Not an original observation, I know, but Wagnerites are a strange breed. Overwhelmingly male and generally solitary, they turn up at every Wagner event to compare and contrast performances and productions with every one they have seen before. They were certainly out in force here, eager to add the completion of another Ring cycle to their lists.

Any opera-goer, Wagnerite or not, should try to get tickets for one of Scottish Opera’s cycles, for these stagings by Tim Albery with designs by Hildegard Bechtler are wonderfully rewarding, full of wit as well as psychological insight. Dramatically, at least, the Götterdämmerung is the finest of the four. Every stage picture is ravishingly beautiful, and Albery has not attempted to impose big ideas or over-arching concepts on the tetralogy. Instead he has peopled it with instantly recognisable contemporary archetypes, who, though they may be dealing with issues of cosmic importance, act out the emotional struggles and power plays of everyday life.

Whether it be the Three Norns in slinky gowns relating what has happened and what is still to unfold, or Hagen addressing his besuited vassals as if they were reps at a boozy sales conference, or the infinitely sad sight of the Rhinemaidens, with matching shoes and handbags, whiling away the hours in a singles bar, every image has point and resonance. It connects today with Wagner’s mythic past, as the final image, after Brünnhilde has ignited Siegfried’s pyre and brought down the gods, makes stunningly clear.

It is a major dramatic achievement, wonderfully acted, and in many ways a major musical one, too. Richard Armstrong’s command of the huge score is fleet and theatrical. The way the very first chord is punched out gives the clue to all that is to follow, and he never allows the tension to slacken. The orchestral playing is superb. Vocally it is more variable: the rather baritonal Siegfried, Matthew Elton Thomas, standing in for the ailing Graham Sanders, does not last the pace, but Elizabeth Byrne’s Brünnhilde certainly makes up in energy and commitment what she lacks in depth of tone. There is a suavely menacing Hagen from Mats Almgren, a troubled Gunther from Peter Savidge, and a wonderfully vivid Waltraute from Jane Irwin. All those performances will deepen as familiarity grows; but already the result is far more than the sum of the parts.

Andrew Clements | 8 Apr 2003

One of the last things you see in Tim Albery’s production of Götterdämmerung is a procession of people bringing the images of their gods to be burnt in Siegfried’s funeral pyre. This initially might seem to fly in the face of Wagner’s intentions of having Valhalla itself burn in the opera’s final conflagration, but it also reminds us of the ideological backbone of the entire Ring – namely that the gods and their laws must die if humanity is to be free.

Wagner gives us little indication as to what that freedom entails. Albery shockingly follows the image with the flash of a mushroom cloud on a front cloth. Ultimate freedom entails both ultimate responsibility and the potential for infinite destruction. Few directors have quite so forcefully unravelled the opera’s ideological implications.

This is superbly integrated music theatre, though it remains hampered by Graham Sanders’ Siegfried. In Act I, as the innocent walking unwittingly into corruption he strikes something like vocal and dramatic form. In Act II, however, faced with Siegfried’s only top C, he loses both voice and nerve, and fudges the passage alarmingly.

Elsewhere, however, we find performances of genius. Elizabeth Byrne’s Brünnhilde is impassioned, tireless and finally overwhelming in the immolation scene. Mats Almgren’s Hagen exudes charismatic evil. Richard Armstrong’s conducting is urgent and inexorable, as is the Scottish Opera Orchestra’s playing. Despite its flaws, this is a Ring that, above all, redefines the work for our times, and its total impact is shattering.

Tim Ashley | 18 Aug 2003

Last weekend Scottish Opera reached the last leg before this summer’s eagerly-awaited Ring Cycle with Götterdämmerung; the most lavish, slow-weaving, outrageously plotted and orchestrally transcendent of Wagner’s four operas; the one in which this company’s orchestra has reached an apotheosis under conductor Richard Armstrong and its singers have shown once more how ensemble work can be applied to this repertoire.

If I’ve been guilty of devoting too much space to Tim Albery’s clean, hyper-naturalistic direction or Hildegard Bechtler’s gracious, off-kilter industrial designs in previous reviews, it’s because this has been the team that translated Wagner for me. But only in Götterdämmerung – which has quite the oddest balance between seemingly fast-moving plot-driven drama and long caesurae where absolutely nothing happens except the uncurling of a single thought – have I clocked how intrinsic Armstrong has been to the process of mapping the qualities of ambition, greed, purity and naivety that jostle for pre-eminence across the cycle. This is a conductor who is supremely supportive of his singers. As in the previous operas, the casting is excellent; young, vibrant, well-balanced, and including some names who will definitely become bigger. Though Graham Sanders’s understudy, Matthew Elton Thomas (Siegfried) coped well with the pressure of a last-minute first-night, unsteadiness of tone suggests that he might have made the transition from baritone to heldentenor too swiftly. More assured were Jane Irwin’s heartfelt Waltraute, the saucy trio of Rhinemaidens (Inka Rinn, Marianne Anderson and Leah Marian Jones), Mats Almgren’s glowering Hagen and Elizabeth Byrne’s riveting Brünnhilde.

Anna Picard | 13 April 2003

The gods deliver the goods festival theatre

The Edinburgh Festival’s first complete Ring cycle has come full circle, thanks to the combined determination of Sir Brian McMaster and of Scottish Opera, the company he chose to enact the greatest of all music dramas. After Saturday’s six-hour presentation of The Twilight of the Gods, the packed Festival Theatre erupted with an enthusiasm which had grown steadily during the preceding days, the cheers laced with a little light booing for Tim Albery and his production team.

This was understandable but hardly a cause for concern. Albery’s priority from the start – that it should be a Ring for our time – had clearly paid off, even if the results occasionally provoked displeasure. Yet the act of modernisation, nowhere more so than in Siegfried’s progress to his doom, has been carried out with rare accomplishment and intelligence.

The most potent moments occurred in the menacing riverside apartment where Hagen – an impassively implacable portrayal by the bullet-headed Mats Almgren – presided over his fascistic coterie, of whom Graham Sanders’s trusting young Siegfried proved an easy victim.

Relentlessly staged and, by Richard Armstrong, rivetingly conducted, this was the dark turning-point of the story, in which Elizabeth Byrne’s Brunnhilde grew in dramatic stature en route to the final immolation scene. This, when it arrived, was as moving and intense as it needed to be, even if the denouement as a whole did not quite peak. Treating the funeral march as an orchestral interlude, with the curtain down, was not enough, but was a small price to pay for a performance which, from its vivid Norn scene onwards, had held us firmly in its grip.

Conrad Wilson | 18th August 2003