E-Mail This Article to a Friend Lord of the Ring Valery Gergiev leads St. Petersburg’s ambitious White Nights Festival BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

A funny thing happened to me crossing the Neva (that’s the major river in St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad, formerly Petrograd, formerly St. Petersburg). I was in a motorboat cruising St. Petersburg’s picturesque if occasionally trash-strewn canals (like Amsterdam, this is a "Venice of the North"). Passing the side of the Hermitage — the tsars’ Winter Palace, now one of the world’s great museums — you suddenly enter the broad river, with its 18th-century buildings lining the opposite bank, last year all freshly repainted in sparkling pastels for the city’s 300th anniversary. The boat didn’t exactly have the latest safety features; the seats weren’t even bolted down. Then as we approached the far side of the choppy river, a patrol boat cut us off and made us stop in midstream. The patrolman asked to see the boatman’s papers. A few hundred rubles changed hands (a ruble is about three cents). The patrolman left all smiles, and we continued back to the canals as if nothing had happened.

This was typical of much of my first visit to Russia. The ubiquitous bureaucracy seems designed to be circumvented. That doesn’t always happen, yet some things manage to get done and even on a grand scale.

I’d been invited by the Mariinsky Theatre (renamed the Kirov under the Soviets — it was originally named for Tsarina Maria Aleksandrovna, wife of Aleksandr II) to attend part of the month-and-a-half-long series of operas, concerts, and ballets that make up the phenomenally ambitious "Stars of the White Nights Festival." (It’s summer — at 10 p.m. the sunlight is uncanny.) I had already missed a celebration by the Mariinsky (still the Kirov when it comes to the US) Ballet of the George Balanchine centennial at the very theater where the 20th century’s greatest choreographer got his start — the home, too, of such dance legends as Nijinsky and Pavlova, Nureyev and Baryshnikov. And I couldn’t stay for the series of operas by Rimsky-Korsakov and Shostakovich, not to mention others by Glinka, Tchaikovsky, and Mussorgsky (some of which premiered here), or the Stravinsky tribute, or the big-time Verdi (a Requiem and Don Carlo) — all conducted by the Mariinsky’s artistic director, Valery Gergiev, the Metropolitan Opera’s controversial principal guest conductor and the director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic.

What I came for was a complete Ring Cycle — the four operas of Richard Wagner’s epic tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, a revival of last year’s first entirely new production in Russia since 1905, performed there for the first time in German (for most of the 20th century, Russians didn’t like anything German). It became the first Russian production — maybe the first Ring Cycle ever — to be imported into Germany. Plans are afoot for tours to China and Japan, and there’s talk of a possible American visit. The New York Times’ John Rockwell saw it at Baden-Baden and reported his excitement.

It’s certainly an impressive undertaking. Also perverse, mysterious, bewildering, and frustrating — yet on many levels deeply moving. Like many things Russian, it was a thing of compromises, with inconsistent casting (Gergiev wanted to give as many of his Russian singers as possible a crack at the major roles in each opera, but they were far from equally successful, and the cast changes hurt the overall continuity), inexpert stage direction (two directors are credited, but neither seems responsible for either the conception or its realization), and insufficient stage rehearsal (one "dead" character got up before the curtain fell). During the Magic Fire Music, the superb Mikhail Kit, as Wotan, ruler of the gods (a role he’ll sing when Gergiev conducts Die Walküre at the Met next year), had a hard time keeping his balance on Brünnhilde’s "rock," a mountainous object in the form of a fallen giant, one of the elements in this "multicultural Ring," as Gergiev humorously calls it, that still has me puzzled.

The sets — bizarre, grotesque, and sometimes beautiful, a mixture of folk eclecticism and Eurotrash — were created by Russian set designer George Tsypin, whom American audiences might recognize as the designer of the Peter Sellars Don Giovanni that was set in the South Bronx and telecast on PBS. Four presiding totemic giants, with or without heads, surrounded the action and, puppetlike, bent and creaked. Some of Götterdämmerung took place under a nomad tent, some on the steeply slanting rooftop of a hut. The sources of the costumes by Tatiana Noginova (when they were identifiable at all) ranged from Scythian folk art, from the part of the Caucasus Gergiev hails from (instead of horned helmets and breastplates, the Valkyries wore the sunburst headdresses of Russian village festivals — perhaps by way of Ziegfeld), to Egyptian, Watusi, and Inuit — aboriginal and neolithic, with touches of Dior. They were all bathed in Gleb Filshtinsky’s dazzling and lurid kaleidoscope of lights. When Siegfried drank the magic love potion, the entire stage turned a pulsating purple. Not a musical phrase went by without some dramatic lighting change.

I prepared for this event by watching my DVD of the great 1980 Patrice Chéreau/Pierre Boulez Bayreuth production (with its potent political center) and by reading the excellent new Finding an Ending (Oxford), by philosophers Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht — views of the Ring that emphasize the meaning of its complex narrative. I’m still not sure what this Russian Ring is about. Is the Rainbow Bridge made up of the four fallen giants a sign that new gods have to step on the old gods on their way to power? Even a year after the opening, some parts have not yet been sufficiently worked out. Dancers wearing dainty caps of glow-in-the-dark flames seemed entirely inadequate for the music they were supposed to embody. Siegfried and Brünnhilde simply standing next to each other, staring at the conductor during their great love duet at the end of Siegfried, was more suitable for concert opera than a staged production. And yet, can any Ring production be completely satisfying? Certainly none has ever looked like this one, and when you compare it with, say, the stodgy Met version, its originality is extremely appealing.