audiences no longer expect to see stand-and- deliver performances in a Wagner opera. Kupfer’s detailed direction of the singers in Berlin and Bayreuth, where everything in the text and all the implications of the music were expressed in every gesture, movement, and vocal inflection of the singer, has certainly made most of us impatient of seeing anything less.  It was a shock, then, to discover that the Kirov singers had been left pretty much to their own devices, devices which varied enormously according to the age and stage experience of the singer. The conductor, Gergiev, was listed as the Production Supervisor. But in fact, there seemed to have been little direction at all.  Most singers opted for a generic kind of performance where a set of stock gestures does duty for a number of dramatic situations. Thus it was clear in RHEINGOLD when the Wotan, Alexei Tanovitsky, was about to sing since he faced the audience and began a semaphoric gesture.  In the next opera’s wonderful scene between Wotan and Brünnhilde, Tanovitsky began well, addressing his daughter beside him, but soon abandoned her, came down “to the footlights”, gestured and sang to the audience, making dramatic nonsense of this intimate scene. Now many were quite happy with this, calling his performance, “dignified” and “noble”, particularly since Tanovitsky’s singing, considered simply as singing, was very good. But surely Wotan is much more than this one-dimensional notion of the character. The poorest stage performance came from the famous bass Nikolai Putilin in DAS RHEINGOLD. Hampered by a costume which looked like a mustard-coloured chenille dressing-gown with a train, he barely reacted to the teasing of the girls; later, the “rape” of the gold consisted of his helping, in gentlemanly fashion, each of the Rhinemaidens in turn to leave the  latticed orb which constituted the gold, then pushing this off-stage in leisurely fashion .

Of course, the veteran Putilin sang well. The Rhinemaidens themselves were a lady-like group who seemed happiest when the sketchy direction gave them choreographed, stylized movement. This stylized movement also prevailed in the “crowd scenes” in the later operas. The Valkyries, clad in circular silver head-dresses, looking rather like a meeting of wannabe Turandots

 came on to sing the famous Ride in a chorus line across the stage; later they sat down and bobbed up individually as each one sang. In the last opera, the Gibichung vassals , their upper torsos decorated with war-paint style designs,  trooped across the stage and sang their choruses first in two lines parallel to the footlights and then on either side of the stage.

Contrasting with these “stylized” performances, single or group, were a number of singers who favoured a naturalistic style. The best of these were the Fricka, Sieglinde and Siegmund. Larissa Diadkova gave a very convincing  performance as Fricka which, while it remained a conventional “angry wife” reading of the part,  probably made the greatest impact of the whole cycle thanks to the vigour of her performance and her superb singing. Sieglinde (Mlada Khudoley) favoured surprisingly contemporary gestures, rather more so than her Siegmund, Oleg Balashov;  but the commitment of both to their roles, the powerful mezzo quality of Khudoley’s voice, and the refusal of  Balashov to overtax his essentially lyrical voice, made their scenes in DIE WALKÜRE very successful. Also in this style were the two Siegfrieds . The Young Siegfried, Leonid Zakhozhaev, hardly gave a detailed reading of the part, but his pleasing stage presence and his smallish but attractive voice, untiring even in the last act of SIEGFRIED, made his performance very enjoyable. It was in fact a relief to listen to a Siegfried who never had recourse to shouting over the massive orchestration of this opera. Nor did the mature Siegfried, Victor Lutsuk. Possessed of a slightly more heroic voice than his young counterpart, Lutsuk nevertheless seemed to have problems controlling his voice in softer singing. But his similar pleasing stage presence connected appropriately with Zakhozhaev.  Their Brünnhilde, Olga Sergeeva, favoured a slightly more stylized approach in her demanding  role across three operas. This worked in a conventional way, without realizing the depths of this complex character. Her singing began rather badly in DIE WALKÜRE, when the final upper note in each of the Hoyotohos emerged as an embarrassing shriek. But the voice soon settled down and her singing throughout was creditable apart from the precarious upper register. One point in her favour was that she did produce a good trill, something unusual in a voice of this size. In GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG, the Gunter was Yevgeny Nikitin who also sang Wotan in the second cycle. His vigorous, naturalistic performance style, coupled with a good voice suggested that he might well have been a more dynamic Wotan than Tanovitsky.

There was, then, a mixture of performance styles, none of them, despite individual successes, contributing to a single stage vision of the cycle which a strong directorial hand would have provided. Contributing to the problem was the fact that some of the vital action was denied the singers and given instead to various stage “extras”. Siegfried’s forging was partly performed by a group of “fire spirits” wearing head-dresses made of iridescent red spring-like shapes, allowing Zakhozhaev to sing the most taxing part of his role down at the footlights;  Gunther and Siegfried did not cut their hands themselves in the ritual blood-brotherhood drink; this was done for them by attendant extras; the norns, dressed in exotic folk costumes, didn’t actually do much spinning or fixing of the rope of destiny; the extras did this for them, walking off stage with the rope at one point, then returning with it for the words “It’s split!”at the end of the scene. There was, however, one effective use of the extras: when in the first opera, Alberich uses the tarnhelm to change himself into a dragon, the extras filed on in caterpillar fashion, each concealed behind a paper disc, the effect amusingly reminiscent of a Chinese New Year paper dragon.

So, there was disappointment in the set and costume design but more crucially in the stage performances. While the naturalistic performers were preferable to those who had recourse to more generalized action, the former often seemed simply “busy” on stage. It’s fairly clear that when a singer strides “purposefully” about the stage for no dramatic reason, the guiding hand of a strong director is missing. But what of the performances on the other side of the footlights -  Gergiev’s conducting, and the playing of the Kirov orchestra? Things began badly with DAS RHEINGOLD. The orchestra seemed to make little impact, the brass were out of tune and very error-prone, and the percussion frequently overpowered the rest of the orchestra. Things improved in the later operas, however. The strings in particular distinguished themselves, especially in quiet, lyrical moments.  In the last act of SIEGFRIED, that wonderful orchestral introduction as Wotan calls up Erda here sounded wooly and unfocussed. However, the difficult upper register string playing, reinforced by the harps, as Siegfried goes to wake Brünnhilde, was as beautiful as one has ever heard. Overall there was a lack of weight in the orchestral sound. Siegfried’s Funeral March, for example, sounded simply loud rather than possessing the necessary weighty gravity.

One always hopes for the impossible: a satisfying staging of the last scene of GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG. By the end of the Kirov’s cycle, I had no such expectation. And indeed, the finale was a very tame affair.  Brünnhilde sang most of her Immolation scene on a stage empty of people apart from the body of Siegfried lying in a coffin shaped like a small boat.  The Valkyrie simply handed the ring to the Rhinemaidens and Alberich made sure he sang his “Get back from the ring!” down stage to the audience before walking up the platform and being pushed over it by the Rhinemaidens. It was all very anti-climactic.  Still, there was that wonderful final music to listen to, and one’s own imagination. I was keen to see whether my own disappointment in the whole cycle of the Kirov’s RING was shared by others in the audience. Many of those present were visiting New York just to go to these performances; but there were a number of native New Yorkers in my seating area in the front stalls whose opinions I canvassed. After DAS RHEINGOLD, many of these were scathing about the standard of the orchestral playing and the visual aspects of the production. These, of course, were people accustomed to the superb Met orchestra, and a tradition of very conventionally-staged productions such as the Otto Schenk RING and the Met’s numerous productions by Franco Zeffirelli. Their criticisms became rather more muted as the cycle continued, but the general dissatisfaction remained.

Graham Bruce

August 2007