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The Guardian, 30 January 2013 |
Andrew Clements
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Wagner: Die Walküre – review |
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Taken
from a series of concert performances that Valery Gergiev conducted in the
Mariinsky Concert Hall in St Petersburg in February and April last year,
this is the first instalment of what over the next two years will become a
complete Ring: Das Rheingold will appear later this year, with Siegfried and
Götterdammerung due in 2014. As with Gergiev's fine 2010 Parsifal, the new
Walküre is founded upon the Mariinsky Opera's own staging, but with
genuinely international-class Wagner singers drafted into the principal
roles for the discs. On this recording, just Hunding (the very fine Mikhail
Petrenko), Fricka (the more ordinary Ekaterina Gubanova), together with the
eight Valkyries are company singers.
In the first act at
least, with Jonas Kaufmann as an incomparable Siegmund, Anja Kampe a
profoundly moving Sieglinde and Gergiev pacing the performance to an
overwhelming climax, the result is spellbinding. In fact, few performances
on disc can match it for sheer excitement, or for Kaufmann's blend of easy
power, immaculate diction and lyric beauty. It would have been
miraculous if the rest of the performance had been able to maintain the same
level, and it doesn't. The huge span of the second act has proved the
stumbling block for many Wagner conductors, and Gergiev doesn't quite bring
it off, either. The focus comes and goes, with the dramatic pulse quickening
unnaturally when things start to flag, and, for all his evenness and beauty
of tone, René Pape's Wotan does not project the strength of character to
bind it all together.
Both Pape and Nina Stemme's Brünnhilde are more
comfortable in the third act, which seems all of a piece again dramatically.
Kampe's final moments are simply glorious, too, and though Pape's subsequent
reproaches to his daughter seem a bit uninvolved, he sings the Farewell with
touching fondness while Gergiev obtains transcendently beautiful playing
from the Mariinsky Orchestra. Even if, except in the first act, this doesn't
challenge the finest Walküres on disc, it's still a fine beginning to what
promises to be a very worthwhile cycle. |
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