Four years after the initial concert performances, English National Opera’s Ring cycle has reached its Wagnerian summit. It is not a triumph of the kind that the young company enjoyed with its first-ever cycle in the 1970s, but at least the staging is complete, with cast and production team intact, as planned. Other, more prestigious companies have achieved less.
Twilight of the Gods, Coliseum, London
By Richard Fairman [Financial Times, 5 Apr 05]
Four years after the initial concert performances, English National Opera's Ring cycle has reached its Wagnerian summit. It is not a triumph of the kind that the young company enjoyed with its first-ever cycle in the 1970s, but at least the staging is complete, with cast and production team intact, as planned. Other, more prestigious companies have achieved less.
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Twilight of the Gods
Andrew Clements [The Guardian, 4 Apr 05]
Anyone who has persevered with English National Opera's Ring cycle will find few surprises in the final instalment. But where the attempt of Phyllida Lloyd's production and Richard Hudson's designs to ground every scene in images from contemporary life scored at least a partial hit in last autumn's Siegfried, the new Twilight of the Gods returns to the relentlessly trivialising approach that so seriously undermined the stagings of The Rhinegold and The Valkyrie last season, and so transforms one of the greatest of all operatic achievements into the soundtrack for the trashiest of TV soaps.