Review: Simone Young’s ‘Das Rheingold’ an experience, 16 November 2023, by Minnie Biggs

By Minnie Biggs

The concert hall was full. The lights went down. The hall was dark. Black. Wait. Then a note, and a chord, and another and another and the famous four minutes…and some lights came on blue, green, slowly, different parts of the house. Dawn. The Rhine. We were there for the beginning of the world. And we felt it.

There unfolded a performance like no other. Orchestra and singers and the conductor who brought it together. We heard singers we never heard of but Simone had. She knew them well and handpicked them. We heard music we never heard before, instruments and sections for the first time, yet never standing out. All part of a superb whole.

We listened to the orchestra tell the story as we have so often been told it does. We have had many glimpses of the orchestra telling the story but never as completely as this vening. The singers told the rest and our imaginations gave us setting and backgrounds that perfectly suited. No distractions. No alternative visions.

Only our own. An inner Gesamtkunstwerk. Our vision of the Rhine and the water and the gold and then our view of Valhalla just built by the strapping giants, and our descent underground to the world of the Nibelungs, insight to their world, their clanging work. And on. Our imaginations soaring with the music, the story. The voices.

Then there were moments of pause, silence, just moments, divine.

When the end came, the beginning of the end of the great work, the entire hall, everyone, stood on their feet and clapped and shouted. Fitting tribute for a masterpiece.