There’s good news for the Saturday morning opera club.
Galaxy Cinema’s recent digital conversion now means that they’re using one of their new digital projectors for opera screenings, giving a far brighter image.
But there’s sad news from the Met. Since my October piece, their increasingly frail music director James Levine has failed to appear at scheduled performances this season. He’d fallen while on holiday and, due to a back injury (not his first), had to keep cancelling.
Now he’s cancelled again, for the premiere of the fourth and final part of the Met’s ground-breaking Wagner Ring cycle, Götterdämmerung. Once again his place will be taken by Fabio Luisi, now appointed as the Met’s new principal conductor.
This new production (one of seven this season) will be screened at the Galaxy at 9 a.m. on Feb. 11.
Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) is the last episode in this epic saga, after Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), and Siegfried. Although single episodes are sometimes performed, Wagner wrote them as a coherent whole.
The cycle is a work of extraordinary scale. A full performance takes four nights, totalling more than 15 hours.
It centers on a magic ring with the power to rule the world, forged by the dwarf Alberich from gold stolen from the Rhine maidens. Wotan (king of the Gods) steals the ring, but is forced to give to the giants Fafner and Fasolt. Wotan’s unending schemes to recover the ring dominate the story, and finally his grandson, Siegfried (who is mortal), wins the ring.
The third episode ended in the midst of a giant fire, where Siegfried and the Valkyrie Brünnhilde became star-crossed lovers, doomed by fate.
In the final part Siegfried will be betrayed and killed due to the plotting of the dwarf’s son, also seeking the ring. Finally Brünnhilde (who is Wotan’s estranged daughter) returns the ring to the Rhine maidens, but in the cataclysmic climax the gods and their home are destroyed.
Wagner’s music is dense and richly coloured, growing in complexity as the cycle proceeds. He planned a huge orchestra with a greatly enlarged brass section, with new instruments such as the Wagner tuba, bass trumpet and contrabass trombone. He even had a purpose-built theatre constructed at Bayreuth in Germany, still used for these productions.
This fourth section will take six hours including breaks. A marathon indeed, but it promises to be a breathtaking experience.
Canadian Robert Lepage directs, and his 60-ton set (built and tested in Toronto), will once again be featured.
Coming up this month on Jan. 21, the first Met-HD opera this year is The Enchanted Island, also a new production, screening at 9:55 a.m.
In a single piece derived from the work of more than one composer, lovers of baroque opera will have a feast: some of the world’s best singers with music of the baroque masters.
And the story is drawn from Shakespeare. Here the lovers from A Midsummer Night’s Dream are shipwrecked on the other-worldly island from The Tempest.
Inspired by the musical pastiches and masques of the 18th century, the opera showcases arias and ensembles by Handel, Vivaldi, Rameau, and others, with a new libretto devised and written by Jeremy Sams.
Conductor William Christie leads an all-star cast with David Daniels (Prospero) and Joyce DiDonato (Sycorax) as the formidable foes, Plácido Domingo as Neptune, Danielle de Niese as Ariel, and Luca Pisaroni as Caliban. The production is directed and designed by Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, who did Satyagraha as well as the Met’s 125th anniversary gala.
–– Jim Elderton is a local filmmaker and freelance writer who covers classical music and the Okanagan Symphony for The Morning Star.
