It will take six hours for Wagner’s incestuous mess of gods and humans to succumb to fire and water, in the final installment of Robert Lepage’s monumentalist take on the Ring Cycle, today on CBC Radio as well as at Cineplex theatres.
It’s my favourite opera in the cycle, and always feels the shortest.
For all the details on today’s performance, check out these sites: the Met, Cineplex, and CBC’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera.
In case you only have six minutes instead of six hours, here’s a cut to the grand finale, with today’s big star, Deborah Voight singing Brünhilde’s Immolation Scene:
Here, for comparison’s sake, is a classic performance from 1990 from the Met’s old production, designed by Günther Schneider-Siemssen and directed by Otto Schenk, complete with a burning and collapsing Valhalla, featuring the formidable Hildegaard Behrens as Brünhilde. James Levine conducts:
John Terauds