Edmonton Opera continued its programming of miniature versions of Wagner’s Ring Cycle on June 5th with the first of six performances of Die Walküre at the Citadel Theatre.
Following last season’s somewhat more elaborate staging of Das Rheingold in the same venue, this Walküre was presented on a single-level platform, enhanced by an elevated, circular screen displaying various narrative and atmosphere images and effects that, because of the images’ quality, gave a cinematic feel to the overall presentation.
In Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick’s much-reduced versions of these operas, about five hours have been cut in total from all four operas, with about an hour and a half gone from Die Walküre, boiling the Norse mythology down to, frankly, a tolerable length for most modern audiences. Besides artistic director Joel Ivany’s economic reasons for producing these adaptations, the storytelling remained unadulterated, if abridged, Wagner.
The reduced versions call for only 18 musicians (a contingent largely of Edmonton Symphony players, in this case). They were stationed behind the playing platform and were directed by Russell Braun, better known as one of Canada’s premiere baritones, making his professional conducting debut with this production. The small orchestral force delivered the music within these limitations, evoking the more lyrical elements of the score beautifully. A puny brass section of merely five yeoman musicians and only six string players inevitably sounded un-Wagnerian in the “Ride of the Valkyries” at the climactic moment that opened Act Three.
The singing, though, was generally superb, and the small distance between the performers and the audience in this thrust-stage, 700-seat venue enhanced the intimate scenes in this weird tale of incest and male-female power struggles. The flirtation between the siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde (relative newcomer tenor Scott Rumble and the more experienced Ukrainian soprano Anna Pompeeva) would have felt a lot more remote in Edmonton Opera’s traditional home at the 2,400-seat Jubilee Auditorium.
And that intimacy, both musical and situational, provided some of the most dramatically effective features of the production. Pompeeva, in particular, has a warm, powerfully unaffected voice which she wielded with hopeful longing and operatic command when emotionally uncompromising. Rumble’s tenor carried well enough, and his interplay with his sibling lover, especially when their hopes were highest, was suitably romantically charged.
Photo Credit: Nanc Price
Fricka (Catherine Daniel) and Wotan (Neil Craighead) in ethical debate
Bass-baritone Giles Tomkins sang Hunding, Sieglinde’s brutish husband with requisite male toxicity, striking a tribalist energy that convincingly underpinned his hostility toward Siegmund, his uninvited guest and sworn enemy. Tomkins got the macho right, musically and dramatically.
This opera is essentially dialectic: an ethical debate between Wotan (bass Neil Craighead, returning to the role after Das Rheingold) and his wife, Fricka (mezzo Catherine Daniel) about whether to sanction, in both senses, the transgressive love relationship. Fricka advocates for the sanctity of traditional marriage. Wotan is willing to bend the rules to empower his heroic charge, Siegmund. Daniel was exceedingly powerful as the aggrieved, disgusted wife of the fundamentally compromised head of the gods. Much of Ivany’s direction was stand-and-deliver static, but Daniel, in this argument, moved frustratedly about the stage as she recriminated against Wotan’s immoral stance. She had but one scene and made the most of it!
The debate between head of the Walkyrie sisters, Brünnhilde (soprano Jaclyn Grossman), and Siegmund about whether she should obey Wotan’s command and kill him was entertaining enough, but her climatic argument with Wotan about how she should be punished for her defiance was a rollercoaster of emotional complexity, and both Craighead and Grossman illustrated the potential power of persuasion, as Brünnhilde convinces her father essentially to punish her on her own terms. Grossman rose to the occasion when she sang at her loudest volume, the equivalent of yelling her argument, and she made her father seem pliable. In more subdued singing, however, I found her less interesting – call it a question of dramatic range or opening-night tension, perhaps.
In the original Die Walküre, there are nine Valkyries. The three women who played Brünnhilde’s sisters here (Leila Kirves, Hannah Crawford, Rachael McAuley) made a strong vocal impression at the end as they lamented the fate of their disobedient sibling.
The projections by Andy Moro were often compelling: an assortment of close-up images of the principals in poignant moments, as well as organic animations of a flourishing or a winter-bound scraggle of eerie branches. The visual effects at this level were intense.
Mikael Kangas’s final lighting effect was especially theatrical. The platform was rimmed by a curving spindle rail, and as the opera concluded with Brünnhilde ensconced in her mountainous inferno, the top rail mirrored the red glow of the projected fire to a strangely soothing effect.
Photo Credit: Nanc Price
As Wotan, Neil Craighead confronts Jaclyn Grossman’s Brünnhilde in Die Walküre in Edmonton
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Bill Rankin has been a classical music and opera writer for two decades. His reviews and articles have appeared in the Edmonton Journal, the Globe and Mail, Gramophone, Opera Canada, La Scena, the American Record Guide and Classical Voice North America. He lives in Edmonton.
