These are good times for British tenors. Ian Bostridge is, of course, the great star, but happily he is not non pareil. In John Mark Ainsley and Paul Agnew, for instance, he has contemporaries of equal musical distinction and perhaps of more secure vocal resources. At the Monteverdi Choir's recent performance of the St Matthew Passion at the Cadogan Hall under John Eliot Gardiner, the Evangelist was Mark Padmore, who firmly demonstrated that he is to be counted alongside these others. Although he started off his narration in a properly matter-of-fact way, his delivery became more emotionally charged and more daring as he moved through Christ's arrest and on to the crucifixion. He was startlingly free in dynamics and tempo, but because he remained faithful to the prosody of the text, what might have sounded mannered from a singer with less textual sensitivity was searing in its cumulative emotional power. Formidable too was the Christ of Dietrich Henschel. Henschel is still a rare visitor to Britain, but his performance showed why he has such a high reputation on the continent. Gardiner cast the soloists for the arias from the choir; the first time that he has felt able to do this. The trouble was that although the singers were by and large up to Bach's demands, they were not confident enough for one to be able to relax into their singing without fear that something might go wrong. Still, since things hardly ever did go wrong, that may well seem an ungracious complaint. This was as intense and concentrated a St Matthew Passion as one could hope to hear, and I cannot imagine a more accomplished account of the Evangelist than Padmore's.
Halfway down the Rhine
Now that the run of Die Walküre has finished, Covent Garden's new Ring has reached its halfway point. On the whole it has been pretty successful, even if Keith Warner's late 19th-century setting did not manage to counter my suspicion that the only way to present the Ring convincingly on stage now is to go for the kind of abstract staging favoured in the "New Bayreuth" of the postwar years. Going even vaguely authentic unavoidably runs the risk of seeming kitsch, while stagings updated to a modern setting have difficulty in dealing with its divine elements, and leave one unsure what is significant. To take just a minor detail, when in Rheingold Donner and Froh are put into highly tailored smoking-jackets, does this indicate that the gods are part of a rich fin-de-siècle mercantile society that can support this kind of tailoring? We do not know—but then rather than determining a particular social context in which to understand the action, the staging obscures one's sense of who the characters are. There is a point to the vaguely mythical but not to the vaguely historical. It is true that at Bayreuth in the 1970s, Patrice Chéreau's production successfully placed the cycle in the 19th century, but this was to present the story as an emblem of class struggle, which allowed him still to capture its epic quality, something that Warner's production has yet to achieve.
Warner's considerable achievement lies in a subtle rethinking of the characters and their relations to each other. The confrontation between Wotan and Fricka at the start of the second act of Walküre, for instance, is unusually complex. Here, Fricka's power to persuade Wotan to abandon Siegmund comes not least from the fact that he still loves her. Similarly, Siegmund and Sieglinde are presented as surprisingly, though convincingly, equal, with Sieglinde very obviously Siegmund's sister. She is no mere terrified woman, but handles the sword as confidently as her brother as she guards the perimeter of their camp. If Warner's setting is not particularly compelling, this is more than offset by a rich conception of the characters and their relations to each other.
This is Antonio Pappano's first Ring, and while it does not have the authority that Haitink's had by the end, it holds much promise. Pappano is rare among opera conductors in being able to accompany singers so that one never feels they have to fight against the orchestra. He seemed less successful, however, in passages where the orchestra had a more independent role. The ensemble at the start of both Rheingold and Walküre was noticeably ragged and too many opportunities for orchestral expressivity were missed (rather painfully so in the cello solo in the first act of Walküre).
Given the well-known difficulties of casting the Ring nowadays, the Royal Opera has done pretty well. Jorma Silvasti was a game Siegmund, though the role stretched the voice to its natural limits. Katarina Dalayman, in contrast, was a wonderful Sieglinde, producing some dazzlingly idiomatic Wagner singing. Rosalind Plowright as Fricka, newly retrained as a mezzo-soprano, was in fine voice for Rheingold, but sounded slightly unsettled in Walküre. Philip Langridge was a sparkling Loge. Lisa Gasteen was a competent Brünnhilde, and in different circumstances might well have seemed a very good one. Her voice is strong throughout her range, but it lacks delicacy towards the top, and that matters. This was all too evident next to the Wotan of Bryn Terfel. One problem of casting Terfel is that he can so easily remind one what allowances one is making for other singers. Without a moment of vocal strain or insecurity, he brought to the part the theatrical and rhetorical intelligence of a great actor. Like Padmore's Evangelist, this was the real thing.
