Mainly Opera and Ballet
Musically this was outstanding under the baton of Antonio Pappano, who has just been made the Royal Opera’s first Conductor Laureate. The singing was excellent all round, and the only thing to mar one’s enjoyment was Barrie Kosky’s production with its obsession in having a naked Erda on stage for most of the time — …
Wagner’s Ring, of which Rheingold is the prologue, attracts some appalling stagings, and at Bayreuth this summer tickets went begging for the previous year’s awful production. Now Covent Garden has taken the lead with a superb new production by Barrie Kosky. See my review in The Article.
Having dancers in the Venusberg scene of Tannhäuser is quite normal, but dance company director Sasha Waltz, who created this opera production, took their use too far. It is fine up to a point to include dancers among the wonderful chorus of pilgrims, but by the second half of Act II they were getting in …
