From around the world: St. Petersburg.(International ... the Marrinsky Theatre's production of the Ring of the Nibelungen was the first in Russia in 100 years)(Opera Review)

The Mariinsky Theatre made good on its promise to stage Wagner's Ring cycle complete during the 2003 White Nights Festival, but in the process the company's capacity for hard work was tested far more than it could have expected. After the first projected installment (Das Rheingold) appeared in 2000, the German director, Johannes Schaaf, and the company had a parting of the ways. The questionable tactic of trying to continue Schaaf's cycle without Schaaf led to a staging of Die Walkure by the production's set designer, Gottfried Pilz, that won little favor. So the Mariinsky (apparently with the encouragement of its Ring partner, the Baden-Baden Festival, where the new Ring will be seen in December) decided to scrap the production and begin afresh.

It was a bold decision but the right one. Even had it turned out well, Schaaf's Ring would have been a product of Central Europe--one more intelligently conceived than most of the radical productions in vogue there, but still from a tradition foreign to Russia. For the first production of the Ring by a Russian company in nearly a century, one wanted something more distinctive. For all its faults, the new production fulfills this desire. Significantly, the company turned first not to a new director but to the Russian-American set designer George Tsypin. He and conductor Valery Gergiev devised the "production concept," and they divided staging responsibilities between Julia Pevzner (Rheingold and Walkure) and Vladimir Mirzoev (Siegfried and Gotterdammerung). The cycle was put together quickly. Siegfried and Gotterdammerung received premieres in December, Rheingold and Walkure only as part of the complete cycle (June 13, 14, 16 and 18). Where else outside Bayreuth is a Ring assembled in less than six months?

The "concept"--if a succinct description may be attempted--involved finding a setting evocative of legendary times by mixing Russian and international elements. Diversity could best be sensed in Tatiana Noginova's startlingly imaginative costumes. A few, such as the (onstage) Forest Bird's, could have come from a production of Ruslan and Lyudmila; others had an African tribal quality. But most were geographically neutral even when eccentric, such as Sieglinde's dress of leaves and branches that made her look like a child of nature. (But it was not good to have the Wanderer change costumes so that he looked more like Wotan in Siegfried, Act II--part of Alberich's cunning is that he recognizes the god while his brother Mime doesn't.)

The dominant image is of immense stone structures of human (occasionally animal) forms resembling prehistoric ruins--three or four per act (or scene, in Rheingold), sometimes suspended by wires, sometimes anchored to the floor, sometimes missing heads or limbs, but always huge. Big stone slabs were positioned to serve as a platform for the singers. On the floor of the stage were clusters of little tombstone-like objects resembling human figures--some thought these were Nibelungs--which, like the principal structures, simply suggested a distant, enigmatic past. Each act was a kind of variant of what had come before, but the gorgeous shades of Gleb Filshtinsky's lighting kept the stage picture looking fresh and invigorating.

This Ring is acknowledged as a work in progress, with the direction of the principals having perhaps the greatest need for improvement. But at least the action was not muddied with stage business contrary to the plot, and in this sense the production bears a similarity to the Otto Schenk/Gunther Schneider-Siemssen literalist staging of the Ring at the Met; though the sets couldn't be more different, both allow the action to play naturally, unfettered by a political or economic ...