Anthony Negus conducts Longborough Festival’s new staging of Wagner’s Die Walküre, directed by Amy Lane, with Lee Bisset, Paul Carey Jones, Emma Bell, Eleanor Dennis and Mark Le Brocq

Wagner
Die Walküre – the first day of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Music drama in three acts. Libretto by the composer. [sung in German with English surtitles]

Siegmund – Mark Le Brocq
Sieglinde – Emma Bell/Eleanor Dennis
Hunding – Julian Close
Brünnhilde – Lee Bisset
Wotan – Paul Carey Jones
Fricka – Madeleine Shaw

Die Walküren
Gerhilde – Kristel Vinter Knudsen
Helmwige – Katie Lowe
Waltraute – Rebecca Afonwy-Jones
Schwertleite – Verena Gunz
Ortlinde – Cara McHardy
Siegrune – Carolyn Dobbin
Grimgerde – Katie Stevenson
Rossweise – Rozanna Madylus

Longborough Festival Orchestra
Anthony Negus

Amy Lane – Director
Charlie Morgan Jones – Lighting designer
Rhiannon Newman Brown – Set and props designer
Emma Ryott – Costume designer
Tim Baxter – Video designer

Longborough’s second full Ring cycle started in 2019, then, because of Covid, had to wait a year before the company’s socially distanced semi-staging Die Walküre in 2021, followed in 2022 and 2023 by the last two episodes. The full staging of Die Walküre in this summer’s three complete cycles is its first outing. With such a fractured, six-year-long gestation it is even more remarkable that the various links the director Amy Lane has seeded through the cycle stick in the memory.

The most obvious of these are Tim Baxter’s video projections on a screen at the back of the stage. At first, I thought that his sequences of highly romantic, ultra-Teutonic and elemental imagery of forest, moon, water and misty mountains would outstay their welcome, but they imposed a captivating, free-fall timelessness. And this was reinforced by the leather-bound journal characters either write in or refer to, implying that the Ring legend is being simultaneously recorded and acted out, a simple, highly effective way of telling us how myth and archetype are absorbed by and embedded in our subconscious.

With Charlie Morgan Jones’s superb lighting, Rhiannon Newman Brown’s set of raised platforms and a huddle of dowdy, bed-sitterish furniture contained the action well enough, yet while Lane’s otherwise stripped-back staging may seem ultra-traditional, the absence of overthought interpretation leaves things open for the audience to make up its own mind. One element that bucked this trend was Lane’s inspired direction of Wotan, the top god fatally compromised in Das Rheingold, and here in Die Walküre enfeebled and seemingly on the edge of being every bit as mortal and vulnerable as Brünnhilde and Siegfried will become. Catastrophically outmanoeuvred you wondered if Wotan could muster the divine authority to find a saviour for the world, making his dilemma all the more urgent.

Paul Carey Jones conveyed Wotan’s failing divine force with devastating accuracy, as much in the desperation of his conflict with Fricka, or the sotto-voce musings of his narrative to Brünnhilde, or his fury and nobility in Act 3, when he tries to turn his back on his wayward, beloved daughter. His secure, full singing and presence both filled the theatre and expanded it in a compelling portrait. He was well matched by Lee Bisset in the title role. Perhaps because the small stage flatters her fluid, responsive acting, her Brünnhilde got straight to the heart of being the extension of her father’s will, either by listening, cajoling or, in the case of Act 3, letting Wotan think that his modified punishment is his own decision. Bisset radiated energy and generosity, and under pressure the way her voice escapes at the top was unforgettable.

One of Bisset’s many outstanding moments was Brünnhilde’s announcement to Siegmund of his death in Act 2 – always an intense episode – and here you could hear and see her assume the mantle of understanding, matched by the tenderness of tenor Mark Le Brocq’s measured response in his soft baritonal register. There was a neat little directorial detail when Siegmund took over Hunding’s armchair, an assumption of power making the way clear for Le Brocq’s account of surging incestuous passion, culminating in a stupendous ‘Winterstürme’. As Sieglinde, Emma Bell was vocally indisposed – how well I remember her wonderful Elsa in WNO’s Lohengrin a decade ago – and the role was sung from the wings by Eleanor Dennis (originally Gerhilde, one of the Valkyries), with a lyricism and synchronicity so light you barely noticed their double-act. And they didn’t spare the high-voltage drama of ‘O hehrstes Wunder’, the realisation of Siegfried’s incarnation that makes the rest of the Ring cycle possible and here took no prisoners. Madeleine Shaw was magnificent as a blisteringly bitter, intransigent Fricka, and Julian Close as Hunding distilled a sense of bleak menace. The choreography of the Ride of the Valkyries, taken at quite a lick, was cleverly escalated, and the sound from all eight warrior maidens was overwhelming.

Keeping this huge canvas on track was Anthony Negus, conducting the score with a rapport between orchestra and cast that simply took your breath away, it was so transforming and immediate, with strongly characterised orchestral playing.