The Valkyrie – Act Three

A bit of Valhalla descended on New England Conservatory Wednesday night as guest conductor Robert Spano and veteran Wagnerians Greer Grimsley and Jane Eaglen performed Act Three of Die Walküre. NEC presented this concert excerpt from Richard Wagner's saga as a fundraiser for a new Student Life and Performance Center, slated to break ground in the spring and open in 2017. 

Die Walküre is the second of four operas that make up The Ring of the Nibelung. Act Three runs 70 minutes, which is less than a tenth of the fourteen hours of music in the entire cycle, but it is a good introduction to two of the major characters: Wotan, ruler of the Norse gods, and Brünnhilde, a Valkyrie (battle maiden). She was once Wotan's favorite daughter, but now she is estranged for disobeying his command. Wotan would rather not punish her, but his hands are tied by the treaties he has forged to gain power.

The act begins with Wagner's most recognizable music, The Ride of the Valkyries. NEC's sopranos and mezzos took on the roles of Brünnhilde's battle sisters, who carry fallen heros to glory in Valhalla. The first voice we hear ("Hoyotoho!") is Gerhilde; soprano Cheyanne Coss had a shining and secure voice that boded well for the rest of the evening. The eight women made a formidable ensemble. 

There is one more person in Act Three: Sieglinde, Wotan's daughter by a human mother. Sieglinde is fleeing man and gods because she is carrying her dead twin's unborn child. (It's complicated.) Wotan is hunting down Brünnhilde for aiding and abetting Sieglinde's escape. Graduate student Kirsten Hart was commendable as the half-human outcast, but her character departs early in Act Three. Her brief outing could be seen as role-building for a dramatic soprano; the bulk of Sieglinde's music is in the first two acts.

Jane Eaglen has performed Die Walküre onstage 85 times (by her husband's reckoning). She is a muscular soprano, still able to sustain an act as Brünnhilde, but she is at a point in her career when it is time to pass along her wisdom in the role to others. She is currently on staff at New England Conservatory, and several of this evening's sister Valkyries were her students.

Bass-baritone Greer Grimsley is a lean man who generates an improbably huge amount of sound. Wearing tuxedo tails for this benefit performance, he commanded the stage and showed why he is the actor's singer of choice for Ring cycles around the world.

Conductor Spano started with a cautiously controlled reading of the first few pages, but he guided the student orchestra admirably through Wagner's superhuman score. During the bows he singled out the English Horn and Bass Clarinet soloists to roaring applause.

Postscript – Die Walküre ends with Wotan taking away Brünnhilde's immortality and sending her to sleep within a ring of fire. In the next opera Sieglinde's grown son will brave the fire and awaken his mother's half-sister with a kiss; Brünnhilde takes her nephew as husband. (It's complicated.) The Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra will perform Act Three of Siegfried with guest soloists in the spring ... stay tuned.

The Fantastic Mr Fox: the opera

Odyssey Opera presented a concert version of Tobias Picker's 1998 opera, The Fantastic Mr Fox, borrowing costumes (and most of the cast) from San Antonio's recent stage production. This was a family-friendly performance: two kids could attend free with each paid adult ticket. Yet it is hard to consider this a children's work; the words come faster than the ear can register, and I would have been lost without the projected surtitles. I can't imagine what the youngest listeners were able to pick up.

Tobias Picker was on hand to hear the show, this being the first American revival of the fully orchestrated score since the Los Angeles Opera premiere. He had made subsequent chamber versions for fifteen and then seven musicians to accommodate smaller productions. The full score was most effective when depicting the destructive power of Agnes the Digger, a juggernaut of an excavating machine bent on rooting out Mr Fox's den. While the role of Agnes was written for a mezzo-soprano, here it was performed, brilliantly, by countertenor Andrey Nemzer. This put a double-reverse gender twist on Agnes the Digger's romantic sparks with Mavis the Tractor.

The vocal star of the evening was soprano Elizabeth Futral, in her fully engaged portrayal of Miss Hedgehog. She has an Act Two lament about her incipient spinsterhood but radiates rapture in an Act Three duet with her newfound love, Mr Porcupine. Incidentally, Theo Lebow, who sang Mr Porcupine, was one of the foxcubs in the original LA production sixteen years ago. He has grown up into an admirable lyric tenor.

Other singers brought varying degrees of acting ability to their roles. John Brancy's Mr Fox was, if not fantastic, at least jauntily approximating the hero's charm. Krista River's Mrs Fox was pleasant, but not dramatically present. Ironically, this concert performance would have benefitted by one of the composer's reduced orchestrations. The full complement of onstage musicians frequently overpowered the singers in this lively but word-heavy score.