DALLAS — Having left Brünnhilde deep in slumber at the end of Die Walküre last May, Fabio Luisi and the Dallas Symphony returned to awaken her this month with their continuation of the Ring in concert at their Meyerson Symphony Center home. They presented Siegfried on Oct. 5 and Götterdämmerung on Oct. 8, thereby scaling an Everest normally considered the domain of opera companies. Between Oct. 13 and 20, the adventure will be repeated — this time with the usual interval of just a few days separating the four operas.
The Dallas Symphony has undertaken an unusually ambitious, even history-making, challenge with this project. Although examples abound of orchestras adapting opera in some form to the concert hall experience — including isolated parts of the Ring and Lorin Maazel’s condensed Ring without Words — I’m not aware of any other instance in the U.S. of Wagner’s entire cycle receiving this treatment. (Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic did devote three separate concerts to Tristan und Isolde in their 2022 revival of the Peter Sellars-Bill Viola production, but that was by scheduling out each act as an evening in itself.)
Luisi brought extensive opera experience with him when he took on the reins as music director of the Dallas Symphony in 2020. His Wagnerian credentials include conducting the Ring at the Metropolitan Opera early in his tenure as principal conductor there, as well as in Dresden (the very city where Wagner first began formulating what would evolve into the four-opera cycle).
As Luisi showed with Das Rheingold and Die Walküre in May, his affinity for this music is multifaceted and inspires not only an impressively high level of playing but a consistent sense of purpose and presence from the Dallas musicians. The fabled excellence of Meyerson’s acoustics further enhances the heightened attention to Wagner’s score.
Particularly in Siegfried, they were able to convey the drama convincingly in the absence of eye-catching sets and costumes, with an unwavering spotlight on the orchestra itself as omniscient narrator and stage director alike. This approach proved surprisingly effective for long stretches of Götterdämmerung as well, though some pivotal exchanges carried less dramatic impact.
Wagner himself decided to let the orchestra tell the story in ever more intricate ways as his work on the Ring progressed. And it is of course for the orchestra that he reserved the grand peroration summing up the meaning of what we’d been through for the past four evenings.
The majority of the cast was already familiar from the launch of the Ring project at the end of last season. Siegfried started out of the gate strong with tenor Michael Laurenz’s memorable portrayal of foster parent Mime as a tense bundle of bitterness, fear, and resentment. He switched on a dime from vehement outbursts to unctuous wheedling as he tried to placate the young hero.
As Mime’s brother Alberich, instigator of the all-powerful ring’s curse, Tómas Tómasson spewed venom while creeping about the sidelines, adding a new dimension of haunted spite in his apparition to Hagen in Götterdämmerung. Andrew Harris again tapped into the sinister impression he had made as the murderous giant Fafner in Das Rheingold for his manifestation as the hoarding dragon in Siegfried.
Mark Delavan indicated the sea change of Wotan now become the Wanderer through his vivid stage presence and devil-may-care expressions, singing with clear diction though lacking the steady heft that’s essential to the role. But he brought out the conflicting passions of his final two scenes — with Erda and his grandson Siegfried, respectively — evoking the angst-ridden Wotan of yore. Tamara Mumford emphasized the Earth goddess’ weary confusion in her third-act confrontation as she reeled from her awareness of the world spinning off its axis.
The key new addition to the Dallas Ring cast was tenor Daniel Johansson in his role debut as Siegfried. A tall, lanky Swede, Johansson brought an unexpected and welcome beauty of tone to his portrayal, along with reliable stamina. Indeed, even approaching the end of his long first night, he was able to maintain his vocal power throughout his extended scene after liberating Brünnhilde from her sleep.
What hadn’t quite come into place was the deeper sense of character and motivation to inform both his phrasing of the music and his persona. Johansson tended to rely on a default expression of either annoyance (with Mime he seemed to have assimilated something of his foster parent’s cynical bitterness) or beaming smiles (with his newfound love). This became all the more apparent through the course of Götterdämmerung, when Siegfried’s crucial transformations registered as dramatically flat, though his singing often thrilled.
As I’d found in her performance of the title role in Die Walküre, there was a great deal to admire in Lise Lindstrom’s Brünnhilde. She navigated the character’s complex development with empathy and charisma. The scene of her awakening by Siegfried and its aftermath in one of Wagner’s post-Tristan variations on the love duet was a highlight. Lindstrom’s ability to signal the heroine’s contradictory sense of self as she becomes a mere mortal suggested a microcosm of the sweeping changes that make Brünnhilde’s role in Götterdämmerung so formidably challenging.
