Photo by Enrico Nawrath
The 2014 Bayreuth Ring cycle, under the direction of the remarkable Kirill Petrenko, is being streamed live by several sources. Check schedule and stations. Remaining operas are Siegfried on Wednesday and Götterdämmerung on Friday; both beginning at 7 a.m. Pacific Time.
Casts are largely new, at least to American audiences, except for Lance Ryan as Siegfried, but reviews have hailed most of the others, even while blasting Frank Castorf's direction at the cycle's premiere last year:
I have never heard booing that matched the loudness and endurance from the outraged audience at this week's Bayreuth festival.This display of vehement displeasure, at the end of Frank Castorf's production of the Ring cycle, was aimed at the Berlin-based Castorf and his creative team, including set designer Aleksandar Denic and the costumes, lighting and video of Adriana Braga Peretzki, Rainer Casper, Andreas Deinert and Jens Crull.
Castorf's take on the Ring was ultimately — and perhaps deliberately — incoherent. Before the cycle began, Castorf held a press conference. In it, he explained that this Ring cycle, focusing on oil, would tease out ways that our greed for it and its wealth re-enact the impulse for the riches, power and destruction on which Wagner's Ring is centred.
In its first two parts — a Rheingold set in a Route 66 U.S. gas station and motel inhabited by Tarantino-style characters, and a Walküre set in the Caspian oil fields just before the Russian revolution — it was just about possible to discern a link, albeit a loosely drawn one, between these two settings and the professed oil theme.
But the two final parts of Castorf's cycle had almost nothing of this theme, beyond the dark polluted clouds that formed its permanent backdrop. Instead, the settings were increasingly dominated by the remnants and echoes of East Berlin before the fall of communism.
At least, the pictures are better on the radio.