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    Review: This London ‘Ring’ Is on the Met Opera’s Radar

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    It’s not stage-filling spectacle, but Barrie Kosky’s version of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold,” the start of a four-opera epic, is eerie, vivid and intense.Two years ago, the Metropolitan Opera went shopping for a new “Ring” in London and came home empty-handed.English National Opera’s first installment of Wagner’s four-part epic of gods and humans, lust and power, was judged a bit too scrappy and bare to transfer to the grand Met. And anyway, the English company was soon reeling from cuts to its government funding, putting the completion of the cycle in jeopardy.The Met would like to bring a “Ring” to New York in four seasons — a blink of an eye given opera’s glacial planning cycles and Wagner’s technical and casting complexities. So its leadership has another London option under consideration: a production directed by Barrie Kosky that opened on Monday at the Royal Opera, the city’s bigger and older company.Eerie, vivid and intense, Kosky’s version of “Das Rheingold,” the first “Ring” opera, is a show that an opera house on either side of the Atlantic could be proud of, accessible and stimulating for Wagner newcomers and connoisseurs alike. The story is crystal clear, and its emotional and political stakes are taken seriously, without oversimplification or overstatement.It would also finally bring to the Met one of opera’s finest, most rangy and resourceful directors. (A collaboration on Prokofiev’s “Fiery Angel” was spiked during the pandemic.) Kosky, who was born in Australia, was celebrated during his recently ended tenure at the helm of the Komische Oper in Berlin, for his revivals of long-forgotten operettas and his giddy disregard for distinctions between high and low art, between “Kiss Me, Kate” and “Moses und Aron.”His signature style is zany, high-spirited and high-kicking, but he can do sober and austere when the piece calls for it, like a starkly savage “Kat’a Kabanova” at the Salzburg Festival last year. His Royal Opera “Rheingold,” though not without shots of bitter humor, is in this vein.The work’s single, two-and-a-half hour act is all played atop, around and inside a huge hollow tree trunk, collapsed on its side. This is a dying world, Kosky suggests — and to that end he puts Erda, the earth goddess who intones a climactic warning, onstage almost throughout, in the form of a silent actress: elderly, naked, frail, vulnerable. (For that climactic monologue, the singer is hidden from the audience.)Katharina Konradi with the magic gold, whose theft from the Rhine sets the “Ring” in motion.Monika RittershausThe gold whose theft from the Rhine sets the “Ring” in motion, and from which the central ring of power is forged, is here a shiny, syrupy fluid that flows from the tree. It evokes, appropriately, a union of metal and river, as well as the fossil fuels on which the global economy is disastrously based. Its associations range bodily and geologic — lava, milk, semen, blood, honey — and characters lick it greedily from their hands.Kosky and his set designer, Rufus Didwiszus, have imagined Nibelheim, the inferno in which the stolen gold is worked on, as a steampunkish industrial monstrosity, with clamps gripping the tree. Erda, her torso popping out of a knot in the trunk, is connected to tubes that pump the iridescent batter from her body and drain it into pails. This society is built from — and rotted by — the devaluation of women (particularly the old) and environmental exploitation.Victoria Behr’s costumes are contemporary, and there are hints of British flavor: These wealthy, self-serving gods have a taste for nostalgic old-money activities like polo. But this is a basically placeless, timeless production; its primary location, the theater. Kosky emphasizes this by having the audience enter, curtain up, to see the unadorned expanses around the stage. Stagehands do their work visibly, and Alessandro Carletti’s lighting draws attention to its equipment.Kosky uses steam, lights, loudspeakers and knobby holes in the tree to conjure, in charmingly old-fashioned ways, the magic effects and transformations of Wagner’s libretto. But this staging mostly lacks proscenium-filling spectacle — and it was a similar lack that made English National Opera’s “Ring” a no-go for the Met.The transitions between the scenes in “Das Rheingold,” from the heights of mountains to the bowels of the earth and back again, are played at the Royal Opera with the curtain closed, as if Kosky is thumbing his nose at expectations that he is supposed to provide more of a scenic extravaganza. Instead, those interludes are simply showcases for Antonio Pappano, starting his swan-song season as the company’s music director, and the orchestra.You could call this meager. But on Monday, it felt more like focused modesty.Christopher Purves, center, as Alberich transforms the tree into an industrial monstrosity pumping golden fluid from Rose Knox-Peebles, left, as Erda.Monika RittershausWork that’s powerful in the 2,200-seat Royal Opera House won’t necessarily make the same impact in the Met, nearly double that size. But the last New York production of the cycle, directed by Robert Lepage on a preposterously expensive, 45-ton high-tech set, was, when it opened in 2010, an artistic embarrassment for the company as well as a depressing example of empty-headed excess at a time of financial crisis.The “Ring,” given its size and prominence, is a symbol of an opera house’s values, and the lean vitality of Kosky’s vision, which will unfold in London over the coming years, seems right for an era of budget and programming cuts.At the Royal Opera, Pappano and the orchestra match Kosky with fiery but never overblown playing, especially from the lush yet biting strings, their intimacy startling. This is a “Rheingold” that, first and foremost, supports its singers.Wotan, the king of the gods, and Alberich, the dwarf who steals the gold from the Rhine, are here almost brotherly figures, both with bald heads and sturdy bodies, and they share certain qualities, too. Christopher Purves’s Alberich has aristocratic reserve, while Christopher Maltman’s booming, tight-smiling Wotan is capable of feverish aggression; it is shocking but not surprising when he cuts off Alberich’s finger to take the ring.Yet the tenderness with which Maltman embraces the fragile Erda, as the voice of the goddess is heard warning him to give up the ring, is just as indelible, and feels just as true. As Fricka, Wotan’s wife, Marina Prudenskaya sings with slicing anxiety; Sean Panikkar is a charismatically grinning, cackling playboy as Loge, the anarchic fire god; Insung Sim is unusually agonized as the giant Fasolt.This is not an ostentatious production. But the finale, which shouldn’t be given away, is proscenium-filling spectacle, and vintage Kosky, in that it uses one of theater’s simplest, most traditional devices with unforgettable showman flair, conveying all the glittering glamour and fundamental emptiness of the gods’ ascent to their new home — a triumph as hollow as the giant tree.Das RheingoldThrough Sept. 29 at the Royal Opera House, London; roh.co.uk. More

