Mahler Players / Negus
Strathpeffer Pavilion
Act Three of Siegfried has a strong claim to be the funniest – and potentially the sexiest – hour and 25 minutes in the entirety of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. As such, it was a good choice for the third of the Mahler Players annual Highland concerts of music by the composer.
Not only does it stand alone well, a sequence of three duets between Erda and Wotan, Wotan and Siegfried and Siegfried and Brunnhilde, but it is full of orchestral riches. It was the first work of the more experienced Wagner when he returned to the Ring after abandoning it to compose Tristan und Isolde, part of which the Mahler Players had performed last year in Inverness and Strathpeffer.
As an added attraction at the Pavilion, the orchestra’s director, Tomas Leakey, ceded the podium to Anthony Negus, with whom he has been studying recently. After a long career at Welsh National Opera, Negus is musical director at Longborough Festival Opera, which will present its full Ring cycle next summer, and has recently been in charge of performances of the cycle in Australia. As was very evident in his conducting, he knows every bar of this music.
The Longborough connections were many, as it turned out, because Sir John Tomlinson, although present, was unable to sing, having succumbed to a chesty cold in the final rehearsals. The last-minute substitute as The Wanderer was Paul Carey Jones, who will sing the part in the Cotswolds, and soprano Lee Bisset – last year’s Isolde – was Brunnhilde here and will return to the role at Longborough.
Completing the cast was rich-toned mezzo Rozanna Madylus as Erde, the earth goddess whose resistance to the blandishments of Wotan gets the comedy started, as well as allowing her to mention some of the drama’s other characters for the benefit of new listeners. The nicety that The Wanderer is in disguise (an eye-patch, usually) at this point was perhaps not clear, but the fact that the couple have history was certainly made apparent, even to anyone who had missed the brooding/breeding puns earlier.
While Paul Carey Jones – like Negus – was in white tie and tails, Brad Cooper’s Tiggerish Siegfried sported all-black evening dress, and that contrast worked well for the increasingly ill-tempered exchanges between the two. The tenor initially seemed to lack the heft to be heard over the instrumentalists, but that was, it soon became very clear, simply Cooper playing a sensibly long game.
The slow build of his duet with Bissett was quite beautifully handled by the pair, and set-up with great “singing actor” skill by Cooper as he mimed removing the armour from the sleeping warrior he believes to be male, and finding – as Wagner’s score makes pointedly clear – that she has a fine pair of clarinets.
When they eventually give in to The Power of Love, it was all conveyed in coy glances from either side of the platform until Cooper’s Siegfried could hold back no longer and sprinted across the stage for a snog on the final chord.
As well as the raw material of the Siegfried Idyll, Act Three is replete with the motifs and techniques that Wagner employs throughout the Ring, so much of the orchestral music has a very familiar sound, and the reduced orchestration by Matthew King and Peter Longworth preserved all the essentials. The intonation of the horns and brass of the Mahler Players took a while to settle, but the strings were on their best form from the first bar to the last.
Of the soloists, Bisset was simply sensational, producing her top notes with apparent ease and demonstrating a huge dynamic vocabulary as well as masterly breath control. The same might be said of Paul Carey Jones, even if he was understandably the only one referring to a copy of the score.
Keith Bruce
Picture of Lee Bisset by Clive Barda
