Following on from Das Rheingold, the second instalment of Dmiti Tcherniakov’s Ring cycle; Die Walküre, recorded at Staatsoper unter den Linden in 2022, has now been released on video.  We are sill in the ESCHE psychological research centre.  During the Prelude we see news footage of Siegmund’s escape from the programme he is in.  He staggers into Hunding’s staff apartment to find Sieglinde.  Hunding, when he appears, is some sort of armed security guard.  This illustrates the problems I have with this production.  The psychology of the Siegmund/Sieglinde/Hunding trio works well but the back story of Wälse, Sieglinde’s forced marriage etc makes no sense at all.  Oh, and Wotan seems to be watching everything that goes on.

Act 2 is more of the same really.  The individual scenes are intense and exciting but have no real ciontext. And then we get to the crucial Hunding/Siegmund duel.  It just doesn’t happen.  The focus is on Sieglinde, two floors below where the fight doesn’t take place until it’s over when we see Wotan with Hunding and Siegmund very much alive.  Hunding is just told to push off while Siegmund is re-arrested (quite brutally) by Security and, presumably returned to his experiment.

Then to Act 3.  The Valkyries are running some sort of research project on violent criminals whose CVs are projected for our benefit but, since they seem to be in some sort of seminar room, why they are wittering on about horses is rather unclear.  Again, the Brünnhilde/Wotan confrontation is intense and beautifully acted but it’s pretty hard to abandon someone in a remote seminar room surrounded by magic fire.  All we get is Brünnhilde drawing flames on a ring of chairs before the set and Wotan recede into the distance leaving her alone in front of the curtain at the very end.

So, there are some wonderful scenes and some great acting but any sort of continuity requires a huge act of faith.  I would be ready to give up at this stage because there are plenty of better Ring stagings on video.  But, and it’s a big but, this is musically fabulous.

Christian Thielemann’s conducting is majestic; so coherent, so detailed, so tectonic.  It can rarely have been equalled (Barenboim, Solti maybe) and I’ve not heard better.  Add to that the most consistently excellent cast I’ve seen on video.  Michael Volle’s Wotan is so complex; scary, troubled, despairing, frustrated and there’s a wonderful freshness, almost a girlishness, about Anja Kampe’s Brünnhilde.  Claudia Mahnke is a busily business like Fricka.  She’s a singer who deserves a bigger name than she has because she’s been singing important roles around Germany extremely well for twenty years.  She does itr again here.  Mika Kares is suitably nasty as Hunding.  Which leaves the lovers.  Robert Watson is an ardent Siegmund with all the notes and fine acting but the star for me is Lithuanian soprano Vida Miknevičiūtė as Sieglinde.  She also has all the notes coupled to really grippingf acting and terrific stage presence.  Such intensity.  It’s a pretty classy group of Valkyries too!

Filming is by Andy Sommer and it’s a decent job of capturing a staging where the set moves up and down and revolves to the point where our POV isn’t always obvious.  The picture on Blu-ray is excellent and the sound (PCM and DTS-HD-MA) is generally good but there are a few places where the sound level of the singer drops out a bit.  I couldn’t see mikes on the singers and I wonder if the stage microphone placement and the revolving set conflict in some way.  In any event it’s fleeting and generally both singers and orchestra are captured well.

The booklet has a synopsis and track listing but it really needs an explanation of what Tcherniakov is trying to achieve.  Subtitle options are English, French, German,Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Korean.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see what Siegfried delivers.

Catalogue information: Unitel Blu-ray 810104