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      Jakub Hrusa Set to Lead Royal Opera House

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      The young Czech conductor will replace Antonio Pappano, who is heading to the London Symphony Orchestra.Jakub Hrusa leading the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall, in New York, in 2019.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesLONDON — Jakub Hrusa, a rising Czech conductor, on Tuesday was named the music director of the Royal Opera House in London, one of the highest-profile positions in opera.Hrusa, 41, who has been the chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony in Germany since 2016, will take on the role in September 2025, replacing Antonio Pappano, who announced last year that he was leaving to become the chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra after a successful 20-year tenure at the opera house.There has long been speculation in London’s opera world over who would replace Pappano. Neil Fisher, a critic for the Times of London, rounded up a dozen contenders last year, including Edward Gardner, a former music director at English National Opera, and Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, who, until recently, led the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Hrusa was not on the list. But the Czech, who is also the principal guest conductor of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where Pappano is the principal conductor, has long received praise.When Hrusa made his New York Philharmonic debut, in 2017, the critic Anthony Tommasini, in The New York Times, wrote: “With his sweeping arm gestures and choreographic swiveling, Mr. Hrusa is a very animated conductor.” He added, “His approach worked, judging by the plush, enveloping sounds and impressive execution he drew from the Philharmonic players in an auspicious debut.”In a highlight at this year’s Salzburg Festival, Hrusa led a breathless rendition of Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova,” directed by Barrie Kosky.Critics have also praised Hrusa’s two performances at the Royal Opera House: a 2018 production of Bizet’s “Carmen,” also directed by Kosky, and a run of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” this spring. In The Times of London, Fisher wrote that Hrusa’s conducting of “Lohengrin” “cannily distills the eeriest sonorities of the score, highlighting its bleak beauty.”Hrusa is not the first relatively lesser known option to become the opera house’s music director. When Pappano took the job, in 2002, he came from La Monnaie in Brussels and had little reputation in London at the time.In a news release, Hrusa, who grew up in Brno, the Czech city where Janacek lived, said he was thrilled to accept the position. “I have always dreamt about a long-term relationship with a house where one can reach the highest standards in opera, and I realized very quickly that I adored the whole team of artists and staff at Covent Garden,” he said.Oliver Mears, the director of the Royal Opera, said in the release that everyone at the house had “been hugely impressed by not only his superlative music and theater-making but also by the generosity and warmth of his personality.”On Tuesday, the Royal Opera House detailed some of Hrusa’s early engagements in the new role. In the 2027-28 season, he will conduct Wagner’s four-part “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” with Kosky directing.Pappano described the all-encompassing role of music director last year in an interview with The New York Times: “With all the competition that there is for people’s attention, for fund-raising, even for survival for classical music institutions,” he said, “the job has become much more than just conducting.”A looming challenge for the Royal Opera could be a cut in its budget. The British government is slashing the amount of funding it gives to cultural institutions in London by a total 15 percent, so that it can give more money to arts organization in poorer regions. Last year, the government gave the Royal Opera House £35.8 million, or about $40 million, equivalent to 43 percent of the house’s total income, including for the Royal Ballet. An announcement on future funding is expected this month. More

