For the past couple of decades at the Metropolitan Opera, Die Walküre was the exclusive property of James Levine, who invariably made the music spacious and the drama thoughtful. Now distracted with duties at the Boston Symphony, the boss has passed the baton to Valery Gergiev. Talk about Wagnerian vicissitudes.
Saturday night, in a house yawning with empty seats, Gergiev imposed unfamiliar accents on the complex challenge, figuratively and literally. He sacrificed grandeur for agitation, sped through much of the heroic rhetoric and scrambled a few orchestral devices in the inexact process. The impetuous results were exciting, to a degree; also disorienting.
Gergiev brought along his own leading soprano and bass from St Petersburg, both underpowered and both prone to Russian-textured German (which meshed oddly with the Hispanic inflections of the Siegmund on duty). The peripatetic maestro, not incidentally, is listed as principal guest conductor of the Met, but this is his only assignment of the season.
It looked like business-as-usual on the cluttered stage, given Otto Schenk's naive production (reheated by Stephen Pickover) and GüntherSchneider-Siemssen's quaint décors. But it didn't sound that way. Olga Sergeeva, the Brünnhildefrom Bashkiria, looked terrific, even when she confused ferocity with petulance. Despite some gleaming top notes, however, her singing often seemed wan, technically insecure.
Mikhail Kit, the Wotan from Kolomyia, replaced his Mariinsky colleague Vladimir Vaneev (reportedly indisposed) and got through the marathon challenge with a lot of dignified huffing and puffing. Stephen Milling, the new Hunding from Copenhagen, projected much menace visually, not so much vocally. The beloved Plácido Domingo returned as a slightly superannuated, initially plangent Siegmund.
The evening's thunder was easily stolen by Margaret Jane Wray, promoted at last from Valkyrie-ensemble duties to the crucial ecstasies and agonies of Sieglinde. She sang with warmth, sensitivity and climactic power, enough to suggest further advancement to Brünnhilde.
Yvonne Naef returned to vitalise Fricka's cameo with vibrant tone and focused urgency. The eight warrior-maidens of act three made raucous noises while traipsing about their rocky summit like escapees from a provincial Iolanthe. Poor Wagner. Tel +1 212 362 6000
