(During his break, among other projects, he directed the 1997 musical “Titanic,” which surmounted a raft of early technical issues to become a Broadway hit.)īut he has since returned in earnest to opera houses with productions including a melancholy, dreamlike “Hänsel und Gretel” that has been a frequent holiday presence at the Met since it arrived there in 2007. It was enough, in his telling, to scare Jones off opera for a bit. Jones’s “Ring” was a notorious fiasco, with the catcalls - brought on by Rhinemaidens in fat suits, Fricka driving what looked like a black cab, Beckettian giants, childlike drawings and tribal masks - making the front pages of local newspapers. After an aborted cycle at Scottish Opera, begun in the late 1980s, he made another effort at the Royal Opera in London a few years later, in the spirit of the influential Brechtian, absurdist “Ring” that Ruth Berghaus staged in Frankfurt in the mid-80s. The applause at the end for Jones - hardly euphoric cheers, but not a boo to be heard - must have been gratifying for a director whose history with the “Ring” is troubled. And tellingly, Jones’s single use of projections is more haunting than anything Lepage came up with: The nefarious Alberich, who forged the all-powerful ring of the title, appears, grinning with gold-capped teeth, as Wotan’s waking nightmare. This is altogether more detailed, moving, stimulating and satisfying than the Met production it will replace. Siegmund lifts Sieglinde’s sleeping body and walks with her so that her toes are dragging on the floor, a strangely poignant intertwining of love and death. And when Fricka reaches out a couple of inches, trying to take his unreceptive hand, it’s a miniature portrait of a broken marriage. Climbing on all fours over a daybed, the eloquent, lyrical bass Matthew Rose conveys in an instant the essential childishness of Wotan, the king of the gods. Jones elicits tiny yet revealing moments from his performers, too. Without scenic spectacle, small events - like Hunding’s hut moving slowly upstage - register as almost thrilling. (Well, more on that later.)Īnd the production, while spartan, doesn’t stint on theatrical flair, as when the Valkyries, charged with carrying slain warriors to Valhalla, attach cords to the men’s bodies, which then float up in solemn limpness. At the end, Brünnhilde, who wears a breastplate over her T-shirt, is encircled in a blazing ring of fire. The Valkyries have horses - shivering cloth-draped actors with animal heads - and spears. A tree grows in the center of the hut in Act I, just as Wagner wrote, its branches tearing through the roof and a mighty sword buried in its trunk. Like many recent productions of the “Ring,” the overall modern gloss of this one is shot through with traditional touches, and little here truly violates the libretto. (This may not be far off: Her husband Hunding’s gang all have the same obscure symbol printed, militia-style, on their shirts.) At the start of the second act, Wotan, dressed in a bright red ski jacket, is staying at a lodge Brünnhilde wears sneakers, a baggy T-shirt and shorts, with her name printed down the sides. In the opening act, the hut in which Sieglinde lives is a lonely cabin of ominous newness, as if a band of survivalists had recently constructed a hideaway. The setting is contemporary - but vaguely so, stylized, almost abstract. In the third act, without Lepage’s planks noisily shaping a snowy mountain around Brünnhilde and Wotan, the audience has no distraction from the shattered relationship of this father and daughter. Amid the starkness, Siegmund and Sieglinde’s covert love in the first act offers them less ecstasy than barely momentary relief. In these austere surroundings, designed by Jones’s longtime collaborator, Stewart Laing, the interactions of the opera’s emotionally wounded, invariably disappointed characters feel bleaker than ever.
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