[2012063] The Ring. Wagner. Animated.
More Than Opera @ Norwood Concert Hall
2:30pm, Wed 29 Feb 2012
Genealogy is an interesting thing. As I’ve written before, my father is a German migrant, and has a genuine connection to the works of Wagner; he and a fellow migrant used to trek from their country abodes to Adelaide for every production of the Ring Cycle. Good, bad, or indifferent, each and every production somehow touched him on a deep emotional level: there’s something fundamental in Wagner’s work that really connects with him.
Me, though? Not so much. Yes, The Flying Dutchman was great, but I feel like I only enjoyed that on a superficial level – distracted by sight and sound. But as I get older – and, perhaps more poignantly, Dad gets older – I feel the need to try and find that connection. To see if, somewhere deep down inside me, that core of German-ity exists.
…
Look, I know that sounds stupid, but that was my thinking when I spotted The Ring. Wagner. Animated. in the Guide: “the complete Ring Cycle in 90 minutes!” they claimed.
I arrive at the Norwood Concert Hall well ahead of time and, as is my wont, get to chatting with a lovely woman who was manning More Than Opera’s merch stall. The company only has a short run in Adelaide and, despite their relative lack of notoriety (and the placement of the show under “Film” in the Guide), they’d been reasonably happy with the crowds – they managed to pull in a respectable thirty-odd punters to the Tuesday night performance at the Big Slapple.
There were more than that present for this matinée, though. A lot more, though the frequency of silver-tops in the audience might have been a pretty good indicator as to why this particular session was so popular.
A short introduction set expectations – this was still a work-in-progress, we were informed, and the animations were still being polished. We were also encouraged to sit centrally in the room – the audio was being presented in surround sound, driven by the same laptop that provided the projected visuals. But the surround sound was completely lost on me, sitting with my Event Buddy in the front row: not only were we mere metres from the three multi-character voices (soprano Olivia Cranwell, tenor Carlos Enrique Bárcenas, and baritone Lucas de Jong), but we were virtually sitting in the “orchestra pit” – though it was but a cordoned-off area in which the largely wind musicians performed (four saxophones, a set of keys, and the delightful Joanne Cannon on the bassoon (swoon!) and quirky sarrusophone).
The animation told much of the (necessarily abbreviated) Ring Cycle, with musical accompaniment. The animation had a narration track that verbalised the story, but (perhaps because of the surround sound processing) the pre-recorded audio felt murky, and the narration often got lost. But, at key scenes, the band would kick it up a notch, and the singers would come out (in full costume – no easy feat, given the multiple characters they played) and… well, they blew the house down.
Their performances were, quite frankly, fantastic. Sure, there was a bit of the hit-your-mark-plant-your-feet-and-belt-out-your-lines stiltedness that seems to accompany most opera (or at least the opera I’ve seen), but their voices (especially Carlos Enrique Bárcenas in the role of Siegfried) were amazing.
With most productions of the Ring Cycle covering at least a dozen hours, there was obviously going to be a bit of brutal content editing – and that sometimes felt obvious in the animation sequences, where I’d occasionally feel that something significant had been skipped over in a couple of glib sentences. But – as I indicated above – I don’t have the in-depth knowledge of the Cycle to judge the appropriateness of the treatment. The one thing I do know, however, was that I was somewhat disappointed that the Cycle‘s denouement was delivered entirely in text: a flat ending to a terrific story, even for relative opera n00bs like us who never knew the appropriate time to applaud.
After the performance, there was a short Q&A session with all the performers (except de Jong, who had to fly back to Melbourne early to conduct a Welsh choir!) which failed to add any further insight, but that hardly mattered – The Ring. Wagner. Animated. was a wonderful experience, with David Ian Kram’s music direction creating a lush bed for those wonderful voices. Most of all, however, it felt respectful to the source material – that was Irene’s word, but it’s such a perfect and succinct description that I had to include it here.