World-class music in Dallas

The 2013-14 arts season, at least for me, got off to a rousing start this past weekend with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra's opening round of classical concerts.

Under the baton of maestro Jaap van Zweden, the concert opened with a Berlioz song cycle, Les nuits d'ete, or "Summer Nights," with mezzo-soprano Annalisa Stroppa. I was not familiar with this work but found it enjoyable, although I'm unlikely to rush to the iTunes Store to download it.

The second half of the program was devoted to the ever-popular Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony. Leave it to Jaap and the DSO to give this chestnut a performance like you've never heard before! The goal of any great conductor (which Jaap is) and great orchestra (which the DSO is) playing great music (which this is) is to show you nuances that you had never noticed before. Which they did. Whether it's the contrasts of dynamics, tempos and emotions throughout the work, the beautiful French horn solo at the beginning of the second movement (performed flawlessly by the DSO's new principal horn David Cooper), the lilting waltz of the third movement, or the brilliant climax of the finale, this group performs like a world-class ensemble.

And make no mistake about it, the DSO under Jaap van Zweden in just a few years has turned very nearly into a world-class orchestra, if they're not already there. I'm frankly amazed and dismayed to look around and see ANY empty seats in the Meyerson Symphony Center when they perform. They should be selling out every concert. And their marketing arm is certainly doing their best to try to reel 'em in.

Somehow it is not sinking in to Dallas' fairly extensive classical music audience that you can go hear some of the best performances you'll ever experience with a short trip to Dallas' Arts District. Maybe if you're fabulously wealthy and can jet off to New York or Vienna, but even then you aren't guaranteed the consistency of great playing that you'll hear by staying in town.

Let me assure you that I'm not compensated in any way for this shamelessly glowing endorsement. Jaap and the DSO are just that good.

See you there!

Return of the Titan

Back in May, I spent a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon listening via satellite radio to a live concert from Carnegie Hall featuring the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. This hot-shot "pit band" turns into a world-class symphony orchestra when its members go up onstage, as they do two or three times a year.

But this was a particularly momentous occasion, because for the first time in two years, the Met's esteemed music director, James Levine, took the podium to conduct the marvelous ensemble that he's polished and perfected during his 40-plus years at the Met.

Levine has been plagued with back problems that required extensive surgery and left him unable to conduct -- until now. He used a motorized wheelchair and a platform, built by the Met's incredible backstage crew, that raised him up to where he could see and be seen by the entire orchestra.

And to open this much-anticipated concert marking his triumphant return, Levine chose the Prelude to Wagner's Lohengrin, a captivating piece that was singularly appropriate for the weekend before the bicentenary of the composer's birth. I wrote earlier about this piece after the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, under Jaap van Zweden, performed it in an all-Wagner concert the same weekend as the Met Orchestra's concert.

On hearing this performance, there should be no doubt that Levine's physical problems haven't cost him anything musically. Those who suggested he should resign as the Met's music director when he had to stop conducting should now feel free to hang their heads in shame. It was his back that went out -- not the musical genius that's kept on giving to appreciative audiences for over four decades.

Levine's friend Evgeny Kissin joined him for a brilliant performance of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, and the concert concluded with one of my favorite symphonies, Schubert's Ninth. The Met Orchestra under Levine was as you would expect -- sensational.

The Met's radio announcer, Margaret Juntwait, even helped by not falling into a trap that's bugged me for years about the Schubert symphony's nickname, the "Great." People who should know better -- classical radio announcers, even the web page for Carnegie Hall -- almost invariably refer to the Schubert Ninth as "the Great symphony," inferring the common English meaning of that word as "of high quality" rather than the original intent of the German "große," meaning "large." His publisher dubbed it "the Great C Major Symphony" to distinguish it from his Sixth Symphony, the "Little C Major." There's no doubt that it's "great" music, but "Great" was used for the distinction because of the Ninth's length (almost as long as Beethoven's Ninth) and the size of the orchestra required to play it. 

Next month, Maestro Levine will undergo the real test of his recovery when he returns to the pit at the Met to conduct a run of Mozart's Così fan tutte, followed by a new production of Verdi's Falstaff around the holidays, and Berg's Wozzeck along with Così again in the spring. Plus three more Carnegie Hall concerts with the Met Orchestra.

