Five hours can be a challenge for the opera audience, but also of course for the singers and the orchestra, and in such a work, expectations are high. It is almost twice as big an orchestra as in ordinary cases and long musical lines where there is a lot happening constantly. The conductor Evan Rogister scuttles quality and top class from the orchestra and it is very fun to hear when it sounds so good.
Even on a musical level, Elisabeth Stridh and Brenden Gunnel sing a poignant sibling and manage the two lyrics very well. Annlouice Glosdlund's Brünnhilde has both spit and heat. There had been a lot of autumn colds in the house so you didn't really know what to expect, and Anders Lorentzon who does Wotan might have been hit. It is heard that he has his Wotan well in the body really, but he probably sang a little on the spare tank in the famous final scene.
The most famous piece of the Valkyrians (perhaps even Wagner's) is the Valkyri Ride, when the god of Wotan's death angels is out and fetches people to leave the earth. Every Valkyri meeting on the Gothenburg stage sounds formidable, but at the same time we see here an example of almost unforgivably strange directing. The Valkyrier plays horse with the dancers and shows pictures of, among others, Astrid Lindgren and Sara Danius. These will probably symbolize fallen warriors and may be an attempt to make it important for us here and now. But even if they had implemented the idea more elegantly than dark copies of press photos, it becomes a little too separate and unmotivated.
But then the question is whether the bare stage room has also forced some stylized simplifications where you really want it to feel real. The Gothenburg Opera has made it a point that the entire set of all four parts of the ring should be sustainable and all scenography is recyclable.
Last year I was struck by the fact that the scenery of the Rhine Gold was troublesome ugly. Valkyrian also offers the same chipboard, scaffolding scaffolding and two aquariums. The same gray coats that I think I've seen at the Gothenburg Opera for 10 years.
Sustainable maybe, but I almost wished that the ring of fire that Brünnhilde had fallen asleep at the end would spread and burn down all that hamster cage to scenography so that one had to think new. But Ragnarök when the world burns up is only in part four, so even Siegfried in a year will probably pull around with his sword in the same colorless world. And that may be part of the point.