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I was very happy with the singing and staging and very unhappy with the conducting in Santa Fe's Die Walküre. As I said to a friend, it's the third time this year that James Gaffigan has disappointed me! I'm told that his Tristan three years ago –– I didn't go to Santa Fe that year –– was good, so who knows what was up with Die Walküre. But it was astonishingly dull conducting of an exciting opera that gives the conductor lots of opportunities.
Let me also note that it occurred to me more than once that the excellent Santa Fe Opera Orchestra doesn't have a long tradition of playing Wagner, and in some hard-to-define way, it showed. The phrasing and articulation weren't quite idiomatic at times (the weak conducting didn't, of course, help.) The San Francisco Opera Orchestra has some players who've been in nearly every Wagner performance in the last 45 years, meaning five full Ring cycles, individual performances of some of the Ring operas, and numerous performances of Lohengrin, Tristan, Die Meistersinger, Parsifal, and so on.
Meanwhile, next May, the L.A. Phil is performing Die Walküre sort of in concert (Frank Gehry is designing the sets), with a similar cast and a more exciting conductor. I mean...I haven't loved everything I've heard from Dudamel but I'd be surprised if he is dull. The singers for the May performances are:
- Siegmund: Jamez McCorkle (pronounced Ja-MEZ, not James)
- Sieglinde: Jessica Faselt (change....one...letter...)
- Hunding: Soloman Howard
- Wotan: Ryan Speedo Green
- Brünnhilde: Christine Goerke
- Fricka: Sarah Saturnino
- Lisa Hirsch, Parterre Box
- Opera Tattler
- Thomas May, Opera Now (I have an Opera Now sign-in but the site isn't letting me read this reivew)
- Scott Cantrell, Dallas Morning News
- William Burnett, Opera Warhorses
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