Welcome back, Jimmy!

Happy Fourth of July!

It's Independence Day! We can have a picnic lunch, shoot off some fireworks (if legal in your location), go to a baseball game, watch fireworks, listen to patriotic music!

If you're in Boston, you can go to the Esplanade along the Charles River and listen to the venerable Boston Pops Orchestra play such thoroughly American tunes as the "Stars and Stripes Forever," "America the Beautiful" and -- the 1812 Overture!

The what?

Yes, the 1812 Overture! Because nothing is more patriotically American than a song written by a patriotic Russian celebrating the military defeat of one of America's longest-standing allies that also includes a glorious tribute to one of the more despotic lines of European royalty!

Remember the American Revolutionary War? The one that cropped up right after we issued a Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776? Oh, yeah, kind of the whole point was to prove that we could exist independently of despotic European (in this case British) kings. But we blithely accept the 1812 Overture's use of the Czarist Anthem in our celebrations of independence.

And yes, the French army over whose defeat the overture gloats with a rather sardonic quotation of "La Marseillaise" was led by Napoleon Bonaparte, a revolutionary despot with whom the U.S. had something of an on-again, off-again relationship.

But I've always been bemused by American orchestras' adoption of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture as an American patriotic piece. Much of that phenomenon may have to do with Arthur Fiedler's inclusion of the work in the Pops' annual Fourth of July concerts on the Esplanade, complete with cannons, bells and fireworks. He did that to bolster sagging attendance -- and it worked! That event is widely seen as the premier Fourth of July celebration in the U.S.

Tchaikovsky himself didn't particularly like the overture. He wrote it because there was a very nice commission involved. He knew it was raucous and didn't have much artistic merit.

It's also an interesting side note that neither "La Marseillaise" nor the Czarist Anthem, the themes in the overture representing the opposing armies in France's ill-fated invasion of Russia, would have been heard by either side in 1812. Napoleon had banned "La Marseillaise," which came out of the French Revolution, and the Czarist Anthem wasn't written til a good 20 years later.

But today, enjoy the freedom to grill you some hot dogs, quaff some good American beer, whistle the Trio from "Stars and Stripes Forever" -- and leave Russia to the Russians.

A religious experience

Last month, on the weekend before Richard Wagner's 200th birthday, the Dallas Symphony gave a concert devoted entirely to the 19th-century German master's music. 

Music director Jaap van Zweden has turned the DSO into a truly top-shelf orchestra, and lucky for people like me, Wagner is right in his -- and their -- wheelhouse. This group thrilled sophisticated audiences in Europe this spring in concerts that included the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. 

And these musicians were no less thrilling that Friday night when they opened their all-Wagner concert at the Meyerson with three of his preludes, and concluded with a sensational concert performance of the first act of  his music-drama Die Walküre. 

The first half of the program -- the preludes to the first and third acts of Lohengrin, and the prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg -- showed the wide range of emotions and drama in Wagner's music, and the wide range of the DSO's capabilities.

The ethereal spirituality of the opening bars of the Lohengrin prelude immediately prove that Wagner is not all about blaring brass and screaming sopranos and "kill da wabbit!" The opening is scored for four solo violins and the rest of the violins divided into four parts, and they build the instantly mesmerizing theme from a breathtaking pianissimo.

This is where Wagner perfected an orchestral technique that he used several more times, most notably in the prelude to Tristan und Isolde. The music starts very softly and slowly builds, with the melodies moving from section to section. Just over two-thirds of the way through, the music reaches its peak, with brass now blaring and (almost) the entire orchestra accompanying. From there, the music begins to fade, until at the end, it falls back to its pianissimo beginnings with just the divided violins. 

I find it fascinating (and this is probably the key reason I keep coming back to this and other great music) that even though you may have heard a piece dozens, maybe hundreds of times, there's always something new to discover in it. When Jaap and the DSO got to that climax two-thirds of the way through the Lohengrin prelude, just as they hit that dramatic, blaring, fortissimo chord, I saw that the strings stopped playing! So what you get for a couple of bars is a straight wind band sound before the strings re-enter. Later, when I thought about what that little passage would have sounded like with full strings added in, I knew that Wagner of course was right. The brassy, forceful wind sound is perfect, but I had never noticed that little trick before. 

