★★★★☆The waters eddied dangerously in Valery Gergiev’s concert performance of Das Rheingold with the Mariinsky Opera. The low E flat that opens the prologue to the Ring cycle was quick to heat to a slow boil. The chording above it was thick with the silt of unsettled intonation: a gamey blend of bright and dark Gs and B flats from cloudy Wagner tubas, shrill flutes and pinched oboes. Chaotic and unkempt, with sung German that ranged from idiomatic to barely intelligible, and passages of perverse slowness and reckless velocity, Gergiev’s Wagner was nonetheless thrilling, and was powered throughout by…

Source: The Times August 16, 2016 16:12 UTC