As competent as Gerhard Siegel is, he’s no dwarf. In this production, he’s rather avuncular. He’s got glasses (we’re out of the myth-world right there) and a nice apron—almost a Gepetto trying to teach his Pinocchio how to behave. He sort of acts scared of the bear, but not really. He doesn’t cringe, he doesn’t cajole, he doesn’t even really bewail. He doesn’t seem sly or resourceful, or confident of his cleverness. And listening to the many uglifying “character” gestures he makes with his voice while watching his physical representation, we ask “Why is he singing like that? Doesn’t seem to go together.” But more on the vocal typing below.

In the case of Mime’s brother, Alberich, the vocal and physical behaviors do coincide. But that is partly because in this imagining, Alberich is just an angry, salt of-the-earth blue-collar guy—a jobless factory worker, perhaps—who steps out of his own opening in the Act 2 wall of planks (not a rocky cleft) to walk about the bare forestage and register his bitterness in straightforward, manly tones. There’s nothing to suggest that a Nibelung is any different from, say, your local cable-repair man. As for the Wanderer, he’s a pretty good-looking fellow who carries himself well in everyday terms, but without anything in his bearing to suggest godliness, disguised or declared, or any consciousness of mission. And Erda? She’s a woman in a spangly dress who faces front and sings, not a semi-conscious, past-it-all earth spirit.

These folks are all coming onstage with the earnest intention of carrying out their assignments as they have been given to understand them. Lacking in all cases is the “heavy,” mythic element of their identities, an awareness that they are bringing with them something larger than even their usual operatic selves, and of fulfilling an important function in the telling of a story of universal fate. They avoid the old clichés, but replace them with nothing of theatrical import.

And so, to Philippe Jordan and the Met orchestra. Here I must, in the name of repertorial integrity, enter a caveat. Since very little seat selection remained by the time single-ticket sales opened, I was obliged to descend from my customary Balcony section to the Orchestra floor, specifically to Row X on the house left side, a couple of rows in under the Parterre overhang. The sightlines were superb. The sound was not. As others have recounted, the plank construction—reinforced for this run, we are told—functioned as a kind of heavy-metal acoustical shell for the singers, bouncing their voices out at us with particular reinforcement of the upper partials. For the Bandsmen, however, no such assistance was available, and all through the night I longed for the sense of orchestral texture wafting up from the pit and melding with the voices to form a musically coherent whole. So, although I have over the years sat in just about every area of the Met auditorium, the imbalance here was so extreme that I hesitate to make a definitive statement on the lack of sheer presence in the orchestral sound, except to register it as a fact from this location.