Ben Heppner: Tristan und Isolde: Welsh National Opera (WNO) - 2012 Update

Update: We provide a Photo Preview here

I did say I would try to keep you updated. However, given that it is 12 months to first night, news is not "coming thick and fast" - as would be expected. Nevertheless, WNO have very kindly provided a little more detailed  information, together with some images of the 2006 revival. I have also included some reviews of the production from 2006.

Sung in German with English surtitles (Welsh in Wales Millennium Centre) First night 19 May 2012.

Photo: Bill Cooper

Tristan                                       Ben Heppner

King Marke                                Matthew Best

Isolde                                        Ann Petersen

Kurwenal                                   Phillip Joll

Melot                                         Simon Thorpe

Brangaene                                Susan Bickley

Shepherd                                  Chorus

Helmsman                                 Chorus

Sailor                                        Chorus

                                               

Conductor                                 Lothar Koenigs

                                               

Original Director                        Yannis Kokkos

Revival Director                         Peter Watson

Designer                                   Yannis Kokkos

Lighting Designer                      Guido Levi

Original Movement Director        Kate Flatt

Assistant Designer                    Muriel Trembleau

Staff Director                            Carmen Jakobi

Co-production with Scottish Opera

Reviews (2006 revival):

Rian Evans

The Guardian,  Monday 2 October 2006 

"Yannis Kokkos's 1993 staging of Tristan und Isolde for Welsh National Opera suggested an integrity of concept that would not date - and so it has proved. In Peter Watson's revival, its classic lines retained all their clarity while allowing Wagner's ecstatic poem to pervade and invade the senses."

Photo: Bill Cooper

George Hall: The Stage, Tuesday 3 October 2006

"Welsh National Opera revives Yannis Kokkos’ 1993 production of Wagner’s transcendent exploration of love and death in a distinguished performance. Kokkos’ self-designed staging is visually highly effective, presenting the opera’s narrative line with exceptional clarity and truth, and the semi-abstract sets have an aptly timeless quality.

This is another show that displays the world-class credentials of the Welsh company. Wagner fans should move heaven and earth to see this outstanding production as it tours over the next few weeks"

Neil Fisher: The Times, October 2006

"Yannis Kokkos’s production is more about suggestive abstraction. At times, the effect is striking — Tristan’s death, on a giant, protruding slab and lit by an eerie green glow, makes for a striking tableau."

Photo: Bill Cooper

More at: Welsh National Opera

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Opera Australia: The Ring Cycle - 2013

THE MELBOURNE RING CYCLE 2013

Given that there are a few years to go till  opening night, information is still a little sketchy. To keep up-to-date visit the wesite: Opera Australia. But in the mean time here is what is known so far. And below is an interview with Richard Mills from the Australian. More shortly.

Opera Australia will present The Ring Cycle at the Arts Centre, Melbourne, during November and December 2013.

The Melbourne Ring Cycle will be a journey through 15 hours of Wagner's music across four nights in the theatre. Opera Australia will perform three complete cycles during November/December 2013, in celebration of the 200th anniversary of Wagner’s birth.

The creative team will be led by two celebrated Australian talents - director Neil Armfield and conductor Richard Mills.

The cast will include:
Susan Bullock as Brunnhilde
Juha Uusitalo as Wotan
Gary Lehman as Siegfried
John Wegner as Alberich

Further cast details will be announced over the coming months.

Tickets to go on sale at the end of 2011

In for the long haul

YOU can almost hear the valkyries coming over the mountain: a hot wind blowing, the pounding of horses' hoofs and the famous war cry -- Hojotoho! -- all set to Richard Wagner's wonderfully bombastic music. For a long time Ring cycles weren't performed in Australia, at least not in their epic, four-part entirety.

Richard Mills

Now they're like buses: nothing, then several at once.

There have been two in Adelaide, in 1998 and 2004, and now Opera Australia will be presenting its first, long overdue Ring in 2013. It's a red-letter year for Wagner fans, being the bicentenary of the composer's birth. That's still more than two years away and so far only the broadest details of the enterprise have been announced: the principal cast and artistic team, and the venue at Melbourne's State Theatre.

For Richard Mills, though, the valkyries are getting louder and closer by the day. The success of this multimillion-dollar enterprise -- the benchmark by which world opera companies are judged -- and the verdict of notoriously obsessive Wagnerians rests with him: the man who would conduct The Ring.

It's already rocking his world. Mills, a composer, conductor and mild-mannered agitator, lives in a converted warehouse in Brunswick, in Melbourne's inner suburbs. When he greets you at the nondescript front door and leads you up the stairs to his studio, the first thing your eyes land on is a shelf of CD box sets, recordings of Der Ring des Nibelungen by all the master conductors: Solti, Furtwangler, Knappertsbusch, Boulez. Those, and a plastic horned helmet. Mills seems to enjoy mixing high seriousness with the faintly ridiculous.

"Technically, just in terms of conducting, The Ring is a much easier opera to conduct than Fledermaus or The Marriage of Figaro," he says, before introducing a metaphor he perhaps didn't think through.

"It's like driving the Titanic, or piloting a 747, as distinct from a DC-3 or a fighter, something that's much more agile and responsive. Whereas [piloting] a big ship is much simpler because its motions are much steadier in a way."

Mills certainly is taking the task seriously and feels the weight of responsibility. Better known as a composer than a conductor, he has written, among many other works, some of the most ambitious and successful new Australian operas in recent years. In his other job, he's the artistic director at West Australian Opera in Perth.

In terms of conducting Wagner in fully staged productions, though, Mills is a relative newcomer. He has conducted some "big chunks of Walkure", and in Brisbane in 2005 a concert of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: a lucid, beautifully prepared performance. He was then to have conducted a short season of Tristan for WA Opera but had to pull out because of illness. So the Brisbane Tristan became his retrospective audition for The Ring.

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