The Copenhagen Ring: Die Walküre
(This is the second installment in our ongoing review of the Copenhagen Ring Cycle, directed by Kaspar Bech Holten, performed by the Royal Danish Opera conducted by Michael Schønwandt. Read the reviews of Das Rheingold and Siegfried,, also on Superconductor.)
This Danish Die Walküre places the struggles of the Gods squarely in a banal world of family drama, like a TV network movie-of-the-week, shot on a low budget. It opens with a striking bourgeois image. Hunding's "hut" is an art deco apartment. Sieglinde as a cowed, bullied hausfrau desperate to get out. When Siegmund (Stig Andersen) enters, and she immediately seizes upon him as the means of escape. Hunding (Stephen Milling) is a loutish, violent alcoholic. The escape from his apartment is quite literal: Siegmund throws a chair through a plate-glass window and they find the sword stuck in a tree in the front yard.
(This is the second installment in our ongoing review of the Copenhagen Ring Cycle, directed by Kaspar Bech Holten, performed by the Royal Danish Opera conducted by Michael Schønwandt. Read the reviews of Das Rheingold and Siegfried,, also on Superconductor.)
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| Siegmund (Stig Andersen, left) and Sieglinde (Gitta-Maria Sjöberg) outside Hunding's hut. Act I of Die Walküre from The Copenhagen Ring Photo by Martin Mydtkalov Rosne © 2006 The Royal Danish Opera/Decca Classics |
