SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

The Giants and Freia

One wishes, but only every so often, for the good old days when a Ring was a very special event. Now it seems the Ring may have overtaken Aida as the most produced mega-opera, at least among the big companies around the world. This does gives us the advantage of seeing it in many different ways, clarifying its mysteries, laying bare its weaknesses, with the result that one approaches any new Ring with skepticism rather than blind enthusiasm.

Das Rheingold is surely the producers nightmare of the four, as it has eleven roles requiring major voices, not including the Rhine maidens. One should expect any major American company to ably fill these spots, as San Francisco Opera has done though without great distinction. At the same time Rheingold has little of the musical-emotional payoff we expect from Walküre and Götterdämmerung thus it generates less excitement at the box office. There was the disappointment of visible empty seats at its opening.

Nonetheless the Eb major rumble of the Rhine never fails too ignite shivers of anticipation for the huge and indeed magical exposition to come of the nineteenth century's socio-economic intrigues, and Wagner's effective but naïve denouement. San Francisco's gold rush was simultaneous with the genesis of Wagner's Ring treatise, thus the famous prelude seemed to belong in San Francisco and in its opera house, the gray, gold and pale blue colors like the Sierras. Viewed from the opera house's grand tier gold lights bounced from the reflecting surfaces of the polished woods of the strings and the luster of the silver and brass instruments, seeming to betray the placement of the Rhine gold.

Jennifer Larmore as Fricka

Once these initial conceptual shivers had dissipated we were left with a scrim on which throbbed two dimensional colors, lots of them, naively illustrating Wagner's river. Moving into the river generated some excitement, with a transparent blue floor, three gold clad river nymphs, and a huge black and white projection of a mountain stream tumbling over stones. Maybe this is the Sierras and San Francisco will be Valhalla: there was another conceptual shiver and more fog than ever before flowed onto the War Memorial Opera House stage. Alberich appeared slipping and sliding on the damp stones, dressed as a forty-niner, a strong, physical performer, Richard Paul Fink. Alberich and the Rhine maidens ceremoniously floated a large gold silk cloth around the stage, then Alberich wrapped himself in it and fled the stage.

The temporary residence of the gods was filled with lounge chairs, tables, architects' blue prints, one had the impression that it might even be a construction trailer or a trailer park. Its inhabitants, Teutonic gods, were trailer-trash even if dressed in what appeared to be post-Victorian garb. Within this context there were excellent performances, Jennifer Larmore as a truly convincing trailer-class Fricka, Jason Collins and Charles Taylor were the handsomely voiced, handsome, if no-good hangers-on Froh and Donner. Tamara Wapinsky made a vibrant, beautifully sung and acted, adolescent Freia. Mark Delavan was the appropriately vain, thin-voiced, head-of-household Wotan. The several extended family squabbles of Das Rheingold unfolded in sometimes amusing, always un-focused staging.

Mark Delavan as Wotan