Frank Castorf’s staging of the Ring, premiered in 2013 and filmed in 2016, provoked controversy right from the beginning. For Castorf, the Rheingold of our days is oil; thus he places the first part of the tetralogy at a gas station on Route 66. Die Walküre is situated in Baku, Azerbaijan, which was seized by the Bolsheviks in 1920 for its oil, whereas Siegfried takes place in a socialist equivalent of Mount Rushmore and at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. Götterdämmerung is set somewhere in the GDR, ending up at New York’s stock exchange. Whilst Castorf’s staging polarized, Marek Janowski’s musical reading was unanimously praised, as was the excellent cast including in this opera Iain Paterson (Wotan), Nadine Weissmann (Erda), Albert Dohmen (Alberich) and Roberto Saccà (Loge).
Iain Paterson
Markus Eiche
Tansel Akzeybek
Roberto Saccà
Sarah Connolly
Caroline Wenborne
Nadine Weissmann
Albert Dohmen
Andreas Conrad
Günther Groissböck
Karl-Heinz Lehner
Alexandra Steiner
Stephanie Houtzeel
Wiebke Lehmkuhl