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      Review: Wagnerian Comedy Is No Joke in the Met’s ‘Meistersinger’

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      The sprawling opera returned to the Met after seven years, with Antonio Pappano on the podium and an excellent cast.There were swaths of empty seats at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday evening, when Wagner’s sprawling comedy “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” returned to the house after seven years.Was it the limits on foreign tourists, lifting soon? Persistent fears about the Delta variant, despite a vaccinated and masked audience? More permanent changes to viewership habits, egged on by the pandemic? Wariness about a performance of very Wagnerian, six-hour length?It’s likely all of the above, and more; arts institutions around the country are grumbling about soft ticket sales as they reopen. But whatever the reasons at the Met, it’s a shame: This “Meistersinger” is excellent, a paean to a community joyfully bickering and making music together that touched me deeply in this period of reckoning with all we lacked for a year and a half.A love story intertwined with a song contest, set in a storybook vision of medieval Germany, it brings back to the company after 24 years the eminent conductor Antonio Pappano. He takes on one of the scores most closely associated at the Met with James Levine; the last time someone other than Levine led a run of this opera there was 1985.With Levine in “Meistersinger,” there was grandeur, richness, not heaviness but glowing weight. Pappano, the longtime music director of the Royal Opera House in London, offers a lighter, lither reading, not rushed but evenly flowing, airy even when agitated. From the prelude to the first act — more lyrical than majestic — this was tender, mellow Wagner, most notable in quieter moments: the warm curlicues of the orchestral reactions to the song rules in the first act, the glistening music of nightfall in the second, the hushed prelude to the third.As the cobbler Hans Sachs, the leader of Nuremberg’s guild of tradesmen who moonlight as singing poet “masters,” the baritone Michael Volle is fiercely articulate. He is not the kindly Santa Claus figure often associated with this role, but rather a changeable, ambivalent, even peevish, very human Sachs.Klaus Florian Vogt — the tenor playing Walther, the knight who bursts onto the Nuremberg scene with an innovative approach to songwriting and a crush on the young Eva Pogner — remains one of the oddest major artists in opera. His appeal has been his uncannily pure voice, which, emerging from classically handsome blond looks, gives him an otherworldly quality in otherworldly roles like Wagner’s Lohengrin.But that voice has in recent years been turning more nasal and glassy. While some high notes, particularly toward the opera’s end, sail out like sunshine, and while he’s an effortlessly noble presence, Vogt’s sound is ever more an acquired taste.There are no equivalent quibbles about this revival’s playful, assertive Eva: the soprano Lise Davidsen, whose voice is luminous when soft and startlingly big at full cry. Her soaring embrace of Sachs and sublime start to the quintet that follows in the third act aroused only excitement about the remarkable Met season she is embarking on, with the title role of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” and Chrysothemis in his “Elektra” to come.The baritone Johannes Martin Kränzle was comically bumbling but sang with straightforward earnestness as Beckmesser, the officious town clerk competing (at least in his own mind) for Eva’s hand in marriage. The resonant bass Georg Zeppenfeld, one of Europe’s finest Wagnerians but an unaccountable absence from the Met over the past decade, was splendidly genial as Veit Pogner, Eva’s father. The tenor Paul Appleby was lively as Sachs’s apprentice, David; the mezzo-soprano Claudia Mahnke made a characterful Met debut as Magdalene, Eva’s attendant; and the bass-baritone Alexander Tsymbalyuk sang with calm consolation as the Night Watchman.It is to Volle’s credit that he doesn’t stint the darkness that suddenly engulfs the piece in its final minutes, when Sachs, trying to persuade the victorious Walther to join the masters, grimly warns of foreign encroachments on the country and its “holy German art.” It’s a call taken up with rally-style fervor by the crowd, and it’s hard not to hear in it premonitions of what was to come in Nuremberg four decades after Wagner’s death.The Met’s utterly literal, quaint staging by Otto Schenk and Günther Schneider-Siemssen, now nearly 30 years old, offers no comment on this notoriously explicit swerve toward chauvinism — nor on the sense many have had that Beckmesser represents Wagner’s antisemitic obsessions, nor on much of anything else beyond the letter of the libretto.But Volle, at least, forces us to reckon with a scene as discomfiting as any in opera — a vivid depiction of the ease with which communal celebration can tip into nationalism, a reminder that even good guys can harbor awful leanings. Sachs’s monologue isn’t a reason not to perform “Die Meistersinger.” It felt on Tuesday, more than ever, a reason it should be seen.Die Meistersinger von NürnbergThrough Nov. 14 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More