Wagner’s Ring cycle is famously long. Even so, a cycle that has lasted more than six years is some kind of record. Back in 2018, Vladimir Jurowski was still the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s principal conductor when he embarked on the tetralogy. Then Covid intervened, and Jurowski moved to new posts in Germany. As a result, the cycle’s completion has had to wait a further three seasons, until now.
Jurowski’s Götterdämmerung was overwhelmingly worth waiting for. Concert performances of Wagner inescapably place the orchestra even more at the centre of proceedings than ever. This was enhanced by a restrained and minimalist semi-staging by PJ Harris, atmospheric videos by Pierre Martin Oriol and, in this most foreboding part of the Ring cycle, Mark Jonathan’s lighting, which began and ended in the pitch dark. The result was a performance more than usually focused on Jurowski and the LPO.
The quality was hard to exaggerate. Conducting from a score of encyclopaedic size, Jurowski’s attention to orchestral balance and sound scarcely faltered across nearly four and a half hours of music. His attention to colour and dynamics was unstinting, the attention to accents and phrasing meticulous. The darkness of Wagner’s score – orchestrated two decades after the first two Ring operas – was thrillingly realised. Was it all occasionally just a little too perfectly sculpted and beautifully played at the expense of the dramatic experience? Perhaps. But if ever you wanted to experience the connection between a conductor who knows precisely what he wants to achieve and an orchestra willing to play their hearts out for him, here it was, and across the most vast of musical canvases.
Jurowski was also super-sensitive to his singers in this orchestra-heavy setting. The Rhinemaidens, vassals and Norns, among whom contralto Claudia Huckle’s lustrous First Norn stood out, all sang from the choral benches at the back, but were never allowed to be overwhelmed – though this would have been hard in the case of the London Philharmonic Choir and London Voices in the Ring’s solitary and pulsating choral scene. The same applied to Robert Hayward’s Alberich, whose crucial scene at the start of act two was among the best realised phases of the evening.
The principals were variable. Albert Dohmen, in his day a Bayreuth Wotan, but now bringing all his craft, experience and his still considerable bass-baritonal heft to the pivotal role of Hagen, was the pick of the men. Burkhard Fritz paced himself, sometimes frustratingly carefully, through the many challenges of Siegfried, but sang with real lustre in his final act narration and death scene. Günter Papendell made what he could of the hapless King Gunther, one of Wagner’s least rewarding secondary roles.
Among the women, Svetlana Sozdateleva was an uneven Brünnhilde. At moments, including much of the immolation scene, the creamy richness of her soprano carried enormous conviction. At others, the weight and range of voice, especially at the top, was sometimes missing, and she tended to scoop at exposed notes. Sinéad Campbell Wallace has a bigger voice than many who sing Gunther’s sister Gutrune, but she caught the character’s vulnerability. As Waltraute, Kai Rüütel-Pajula excelled in another of the opera’s crucial confrontations, bringing just the right mix of vocal luxuriousness and fervour.
Might Jurowski and the LPO now put a whole Ring cycle together inside a much shorter span? Probably too costly. But we can hope. In the meanwhile, to catch Jurowski in the Ring, you must head for Munich, where he begins a staged cycle in October.
