WAGNER'S DAS RHEINGOLD / Orchestra of the Music Makers / Review

WAGNER’S DAS RHEINGOLD

Orchestra of the Music Makers

Esplanade Concert Hall

Saturday (8 July 2023)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 11 July 2023 with the title "OMM pulls of triumphant semi-staging of Das Rheingold".

 

 

Singapore received its second dose of German composer Richard Wagner’s monumental operatic tetralogy The Ring Of The Nibelung (or Ring cycle) with the Orchestra of the Music Makers’ (OMM) semi-staged production of Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold, originally premiered in 1869). This first part, euphemistically referred to as a Prelude or Preliminary Evening, of the 15-hour-long cycle was itself a whopping two-and-a-half hours of melodrama. This Singapore premiere, conducted by Joshua Tan with stage direction by Tang Xinxin, was an unqualified triumph.

 

Its sordid tale of greed, lust, fatal curses, murder and mayhem, perpetrated by Nordic gods and mythical beings with disgustingly human traits, was played by an international cast of thirteen singers with orchestral support that spared neither effort nor attention to detail. The 110-strong orchestra placed centrestage (and not cooped up in a pit) revealed Wagner’s music in its full glory, including the use of sonorous Wagner tubas and the fabled six harps near its conclusion. All this made for a treat for the senses.

The Rhinemaidens foolishly
reveal the Rhinegold to Alberich.

 

From primal depths of the Rhine, waves of the E flat major triad – a representation of Nature herself – built up its first drama. It was appropriate that this production opened with voices of Singaporean singers, sopranos Teng Xiang Ting and Victoria Songwei Li starring as two of three Rhinemaidens. Joined by Anna Harvey, who also sang the Earth goddess Erda, they were the embodiment of innocence, ignorance and loss.

The Rhinegold becomes Alberich's obsession,
having foresworn love.

 

The opera’s principal antagonist was evil dwarf Alberich, imperiously portrayed by Joachim Goltz, who foreswore love for the ultimate power grab of gold. Instead of physical ingots or bars, the Rhinegold was unusually personified in the form of gold-painted soprano Felicia Teo (in a wordless role), an object of obsession, possession and lust. This poetic transformation made for seamless and fluid staging, as opposed to the static stacked plastic crates used in the final scene, reflecting the prize’s true worth of misery and death.  

The gods and mythical beings confer
with Wotan, and all is not well. 

 

The flawed gods themselves were also trenchantly played, Greer Grimsley as the duplicitous Wotan and Caitlin Hulcup, his long-suffering wife Fricka, both dressed in opulent finery. The costumes for the others were workaday clothes, including the giants Fasolt and Fafner (basses Yorck Felix Speer and Lukasz Konieczny) labouring with hard hats and soiled boots after their construction of fortress Valhalla.

And so to Nibelheim...

... where Wotan and hold Alberich captive.

 

Perhaps most remarkable was god of fire Loge’s knowing and freewheeling persona, with Tuomas Katajala donning the most exuberant outfit while balancing mostly on roller-skates. Goddess of youth Freia (Anita Watson) as the giants’ ransom, her brothers Froh and Donner (Florian Thomas and Michael Lam) and the brow-beaten elf Mime (Adrian Dwyer) completed a fine ensemble that had no obvious weak links.

Fafner and Fasolt can still see Freia
through all those stacks of gold.
What is missing is the Ring!

 

While the drama was gripping, liberally laced with cynical humour, sumptuous musical moments abounded. The opera’s mystical opening Prelude, the striking smithy anvils of subterranean Nibelheim and the gods’ faux-triumphant entry into Valhalla in D flat major (literally a deflation from the earlier E flat major), all rendered with a brash confidence bordering on vehemence.

 

Alberich does not want to be parted
from the Rhinegold but he has no choice.

The real star of this outing had to be Richard Wagner (1813-1883) himself. A visionary genius but thoroughly unpleasant human being (narcissist, megalomaniac and anti-Semite were but a few descriptions), he envisioned his creations to be gesamtkunstwerk, the complete and ultimate fusion of the fine arts. He composed the music, scripted the German texts, directed every scene down to the last detail, and even built his own opera house in Bayreuth to boot, tasks which would have daunted the gods themselves.

Erda intervenes and warns Wotan
and all of the Ring's curse.

And so the gods enter into
a doomed Valhalla.

 

Ultimate credit goes to OMM and its founder Chan Tze Law for realising this Wagnerian dream by following up on its pre-pandemic success of Die Walkure (The Valkyrie, 2020) with this equally impressive coup. Can one expect for the next opera of the cycle, Siegfried, sometime in the near future?