The Rheingold by Richard Wagner ★★★★✩
Starring: Gábor Bretz, Nicky Spence, Scott Hendricks, Marie-Nicole Lemieux, Ante Jerkunica, Wilhelm Schwinghammer, Anett Fritsch, Nora Gubisch, Andrew Foster-Williams, Julian Hubbard, Peter Hoare, Eleonore Marguerre, Jelena Kordić and Christell Loetzsch. La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra. Musical direction: Alain Altinoglu. Stage direction: Romeo Castellucci. Place and date: La Monnaie Theater in Brussels (X/24/2023). Co-production with the Liceu
More than ten minutes of applause and artistic success for Das Rheingold, the first approach to the Ring by the Italian conceptual artist and stage director Romeo Castellucci.
Hypnotic result of this first day of the new Tetralogy, co-production of La Monnaie de Bruxelles with the Liceu of Barcelona - where it will be seen from the 2026/2027 season, at the rate of one title per season -, with a solvent cast, a magnificent orchestra but, above all, with a symbolic regime that finds an iconic and powerful result in the literality of the text and its psychological metaphor.
Castellucci conceptualizes the Ring in a myth that is read from a mental perspective. The power struggle of its protagonists explodes in the middle of an open and naked scenery. The characters are represented by the symbols that identify them. Alberich's deformity, gilding of the Daughters of the Rhine, classical monumentality for the gods or enormous crocodiles for the giants, a prefiguration of the dragon that Fafner will become in Die Walküre.
Great dramaturgical work is stimulating and generates concern with its pluses and minuses. Ideas like that of child-gods, with child actors who dub them, or old people when they lose their apples of youth, work on stage but musically the external voices lose presence.
There is an important lighting job, too dark in the opening scene of the Daughters of the Rhine, in contrast to the final prevailing white, with a overhead laser shot at the black hole that swallows the gods, in a Walhalla that swallows everything. A suggestive production that does not leave you indifferent.
Alain Altinoglu, in his first Ring, recreates himself in a tempi where the narrative and the beauty of the sound accompany each scene with a Mediterranean light of hedonic lyricism. Dreamy strings, incisive metals or fantastic woods, for an organic and naturalistic reading.
Among the multiple cast, the first Alberich of the Texan baritone Scott Hendricks stood out, whom Castellucci transforms into the central black soul of the Ring. A stage animal with adequate vocality that steals everyone's attention.
Lights and shadows among the rest. A still too lyrical Wotan by Gábor Bretz; the contradictory rudeness of Ante Jerkunica's Fasolt; the ironic Loge of tenor Nicky Spence, a priceless theatrical conjurer; the roundness of Marie-Nicole Lemieux's Fricka, or the transcendent lyricism of Anett Fritsch's Freia in counterpart to Nora Gubisch's timid Erda. General vocal solvency for a promising and ambitious conceptual whole.
