As the tempestuous overture struck up, a silky sheet-curtain wibbled with racing shadows to suggest waves.
Sensibly, his fussy, naturalistic instructions tend to be jettisoned, yet they offer a good starting point which Levine may or may not have observed. Wagner asks for a steep, rocky shore with sea occupying most of the stage. In contrast, this new staging, directed by Tim Albery and designed by Michael Levine, was becalmed on what might have been a cross-Channel ferry, complete with nylon-clad boozers and their peroxide chavettes below deck. He first sang the role with WNO in 2006, when he implied he was less than enamoured of the outer space setting. It was as if Terfel's dumbstruck Dutchman had to learn to speak, so foreign was the language of love or hope. The music, so turbulent for much of the time, silvers and gleams with rare stillness, horns throbbing a gentle pulse until the orchestra swells up again. This was especially chilling when he encounters the wife he had "dreamed of through eternities of dread". Drawing on the formidable range of vocal colours which single him out, he conjured a harrowing, subtle performance, physically conveying a forlorn bewilderment which made his character all the more poignant. However perpetual the doom of the Dutchman - a Nordic version of the Wandering Jew - this was redemption indeed for Terfel, were any required.
0 kommentar(er)
