Die Walküre review

Paul Carey Jones as Wotan, ruler of the gods, convincingly shows the struggles of a long-dominant figure, now careworn and increasingly unsure of himself, despite his many powers (like Darth Vader, he can choke his victims remotely with a single hand gesture). Stuck in a trap of his own devising, Wotan is caught between the rule-bound hierarchy of the gods and a new, freer world, in which the love, illicit though it is, between the two siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde might thrive. Wotan’s wife Fricka (a commanding Madeleine Shaw) demands that Wotan restore the rightful order of things and punish the lovers. Reluctantly, Wotan cedes to Fricka’s demands, commanding his Valkyrie daughter Brünnhilde to guarantee that Siegmund dies in battle. The feisty Brünnhilde (Lee Bisset) has never disobeyed her father, but now, moved by Siegmund’s devotion to Sieglinde, she contrives to rescue the hero from his fate.

Mark Le Brocq is an imposing Siegmund, a character who is a sharp contrast to Loge, the trickster god of fire he portrayed in Rheingold. Julian Close vividly depicts the smirking Hunding, whose constant cruelty to his wife Sieglinde is evidenced in his slightest gesture. Emma Bell, as Sieglinde, is most winning in her final scene as the bewildered guest of the Valkyries, into whose hands she is delivered by Brünnhilde after the death of Siegmund.

Pursued by her furious father, Brünnhilde marshals her Valkyrie sisters in the famous third act opener. The opera’s final scene is a truth-telling between Wotan and Brünnhilde, an angry father and a defiant daughter who will no longer bend to his will, and thereby seals her fate – a thrilling climax to the production.