<<  -- 2 --  Robert Hugill    STUNNING LIGHTING

From Siegfried there is a snippet of Siegfried's monologue in Act 2, plus his dialogue with the Woodbird and over eight minutes of Siegfried and Brünnhilde's Act 3 duet. The Act 2 excerpts take place, not in a forest, but in a complex wilderness of abandoned objects. Again black is the prevailing colour, and I wish that we could have seen Fafner in action. Siegfried does have a sword, though he is wearing a boiler suit. Jerusalem presents Siegfried as convincingly naïve, even if he does not look young.

The first extract is tiny. In the second, the mechanical woodbird (the singer is off stage) is manipulated by Wotan, a rather neat solution by Kupfer to one of the Ring's problems of plot. As Siegfried leaves, the wilderness retreats, giving him pure light, another stunning effect. For the Act 3 duet, we are, correctly, back in the setting for Act 3 of Die Walküre. Siegfried wakes Brünnhilde with a very, very passionate kiss, and she seems to respond. Evans is good at suggesting the way Brünnhilde is coming back to life after 20 years of sleep, though the scene is rather gloomy with not much sun for her to greet. As with Siegfried and Sieglinde, Kupfer keeps Brünnhilde and Siegfried physically separated for much of the time. The balance between voices and between voices and orchestra seems to be a little different from the CDs and rather favours Evans more, which is a good thing.

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