The prelude to Act III of Lohengrin is the opposite of the first act prelude. It is loud and raucous. Wagner intended for this music to represent the wedding feast after the marriage of Lohengrin and Elsa, and you can tell that there's plenty of swigging of steins of good German beer, along with dancing, carousing and what-have-you. It's great fun.

In the opera, this prelude goes straight into the most famous music Wagner ever wrote -- the Bridal Chorus, or what everybody calls "Here Comes the Bride." It includes a chorus of villagers accompanying the happy couple to their wedding chamber, and it's got some nudge-nudge-wink-wink lyrics to go along with it. Apparently, Wagner was either appalled or amused (history is not sure which) when he heard that it had been used as the processional in a church wedding -- possibly the one between Princess Victoria of Britain (daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert) and Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia in 1857. The lyrics, the dramatic origins of the piece, and the fact that Elsa and Lohengrin's marriage doesn't last 20 minutes (a blink of an eye in a Wagner opera) are why many churches frown on or even ban its use as a wedding march. But they'll let you use it in Vegas.

The Act III prelude, as performed by the DSO, stops just before the Bridal Chorus begins, while we're still at the party. Why spoil the fun?

The Prelude to Meistersinger is the closest thing to a traditional opera overture that Wagner wrote in the latter part of his career. It contains all of the opera's major musical themes masterfully woven together. It's interesting to note that, unlike almost any other opera overture by any composer, Wagner wrote this before he composed the opera itself. Amazingly, the themes survive intact over the course of the opera.

The end of this prelude uses the same music that ends the opera, and the last voices you'd hear in the opera during this very recognizable music are the chorus', singing the praises of the popular and avuncular Meistersinger Hans Sachs: "Heil, Sachs! Nürnbergs taurem Sachs!" (Hail to Sachs! Nuremberg's beloved Sachs!) As I listened to that part of the Prelude, at the point where the chorus would make this affectionate gesture in the opera, it occurred to me that the Meyerson audience that night could have easily stood up and sung: "Heil! Jaap! Dallas' taurem Jaap!"

Almost a year ago, I wrote on this blog about one of my favorite scenes in all of opera, Act I of Die Walküre. By the time he wrote this in the mid-1800s, Wagner had pretty much perfected his technique of using the orchestra to help tell the story being played out on the stage. The orchestra leads the drama's steady buildup from beginning to end. And using leitmotifs as themes, he develops the music much as a symphony composer would. That, plus its use of only three singers and no chorus, is why this work is perfectly suited for a concert performance.

With Wagner's expanded orchestra squarely on display, we can really see and hear how all the parts work together. And to top it off, the DSO brought in three top-notch singers:

• Clifton Forbis as Siegmund, the misunderstood young man (he's actually the son of the god Wotan, although he doesn't know it), fleeing his enemies, who stumbles into a hut in a forest to escape a raging storm. Forbis has been around awhile, and has earned his reputation as an accomplished opera singer, including many Wagner roles. He did a remarkable job last year as Tristan with the Dallas Opera.
• Heidi Melton as Sieglinde, who's been forced into a loveless marriage and helps the stranger who's stumbled into her home. Melton is an up-and-coming dramatic soprano who has the chops to make it in the demanding world of Wagner opera. I saw her just two weeks before this, singing one of the three Norns in the Metropolitan Opera's production of Götterdämmerung, the last part of the Ring of the Nibelung.
• Eric Owens as Hunding, Sieglinde's brute of a hubby, who returns from battle only to find his enemy being sheltered by his wife. Owens is knockin' 'em dead around the world, not only in Wagner but in new works, as well. He turned in a masterful performance as the evil Alberich in that same Met production of the Ring.

I'm a little too unschooled in the fine points of vocal artistry to play the critic, but I can say that all three lived up to their reputations in this DSO performance.

The orchestra also was in top form, including all the "extra" instruments that Wagner employed to fill his musical palette, like the bass trumpet and of course the Wagner tubas, played by members of the DSO's French horn section along with some fine extra musicians.

