<<  -- 7 --  Robert Hugill    VITAL PERFORMANCE

Keeping her on stage before the Todesverkündigung meant that Gasteen was able to make this key scene all the more convincing and believable. This is one of the core moments in this opera, and in the Ring. Brünnhilde's growing appreciation for Siegmund's all too human love for Sieglinde makes her break her word to Wotan and thus causing the events which lead to the final conflagration. I am looking forward immensely to seeing how Gasteen's Brünnhilde develops and after all this is only her third Ring production so she has many more ahead of her.

Rosalind Plowright's Fricka was familiar from Das Rheingold and here she did not disappoint either, managing to combine a sense of the buttoned up, rather Edwardian wife, with a feeling of simmering sexuality and power underneath. It helps that she is an enormously attractive performer and her re-configured mezzo-soprano voice gleams beautifully, always retaining a rather Italianate sense of line in the music. With a performer like this, I always regret that Wagner did not write more for Fricka.

This was a tremendously vital performance, one that carried us away at the end as all performances of this work should; with such a fine cast we could forget little niggles about production details. I look forward immensely to seeing how singers, conductor and production develop.