Lindstrom embodied these with striking dramatic power. If she lacked evenness of strength across the range of her voice — her farewell to Wotan (“Ruhe, ruhe, du Gott!”) in the Immolation Scene sounded thin, for example — she deployed top notes that gleamed with varied sheens of metal to convey bliss or terrifying anger. Lindstrom was devastating as she conveyed Brünnhilde’s sense of outrage at the idea her betrayal by Siegfried may have been the real punishment intended by Wotan.
It was fascinating to see Deniz Uzun as Waltraute following her icy scorn toward Brünnhilde as the Walküre Fricka last May. Shades of that scorn still seemed to emerge from her upper range, though Uzun focused on her sense of disappointment with her Valkyrie sister’s disregard for her urgent message.
Of the characters newly introduced in Götterdämmerung, bass Stephen Milling’s Hagen was the standout, booming, leering, and insinuating. His sheer vocal force, above all in his call to arms, sent shivers down the spine. The chorus (impeccably prepared by Anthony Blake Clark) considerably enhanced the sense of his power’s frightening reach.
Roman Trekel, by contrast, seemed to exaggerate half-brother Gunther’s weakness, while Kathryn Henry projected a generic insecurity rather than cunning calculation as Gutrune, though her final scene of worry over the absent Siegfried came to life with flashes of psychological realism.
Henry and Mumford also doubled as Norns, joined by the rich mezzo of Jennifer Johnson Cano for the opening scene of Götterdämmerung. Valentina Farcas was cast as a notably expressive Wood Bird as well as Woglinde, appearing alongside Wellgunde (Kimberly Gratland James) and Flosshile (Renée Tatum) in the Rhine Daughters’ last-ditch attempt to retrieve the ring from Siegfried.
All of these portrayals were accomplished through the voice and stage movement, with minimal semi-staging by director Alberto Triola, a frequent collaborator with Luisi. The lighting design by Krista Billings seemed even more subdued than in the first two operas, with occasional patches of green or red flickers projected onto the organ pipes upstage to suggest the forest or the magic fire around Brünnhilde.
With tightly limited space to move about downstage, props were almost entirely omitted (no Nothung or spear, though there was a ring). At times, something as simple as a chair could be surprisingly effective, as when Hagen brooded from his perch and was visited by Alberich. In an especially nice touch, Siegfried’s (standing) corpse was absorbed into the cortege of the men’s chorus as they passed across the stage, a small army of shadows like a William Kentridge illustration.
Not all of the staging worked. A significant miscalculation near the climax of the entire cycle was to have Hagen take possession of the ring after announcing Siegfried’s death to Gutrune (the corpse being absent in this staging). He then held onto the ring, as if in a trance, until Brünnhilde approached him during her immolation to reclaim it for the Rhine Daughters.
In any case, one aim of the Dallas Ring is to let the orchestra take care of the visual elements. Under Luisi’s assured guidance, the musicians accomplished this with remarkable success. The respective preludes to the first two acts of Siegfried, for example, delineated a vast range of dark, shadowy tone colors that defined Mime’s cave and the dragon’s lair elsewhere in the forest.
On one level, the Dallas Ring resembles an enormous, labyrinthine concerto for orchestra, with all the virtuosity and imaginative willpower that implies. Some threadbare passages in the upper string ensemble aside, the playing overall was very fine indeed, with many excellent solo contributions across each section. The regular orchestra was augmented by more than 20 musicians.
Throughout, Luisi showed his command of the flowing line that becomes even more apparent in the later Ring style from act three of Siegfried on. He teased out the score’s rich contrapuntal lines with marvelous transparency while never skimping on the fullness of the sonic blend. Moreover, his understanding of the musical architecture illuminated the course of the narrative. The transition from opening gloom to sun-pierced expectation outlined in Götterdämmerung’s Prologue seemed to echo the large-scale arc of what we had recently experienced in Siegfried.
Concert performances inevitably alter the sense of tension and dramatic stakes that are at the forefront of a staged presentation. There were moments when a certain dynamism felt absent — the actual reforging of Nothung in Siegfried or the humiliation of Brünnhilde at the center of Götterdämmerung come to mind — but Luisi’s refocused attention on musical events paid new dividends of its own.
Opportunities to see a full production of the Ring at opera companies around the U.S. have diminished over the past decade: Seattle shows no signs of reviving its once-proud tradition, for example. Could Dallas be starting a new trend?
For tickets and information about the Dallas Symphony Ring, go here.