At one point late in this hour-long piece, I got a chuckle from the reaction of this mostly symphony-going audience, many of whom apparently had not read the program notes and did not know the story. Aided by supertitles, it became obvious that the young couple onstage who were falling desperately in love, despite her unhappy marriage, were also realizing that they were long-lost twin brother and sister, which seemed only to fuel their ardor! At this realization, a murmur ran through the Meyerson crowd. So even after almost 150 years, Wagner continues to shock his audiences with his strange but captivating story.

It's hard to describe how all these great musicians made everything come together so spectacularly, except to say that the entire evening, at least for me, was nothing less than a religious experience!

'Das ende, das ende!'

I've heard that the most difficult scene to stage in all of opera is the end of Götterdämmerung, which concludes Wagner's monumental Ring of the Nibelung, because so many things have to happen in a very short span.

In 84 bars (about 3-1/2 minutes):

• Siegfried's funeral pyre is lit, and Brünnhilde jumps on her horse and rides into the fire, carrying the Ring and proclaiming her devotion to Siegfried. 
• The Gibichung Hall, where most of the shenanigans of Götterdämmerung have taken place, collapses into ruins. 
• The Rhine overflows, and the Rheinmaidens swim in to claim the Ring from the pyre. 
• Hagen, who was born and raised for the sole purpose of reclaiming the Ring for the Nibelung Alberich, plunges into the water screaming "Zurück vom Ring! ("Away from the Ring!")
• As one of the Rheinmaidens holds up the Ring in triumph, the other two grab Hagen and pull him under the water, drowning him. 
• In the distance, Valhalla can be seen burning, with all of the gods inside.

From that point, the orchestra takes control, reminding us in magnificent Wagnerian style of the heroism of Siegfried and the compassion of Brünnhilde, that the era of the gods has passed and that a new era has dawned.

I've heard that to pull off any production of the Ring successfully, the director has to work out that final scene of Götterdämmerung first. If you can do that, everything else in this four-opera, 18-hour spectacle can fall into place. 

I fear that Robert Lepage, director of the current Metropolitan Opera production of the Ring, didn't do that. In developing his concept, he seems to have been preoccupied with getting his Machine to work and meeting the stringent deadlines of getting that first performance of Rheingold onto the Met stage. In performance, it almost looks like the staging of the end of Götterdämmerung was an afterthought.

Here's what happens:

• Grane, Brünnhilde's steed, is represented by a mechanical horse, which works OK when it's accompanying Siegfried on a boat on the Rhine. But when Brünnhilde makes her ultimate sacrifice to save the world, she climbs up on this metal contraption and is pulled slowly toward the pyre -- hardly an epic gesture of selflessness.
• There's no representation that I noticed of the Gibichung Hall collapsing, which Wagner intended as a physical analogy for the end of the corrupt Gibichung line. Plenty of productions leave this out, as that point is kind of obvious, so I have no quibble with Lepage doing the same.
• The flooding of the Rhine is projected on the Machine, and the Rheinmaidens hold up the Ring. But then Hagen, who's been standing over to the side for all this, kind of stumbles into the slightly lowered area just in front of the Machine, clumsily grabs for the Rheinmaidens, and then they do an utterly unconvincing job of drowning him.
• The Machine's planks reposition themselves, and instead of Valhalla burning with all the gods inside, we see on top of the Machine various statues of the gods, which crumble. Kind of anticlimactic, especially when it's accompanied by some of the most climactic music ever written. At least the statues just crumbled. I understand that in the very first performances of this, the heads of the statues exploded, one by one, in a rather cartoonish ending for one of opera's great dramas.

In the final bars, we see the Machine bathed in blue making a wave motion. This is the first image we saw at the beginning of Das Rheingold, representing the primeval waters of the Rhine, and it's return at the very end of Götterdämmerung is quite effective. Too bad what leads up to it didn't really work. 

What's particularly disappointing in all this is that with all the things they can make the Machine do -- all the shapes it can take, the wonderful projections, the grand size of the thing -- they couldn't come up with anything that made the audience go "Wow! That was like the end of the world!"

