Wagner Das Rheingold. Directed 2010 by Plamen Kartaloff at the National Opera and Ballet in Sofia, Bulgaria. Stars Nikolay Petrov (Wotan), Krastan Krastanov (Donner), Miroslav Andreev (Froh), Daniel Ostretsov (Loge), Biser Georgiev (Alberich), Krasimir Dinev (Mime), Stefan Vladimirov (Fasolt), Petar Buchkov (Fafner), Rumyana Petrova (Fricka), Veselina Vasileva (Freia), Blagovesta Mekki (Erda), Irina Zhekova (Woglinde), Dorotea Doroteeva (Wellgunde), and Tsveta Sarambelieva (Flosshilde). Pavel Baleff conducts the Orchestra of the Sofia Opera and Ballet. Assistant direction by Juliya Krasteva; set and costume design by Nikolay Panayotov; light design by Andrej Hajdinjak. Directed for TV by Rumen Kovachev and Plamen Kartaloff; sound engineer was Yordan Tomov; video editing by Angel Hristov. Sung in German. Released 2021, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: D
It’s 2021. This was recorded 11 years ago as the first of 4 videos that will comprise Wagner’s entire Ring cycle. It appears it’s being released now for the first time on Blu-ray and DVD.
The singing and music is poorly recorded on this disc from the dawn of the era of HDVD recordings. The sets, costumes, and props are in a fantasy-science-fiction style that was popular in 2010. The use of this style reached it’s zenith with opera recording by the Fura dels Baus company out of Barcelona, but has since all but disappeared. Our first 3 screenshots below deal with sets and mise-en-scène. You may recall that Wotan had the giants build him a mighty fortress called Valhalla. The citadel is shown as a series of cones below, each of which appears (to the high-def camera) to have some kind of trap door:
Below the Nibelheim with strange structures:
At the end of the opera, the gods walk up the ramp under a rainbow and enter Valhalla. The rainbow called for is weakly presented below by a crude video projection:
Now let’s look at some costumes. First below is the Nibelung Alberich:
Next the Rhinemaidens, who are seen mostly jumping on 3 large trampolines in shiny latex suits:
Wotan, king of the gods:
Wotan’s queen Fricka:
The princess Freia, who has an apple orchard:
The giants, Fasolt and Fafner:
The happy god Froh:
Donner, god of weather, with this mighty thunder hammer:
Wotan tries to pay the giants for Valhalla by giving Freia to them, but this doesn’t go over well with the rest of the gods:
Wotan coughs up enough gold to get Freia back:
Wagner’s Ring cycle is, of course, the ultimate practical challenge for any opera company to stage. The only safe bet for this in HDVD would be the Met box. The Sofia Opera and Ballet production is not competitive and we will give it our D grade, which means you would not want to buy and spend time watching this unless you have a special reason to do so.
The Sofia Opera has already published a Die Walküre also. We will give this and the later Ring installments a D grade also. Peter Quantrill reviewed this and the later Die Walküre in the September 2021 Gramophone at pages 76-77. The experience threw him into some kind of verbal spastic fit with 7 paragraphs in which I understood only a few sentences. But I did understand his conclusion: “ Approach with caution.”
Here’s a clip for the entire Ring cycle from Dynamic:
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