Prom 3


Royal Albert Hall, London

3 / 5

The third yearly instalment of the Proms Ring cycle had a lot to live up to; in last summer's Die Walküre, fresh from Covent Garden, Placido Domingo's festival debut generated the kind of electricity the Proms aspire to but rarely achieve.

This Siegfried, sung in concert with a bit of rudimentary acting thrown in, was a less enticing prospect, with a less starry cast drawn mainly from a routine revival of Robert Wilson's unexciting production at the Châtelet in Paris. And initially it seemed that the Proms Ring might have run out of steam. Christoph Eschenbach's conducting at first drew little colour from the Orchestre de Paris, making few concessions to the cavernous venue. With its light-footed strings and the winds going easy on the vibrato, the orchestra made some quieter passages sound like middling-volume Mendelssohn.

Details were still getting lost, in the harps especially, when Brünnhilde awoke five hours later. Yet in the passages when Eschenbach encouraged the orchestra to dig in and broaden out, as in the glowing moments following that awakening, the resulting ramping-up of tone made the music's magnificence shine out.

There were some surprises from the cast. Volker Vogel's hectoring Mime soon palled, but as Erda, Qiu Lin Zhang's liquid contralto was a discovery. Evgeny Nikitin, in his early 30s, was a too-youthful Wanderer who tired before his exit, but his is a voice to listen out for, and he stood up well to Sergei Leiferkus's experienced Alberich. Olga Sergeeva's crystalline soprano scythed through the orchestra effortlessly as Brünnhilde. But the performance depended on Jon Fredric West's Siegfried. It's unwise for a portly fiftysomething tenor to bound Winnie-the-Pooh-like around the stage, but West can really sing this role, with limitless stamina fuelling hefty top notes until the very end, and there are precious few tenors who can do that.

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