Reviews 2004
Reviews 2004
✭✭✭✭✩
by Richard Wagner, directed by Atom Egoyan
Canadian Opera Company, Hummingbird Centre, Toronto
April 4-23, 2004
Richard Wagner’s four-part opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelungen, is the most massive work of music theatre any company can attempt. No Canadian company has ever taken on the challenge of the whole cycle--that is, until now. The Canadian Opera Company begins with the second and most self-contained of the four, Die Walküre (The Valkyrie). As envisioned by Michael Levine, who designed the COC’s international hits of Bluebeard’s Castle/Erwartung and Oedipus Rex, and renowned filmmaker Atom Egoyan, the productions is a major success and bodes well for the entire project.
For these operas Wagner mined the same vein of Nordic myth that JRR Tolkien used a century later for his own Ring epic. We meet Wotan (Peteris Eglitis), king of the gods, powerful but, unlike in Greek myth, not immortal. In his greed for world domination he has initiated the very apocalypse he sought to avoid. To prepare the for the end, his daughters, the Valkyries, led by Brünnhilde (Frances Ginzer), bring dead heroes to Valhalla who will fight on his side in the Norse Armageddon. Wotan’s only hope is that a hero can be born whose purity can undo the corruption he began. To this end he reunites long-lost siblings Sieglinde (Adrianne Pieczonka) and Siegmund (Clifton Forbis), whose incestuous love will engender this saviour.
Levine has set the opera in what looks like an abandoned theatre whose catwalks and lights have collapsed onto the stage. In one stroke this makes us view the action as myth, theatre and ritual. Egoyan’s conservative direction employs film projection only once but draws carefully detailed performances from the entire cast with a clear understanding of the personal and cosmic meaning of their actions. Forbis and Pieczonkla give rapt, passionate performances that Eglitis and Ginzer do not quite match either vocally or dramatically. Like Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake, Wagner’s Ring makes enormous demands on its audience. Performed with such total commitment as here, it lavishly rewards the effort.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2004-04-15.
Photo: The Valkyries. ©2004 Michael Cooper.
2004-04-15
Die Walküre