The first thing we see is the feet. They sway gently, forward and back, as the curtain slowly rises on the third instalment of Wagner’s Ring cycle to reveal their owner, sat on a swing hanging from a gnarled tree. Wedged precariously in its scorched branches is the treehouse where the dwarf Mime has been raising the hero-in-waiting Siegfried.
And whose feet are they? If you’ve been following Barrie Kosky’s production of the Ring since it began with Das Rheingold two and a half years ago, you won’t need me to tell you that they belong to Erda, the earth goddess. Again, she’s a silent but mesmerising presence courtesy of the octogenarian actor Illona Linthwaite. And again she is on stage, naked, for most of this opera’s four-and-a-half hours: smiling at Siegfried as the sparks fly from the sword he’s reforging on a Heath Robinson furnace in the first act; serenely tending the flowers that carpet the meadow where he eventually awakens Brünnhilde in the final act.
For her scene with Wotan – an aggressive confrontation, the tension reinforced by the orchestral turmoil Antonio Pappano is whipping up in the pit – she births a younger, singing version of herself. There is now a suggestion that Erda is not merely witnessing the events but actively directing them so as to outfox Wotan. Could she be about to bring down the old order, armed with only a watering can and a handbag full of feathers?
Only with Götterdämmerung – the final instalment of the tetralogy, due next year – will we know what Kosky has in store. For now, though, Erda’s omnipresence lends a mythical aura to scenes that otherwise play out, in Rufus Didwiszus’s sets, on a very human level. An excellent cast of singing actors carry the long scenes of dialogue that make Siegfried the most conversational episode of the Ring – and thus, potentially, the hardest to bring off.
First among equals here is Christopher Maltman’s velvet-toned, coldly calculating Wotan; formerly a smug CEO, he has let himself go and is now a Jackson Lamb lookalike in a grubby mac and cardigan. He’s almost as unkempt as Peter Hoare’s straggly Mime, who bashes out his trademark rhythm on his tin hat. Waiting in the snow outside Fafner’s lair in the grey, dark second act, Wotan and Christopher Purves’s bitter Alberich argue like tramps on a park bench. It’s a stark contrast with Soloman Howard’s Fafner, who, costumed by Victoria Behr, wears a fabulous suit of glittering stalagmites, as if the Rheingold has been growing on him in crystals. It looks as if he’s covered himself in glue and rolled in Christmas decorations.
Wiebke Lehmkuhl gives sonorous voice to Erda, and when Brünnhilde is finally awakened Elisabet Strid sings her in a gleaming soprano, fresh-sounding if slightly earthbound. All, however, are eclipsed vocally by an extraordinary house debut in the title role from Andreas Schager, his clarion tenor seemingly calibrated to a louder, freer, clearer setting than anyone else’s. It’s invigorating: he sings tirelessly, and there is never the sense that Pappano is having to restrict the orchestra to accommodate him. On the contrary, the playing captures all the complex colours of Wagner’s score, bringing out its moments of light but never underplaying its swathes of shade. Pappano and Kosky seem absolutely of one mind here, and it’s gratifying to see and hear the unfolding of a Ring cycle that’s so serious in its intent yet so deft in its touch.
• Until 6 April. Live in cinemas from 31 March.
