CAST: Bradley Daley SIEGFRIED; Adrian Dwyer MIME; Paul Carey Jones THE WANDERER; Mark Stone ALBERICH; Simon Wilding FAFNER; Julieth Lozano WALDVOGEL; Mae Heydorn ERDA; Lee Bisset BRÜNNHILDE; CONDUCTOR Anthony Negus; DIRECTOR Amy Lane; SET AND PROPS DESIGNER Rhiannon Newman Brown; LIGHTING DESIGNER Charlie Morgan Jones; COSTUME DESIGNER Emma Ryott
What is it with Wagner and chicken barns? Other members of the Manchester Wagner Society have long enthused to me about Wagner at the Longborough Festival opera house, and finally this year, with the resumption of full stagings after the pandemic, I decided to give it a go, choosing the Jubilee weekend as an appropriate time to not be in my home village, rightly or wrongly.
I guess part of a true mythic quest involves difficulty and inaccessibility – and indeed Bayreuth in 1876 was a pretty out of the way place – so, being car-less for the weekend I anticipated some difficulties. And difficulties there were – I had blithely booked accommodation at the Fire Services College in Moreton-in-Marsh, without looking too closely at the distances involved. There were no taxis available for the entire weekend in the Cotswolds – they all seemed to be employed in carrying wealthy Cotswolds dwellers to and from Heathrow – so I had to walk one hour 40 minutes to and from Longborough back to Moreton-in-Marsh, in miserable wet weather, the journey back being partly in the dark and a bit scary on the main road, even with a high vis jacket. Difficulties also manifested themselves with the weather at the opera house. The Manchester Wagner Soc people I had agreed to meet had very kindly set up a hamper of food and a gazebo in the grounds. It was very cold…. we had some super meals but dismantling the gazebo and getting drenched in the process before Act 3 of Siegfried took the principle of arduous quest to a new level of extremity. Added to which, my ears were full of olive oil (I’ll not go into the gory details) so my hearing wasn’t always 100%. Thus….lots of trials and tribulations….
So was it all worth it? The short answer is ‘yes’, though with a qualification I’ll mention at the end. The opera house really did start life as a chicken barn, though now extended and with a range of trailers at the back for artists. It seats 500, the orchestra is mostly located under the stage, there are no flies, no real stage machinery and the stage is small. What makes it special is the proximity (unless you’re sitting in very expensive stalls seats at ROHCG or ENO) of audience to singers and the very special sense of engagement which that creates. It is a very bonkers project indeed to stage Wagner in this set-up and charge high prices but somehow the price seems justified.
In terms of this performance there were mostly pluses and a few minor minuses. The huge major plus was Anthony Negus’ conducting and the orchestra. What was notable about Negus’ conducting was the way everything felt ‘right’ in the flow of the music and in the speed relationships of different scenes. In particular the way the 3rd Act was paced felt instinctively right – enough slowness to appreciate the majesty of the music in the Wotan /Erda scene, enough speed to ensure that the Wotan / Siegfried scene didn’t drag and enough flexibility to encompass both the stillness and wonder of the mountain surrounded by fire and the passion of Siegfried and Brunnhilde. The orchestra in a reduced orchestration (60 rather than 100+) sounded very fine, with some beautiful woodwind and horn playing. The orchestra pit, recessed, as I say, underneath the stage doesn’t, unlike Bayreuth, have a cowl pushing the sound to the back of the stage before coming into the auditorium with a wonderfully melded feel – this seems to create problems of balance sometimes which are nothing to do with Negus but simply emerge from where particular groups of instruments are sited ( thus some of the climaxes are less overwhelming than they night otherwise be -on the other hand this might just be my olive-oil drenched ears).
The most effective part of the physical staging were the extensive range of video images projected onto the back screen of the set – there were bears, forests, streams, abstract images, sunrises – too many to name all of them. They always enhanced the action on stage, never detracted from it and I am surprised they are not used more often in Wagner productions, given the difficulties of Wagner’s stage directions. The basic set was a series of platforms that looked a bit ramshackle and further constricted a small stage. The problems of this approach were most apparent in the final duet, where Siegfried and Brunnhilde had to declaim to each other stuck on opposite platforms and then totter down steps to perform the final clinch. For the most part though this wasn’t so much of a problem, and of course Mime’s cave should feel constricted and cluttered. There were a few oddities of staging – it wasn’t clear whether there was any deep meaning in Wotan’s bringing Brunnhilde on stage to lie asleep on the rock or whether, given the lack of machinery, this was the only way to get her on stage. Less controversial was Fafner being a top-hatted Victorian Scrooge like figure on crutches – slightly au Chereau. The Woodbird was a very visible figure on stage – human, again, perhaps a little Victorian (possibly a virtuous clerk) – writing in a book and referring to it (maybe the book of nature). It wasn’t clear what her relationship with Wotan was – if the latter was in anyway ‘controlling’ her that would seem to be against the whole concept of the Wanderer’s renunciation of his god-hood. Anyway, it’s a clever idea and fully justified by Wagner’s text.
The best singer and performer was Paul Carey-Jones as Wotan. He’s not got a big voice – I wonder how he would fare in a bigger theatre in this role – and not as dark or as deep as maybe an ideal Wotan should sound. But he sang beautifully and characterfully – good word pointing and sensitive phrasing. Adrian Dwyer’s Mime was also excellent, in its way, but this was quite a quirky reading of the role – not the usual caricature evil dwarf but a tallish languid urban bachelor, maybe slightly hipsterish, in his 40s, amiable on the surface but deeply malevolent underneath. This seems to be not quite what Wagner intended, but in its own terms it was well done. Lee Bisset was one of the most believable and striking Brunnhildes I’ve seen and in her middle and lower ranges her voice was beautiful. However her high extended notes had a heavy vibrato, and she emitted a graceless squawk of a top C at the end (on the other hand at least she tried, unlike the one in the LPO performance just before lockdown)
Bradley Daley as Siegfried had of course a thankless task in the role, as every performer taking on ‘Siegfried ‘ does. He didn’t look stupidly old in the role; he was unfailing in vocal and physical energy and sounded much the same at the end of the evening as he did at the beginning. This is all one can reasonably ask any Siegfried to offer. He had a voice that offered not much variation but he did hit the high notes with ease, and he was at times sensitive in the lyrical passages. He made a decent shot of acting the impetuous teenager. All in all, his contribution was significant and appreciated.
There was a rather wobbly Erda, an excellent bright voiced Woodbird, and a resonant Alberich, looking very much like Wotan – the director clearly playing on the licht-Alberich, schwarz-Alberich comparisons in the text.
In short this was a story telling Ring approach and very successful on its own terms.
Would I go again? Yes in both senses – I am going to Die Tote Stadt in two weeks time and I will certainly make plans to go to Gotterdammerung next year. Would I go to a full Ring cycle in 24 or 25. Hmmmm – a week in the Cotswolds tramping backwards and forwards from Moreton or Stow on the Wold might be a bit much……
John's musical journey 