Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✭✭
by Richard Wagner, directed by François Girard
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
January 23-February 14, 2016
Brünnhilde: “Lang war mein Schlaf; ich bin erwacht” (“Long was my sleep; I am awakened”)
Recommendations for the COC’s Siegfried are very simple. If you have never seen the opera before, this is the production to see. The archetypal story of a hero who slays a dragon and awakens a maiden in a magic slumber is portrayed in all its rich psychological and mythic dimensions. The physical production is dazzling. And the cast and their performances could not be bettered. If you have seen the COC’s Siegfried before, you must see it again because the entire cast gives such extraordinary performances. This may well be the finest Siegfried you ever see.
The Canadian Opera Company’s production of Siegfried directed by François Girard was first staged in 2005 and then remounted as part of the complete Ring cycle in 2006. Now, ten years later, the production itself is still stunning. Each of the operas in the COC’s Ring cycle has a different director but the four are united by the brilliant production design of Michael Levine. The first, Das Rheingold, concludes in a showroom dominated by a scale model of the neoclassical Walhalla that the giants Fafner and Fasolt have built for the gods. The second, Die Walküre, is set in the ruins of this showroom and depicts the love between Siegmund and Sieglinde, who will become Siegfried’s parents. The warrior maiden Brünnhilde takes the pregnant Sieglinde to safety in the forest where she dies in childbirth and Brünnhilde puts the newborn in the care of the wily dwarf Mime. For her disobedience, Brünnhilde’s father, the chief god Wotan, has put her to sleep and placed her on a mountaintop surrounded by a ring of fire so that only a hero will have courage enough to awaken her.
Act 1 of the COC’s Siegfried begins with the title character seated on a massive tree trunk with a cloud of branches above his head composed of fragments of the showroom including the model of Walhalla and various people with a male and a female figure in the foreground. It looks like the turbulent cyclone of Siegfried’s mind caught in mid-whirl, the man and woman being the unknown parents that so preoccupy Siegfried’s thoughts in Act 1.
Girard and Levine have imagined Siegfried as a journey through Siegfried’s psyche as it matures from innocence to first love. Siegfried and all the other characters are presented as other aspects of him and are clad in bright white pyjamas. The one important exception is Brünnhilde, the Other that Siegfried seeks who will teach him fear, dressed as she was in Die Walküre in a black Victorian gown. In 2005 people wondered about the predominance of pyjamas, but in an opera where three significant characters are woken from slumber – Fafner, Erda and Brünnhilde – the garb reinforces the themes of dreams and the unconscious. After all, we learn that what the primordial goddess Erda dreams becomes reality. Besides this, Siegfried himself awakens metaphorically from his state of innocence.
The opening image of Act 2 is still astonishing with its view of the same vortex of Act I as seen from above. The eye of the storm becomes the giant-turned-dragon Fafner’s cave and Fafner himself rises as a threatening six-person human pyramid. The black stage of Act III, empty save for red-lit extras representing the ring of fire, seemingly indicates a reality discovered beyond the whirl of fragmentation, soon to be transformed by Siegfried and Brünnhilde’s love.
Stefan Vinke’s Siegfried is absolutely outstanding. In its lower register his voice is very sinewy but the higher it rises the more open and rounded it becomes with gloriously ringing top notes. His Forging Song is especially thrilling, but he maintains the stamina required for that song right through to the end. Vinke is also a fine actor. He changes his gestural language from the quick, awkward movements of the youth we first meet to the graceful gestures at the end of the man transformed by love.
Christine Goerke, continuing Brünnhilde’s journey from her appearance in Die Walküre last year, is radiant in the role. She lends Brünnhilde’s awakening great psychological complexity – a mixture of bewilderment, joy and wonder – that electrified the audience, and sings in the beautiful, warm tones that make her Brünnhilde so human and so sympathetic.
Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke makes Mime, who is so often played as a caricature, into one of Wagner finest comic creations. His Mime promotes his care for Siegfried without seeing that the very act of such promotion undermines his cause. He is simultaneously proud of his cunning but fearful he is not cunning enough. What aids Ablinger-Sperrhacke in projecting a more complex view of Mime is that he actually sings the role, carefully colouring his tone and without resorting to the funny voices or shouting so many other Mimes use.
Alan Held is a majestic Wotan even if Wotan in Siegfried is a god in decline. Indeed, Held lent his huge bass-baritone a dusky world-weary quality to portray a god overwhelmed by the ruin his own actions have set in motion. Christopher Purves sings in a fine full voice as Mime’s brother Alberich, avoiding the pinched tone many other Alberichs employ. Jacqueline Woodley was a delicate-voiced Forest Bird, the being who warns Siegfried of Mime’s treachery and guides him to Brünnhilde. Meredith Arwady commands an imposing contralto as the earth-goddess Erda. And bass Phillip Ens is impressively resonant yet again as the dragon Fafner.
A central difference in Girard’s direction this time was his encouragement of more interaction between characters. Listeners to Wagner’s many long narratives became active, if silent, participants by signalling their reactions to what they hear. Such detailed direction helped shift the characters from the realm of the mythical to the realm of the human while also reinforcing key points of the narrative.
Under Johannes Debus, the COC Orchestra plays the score with amazing freshness. It was a triumph of clarity over lushness where the inner detail is never obscured and where the interplay of the various sections and the dynamic of their collaborations and regroupings, are both exciting and fascinating in themselves as well as providing, as Wagner intended, a commentary on the action. With its unbeatable cast and incisive orchestral playing, this is the finest Siegfried the COC has ever presented and is simply not to be missed.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This is a version the review that will appear later this year in Opera News.
Photos: (from top) Stefan Vinke as Siegfried with the ensemble; Alan Held as the Wanderer, George Molnar as the Bear, Stefan Vinke as Siegfried and Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke as Mime; Stefan Vinke as Siegfried and Christine Goerke as Brünnhilde. ©2016 Michael Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.coc.ca.
2016-01-28
Siegfried