A lot of controversy is generated by directors these days, especially in productions of Wagner, by moving around the time and place of the operas, "deconstructing" them, adding unnecessary elements, emphasizing some "message," using shock just so people will remember them, even in some cases changing the story, and all the other trappings of "regietheater." I've long contended that what directors should be doing is using the marvelous techniques and advanced technology that are available today, and that weren't there in the 19th century, to tell Wagner's story! Don't try to impose a different story on Wagner's music. Your "genius" in making such attempts pales in comparison to his theatrical genius. If you have your own story to tell, write your own damn opera. Don't burden Wagner's music with your pathetic ego trip, which your apologists defend as "artistic expression."

That said, it's obvious to me that Mr. Lepage set out to do exactly what I've suggested, and for that he deserves praise. He wanted to create a new and fantastical way to tell the story of the Ring, and let the audience take something new from Wagner's story. For the most part, I think Lepage's Machine succeeded. And certainly it's true that no production of the Ring is "perfect," because of its inherent size and complexity. But for whatever reasons -- time, money, having to worry more about the Machine than the production -- he wasn't able to get this Ring as close to perfect as we've come to expect from a house like the Met.

I'm really glad I got to see this production of the Ring so close to Wagner's bicentenary. Despite some problems with the Machine and the production, it was a thrill to hear it performed by such excellent singers and the superb Met orchestra. To all involved: "Heil!"

The boy from East Texas who never learned fear

My bicentenary pilgrimage to the Metropolitan Opera in New York to see Wagner's complete Ring of the Nibelung was a musical treat. While the production and Robert Lepage's noisy Machine may have fallen a little short, the cycle I attended was extremely good, musically.

The Met orchestra under Fabio Luisi seemed only a blip down from where it was a few years ago under James Levine, who I think is one of the great Wagner conductors of our time, especially when leading this, one of the great Wagner pit bands. Luisi took things a little faster than Levine in several places, which was refreshing, although I've always greatly admired Levine's interpretations of Wagner.

Of course, the Ring requires a huge cast to cover all the gods, giants, Nibelungs and all their offspring. Some noteworthy performances from the cycle I saw in late April and early May:

• Mark Delavan made his Met debut as Wotan this year. He sang powerfully and portrayed magnificently the head god's majesty as well as his very human weaknesses.
• Stephanie Blythe as his wife, Fricka, brings sympathy and emotion to her character, who is too often portrayed simply as a shrew.
• Gerhard Siegel played Mime with just the right balance of making you feel sorry for him and hating his evil intentions.
• Richard Croft as Loge was better than I expected. This is a role that doesn't require a huge Wagnerian voice, and I'm sure it's a fun role to play.
• Hans-Peter König was the only singer to appear in all four of the music dramas (none of the characters appears in all four). His often-sinister bass served him well as Fafner the Giant in Das Rheingold, Hunding in Die Walküre, Fafner the Dragon in Siegfried, and Hagen in Götterdämmerung.
• Simon O'Neill and Martina Serafin made an almost perfect Siegmund and Sieglinde in Die Walküre.
• The Scottish tenor Iain Paterson has the sound, the good looks and just the right amount of royal arrogance for the feudal lord Gunther in Götterdämmerung.
• Soprano Wendy Bryn Harmer was both sincere and gullible as Gunther's sister, Gutrune. I wonder when we'll get to hear her in a more substantial Wagnerian role, like Sieglinde?

I have become a big fan of Eric Owens as Alberich. This American bass-baritone is a superb singer and actor with a commanding stage presence. He really brings out the pure evil of the character. Alberich appears in three of the four parts of the Ring, and with each one his time onstage gets shorter. I heard that Owens once complained (in jest) that he's the title character of the whole shebang -- the Nibelung who forged the Ring -- and yet in Götterdämmerung he appears onstage for all of 10 minutes out of a 5-plus-hour performance!

And then there's Siegfried, the lad who never learns fear. Jay Hunter Morris hails from Paris, Texas, and he's essentially a big ol' redneck with a wonderful, thick, down-home East Texas drawl, who just happens to sing opera. But when you put him on the Met stage, you'd think he was born and raised in the heart of Bavaria. He doesn't have the really big heldentenor voice for which this role was intended, but he knows when to hold back and when to let go, so by the end of a five-hour performance of Siegfried, he's barely lost an ounce of stamina. And you can tell he's having a blast acting his part, which he does very well.

