In Britain, Wagner's Ring in the composer's bicentenary year has already brought acclaimed cycles at the Longborough festival and the BBC Proms. In the wider Wagnerian cosmos, however, the most anticipated event has been Frank Castorf's new Ring cycle in the composer's own festival theatre in Bayreuth, conducted by Kirill Petrenko. On the basis of the first two evenings, it is a decidedly mixed achievement. The production takes a bold step along the path pioneered by Patrice Chéreau and Harry Kupfer in their admired Bayreuth Rings of the late 20th century. Like theirs, Castorf's Ring is set in a political frame, but a less nuanced one. Castorf's unifying theme, hardly a revelatory insight, is that oil is today's equivalent of Wagner's mythic gold – source of power, wealth and destruction. So Das Rheingold is placed in a Quentin Tarantino-style gas station and a "golden" motel on Route 66, in which Wotan is a sleazeball mafioso who beds Fricka and Freia in an upstairs room while the Rhinemaidens lounge by the pool below. Meanwhile, Die Walküre transports us a world away to the Baku oil fields of the early 20th century, with red revolution in the air and where Hunding's hut looks like something out of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood.
The continuities between the two settings are the dark, polluted skies against which both operas unfold, and Castorf's extensive use of on stage handheld video, so that interactions are highlighted on large screens. By directing the attention at stage and screen simultaneously, Castorf distracts from the music and words. There are two Rings taking place here: one by Castorf and one by Wagner. They only intersect intermittently, and major moments in Wagner's version – including Alberich's curse, Siegmund's death and Wotan's punishment of Brünnhilde – are denied their proper weight. This sense of the production overshadowing the music is not helped by Petrenko's fluent but somewhat self-effacing account of the score. Two stand-out vocal performances – from Anja Kampe as Sieglinde, urgent and incisive, and Günther Groissböck (a Wotan in the making) as a tender Fasolt, could not conceal a run-of-the-mill feel to much of the other singing. But Wolfgang Koch's Wotan, mainstay of the first two parts of the Ring, sang with growing authority and an attractively burnished tone, while Catherine Foster's richly articulate Brünnhilde – disgracefully booed for presumably chauvinistic reasons after Act 2 of Die Walküre – now prepares to come into her own.
