United States Wagner, Das Rheingold: Soloists, Los Angeles Philharmonic / Gustavo Dudamel (conductor). Walt Disney Live performance Corridor, Los Angeles, 1.11.2024. (LV)
Gustavo Dudamel’s first ‘totally staged’ Das Rheingold was modern and, at occasions, stunningly lovely, but it surely by no means had a lot dramatic weight or substance, and it lacked little of the horrible premonition of what was to happen within the subsequent operas. It felt extra like an out-of-town tryout.
The orchestra performed with razor-sharp virtuosity and beautiful readability in music that calls for neither, though, when the low strings bought it collectively, they created a semblance of the drama’s superior darkish drive. Even excellent taking part in from the brass, together with one actual Wagner tuba and 4 common tubas, by no means tried, not to mention achieved, something just like the darkish sound that creates the foreboding which permeates the opera. The giants’ footsteps, for instance, had been loud however not heavy.
The opening prelude was a set piece moderately than surging into the looks of the Rhinemaidens, the brass intertwining with one another extra sensuously than the Rhinemaidens to return. The entire orchestra misplaced momentum briefly earlier than choosing up once more when the water-nymphs, trying like refugees from a Bette Davis film concerning the antebellum South, flounced onto the scene.
Marketed as totally staged, the singers (most of them barefoot) had been costumed like fugitives from a drag queen’s ball and led by Ryan Speedo Inexperienced’s stentorian Wotan in Klingon duds. Other than striding throughout the makeshift stage in entrance of the organ loft or on the makeshift walkway in entrance of the orchestra or climbing to get to the totally different ranges of Frank Gehry’s set (constructed from what might have been condo constructing blocks), it would as effectively have been a live performance manufacturing.
The theater itself grew to become the stage, which was a pleasant thought, however the Tarnhelm bit was fairly tacky, with solely a projected snake for the dragon and Mime’s anvils in one of many balconies clattering away like pots and pans. Jochen Schmeckenbecher’s Alberich, who started in virtually whole darkness, made a really snappy and beautifully sung theatrical dwarf, and Simon O’Neill’s Loge, because the position typically does, threatened at a number of occasions to steal the present. In any other case, probably the most profitable singers had been the 2 giants, significantly Morris Robinson’s massively human Fasolt and Tamara Mumford’s splendidly luminous Erda. Raehann Bryce-Davis’s Fricka, then again, was charged with occasional shrieks of Italian verismo.
The important thing dramatic factors that underachieved included Alberich’s cursing of the ring which was neither bleakly desolate nor horrible sufficient to dominate the large expanse of time and sound of not solely Rheingold however the three subsequent operas of the Ring. And there was not one of the nice sweep of slowly mounting pressure that resolves itself within the final chords of the ‘Entry of the Gods into Valhalla’.
Nor was it a user-friendly manufacturing. There have been solely two subtitle panels in the whole corridor, hung excessive in entrance of the loft and thrown out of focus by two vertical scrims. With the viewers that confronted the orchestra trying up and down, and people on the edges craning their necks, it may need been billed as an opera for chiropractors. There might have been slight compensation for spectators on the facet positioned behind the aircraft of the stage in having the ability to watch Dudamel conduct, however he principally stored his nostril within the rating and his concentrate on the orchestra, sometimes trying as much as mouth cues to the singers. And the interpretation itself, maybe making an attempt to be extra accessible, nonetheless got here up with strained phrases like ‘ruddy gold’.
To finish all of it, Donner’s hammer summoning the thunderstorm appeared to barely misfire, with only a temporary spark someplace within the higher reaches of the corridor.
Laurence Vittes
Featured Picture: Wagner’s Das Rheingold on the Walt Disney Live performance Corridor © Timothy Norris
Manufacturing:
Director – Alberto Arvelo
Set – Frank Gehry
Costumes – Cindy Figueroa
Dramaturg – Cori Ellison
Lighting – Rodrigo Prieto
Video artwork idea & script – Jorge Chacin
Video artwork producer – Gabriela Camejo
VFX artist, editor – Nascuy Linares
Forged:
Wotan – Ryan Speedo Inexperienced
Donner – Kyle Albertson
Loge – Simon O’Neill
Froh – John Matthew Myers
Fricka – Raehann Bryce-Davis
Freia – Jessica Faselt
Erda – Tamara Mumford
Alberich – Jochen Schmeckenbecher
Mime – Barry Banks
Fasolt – Morris Robinson
Fafner – Peixin Chen
Woglinde – Ann Toomey
Wellgunde – Alexandria Shiner
Flosshilde – Taylor Raven
