Last night I heard Das Rheingold here at the Canadian Opera Company’s brand-spanking new Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. It’s so new the street in front of the building is still under construction, causing traffic nightmares almost as bad as the jam on the narrow stairs down from the lecture space! (There’s no lecture hall, but rather a tiered area up in the lobbies, with glass walls looking onto the street, where a University of Toronto lecturer last night played through a list of motives before the show.) But I forgive traffic problems at a company that’s doing a Ring the right way--with way too many education events! These little pre-show motif reminders are simply the tip of the iceberg. They’ve had a huge symposia series, backstage tours, Wagner movie nights, and (I’m particularly glad to see) lots of events for kids, including a huge Ring summer camp program. Their publicity is admirable. Since I got to town everywhere, not only are there banners on every street lamp and ads on every bus, all the random Joes I’ve talked to--cab drivers, waiters, a person at the waterfront--know it’s here, it’s happening, it’s OUR TOWN.

But a Ring is not, in the end, about its education events, no matter how much I might like that to be the case. Is it about singing? About music? About the choices made by directors and designers? What shall I go on and on about? This particular Ring is extra special in that it is taking the new theater for its maiden voyage; and because of the odd design team structure. Rheingold was designed and directed by Michael Levine. He has designed the other three operas, too; but he worked with three different directors. (Something like this happened in Stuttgart, a few years back, and in Riga, recently.)

So: first things first. It’s a lovely theater! Very small, very simple, not ostentatious by the slightest stretch of the imagination. But bright, open, pleasant spaces, lots of slightly tan wood. And excellent acoustics, at least (last night) from Row R. With a great performer like Richard Berkeley-Steele as Loge, I could hear and understand every single word. The clarity of the orchestral playing was remarkable; I confess I heard something last night I’ve never before heard in Rheingold, a jazzy trumpet riff reminiscent of Mahler, accompanying Loge’s complaint to Wotan in Scene Four “But then I won’t be keeping my promise to the Rhinedaughters!” “Schlimm dann stehst mit mein Versprechen!” That’s been there all these years, and I never noticed it?

I was happy to run backstage afterwards and greet some old friends from Jet City, Richard Berkely-Steele, Richard Paul Fink, Tom Truhitte, and Julie Makerov, an unusually compelling Freia with a great vocal presence. (She was our Rosalinde last winter.) There’s lots of people here I don’t know, but I’m working on that this week! Strange thing about the whole cast--before last night I had never seen a Rhinegold where Fafner was the most appealing character.

In terms of Mr. Levine’s contributions, the greatest single drawback was a lack of differentiation among the gods. Who are these characters, anyway? Costumes were vaguely late Victorian, mostly black and white, and I talked to people in the audience who couldn’t distiguish, for instance, Fricka from Freia from Erda from the many other ladies onstage--they all wore severely black dresses. It felt to me as though he must have run out of time or money midway through the last scene: Erda had no entrance to speak of, she just wandered on; there was no storm and no rainbow, and Valhalla was a small space which opened between two panels at the back of the stage.

Earlier in the production, Levine had had some really remarkable ideas. The Rhinedaughters are constantly referring to the “Bett” of the riverbed; he took that literally, and opened the opera in a billowy space that’s all sheets and pillows. Wotan, center stage, sound asleep in his bed. The three Rhinedaughters emerge out of the sheets, have a pillow fight with these weird balloon-like slow-motion pillows, and Alberich tries to crawl up out of Wotan. By the end of the scene he’s emerged, but he can’t move very fast, and most of the scene he and Wotan were stuck together like Siamese twins in all sorts of weird attitudes. The sheets are lit bluish at the beginning, but they turn all gold after a sudden cue at the first renunciation motif.

Similarly, the Valhalla of Scene Two and Nibelheim were kind of interesting. We had what Weta Workshop in New Zealand would call a ‘big-ature’ of Valhalla. There was a central rotunda (think US Capitol Building) which flew down and into place (supers/dancers took it off its ropes and set it where it belonged on a table) while others wheeled on tables with lots of extra wings (think Versailles), which took up most of the stage. At each of the turns and corners in the model castle there was a tower--they reminded me at first of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque, with all those minarets, then as I looked closer I thought of Toronto’s own CN Tower, which is just a few blocks away. Whatever it is, it’s far and away the most phallic Valhalla I’ve ever seen.

After Scene Two, the extras wheel most of the model away, but they bring the center section with the rotunda forward. A catwalk flies down, with Alberich upon it, and he drapes the sheet he stole from the river over the castle. Valhalla is now wrapped in a protective gold coating--no way it’s getting any STDs. Alberich uses it as his hoard, throughout Scene Three, masturbating with the minarets when he’s fantasizing about raping all the goddesses. The magic tricks were kind of fun: to turn invisible, he simply put on the gold helmet; he was wearing gold, and so blended into this great gold heap. That itself was lame, but was a good setup for the dragon--he puts on the helmet, and the big thing under the sheet starts wiggling here and there, in a kind of mysterious and gross way. Then, when he’s the frog, something under the sheet is hopping. All in all, it was a more explicitly sexual Nibelheim scene than I can remember (“Oh, can you be large? What about small?”) in a dreamlike and unsettling way.

We just took a city bus and harbor boat tour. Off now to high English tea! More late tonight.