"Where do you go after the Himalaya?" asked maestro Chien Wen-pin (簡文彬) at the party after Wagner’s four-part marathon. Mountain climbers would make the ascent again, perhaps from a different angle. This is hardly an option, though, for the no doubt exhausted and emotionally drained National Symphony Orchestra (NSO), not to mention the Taiwanese soloists, some of whom sang three or even four roles, all of them new, and all in a language they had rarely encountered before.
The first thing to say about the pioneering venture is that everyone involved considered it a major success. That they’d gone the course at all was part of it, but the audiences on all four nights greeted the concluding bars with wild applause, possibly also congratulating themselves on having endured so long. Adverse criticism was hard to come by. Pretty much everyone thought it had been a success for Taiwan, a milestone for the NSO, and a plume in the cap of Chien.
Even the three European critics and one musicologist who attended were united in feeling this had been a considerable achievement. Ulrich Ruhnke, editor of the German-language magazine for musicians Orchester, told me he thought the youthful NSO had achieved wonders, even if some minor highlights were overlooked.
This wasn’t an overwhelming, cataclysmic Ring cycle, but instead one marked by deference to an indisputable masterpiece, and endless attention to detail. Among the visiting soloists were some of the greatest Wagnerian voices currently working. Linda Watson’s Brunnhilde, everywhere supremely strong, was most remarkable last Friday night, in Act Three of Siegfried. You’re starved of women’s voices in Siegfried till then, with the exception of the Woodbird (nimbly sung by Lo Ming-fang, 羅明芳), so to hear Watson at her best from the first moment she opened her mouth, and from then on until the curtain fell, was extremely intoxicating. This was Wagnerian singing as it was envisaged by the composer when he constructed these titanic works, and the audience could hardly believe it was hearing it here in the Furthest East.
Equally majestic, though, was Hans-Peter Konig’s Hagen. He doesn’t appear until Gotterdammerung, but then the effect is overwhelming. Konig must have been compared to a bear too many times for comfort, but his voice was like the noblest of that species braying out and echoing among mountains on a cold winter morning. Many in the audience had never realized that a human being could sing quite like that. Konig was Brunnhilde’s truest male counterpart.
Robert Hale’s Wotan completed the trio of truly awesome singers. He has a long role, and his character is marvelously complex — the ruler riven with doubts, the faithless husband brought to heel by an insistent wife. But the Alberich of Franz-Josef Kapellmann could hardly have been bettered either. As for Wolfgang Neumann, Loge in Rheingold and Siegmund in Walkure, he to was very strong, especially in the first role. Alan Woodrow’s Siegfried wasn’t quite in the same class, but he certainly had his moments too. Taipei was extraordinarily lucky to have all six of them, and without them this Ring would have been impossible.
It was the local singers who surprised, however, with Chen Pei-chi (陳珮琪) the most astonishing. She has come an enormous way in the last four years. Her low contralto tones were ideally suited to Erda, but she showed she had dramatic power too as Fricke and Waltraute, and even as the First Norn. She was the most impressive of the local soloists of either sex.
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