One thing I always listen for in any Götterdämmerung performance is the incredibly treacherous vocal leap that Siegfried has to take in the last act, when he's calling out to the hunting party. It's an octave leap to a high C, and I have heard many very good heldentenors miss it completely -- it is, after all, coming near the end of a very long and demanding role. Morris nailed it (as he did in the HD telecast in 2012), perhaps not as forcefully as you'd want, but he did nail it. And he does it by singing it exactly as Wagner wrote it -- with an eighth-rest right before the high C, which gives the singer just enough time to adjust his voice for that cruelly high note.

At the end of the night, when the cheers come raining down for Morris, he always acknowledges the orchestra, as many singers do, but he also always leans over and extends his hand into the prompter's box at the foot of the stage, shaking hands with another of the many professionals who support the singers and other musicians at the Met. Morris is nothing if not gracious.

The Met presented three Ring cycles this year, and as often happens, the headliners in the major roles sang in two of them, with other singers getting their chance on the stage of the Big House in one of the cycles. For Delavan, Morris and Owens, that meant skipping the third cycle. The marquee Brünnhilde (she's on all the posters and promotional literature) was Deborah Voigt, but she sat out the middle cycle, which is the one I attended.

I've always wanted to see and hear Voigt in a live performance. She was long heralded as the up-and-coming dramatic soprano who would eventually step into this most demanding of roles. I wonder if she just waited too long in her career to do it, or I've heard that her weight-loss surgery of a few years ago affected her voice. But hearing her on the radio and reports from those who've heard her in the house leave little doubt that she isn't really up to the part.

The Brünnhilde in this cycle was Katarina Dalayman, who was superb. Despite a little bit of a shriek in her highest notes, she did a remarkable and very enjoyable job, from her treacherous opening Valkyrie Battle Cry to the closing Immolation scene.

The third act of Siegfried is always tough because Siegfried has been onstage singing for several hours before he awakens Brünnhilde, who's coming in fresh. Dalayman's big sound was a little mismatched with the smaller-voiced Morris, but they pulled off their exhilarating duet convincingly.

And the chorus in Götterdämmerung? Well, it's the Met chorus, which is simply the best. And choral writing was one of Wagner's strong suits -- too bad he didn't do more of it.

NEXT: Das ende

'The Ring' in a railroad freight yard

In commemoration of Richard Wagner's 200th birthday, I recently attended a performance of The Ring of the Nibelung at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

This is the Met's relatively new production, directed by Robert Lepage, that's sometimes referred to as "The Machine Ring" because the set for the entire four-opera marathon consists of a 45-ton series of 24 aluminum planks that rotate on an axis and can be manipulated into almost any needed shape -- from the waters of the Rhine River to a rocky mountaintop to a dense, lush forest to the inside of a feudal castle. Creative use of interactive projections on the planks and effective background lighting make the Machine an amazing piece of stagecraft worthy of the Met and this monumental work of art.

Theoretically.

The main problem, to my amateur senses, is that it's very noisy! Anytime it moves, there's clanking, creaking and banging. It might have actually worked better if Lepage had changed the setting from Wagner's mythological prehistoric time to a modern-day railroad freight yard! Weirder Ring productions than that have been attempted, unfortunately.

In 2009, I saw Seattle's "Green Ring," with its naturalistic and realistic sets. That production also was set in mythological time. At one of the post-performance Q&As with Seattle Opera's knowledgeable and entertaining general director, Speight Jenkins, an unsuspecting audience member thanked Mr. Jenkins for presenting what he called a "traditional" Ring. Speight was furious!

"This is NOT a traditional Ring," he insisted. A "traditional" Ring, Speight said, would be what he saw at the Met in the early '50s, with a forest represented by trees painted on a background rather than Seattle's forest of realistic-looking onstage trees. And more important, the singers in those days simply came out and stood while singing their part -- they made little effort to act. And one of the Seattle production's many strengths was how the singers brought out and developed the characters' personalities.

In New York, the Lepage Machine, while creating marvelous images for the visual sets, too often takes us back to those days of "traditional," static opera by restricting the singers in interacting with their colleagues. The giants in Rheingold, for example, are separated and elevated by the Machine's set from each other and the gods they're bickering with, which makes their abduction of the goddess Freia look contrived. Sometimes the Machine does get out of the way and let the singers act, but their space is always limited because the area in front of the Machine, which cannot move up- or downstage, is a fraction of the Met stage's generous proportions.

