<<  -- 5 --  Roderic Dunnett    MESMERISING

The one bit of this Ring that never quite acquired a marble edge -- although one rooted for him as far as one (sanely) could -- was Matthew Elton Thomas's Siegfried. I originally hoped his lumpen idiot -- a bit like watching Elliott Gould play Caliban -- was a cleverly apt piece of casting; after all, Siegfried is more or less just that, a sword-wielding lagerless lout and bear-of-little-learning (how much more entertaining an evening one would pass with Mime), an automaton almost (here with visible shades of Boris Karloff), whose reactions and responses rank minus one on the Pavlov's dog scale. It would be difficult to imagine a less likely Held to get you out of a scrape than this shambling, check-shirted, second-hand car-mending hill-billy, who would find his natural home as a lumberjack chorus member in Paul Bunyan.

One could ignore all this and cheerfully go with the flow -- he's a personable enough fellow, and you feel some sympathy for his predicament, especially as Mime mingles his potion -- if Elton Thomas would only sing in tune; a third of his notes were brazenly off-beam, and worse still, it always seemed to be the ones that really mattered. You're just beginning to warm to the chap when you begin to wonder if the entire orchestra is out of kilter. One admires his pluck in the role -- and the voice soars across the reduced orchestra wholly admirably; but this Siegfried now seems about as apt as casting Bronder as Wotan or (the immortal) Florence Foster-Jenkins as Fricka.

That said, the dragon scene was magical, the waking duet exciting, and the lovers' later get-together pretty energising too, if only because he can match Brünnhilde blow by blow for belt. Still, when he turns out to be a cad, too (Elton Thomas does his Götterdämmerung hobnobbing with the Gibichungs rather well) -- that's just about what you'd have guessed. The feistier woman gets dumped : so much for feminism.

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