DALLAS – Fabio Luisi wanted his Ring Cycle to be heard and not seen.<\/p>\n
Wagner\u2019s four-opera epic \u201cDer Ring des Nibelungen,\u201d approaching the 150th anniversary of its premiere in 1876, has been reinterpreted and deconstructed by directors finding various meanings in the conflicts among gods, humans, giants and dwarfs.<\/p>\n
While most new recordings are on video, Luisi led his Dallas Symphony Orchestra in concert performances that were released on 13 compact discs by Delos on May 22 and are available on streaming services.<\/p>\n
\u201cWagner conceived this as a total immersion in visual and acoustic, but I could focus really only on the music, and this was the point actually \u2014 not to be distracted by staging and not to have to cope with maybe strange ideas of staging,\u201d Luisi said. \u201cI think the music tells everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Luisi became DSO music director in 2020 and broached the idea while dining two years later with Morton H. Meyerson, a longtime board member.<\/p>\n
\u201cFabio came back from lunch sort of giddy but sort of sheepishly saying: `Do you think that this would ever be possible?\u201d recalled Kim Noltemy, the Dallas CEO at the time. \u201cSo, I said, well, let\u2019s give it a try. So, we called around to see if there were people who wanted to support it and did a budget.\u201d<\/p>\n
After securing a waiver from the orchestra allowing for the needed rehearsals and performance length, recordings were made during four concerts from May 1-5 and six more from Oct. 5-20. Each opera was performed two or three times. American singers featured prominently, with Mark Delavan as Wotan, Lise Lindstrom as Br\u00fcnnhilde and Sara Jakubiak as Sieglinde, part of a cast that included Christopher Ventris (Siegmund), Daniel Johansson (Siegfried), Deniz Uzun (Fricka), T\u00f3mas T\u00f3masson (Alberich), Michael Laurenz (Mime) and Stephen Milling (Hagen).<\/p>\n Delavan sang Wotan at New York\u2019s Metropolitan Opera in 2013 after Luisi took over from an ailing James Levine in Robert Lepage\u2019s much-maligned production staged on a 45-ton set of 24 rotating planks.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re accessible and they know that we\u2019re hungry and we have a chip on our shoulders,\u201d Delavan said. \u201cWhat conductors like about American singers is their technique is sound. Even a European conductor would say: Well, I\u2019m going to give up some of the communication skills, only one degree of separation with the language, but I\u2019m going to get a solid technique, and I\u2019m going to get pretty good acting chops.\u201d<\/p>\n Lindstrom has been in Atlanta to sing in its production of \u201cG\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung,\u201d the concluding night of the tetralogy, leading to what is being billed as the first complete Ring Cycles in the America South in 2029.<\/p>\n \u201cThe wonderful thing about it is the intimacy between the orchestra and us, because we\u2019re not separated by a chunk of stage or a chunk a scenery or a chunk of concept,\u201d she said of the Dallas performances. \u201cAnd for people like me, who have had the opportunity to perform the role before, I have all those iterations to rely on for my portrayal that I can sort of filter myself through.\u201d Luisi, 67, first heard a Ring recording in Georg Solti\u2019s famous studio set with the Vienna Philharmonic from 1958-65. He also admires Karl B\u00f6hm\u2019s live recording from the 1967 Bayreuth Festival and Marek Janowski\u2019s 1980-83 studio version with the Staatskapelle Dresden.<\/p>\n He first conducted Ring when he was music director of Dresden\u2019s Semperoper from 2007-10. Luisi\u2019s Dallas performances include more legato and softer sound than his rendition a decade earlier at the Met. He tries to keep an arc from the first notes of \u201cDas Rheingold\u201d to the final strains of \u201cG\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI have a deeper understanding about the meaning of this piece,\u201d he said. \u201cI consider the ring to be a big Bruckner symphony. So we have the introduction, then we have the first movement, this is \u201cWalk\u00fcre,\u201d which happens to be a slow movement, and then we have the scherzo, which is \u201cSiegfried,\u201d of course, and then the long, long, last movement. There is a unity.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" DALLAS – Fabio Luisi wanted his Ring Cycle to be heard and not seen. Wagner\u2019s four-opera epic \u201cDer Ring des Nibelungen,\u201d approaching the 150th anniversary of its premiere in 1876, has been reinterpreted and deconstructed by directors finding various meanings in the conflicts among gods, humans, giants and dwarfs. While most new recordings are on … Continue reading Fabio Luisi and Dallas strip Wagner\u2019s Ring Cycle of staging and issue audio recording<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[164],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1514661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-state-news"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-12 18:15:33","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1514661"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1514662,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514661\/revisions\/1514662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1514661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1514661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1514661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAmericans in cast fill big roles<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nA younger Luisi listened to famous renditions<\/strong><\/p>\n