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Met’s New Lepage Ring Cycle to Feature Voigt’s First Brünnhildes, Heppner & Terfel
January 09, 2007

The Metropolitan Opera’s new Ring cycle, which will be directed by pioneering Canadian theater director Robert Lepage, is to feature American soprano Deborah Voigt singing her first Brünnhildes, tenor Ben Heppner performing the demanding role of Siegfried and Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel as Wotan, the company’s general manager, Peter Gelb, revealed on Friday evening at a New York Times panel discussion.

The 2010-11 season — the second season that Gelb will have planned in its entirety — will present the first opera in Lepage’s Ring cycle; a full performance-cycle of Wagner’s tetralogy is slated for the following, 2011-12, season. The Met’s music director James Levine is scheduled to conduct.

Lepage has said that his Ring will be influenced by a particularly Nordic aesthetic, and will evoke the “dramatic and mythic coast of Iceland, a place where the land shook and spoke back to the early Viking settlers.”

“At a time when global warming and climatic change make us more conscious than ever of the fragility of this lonely planet, the Ring’s romantic power to evoke the conflicting forces between man and the divinities of nature makes more than a lot of sense,” Lepage is quoted as saying in press materials issued by the company. “When you stage these works you are not only staging a new production, you must create a new world that explains the old one.”

The Met’s current Otto Schenk Ring production, which premiered with a performance of Walküre on opening night of the company’s 1986-87 season, will be given one more full revival — as part of the company’s 2008-09 season — before it is formally retired.

More information can be found at The Metropolitan Opera.

Opera News > The Met Opera Guild.