There may be some elderly folk who can not, but most of us can remember every Ring cycle we have seen. We are talking about Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. I have never seen the operas consecutively but I remember the ones I didn’t get to.
I had not heard of Fulham Opera when they staged it on my doorstep in 2014. I met a friend at the station with a suitcase. He was going to see it in Seattle. I would have liked to see it in San Francisco. I did see two of the four parts at the Proms in 2013. I didn’t see it at Longborough but they will stage it again in 2023. I have never been to Bayreuth; apparently the seats are so hard that it keeps the audience awake in any longueurs. The Ring is the Holy Grail for Wagnerians. Tickets usually are expensive and hard to come by, so it is with pleasure I tell you that the London Philharmonic Orchestra are putting on two cycles at the Festival Hall in January and February 2021. There are still tickets but lift up your feet and credit cards because it will soon sell out.
The LPO gig has two stupendous advantages in addition to ticket availability. It will be semi-staged. Often operas are ruined by ludicrous productions that simply distract from the music. Wagner needs to be savoured and the best I’ve heard have been concert performances. Secondly, tickets are relatively cheap – half the price of the tennis at Queen’s Club this summer and probably cheaper than going to a Premier League football match. Each opera has been performed individually since 2018 so what did the critics opine?
‘This concert cycle of Wagner’s Ring is worth waiting for; Jurowski’s measured interpretation is revelatory … The gain in detail, clarity and projection, compared with the generalised cushion of background sound when the score is played in a theatre pit, is exhilarating … Yet never were the singers drowned: a miracle of balance.’ The Times, January 2018.
Vladimir Jurowski has featured here before. In the summer of 2017 he conducted Brett Dean’s Hamlet at Glyndebourne to acclaim. He makes regular appearances at the Met and Royal Opera House. Interestingly this Russian, who moved to Germany in 1990, made his international debut at Wexford in 1995 when he was only twenty-three, conducting Rimsky-Korsakov’s May Night. Opera is hit and miss; for every stupendous production I have seen there are a couple that are adequate and at least one that is dire. May Night at Garsington in 2006 fell into the last category and it was not hard to linger over a picnic in the garden in the second half.
This is more or less how my journey with Jurowski will start on January 25th 2021.
Something to look forward to, indeed. I have never managed to get to Bayreuth, either, but I intend someday to see if the seats are uncomfortable enough to keep me awake through all 17 hours when I am in my dotage.
One cannot hear of the Ring without thinking of perhaps the best explanation of the plot and musical structure ever given, that by the comedienne Anna Russell: https://youtu.be/eN5dAQLYYrs