Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stunning, 23 Aug 2007
If you are looking for the greatest singing and most profound musical interpretation of the Ring, forget any of the current or likely DVDs and go back to the CDs of Furtwängler, Keilberth, or Knappertsbusch. There are few significant Wagner singers any longer, and no great conductors of anything - except for Boulez, who comes from a different cultural tradition.
If you are reasonably familiar with the music, this is the DVD set to have for its terrific new-modernist set designs and brilliantly detailed direction by Pierre Audi that offers intimate insights into the psychology of the characters and makes good sense of the complex motivations driving the plot. The singing is as good as you are likely to find in any opera house today and is carefully balanced with an orchestra drawn into the middle of the action. The close interaction of the characters comes over well on DVD. The only drawback is that your screen is never going to be big enough to have the impact that the huge, spacious set structures must have had in the Muziektheater, Amsterdam - pretty stunning nevertheless.
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4 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Cringe!, 22 Dec 2006
This is a truly dreadful production - the cons far outweighing the pros. It begins with a sluggishly played overture to reveal a strange scaffold and glass structure. As Anna Russell said, "the story begins in the Rhine. IN IT!" This Rhine is a perilously raked platform where three Rhine maidens sung by three overweight, menopausal Rhine Fraus, dressed in red cat suits, bounce, thump and slither embarrasingly over the glass. If French and Saunders had done a send up they could not have done it better. Honestly. Alberich was an ancient, really weird-looking creature, when he took his shirt off he looked like a concentration camp refugee. All white and skinny and weasely. Honestly. The gold, (remember the Gold?) looked like Christmas tree decorations in a very big cellophane box that magically moved off stage. The scene change was even more extraordinary. And then an old, and I mean really old, Wotan, dressed like some sort of Japanese comic book character began to sing. (Dreadful costumes!) Poor old bloke should have given up years ago. He couldn't reach some of the notes, and not necessarily the high ones. Honetly. Fricka could sing, sort of. But she was so-ooo ugly, poor dear. Naturally the video director filmed her in extreme close ups. The biggest problem, however, was that there was not one ounce of truth in any of the performances - the poor singers sabotaged by the dreadful set, the truly awful and ridiculous costumes and the heavy-handed conducting.
Productions like this are not fair on the performers, not to mention the poor audience. So, if you want to watch a truly magnificent production on DVD, look at the Harry Kupfer Bayreuth production or the 1976 Patrice Chereau Bayreuth production.
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