Dresdner Festspielorchester & Concerto Köln perform Wagner’s “Siegfried” at the Lucerne Festival

With "Siegfried", the third work of Richard Wagner’s "Der Ring des Nibelungen" was performed. The concert took place on September 12 as part of the Lucerne Festival.

At the heart of the project is the close connection between scholarly research and musical practice. The aim is to reconstruct how Wagner envisioned his Ring and how it might have sounded. Scholars work directly with the conductor, orchestra members, and singers. The project also involves the meticulous reconstruction of historical instruments and their playing techniques, as well as the rediscovery of a historical approach to text, which differs significantly from modern interpretative practices: singers in Wagner’s time not only used less vibrato but also employed a wide range of dramatic expression, extending even to spoken passages.

On stage were tenor Thomas Blondelle (Siegfried), baritone Thomas Ebenstein (Mime), bass-baritone Derek Welton (Wanderer), baritone Nick Mogg (Alberich), bass-baritone Hanno Müller-Brachmann (Fafner), mezzo-soprano Gerhild Romberger (Erda), soprano Åsa Jäger (Brünnhilde), and a soloist from the Tölzer Knabenchor (Forest Bird), all of whom captivated the audience with their impressive performances.

All four works of the Ring cycle will be completed by 2026, marking the 150th anniversary of the premiere at the Bayreuth Festival. This historically informed interpretation is expected to shed new light on the cycle.

 

Below are reviews of the above-mentioned performance:

"All the more powerfully, the music paints the - psychological - scenes. The double basses scrape, the bassoons, oboes, and clarinets sound like voices from another world, the trumpets shift from venomous bickering to the golden jubilation of the sword motif, and the cellos weave silky sounds like a consort of viols. The most astonishing thing remained that, despite the transparency created for the voices, the orchestra demonstrated an enormous, indeed audibly heightened, percussive force."
Luzerner Zeitung, 15.09.2025, Georg Rudiger

"In this orchestra under Nagano’s direction, this illusion does not occur. The individual instruments emerge almost figuratively as their own theatrical actors. Only the forest-like weaving of the strings on gut strings retains the delicate magic of a sound whose origin cannot be unraveled."
FAZ, 15.09.2025, Jan Brachmann

"Also, Richard Wagner’s concert version of 'Siegfried' on historical instruments under Kent Nagano – a project of the Dresden Music Festival – combines the familiar with the new. The orchestral part achieves a rarely heard transparency, which allows the singers to perform more freely and without any forcing."
Badische Zeitung, 15.09.2025, Urs Mattenberger

The Wagner Cycles
A project of the Dresden Music Festival under the artistic direction of Jan Vogler and Kent Nagano