Another problem with the Machine is that it occasionally malfunctions. I consider myself quite lucky that it didn't break down during the cycle I saw in late April and early May.

Lepage's Rheingold was chosen to make its much-hyped debut on opening night of the Met's 2010-11 season. At the end of the opera, the gods are supposed to cross a rainbow bridge and enter their new home, Valhalla. The effect was quite spectacular when I saw it last month. But at the end of that first performance, the bridge was nowhere to be seen, and the gods just ambled off into the wings to some of Wagner's most stirring music. Oops.

More recently, I listened to this season's radio broadcast of Rheingold shortly before my trip to New York. When the head god Wotan and the demi-god of fire, Loge, head down to the caves of Niebelheim, where they intend to steal the Ring, stunt doubles walk down a brightly lit stairway in another very cool effect. But at that point in that Saturday matinee broadcast, there was a loud thud, some clanking, then voices talking frantically, and finally someone saying something about "the conductor," although the music never stopped. Very odd. A friend in New York who attended the performance reported that a malfunction kept the stairway bit from happening, a stagehand had to walk onstage (can't be good if that happens!) to push part of the set back in place, but then a section of it was hanging down in front of the Machine as the next scene was about to begin. When someone told bass-baritone Eric Owens to go ahead with his upcoming entrance, he protested that he couldn't see the conductor. Thus the voices heard on the radio broadcast. Amazingly, conductor Fabio Luisi and the Met orchestra didn't miss a beat, Owens and tenor Gerhard Siegel made their entrances, and somehow the set snafu was resolved. But it made for some tense moments in the house.

The quality of this production was varied -- sometimes the Machine and its accompanying effects were superb, as when it showed all the creepy critters crawling through the forest where Siegfried has grown up, or the "overhead" view of Brünnhilde lying asleep surrounded by fire at the close of Die Walküre.

At other times it fell short. In the very first scene, a little more convincing theft of the Rheingold would have been nice, rather than Alberich with a sack scampering up the Machine's planks to the top of the set while the Rheinmaidens just sit and watch. One sings "Haltet den räuber!" (which pretty well translates to "Stop! Thief!") but they make no effort to actually stop him as he walks right past them.

The end of Act II of Götterdämmerung is supposed to be one of opera's great "awkward moments." Brünnhilde, Hagen and Gunther have just sung their great trio (wait! a trio? in Wagner? yes, it's true, he broke his own "rules," and quite well, I might add) plotting Siegfried's death, each of them with a different reason for it. They are all quite serious at this moment, but who comes in at just the wrong time? Why, it's the happy Siegfried, Gutrune and the wedding party! It would have worked much better with an obvious glance or two between the characters that just hinted at "Oh, it's you. Plotting your death? Uh, no, we'd never do that!" In this production, the plotters just appear kind of grumpy as they take their places in the procession and the curtain falls. The final music of this scene is the sinister motif of the evil Hagen, played by the low strings and bassoons, but there's no acknowledgement of that onstage.

The interactive projections were quite ingenious at times. When the Rheinmaidens sing in the first scene of Rheingold -- they're supposed to be underwater -- bubbles are projected on the planks just behind them at exactly the moments and in exactly the places that they sing. And when one of the characters puts his hand in a projection of water, it realistically ripples out. All a very clever inclusion of technology that really sets the Machine apart.

An audience favorite is the eight Valkyries riding their flying horses during the "Ride of the Valkyries" music. Each sits astride one of the Machine's planks as it bobs up and down like a hobby horse, and as they "land" on the Valkyries' Rock, they slide down their plank one by one as if they were coming down a playground slide. Kind of hokey, but if any scene needs a little humor and hokeyness, it's this one.

Despite the Machine's shortcomings and a few production disappointments, this was actually a quite enjoyable Ring, and the main reason for that is that musically, it was superb (at least in the cycle.I attended).

Check back soon for a rundown of the performances. For rail yard workers, the Met's cast, orchestra and chorus did a masterful job of putting this train together.