By Shirley Apthorp [Financial Times, 6 March 2006]

Copenhagen’s new Ring cycle draws to an apocalyptic close at the city’s shiny new opera house with a conflagration of suitably Wagnerian proportions. Siegried’s pyre burns. Valhalla burns. The gods burn. Even Hagen, in his final plunge for the Ring, combusts. Just what the composer ordered. Or it would be, if he returned to earth as a feminist. Because Brünnhilde does not burn. Instead, as the score’s final bars herald a new dawn, she cradles a newborn child. A girl? One hopes so.