The main attraction of this Mariinsky Ring cycle, originated three years ago in St Petersburg and already seen in Baden-Baden and Orange County, California, is its conductor and artistic director, Valery Gergiev. He and designer George Tsypin are credited with the production concept but, in this prologue to the main trilogy, it was surely the absence of a single directorial hand that was to blame for its lack of dramatic integrity.
Where Wagner took Nordic legend to fashion the Ring's allegory of greed, evil and love, the driving vision here was apparently Gergiev's perception that man, the world over, has created myths to explain motives that are universal. Inspired by the commonality of myths from Gergiev's home region of Ossetia, in the Caucasus, this staging seeks a Russian thread to weave into the whole, but also includes a raft of Egyptian references only marginally clearer than hieroglyphics. Thus, as Wotan and Fricka cross the bridge to their Valhalla, they don headgear respectively representing Anubis, the jackal-headed god of dying, and Bast, the cat-headed sun goddess - presumably symbolising the gods' eventual twilight.
Quite what was signified by the beaded pelmet that earth goddess Erda wore on her head was unfathomable. Zlata Bulycheva's rich sound emerged in spite of this, but other fine voices were encumbered - notably the giants Fasolt and Fafner, pinheads imprisoned in massive slabs of pseudo-basalt on castors. Even the Rhinegold was on castors: it was depicted as a woven orb, making nonsense of the crucial measuring of gold ransom against the worth of Freia, goddess of youth. In this mixing of mythologies and metaphors, confusion was inevitable. Yet the play of rainbow colours was vivid and the Mariinsky orchestra's tonal palette mostly matched it.
The Mariinsky/Kirov name still carries a huge cachet, yet Gergiev's seemingly ubiquitous presence in the west and the somewhat inconsistent work suggest that, subjected to the magnetic pull of ambition and power, his energies get dissipated. Rather like Wotan and, perhaps, this cycle.
