Opera North has just announced exciting plans for a series of concert performances of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, beginning in June 2011 with Das Rheingold, followed by Die Walküre in 2012, Siegfried in 2013 and finally Götterdämmerung in 2014. Building upon the success of recent concert performances of Nabucco, Salome, and last year's Elektra, which starred the outstanding Susan Bullock, Opera North's Ring Cycle will be performed in Leeds Town Hall, The Sage in Gateshead, The Symphony Hall in Birmingham and The Lowry in Salford Quays.
The Music Director for Opera North, Richard Farnes, will conduct Wagner's mammoth tetralogy. After receiving glowing praise for his handling of Strauss's challenging Elektra, it is reassuring to also hear that the maestro will be staying on at Opera North until at least 2014. Farnes had this to say about their undertaking of The Ring: "This will be the first time in Opera North's history that we will be able to bring The Ring to our audiences across the North and the Midlands and reaffirms our commitment to the development of talent and to providing opportunity for emerging artists. These are some of the most challenging operatic roles in any repertoire." The reference to emerging artists is a unique aspect of this ambitious plan. Opera North is looking to blend experienced and new artists in this repertoire, so as to offer up new and exciting possibilities. Extended coaching and public masterclasses (to be held in the Howard Assembly Room in Leeds) will form part of the preparation period for each of the operas. In addition to this, Veteran Wotan, Sir John Tomlinson, has also joined the team in the capacity of Artistic Consultant for this project.
Any Ring Cycle, whether staged or not, is invariably a finanically prohibitive excercise. However, Opera North appears to have largely overcome this hurdle, thanks to the support and co-operation of The Sage in Gateshead and The Symphony Hall in Birmingham, as well as from a consortium of private supporters.
Casting will be announced in April 2010 however, the performance dates for Das Rheingold, have already been released:
Leeds Town Hall: Saturday 18 June 2011
Symphony Hall Birmingham: Friday 24 June 2011
The Sage Gateshead: Sunday 26 June 2011
Leeds Town Hall: Wednesday 29 June 2011
Leeds Town Hall: Friday 1 July 2011
The Lowry Salford Quays: Saturday 10 September 2011
Antony Lias
Opera Britannia
invited to join composer Anna Meredith, sound designer Sam Godin and the classically trained Indian singer Falu, in an evening where they can record Satyagraha-inspired loops that will form part of the “Remix”. 
even as warmly as they did to Thomas Adès’ The Tempest. Both these works were broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, and each of these broadcasts has been cleaned up and recently issued on double CD (Adès on EMI, 2009; MacMillan on Chandos, 2010). Both operas also have composers who enjoy successful careers as conductors, but while Adès conducted The Royal Opera House forces at Covent Garden, it was unfortunate that on the night when The Sacrifice was broadcast from the Wales Millennium Theatre with Welsh National Opera, MacMillan was unwell and was therefore forced to hand over the reins to Anthony Negus.
of recession by the magnificent margin of point squit of a zillionth, it was nice actually to encounter something quite so uncomplicatedly positive as her recital. Opera singers, in the up-close and personal context of a recital room, fall into extremely contrasting categories, ranging from the all-singing, all-dancing Ethel Merman-esque firecrackers (Cecilia Bartoli) to the half-barmy and catatonic (um, better exercise some discretion here, I suppose) by way of sassy, sweet ‘n simple, straightforward or sepulchral, the raunchy or the reverential, the bullish or the businesslike. 
Covent Garden, the Metropolitan and, as preserved on this DVD, the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, each of the original directors was no longer around to supervise his show's latest outing. This matters less, of course, in stagings that cleave close to the scenic and theatrical givens of the work as conceived by Hofmannsthal and Strauss in microscopic detail, than in ones like that under consideration here that avail themselves of varying degrees of liberty and licence.
