Not Only Opera

Rolls Royce plus gremlins: Siegfried at the Bridgwater Hall

Siegfried
Mark Elder and the Hallé
Bridgewater Hall
Acts I and II, 2 June 2018, Circle F51, £27
Act III, 3 June 2018, Circle F54, £25.50
Bridgewater pages: Acts I and II, Act III

I’ll start with a whinge. Why split Siegfried over two evenings? I suspect it’s so they can double the ticket price, and perhaps there was no way round it. But no piece likes to be bisected and I might say Wagner least of all. Sure, Siegfried is long, and you need some kind of break to refuel, but a whole night and day of having to interact with things other than Siegfried (or other than that Siegfried) breaks the heady weirdness that is Siegfried and Brünnhilde’s love for each other. Bad call.

I’ll continue with a second whinge. Bless Simon O’Neill and his beautiful voice but why could he not have learnt the role? Literally the title role? Literally the most important part around which all events and exchanges centre? Again, sure, it’s a concert performance and, sure, it’s a lot of music and, sure, he’s alone among the cast of never having performed his role on stage before. But surely all these would have been greater incentives to get it learnt! I felt embarrassed as I saw O’Neill tied to his music stand while all the other performers moved freely about him, but I had no idea of the embarrassment in store for me when in Act III he not only bungled his words (which were right in front of him) but missed entire entries and even skipped a bar. ‘What can Mark Elder be thinking’ was almost my occupying thought for the final two hours.

Last whinge. The Bridgwater Hall has a great acoustic, full stop. The Hallé is an extremely good orchestra, especially under Elder, full stop. But it seemed like they left the speakers running after the mobile phones announcement on the first evening, so that the music, sounding impressively boomy, was accompanied by a slight hiss. I don’t think the orchestra was being amplified – that would be bizarre – but I’m worried that they might have been, and maybe more worried that I only think this because someone forgot to turn the tannoy off. I guess it makes me sound like a dictator to get het up about a minor mistake, but I don’t need to tell you that these things really matter. Amplification has no place in this hall with this orchestra and these singers.

Everything else made me happy. Elder seems to have inculcated a Rolls Royce attitude in the Hallé, their big vrooming sound washing around the echoey Bridgewater in a way that wouldn’t be my cup of tea for everything but I’m happy to go with for this. Some very minor fluffs aside and barring the odd pizzicato kerfuffle the orchestra sounded fantastic, Elder’s tempos a touch slower than I was expecting (possibly because of that big acoustic) but thoroughly magnificent in everything and all.

The cast that wasn’t Simon O’Neill was also pretty uniformly magnificent. I’ve heard tell of Rachel Nicholls, of course, but never seen her in full Wagnerian: at a few points she maybe touches on screechy but these are very minor imperfections in a performance that soars and transcends, speaking with the music in glory. I was disappointed by Iain Paterson many, many years ago when he sang Don Giovanni for ENO and I’ve really got to let that go: he is a fine Wagnerian and surprisingly strong stage presence, his Wotan stomping so genially I had to rethink my usual simplistic reading of him being the one that started it all. Clive Bayley was perfect in plangent stertorousness as Fafner. But I think leading the way was Gerhard Siegel, Mime non-pareil, outsinging the entire orchestra, blissfully accurate and heroically loud.