The music flies, sometimes it hovers just a few centimeters above the ground, at the end it sails away drunk as a dream: over the clouds, to the stars, to Valhalla, wherever, everyone can be blissful according to their own style. But the conductor Pietari Inkinen, a newcomer to the Green Hill, the first Finn to stand at the podium at the Bayreuth Festival, freed Richard Wagner's music for “Valkyrie” from all earthly gravity wherever it made sense. One hears a Wagner beyond the sound prejudices of the massive, a music that manages without the imposing of horned helmets and is still strong. Delicate play of colors of evocations of nature, refinement of psychology, everything that later fascinated the symphonies of France, Russia and Finland about Wagner, resonates here as the spiritual resonance of a European event,that cannot be reduced to the special route of German gloom and force.

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the features section.

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Inkinen has largely taken back the low register of the wonderfully obedient festival orchestra.

The basses give location signals for tonal hearing and for the architecture of the movement, but they do not cover anything in terms of color.

When Oskar Bie in his book “Intime Music” at the beginning of the twentieth century cites Wagner's dramas as prime examples of the genre named in the title, one can now understand why, thanks to Bayreuth's “Walküre”.

Inkinen's conducting is so fine that the singers can sing with particular creative flexibility.

"I was born two people," says Klaus Florian Vogt, with an exemplary text comprehensibility, with great certainty.

But suddenly becoming quiet he continues: "a twin sister and me".

The sudden withdrawal suggests the premonition - not the certainty - that this sister is in front of you in Sieglinde. Lise Davidsen, this miracle of shine and warmth, as Sieglinde, is given the space as the support to create her ecstasy from “You are the spring I asked for” to the line “First saw my friend” as a single, large crescendo. This is singing that doesn't have to move from point to point, or even from word to word. And when Tomasz Konieczny surrenders as Wotan, only rarely to shout: “I only want one more thing: the end”, then follows a shockingly well-timed pause before a meekly added “the end”. In the Valkyries ride of the third act, the singing of the eight women of strength appears as an increase compared to the orchestra,not as a withdrawal of the vowel before the overwhelming power of the instrumental.

Silence that forces you to listen

Quietness is often created that forces you to listen: to the deep sadness that Christa Mayer as Fricka places in her allegations against Wotan, or to the erring perplexity with which Iréne Theorin tries to comfort her father Wotan.

Sure, Hunding, sung by Dmitry Belosselskiy, remains a no-nonsense here too, one that you don't want to encounter in the dark.

And Konieczny, who didn’t know a week ago that he would stand in for Günther Groissböck as Wotan, sometimes slips an unattractive stretch E after long U-vowels like “Luëst” and “Fluëch”, but otherwise remains as a husband and father a tender, brooding cavalier.