Ever since Eduard Hanslick’s complaints of too much talk of steam and dragons (at Das Rheingold’s Munich premiere in September 1869), commentators have harped on ad nauseam about the expense and technical challenges of Ring productions. And nowhere more so than at the Metropolitan Opera’s new 2010/12 Robert Lepage/Carl Fillion staging. But the disappointment in Fillion’s unit set of hydraulic moving planks is that, at least as filmed for the small screen, it rarely provides the telling – not to mention useful – images and set-ups that the four operas need. Also, the lighting and projection work (again, as filmed) do little more than provide filler cover for the boring bare planks – projected water and moss as, erm, water and moss, or an over-cute docu-style film of a coloured bird as the onstage visual reference for Mojca Erdmann’s (exceptionally clearly sung) Woodbird.

While the positions of Fillion’s construction often do little more than give the singers a flat ramp downstage backed by a wall, Lepage’s Personenregie seems (again, as filmed) surprisingly literal and conservative. The only real characterisation comes from the (perhaps) personally imported efforts of Terfel, Kaufmann, Westbroek, Morris, Meier and Iain Paterson’s Gunther. But even Terfel’s Wotan, imposing in a generalised way physically and vocally, and always alive in face and eyes, is small beer compared with the complex psychological portrait he has achieved in Keith Warner’s Covent Garden staging. For just one act Kaufmann and Westbroek project the right kind of sexual and emotional intensity to carry the drama in the very bare setting that they’re in, a tension matched elsewhere only by Meier’s masterclass of a Waltraute. Morris – starting as effectively the cover of a cover – is a likeable, imaginative and fluently (if not hugely) voiced Siegfried, somewhat in the manner of Alberto Remedios, more vocally at ease in the earlier of his two operas. His achievement to come this far in such a context is considerable. Paterson makes (and sings) Gunther into quite an event.

Elsewhere there is solid singing from the ‘baddie’ basses – and perhaps rather more than that from Eric Owens’s Alberich (but why is he so noble?) and much evidently enjoyed hard work from Deborah Voigt’s Brünnhilde, predictably more comfortable vocally with the upper range of the Siegfried scenes than the lower Walküre or more full-on loud Götterdämmerung. Voigt’s duets with her men go well but compared with, say, Jones (for Boulez/Chéreau – DG), Evans (for Barenboim/Kupfer – Warner, 10/05 passim) or Behrens (for Levine/Schenk – DG, 1/03 – the old Met Ring) she has some way to go before looking and sounding like a natural Wotan daughter. It must be said that no one is helped by costumes that – presumably intended to be mythical – have ended up like three-dimensional realisations of the poorer attempts made in recent years to illustrate the cycle in story comic books.

Another disappointment of the release is the loss of James Levine halfway through. Not that there is anything ‘wrong’ with Fabio Luisi’s faster, lighter, less detailed accompaniment, just that the Met’s now retiring chief (and his quite stunningly playing orchestra) was on prime form for Rheingold and Walküre, more locked into the drama in both pace and colour than was his previous Wagner in New York or Bayreuth. Sound and balance on the DVDs
are good (with, I would imagine, quite a lot of intervention); filming is oddly workaday, with annoying glitches as ill-timed pans don’t quite catch a singer’s face in time for a vocal entry. So, regrettably in summary, the result, surprisingly for this new Met administration, is a boring, conventional, narrative stage production with some undoubted musical highs.