Regents Opera

When Keel Watson’s Wotan sang of “der Gottheit nichtigen Glanz” (“the empty splendour of the Gods”) at Freemason’s Hall on Sunday it seemed like a wry comment on the venue. With every surface overlaid with marble, gold leaf or mosaic, the Grand Temple outdoes even the most lavish opera house and seems to compete with Valhalla itself. Did Regents Opera have this in mind when choosing it as the location for their shoestring Ring cycle, now on its second instalment with Die Walküre?

Director Caroline Staunton’s programme note concentrated on the personal aspects of the story, the consequences for the characters of decisions already made and the tensions between their own needs and desires and the world’s demands. Her production worked best when it concentrated on those relationships rather than abstruse visual symbolism. The art-gallery conceit of last November’s Rheingold re-appeared in the final act, which, seeking to evoke the Nazi campaign against “degenerate art”, presented us with a rather bohemian set of Valkyries rescuing paintings (not particularly degenerate ones) rather than fallen heroes. The paintings were later smashed by a masked female figure credited in the programme as “Wotan’s Will”, who proceeded to wrap the condemned Brünnhilde in masking tape marked “Entartet”. They finally provided fuel for the magic fire with which Wotan encircles his daughter, recalling the burning of 5,000 artworks in Berlin in March 1939. It may all make sense by the time we get to Götterdämmerung, but for the moment it seemed shoe-horned in to the narrative.

As the wanderer Siegmund, Brian Smith Walters presented a convincingly weatherbeaten figure, toughened as well as beaten down by suffering. But his diction was muddy and there seemed little passion between him and his sister-bride Sieglinde, limpidly sung as she was by Justine Viani. Gerrit Paul Groen‘s Hunding introduced a swaggering figure of menace and mostly implied violence, despite an incongruous brown check suit. The arrival of Catharine Woodward‘s Brünnhilde, a day early for World Goth Day in black leather and eyeliner, raised the dramatic and musical temperature for Act II. Launching her initial war-cries with athletic precision, she brought vulnerability as well as volume to the role, and the father-daughter relationship with Keel Watson’s Wotan was affectingly realised. Watson was in every respect a worthy war-father for such a daughter, by imposing, fearsome and finally broken. The trinity of gods was completed by Ingeborg Novrup Børch as Fricka, an authoritative and powerful presence in her pivotal scene with Watson.

Some musical compromise is inevitable when Wagner is performed in the round with only 22 instrumentalists, and I couldn’t help missing the extra firepower of the full Wagnerian orchestra during the “Ride of the Valkyries”. But the band under Ben Woodward played superbly, sounding more bedded-in than they did in Rheingold, and Woodward’s arrangement showed astonishing ingenuity in reproducing Wagner’s orchestral colours on a smaller scale. As before, there was judicious use of Paul Plummer at the Freemason’s Willis organ, adding sonority to bass lines and providing an unearthly background for Brünnhilde’s message to Siegmund. With the postponement of ENO’s Siegfried Regents’ is now the only Ring in town – Wagnerites should not hesitate to join this Rhine journey.

At Freemasons Hall, London, Saturday 27th May, 5:30 pm https://regentsopera.com/

William Hale