Covent Garden Ring Cycles

Details of the Ring cycles at the Royal Opera House for autumn 2007 are now official.

There are to be three cycles, each spread over eight days: the first starts on Tuesday 2 October, the second on Wednesday 17 October and the third on Friday 26 October.

The casting is much the same as in the individual performances that have taken place so far. Lisa Gasteen sings Bruennhilde, John Treleaven Siegfried. Bryn Terfel sings Wotan in cycles 1 and 3 and John Tomlinson sings the part in cycle 2. Domingo sings Siegmund in cycles 2 and 3 and Simon O'Neill in cycle 1. Some other notable casting is Philip Langridge as Loge, Mihoko Fujimura as Waltraute and Eva-Maria Westbroek (who has just triumphed as Katerina in "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk") as Sieglinde.

Antonio Pappano will conduct all three cycles.

Public booking opens on 14 November. Ticket prices for a complete cycle range from £32 (standing in the Lower Slips) to £850 (sitting in the stalls).

I have seen each of the four operas as this Ring has been assembled. The musical standards have been extremely high, with outstanding playing from the orchestra and a notable contribution from Terfel, singing his first Wotans. The production (Keith Warner) has been less universally praised but I found that the good very much outweighed the bad.

It is thirty years since I last saw a Ring Cycle in one week, so I think I will treat myself next autumn...

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at the ROH

I saw this production when it was new two years ago and thought it one of the most extraordinary things I have seen at the Royal Opera House. I returned to it again last week and found it, if anything, even more brilliant on a second encounter.

The opera was written by Shostakovich when still in his twenties. After early popular success it was suppressed after attracting Stalin's disapproval. The experience drove Shostakovich away from opera and thus it remains his only full-scale 'serious' opera.

The story centres around Katerina (the Lady M of the title), who is a bored housewife. To spice up her life she has a fling with a bit of rough. Her father-in-law discovers this so she murders him. Her husband returns from business and finds her and bit-of-rough on the job so they murder him. Katerina and bit-of-rough marry. On their wedding day her husband's body is discovered. They are arrested and sent to Siberia. In the prison camp bit-of-rough has a fling with another woman. Katerina murders her and kills herself.

The operatic setting of this up-lifting tale ranges from broad ribaldry (including on-stage sexual intercourse with explicit accompanying music) through black humour to utmost despair. And then there is the poisoning, the attempted rape, the strangling and beheading, the double drowning and the whipping: all carried out onstage to appropriate musical accompaniment!

Katarina Dalayman sang the role of Katerina when the production was new. In this revival the part was taken by Eva-Marie Westbroeck. Without erasing completely memories of Dalayman, this was another virtuoso performance. Westbroeck revealed a fine dramatic soprano voice: an Isolde in the making perhaps?

Returning to his role was John Tomlinson as Boris, Katerina's father-in-law. This part could almost have been made for this great artist at this stage of his career. The slightly frayed quality of the voice matched the character perfectly and, again, his acting was totally convincing. The way he sang and acted as he demolished the poisoned mushrooms that were to kill him was both blackly comic and horribly vivid.

All these horrid goings-on are matched by an orchestral score of eclectic virtuosity. Pappano and his orchestra revelled in every detail of Shostakovich's extraordinary range of tone colour and dynamics.

The production was by Richard Jones. He has been somewhat controversial in the past and his "Ring" at Covent Garden was less than wonderful. Lady M, however seemed to suit his unusual theatrical talent totally.

This was a thrilling evening greeted sometimes with laughter, sometimes with stunned silence and, at the end, with uninhibited shouts of approval from a capacity audience.