LOS ANGELES — As he prepares to leave the Los Angeles Philharmonic after 17 adventurous seasons for his new perch at the New York Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel has been going out with a splash. His farewell season as music director came to a spectacular and highly anticipated climax with two complete back-to-back performances of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre.
Dudamel gave his grateful audience one act per night, presenting two complete performances on six consecutive days May 19-24. No expense or care — or imagination — was spared in mounting this visionary, timeless, and superbly cast semi-staged production, one of the most thrilling and musically rewarding events in Disney Hall’s storied 23-year history.
This poetic, poignant Walküre carried special personal resonance for Dudamel because his longtime friend Frank Gehry, the music-loving LA architect who created Disney Hall, devised the set design and overall visual concept not long before his death in December 2025 at age 96. Gehry also designed the sets for a semi-staged (and less successful) Das Rheingold in 2024.
Gehry collaborated with the LA Phil in various capacities (architect, sound designer, set designer) for 55 years. Walküre made a perfect capstone to his partnership with Dudamel, who praised him in a program essay for “taking us into the deepest waters, where beauty thrives and music’s meaning is made apparent.” Gehry’s acoustically resplendent Disney Hall became a Wagnerian shrine, a Valhalla of sound, voices and orchestra filling the soaring space under Dudamel’s subtle and assured command.
On all three evenings I attended (May 19-21), Shutter Cut Lighting Design created a magical environment that perfectly suited the opera’s fantastic fairytale world. The ever-present, cloud-like clusters absorbed and reflected light, enveloping the characters in a protective womb.
Working with film and stage director Alberto Arvelo, who also led the LA Phil productions of Rheingold and Fidelio, Gehry developed an abstract visual concept that was “simultaneously ‘nowhere’ and ‘everywhere’,” he wrote. Giant dynamic clusters of white fabric bloomed behind the orchestra, floating like clouds or the foliage of the tree that houses the magic sword Siegmund extracts at the end of Act I. At various crucial points in the action, these forms acquire different hues from internal and external lighting that convey the changing emotional and musical temperature. (It was difficult to read the surtitles from the side seats, however, because the clusters partly obscured them.)
Below, spare wooden benches and tables and stairways allowed the singers to move around freely. The orchestra was sunk in the pit below the stage, encircled by an apron at the edge of the orchestra seats. For some scenes, such as the long confrontation between Wotan and Fricka in Act II, the singers (Ryan Speedo Green and Sarah Saturnino) were stationed far apart on either side of the orchestra, symbolizing their emotional distance and alienation.
For Act III, when (according to the libretto) the Walküre maidens enter the scene on horseback, their steeds were already stationed at the ready, fantastic life-sized white creations that seemed to float heavenward. Illuminated from within, they gradually took on different shades, culminating in the fiery red of Brünnhilde’s encirclement by Loge’s flame. It was a breathtaking image.
Arvelo and Gehry’s production treated the singers well, placing them forward and above the orchestra so that their vocal sound could reach easily to the farthest depths and lofty heights of the hall. The costumes by Cindy Figueroa, who also worked on the LA Phil’s Rheingold, mixed earth-toned robes with glittering breastplates and crowns in a harmonious palette of colors that never tipped over into caricature and lived smoothly with Gehry’s sets. The Walküre maidens (Alexandria Shiner, Teresa Perrotta, Lindsay Ammann, Ronnita Miller, Laura Wilde, Zoie Reams, Taylor Raven, Siphokazi Molteno, fine singers all) dazzled in silver gowns with blue and green accents that seemed to amplify the burnished, fulsome sound of their ensemble. Brünnhilde (Christine Goerke) wore a crown of what looked like antlers.
The cast featured some of the finest Wagnerian singers on the scene today. In the first and most intimate of the acts, the trio of tenor Jamez McCorkle (Siegmund), soprano Jessica Faselt (Sieglinde), and bass Soloman Howard (Hunding) blended smoothly both dramatically and vocally.
A rising star who will sing Siegmund on three different stages this season, McCorkle made a deep impression on LA Opera audiences in the title role of Omar in 2022. Intense and even ferocious in dramatic style, McCorkle shook the rafters with his poignant plea for help, “Wälse! Wo ist dein Schwert? (Where is thy sword?),” addressed straight to the audience from the apron in front of the orchestra. Howard was properly menacing as Sieglinde’s brutal husband, if less dramatically focused and occasionally lacking in volume in his lower register.
Faselt, in her LA Phil debut, made the strongest vocal impression, her big, full sound loaded with an emotional power and nuance that made entirely real her desperate struggle between spousal loyalty and star-crossed passion for who turns out to be her twin brother Siegmund. This was Faselt’s first appearance as Sieglinde and surely will not be the last.
In Act II, Green, seen recently as King Marke in the Metropolitan Opera’s triumphant Tristan und Isolde, reprised the role of Wotan that he sang for the first time at Santa Fe Opera in 2025. Tall, buffed, and bald, menacing in the early scenes of Act II but tender and paternal in his long dialogue with Brünnhilde, Green is one of the great Wagner basses of our time.
As Brünnhilde, Wagner veteran Goerke proved more than his equal both in vocal and dramatic heft. Her earthy, chesty voice, with its dusky timbre and power, brought the Valkyrie’s conflicting emotions — love vs. duty — to vibrant life, although her phrasing was occasionally choppy.
Saturnino, who recently starred in the LA Opera Gala for retiring conductor James Conlon, appeared as Fricka, following her triumph in the role at Santa Fe Opera in 2025 alongside Howard, McCorkle, and Green. Saturnino’s gleaming mezzo-soprano made Wotan’s nagging wife into a more appealing and engaging character than she often appears.
In the pit, Dudamel presided over the enormous orchestra with commanding calm. His easy rapport with the singers and orchestra was evident from the start. In the quiet passages preceding the final duet between Brünnhilde and Wotan in Act III, the woodwinds played with heartbreaking eloquence — especially oboist Ryan Roberts. A newcomer to the LA Phil, Latvian violinist Vineta Sareika, formerly a concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic, sat in for these performances as concertmaster, a position currently vacant. Her authority and passion showed why she is clearly in the running to take over the position permanently.
At the end of each evening, Dudamel only reluctantly rose from the pit to take a curtain call along with the cast, acknowledging the roars of approval for one of his greatest triumphs in Los Angeles.
