Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
What would the cultural environment be like in a country whose orchestras steered clear of Beethoven, or whose theatres stayed away from Shakespeare? In a strange way, Ireland is such a country when it comes to opera. Our operatic life is seriously deficient in the case of that towering giant of the 19th century, Richard Wagner, a man whose legacy still rumbles not just in musical but also in political and other circles.
In the annals of Opera Ireland and its predecessor, the Dublin Grand Opera Society, you will find far more mentions of Wagner the character in Gounod's Faustthan of Wagner the composer.
A gap of 18 years elapsed between the Lohengrinof 1983 and the Fliegende Holländerof 2001, and it's over half a century since any part of the Ring cycle was presented by the company – Die Walkürewas heard in 1956, in a production by a German company from Essen.
Ireland hasn't been completely without a flavour of the Ring. The City of Birmingham Touring Opera's two-night condensation of the work came to Belfast, and the Pocket Opera of Nuremberg's single-night version was seen at the Dublin Theatre Festival in the 1990s. And chunks of The Ringturn up in symphony concerts from time to time.
The National Youth Orchestra put everyone in its debt with its 2002 concert performance of the complete cycle at the University Concert Hall in Limerick, a cycle which was later repeated at the Symphony Hall in Birmingham.
So there's a lot to welcome in Opera Ireland undertaking performances of Das Rheingold, the opening part of the Ring, even if the recession transformed what was to have been an actual production into two concert performances.
The NYO was able to field an orchestra that simply wouldn’t fit into the Gaiety pit (they provided all six harps that Wagner asked for), and in the Opera Ireland production there’s no denying that the playing of the RTÉ Concert Orchestras, under Roman Brogli-Sacher, rarely came close to matching the kinds of sounds the word “Wagnerian” suggests.
The power struggle of the opera may too often have been a struggle between performers and venue, yet the contribution of Arnold Bezuyen’s controlling god of fire, Loge, was commanding, and once Rainer Zaun’s Alberich settled down he was a forceful foe to the Rhinemaidens of Louise Walsh, Catherine Hegarty and Victoria Massey, although he went off the rails in his later curse.
Jean Teitgen's Fasolt was imposing in a slightly woolly-sounding way, and there were solid performances from Vitalij Kowaljow, as Wotan, and Imelda Drumm, as Fricka, and a penetrating Freia from Orla Boylan. In the end, though, this was a Rheingoldthat amounted to rather less than the sum of its best parts. Final performance tonight.
