Review: Die Walkure, Gustavo Dudamel and Frank Gehry attempt Wagner history at Disney Hall

Richard Wagner’s “The Ring of the Nibelung” has been probing the morality of power and possession for a century and a half. The composer designed a revolutionary theater for the four-night epic in the provincial German town of Bayreuth. And this summer Wagnerites will climb the Green Hill to the Festival House for a 150th anniversary production of what remains the greatest immersive experience on the planet — and the most daunting theatrically and musically to execute.

“Die Walküre,” the second opera in the tetralogy, is Gustavo Dudamel’s last grand project of his tenure as Los Angeles Philharmonic music director, and last weekend Walt Disney Concert Hall became an L.A. Bayreuth.

The Bayreuth experience encompasses not just the production and performance but also a sense of place and purpose. It becomes a pilgrimage. You enter a different world. The orchestral sound comes out of a hidden pit as though from the ether. You are expected to sit in worshipful, silent awe for hours. Yet that different world may turn out to represent the one you have left.

The last Bayreuth “Ring” looked like a Netflix series taking place in a modernist woodsy villa. This summer the festival promises (or threatens?) that the stage imagery for its new anniversary production will, for the first time, be generated by AI.

Disney couldn’t be less like that. Frank Gehry said he designed it to be Los Angeles’ living room. Yet the set he designed for “Walküre” shortly before he died in December nonetheless captured Wagner’s immersive essence. Large, irregular, corpuscular clouds made of crumpled paper hung over the stage. They were strikingly lit, making them come alive. For the third act, which opens with the famous “Ride of the Valkyries,” Gehry designed paper sculpture horses in different poses of motion that, though stationary, activated the stage.

The effect was to transform an iconic space that has become a symbol of L.A.’s embrace of sky and nature, of bringing the outside inside.

Two years ago, for a new production of “Das Rheingold,” the first “Ring” opera, Gehry had designed a semi-pit for the orchestra in Disney and an elevated stage on the organ loft. This time he went further, turning the wooden organ pipes, or “French fries,” into a tree. The full effect was a Gehry wonderland.

Wagner has always been essential to L.A. His sense of story and sonics began influencing Hollywood as early as the silent era and has never ceased. John Williams’ gloriously Wagnerian soundtracks helped launch the never-ending “Star Wars” sagas.

Gehry and Williams also happen to be the two greatest L.A. artists with whom Dudamel became closest during his L.A. tenure. The way Dudamel designed his L.A. Phil “Ring” project, which he has been obsessed with for the last decade and hopes to complete, is an only-in-L.A. monument. (His final Disney show of the season is June 7, but even after he departs for New York, and Daniel Harding takes over as music director, he expects to return for short stints.)

In the summer of 2022, Dudamel staged the third act of “Walküre” at the Hollywood Bowl with green-screen video technology, allowing characters to look like they were racing through space on motorcycles in a video game. Staged by Yuval Sharon, it became a modern-day take on the L.A. Phil’s historic staging at the Hollywood Bowl a century earlier. That one had live horses, framing the venue as a place for the grandest of spectacles. Sharon also happened to have been the assistant of Achim Freyer, who staged Los Angeles Opera’s uniquely imaginative “Ring” in 2010. That led Sharon to then found the Industry and stage the echt-Wagnerian epic “Hopscotch,” turning L.A.’s streets and parks into an epic stage.

At Disney, once more and more profusely than ever, the space became the place. The orchestra in its pit, with no risers, inhabited the hall. Dudamel conducted as if transfixed. Raw when he needed storm or battle; extra excited when Valkyries cavorted with horses; effusive when emotion took over senses; tender when morality mattered. Unlike surround-sound in movie theaters which pinpoints directionality, the result here was diffusion — not eavesdropping but pure immersion.

The production by the film director Alberto Arvelo was not elaborate drama. Gods were lofty gods, not you and me. They mostly stood on the elevated stage, but occasionally came down to the catwalk in front of the orchestra. Cindy Figueroa’s costumes made them exotic figures.

Ryan Speedo Green’s Wotan made the king of the gods an exceptional presence. His dignity is impenetrable. His lust for power has bizarre ramifications. That includes siring twins who fall in love — their child, a supposed hero.

Green’s voice radiated power and defiance, fighting off the compassion he knows will spell his end. Christine Goerke, a glorious Brünnhilde (as she also was at the Bowl), filled the hall and hearts. Jessica Faselt and Jamez McCorkle as the twins Sieglinde and Siegmund, along with Soloman Howard as the frightening Hunding, made the more lyrical first act glow.

But it was the big picture, the awareness in Disney of our own environment, that made this “Walküre” singular. It’s a new Wagner for our time and place and begs for continuation through the full cycle.