This Ring also has its fair share of absurdities. That Brunnhilde is made to cover the head of Siegmund with what looks like sticky shaving-soap while she's telling him he's doomed to lose his fight with Hunding is frankly ridiculous, and Wotan's farewell to Brunnhilde at the end of Die Walkure, probably the most affecting passage in the cycle's entire 15 hours, was strangely unmoving. Wotan's appearance had a lot to answer for too -- that the ruler of the gods wore sunglasses throughout and sported a ginger ponytail proved a hard cross for Falk Struckmann to carry, despite his relative vocal strength in the role.
This was a production that purported to know what evil was all about but was somewhat stumped when it came to
goodness and self-sacrifice. The baddies, as a result, were uniformly strong. Gunther von Kannen's Alberich, Eric Halfvarson's Hunding and Matti Salminen's Hagen were all eminently satisfying. But then John Treleaven's Siegfried, less youthful than usual, was also forceful, and moving more often than you'd expect, and Richard Berkeley-Steele's Siegmund gave a lot of pleasure.
Of the women, Taiwan's operagoers will be especially interested to see Linda Watson as a strong Sieglinde in Die Walkure -- she will be singing Brunnhilde in Taipei in September. The Brunnhilde on these DVDs, Deborah Polaski, was frequently more than impressive.
Even so, it must be said that the great moments of the cycle often failed to materialize. A case in point was the ending of Gotterdammerung, when a flood is meant to overwhelm the stage while distant Valhalla is seen aflame. Little of this was available to the chosen staging. The flashing of strip lights, billowing of red-tinted stage-smoke and bowler-hatted citizens walking backwards and forwards cannot credibly add up to the downfall of the gods of the old heroic world, Wagner's ostensible subject matter.
The orchestra playing under Bertrand de Billy was excellent, and the sound quality is excep-tionally vivid. All in all, this is a Ring where the parts are better than the whole, but where the best efforts of the often fine soloists are undercut by the shortcomings of Harry Kupfer's often-praised, but to my mind overly tough-minded and idiosyncratic, production.
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