This is a spectacular Tristan and for one overriding reason: Nina Stemme, whose Isolde is the best since the great days of Waltraut Meier.
      I have heard Stemme sing Isolde before, but her voice has since opened up, combining her previous mastery of both lyric and dramatic soprano with the fabled fullness, warmth, and steely clarity of the Nordic vocal world, as well as its intimation of some vast and charmed hinterland. She perfectly places every note, from its inception. Not for her the all too common attempt to feel one’s way to a note – its pitch, its volume, its colour, its mood – before actually finding it. After nearly four hours of music, her sound in the Liebestod was as fresh and focussed as if she had arrived just to deliver this one, notoriously difficult, ‘aria’. Her vocal line was uninterrupted, despite the many emotions Isolde must convey in addition to rage, contempt, love, betrayal, and tenderness. And, one should not omit to mention, almost every word of this marathon part could be understood. If this reviewer seems in the grip of purple prose he should on this occasion be forgiven.
      The same cannot be said of her Tristan, Ben Heppner. Heppner can do this role better. He was lacklustre and nerve-wrackingly unreliable in quality. He was too cautious. He seemed tired and by the third act drained. Tristans are a dying breed (no pun intended) and Heppner with his lyrical yet powerful tenor voice is one of the few who can still sing the role to perfection. What happened?
      Sophie Koch as Brangaene, Isolde’s maid, re-thought a well-worn part. Brangaene is frequently sung in a slightly weepy way, which is understandable in the sense that she, more than any other character in the opera, perceives the inexorable drive of fate towards the lovers’ deaths, and the grief into which this will plunge the good King Marke, the man to whom Tristan is supposed to deliver Isolde as the new queen. But Brangaene is also a gutsy woman who manipulates fate so that the nascent love between the two principals might speak before they have to die, and Koch consummately conveyed this ingenuity and sense of command.
      But it wasn’t entirely a woman’s evening. Michael Volle as Tristan’s devoted retainer, Kurwenal, imparted refinement and knowingness to a figure often portrayed as nothing more than doltishly loyal, and he phrased with great beauty. John Tomlinson as ever dominated the stage with his presence, if no longer with his once-unsurpassed Wagnerian voice. But he was moving as the betrayed, humiliated and ultimately generous king.
      The new production of Christof Loy, the German director, is clever: a curtain, aided by imaginative lighting design (by Olaf Winter), divides the stage into a rear section, encasing the quotidian world of individuals going about their social and courtly business without much reflection, and a bare front set on which the lovers’ drive to escape the realm of light and life for a metaphysical reality of darkness and death takes place. Perhaps the curtain moves to and fro a little too often – somewhere in the third act one starts to feel that the point about the division between the two realms has now been made beyond all reasonable doubt – but this is an absorbing and original production, though the chorus of boos for the director and his team suggested that many thought otherwise.
      One mundane but hardly trifling point: so much of the action takes place at the far left of the stage, including most of the dialogue between Tristan and Isolde, and even the Liebestod itself, that anyone on the wrong side of Covent Garden’s horseshoe-shaped auditorium is unable to see it. This is a real oversight and all Loy’s innovation (including the complex physical relations between Tristan and Isolde themselves, who in most productions barely touch each other) could have been achieved without it.
      Finally, the orchestra under Antonio Pappano again lavished on us the rewards of years of hard work under their musical director. Their playing was beautifully articulated throughout, the balance outstanding, and even when, in the second act, the tempi became a little hectic, this never obscured the score.
Simon May