War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco
June 17, 2018

Anyone who considers bringing climate change and man’s destruction of the planet into Wagner’s Ring merely a hippie-dippy 21st-century directorial fad need look no further than the poem for Götterdämmerung. As reported by the three Norns, the mutilated world-ash-tree has withered and been cut down, the spring has dried up. Add merciless images of factories and power plants belching acrid smoke and a river bed strewn with plastic bottles and you have the visual background to the final part of Francesca Zambello’s cohesively argued and increasingly impressive production of Wagner’s mighty tetralogy.

Sarah Cambidge (Third Norn), Ronnita Miller (First Norn) and Jamie Barton (Second Norn). Photo © Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera

With an echo of Silicon Valley run wild, the Prologue opens in a burst of visual electronics (S. Katy Tucker’s effective video once again). Here, a trio of visually-impaired engineers grapple with a mountain of unwieldy cabling in a futile attempt to keep up with the rampant advance of micro-technology. Zambello’s Norns (Ronnita Miller, Jamie Barton and Sarah Cambidge) are the hapless ghosts in this machine and they couldn’t be better sung. Impeccable diction...