A triumph, if you keep your eyes wide shut

Some crude and clumsy staging detracts from the impact, but nothing can hinder Antonio Pappano and Bryn Terfel in the Royal Opera's new Ring

Das Rheingold
Covent Garden, London WC2, to 10 January

Opera companies are inevitably defined by their occasional Ring cycles. To mount Wagner's epic fantasy of power and greed, love and lust is to offer audiences an interim update on the state a house is in, the way it currently sees itself and the curious art form it exists to serve.

English National Opera's cycle-in-progress, which reaches its fourth and final instalment in April, has been bewailed by the cognoscenti as a travesty of Wagner's intent - a patchwork quilt of ugly scenes from contemporary life, from the board-room to the streets, forfeiting the sweep and grandeur of the composer's vision.

Purists also, and more importantly, find it musically flawed, no doubt requiring standards higher than those divined by Wagner virgins, many of whom find Phyllida Lloyd's staging dynamic, even relevant to their own lives. ENO, in other words, may be risking the loyalty of its regulars in the eternal struggle to win new audiences.

Scottish Opera's recent Ring, which deservedly won awards after wowing last year's Edinburgh Festival, was quite as up to speed in its transfer of Valhalla to the Gorbals. Yet somehow Tim Albery's vision managed to capture the scale of this ultimate soap-opera amid the machinations which punch home its various morals. As did the highest musical standards, with the exception of one significant soloist.

But the company has since gone into a terminal tailspin, let down by philistine politicians while perhaps guilty of overweening ambition. Before long, Scottish Opera will cease to exist in its present form. It's wrong, if tempting, to pin the blame on Wagner; artistic and commercial managers must shoulder their share if a Ring cycle ends in the twilight not just of the gods, but of their company.

So plush and pre-eminent is the Royal Opera, so confident in its own abilities, that it has now launched its eighth Ring cycle since the war. A spell of uncertain management saw the last two (both in the 1990s, both conducted by Bernard Haitink) earn reviews as mixed as the company's fortunes at the time.

Since the upheavals surrounding Covent Garden's renovation, and the company's unhappy period in peripatetic exile, the arrival of Tony Hall from the BBC steadied the ship before that of Antonio Pappano filled its sails with favourable winds. Apart from one or two misjudgments, usually caused by money-saving collaborations with other houses, the Royal Opera is currently in its best shape for years. So is that reflected in its star-studded new Ring cycle?

The answer, after a mere two-and-a-half hours of 15 in the shape of Das Rheingold, is a guarded yes. Musically, which is the main thing, there is no need for equivocation: Pappano conducts superbly and most of his singers do him proud. If you shut your eyes (as many devout Wagnerians do), this is a majestic evening. If you keep them open, as is the general idea, doubts soon creep in.

Director Keith Warner and designer Stefanos Lazaridis are both thinking on a suitably grand scale. Giant windows suggest limitless perspectives, as do ladders and ropes from beneath the floor into the flies. And this comes after the most magical of openings, in which the slow burn of Wagner's prelude is echoed by gradually dawning light, eventually revealing exquisite underwater effects.

That the Rhinemaidens are as scant of presence as of clothes, and Alberich's lurching dinghy an expensively clunky conceit (complete with crude music-hall use of his phallic oar), proves a portent of clumsy detail to come amid a lofty, if surreal, vision of the road to Valhalla.

Wotan's interim headquarters look like the great hall of Citizen Kane's Xanadu, with the gods dressed as Victorian bucks and their womenfolk in Edwardian party-frocks. Loge is a red-haired Uriah Heep, the giants respectively cone-headed and monster-footed. Such mixed messages are no problem in a Ring, reminding us that Wagner was but a forerunner of Tolkien and Rowling, with heavily Gothic overtones.

The descent to Nibelheim is more of a problem. As Pappano wrings magnificent menace from his orchestra, we find ourselves in Dr Frankenstein's laboratory, with Alberich removing his victims' brains and Mime dancing with dismembered corpses. Given that these are the characters charged with revealing Wagner's anti-semitism, this comes too close to Nazi medical experiments for comfort.

The monster is sub-Hammer, the toad the only laugh in an evening otherwise devoid of its usual humour. Back in Wotan's lair, his sons cling gormlessly to walls while the girls hide beneath tables. The Tarnhelm is a silver Rubik's cube, Erda an elderly Miss Havisham, hiding in a high-backed chair. There is a sense of rushed, last-minute stage business after too much agonising over the bigger picture.

By the time Loge fries an egg as Wotan leads the way up to Valhalla, openly ravishing Erda en route, I had lost track of the clever-clever detail marring Warner's reach towards the epic. For all the magnificence of his singing, suggesting a future as one of the great Wagnerians, Bryn Terfel's Wotan is robbed of his essential authority by the cramped, crouchback style in which he is directed.

Which leaves Günter von Kannen's terrific Alberich threatening to steal the show, with a wonderfully oily sidekick in Gerhard Siegel's Mime. Philip Langridge sings and cavorts spryly as Loge, while Rosalind Plowright's Fricka, Emily Magee's Freia and Jane Henschel's Erda are all richly, authentically Wagnerian. As Fasolt and Fafner, Frank-Josef Selig and Phillip Ens sing strongly enough to overcome the indignity of their costumes.

If the evening is a triumph for Terfel, and an uncertain start for Warner, it belongs primarily to Pappano and his superb orchestra, who lend Wagner all the grandeur, wealth of detail and ravishing beauty for which even the megalomaniac of Bayreuth could wish. With Placido Domingo joining Terfel in Part Two, this Ring promises to see the Royal Opera duly installed in its rightful musical Valhalla, with stagecraft still stuck half-way up the mountain, struggling to keep up.

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