Ring

uh well, I err... wanted to discuss more on how to represent the fantasy characters on stage since this is my first Ring experience. I bought a book on Wagner by Charles Osborne which has drawings and old photographs when they were doing animal skins and helmets with horns to some pics of very modern staging. Each opera is discussed which helps me get prepared.

I'm really quite happy with it being staged in such a fantastic neo German Expressionist style. I don't think I'd like it being staged as reality. It really has colored my first take on the Ring sitting with a good friend who just hates this production. In spring we get the last Gotta..... On the way home there was a big discussion of it, but I guess it will make itself clear on seeing it. Seems so many plot twists and about 6 hours long UGH! Then mid summer 2010 I bought tickets for friends for the whole cycle to done again. So this is my year for Wagner.

John had gone down to Orange County to see a Russian production and he said they handled the staging with huge abstract shapes that were lit in wonderful ways, the Fafner being very dark. At the time he thought it an OK production, but after seeing Freyer's he thought better of the Russians.

But what his complaint is in this current production is none of the characters make physical contact and that's what singers are trained to do, act and emote together. He also saw the extra characters , dopplegangers and black figures walking very slowly across the stage, stupid and distracting. Yes I was also often distracted by them. And this eyeball that was staring into the audience and would flash different colors, really irritating.

It was certainly a colorful staging, lots of use of primary colors only, with black stage and some B&W characters. I quite liked the huge round turntable they stood on and would rotate and expose different things. It often did this taking one character away from the other.

John was a professional musician and graduated from UCLA, he doesn't listen to anything but classical. We used to commute together so I'd ask him about music and he really clued me in on people, instruments, and events. I said I didn't like Wagner and he went about telling me to reconsider as Wagner really changed music. But all of his operas are such long songs, If I saw it on DVD I'd be really tempted to fast forward.

Good to have someone talking about the music and staging of this Ring, which is what this thread should have been about all along!

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yeah I'm really sorry that feelings were hurt and I did remember the old W arguments, I should have prefaced this as to the experience and not the politics.

Completely unnecessary what happened earlier, but I will not be called a Nazi or anti-Semite for professing my love of Wagner's music. If that man's off the Forum, which he threatens to do all the time, the Forum's a better place for that.

Anyway, I'm going to pour myself a large glass of red wine and listen to Carlos Kleiber's unsurpassable recording of Tristan und Isolde: Second Act, until they're caught in flagrante delicto by Marke. Probably the most evocative sound painting that I've ever experienced.

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yeah that second act is really wonderful

I've enjoyed the other Operas I see here in LA be easier to sit in my living room tho. I have Domingo in Antonio Pappiano CD. I bought it when Virgin was going out of business. They had good sales people but the clerk said this was the best of what they had left.

my first T&I was teh Hockney production second time around 10 years ago. Loved the second act at night, so beautiful but it was not well sung John said, the 3rd act my body physically hurt from sitting still so long, I couldn't wait for the thing to end. He's dying alone and sings for an hour longing and loosing it, ugh!

Favorite was the Tristan project Salonen and the LAPhil put on at Disney, end of every act was wild standing ovation, you really felt yourself taken somewhere emotionally.

On the Ring, once I saw who was doing what to whom it made sense. Before I never knew that the Valkureis were protecting Brunhilde, and all the siggies in there, who what why?

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