There are arresting moments in the physical production. The sound was thin, murky and diffuse, like a cloudy broth the brasses were inelegant even when not flubbing. While Philippe Jordan’s conducting had moment-by-moment fleetness, and agile responsiveness to the singers, there was no sense of long-arching accumulations of intensity, little variety of mood or color. If only the orchestra had been nearly so characterful. Lepage didn’t even convey the basic plot - let alone the spectacle’s larger issues, why it should matter. Falling well short of his goal of presenting Wagner’s stage directions literally, Mr. Years of attention seemed to have gone into expensive, wonky animated projections that splashed onto the seesawing set to suggest the cycle’s shifting locales, from the bowels of Nibelheim to Valhalla in the clouds. The star soprano could barely make it through. Plainly afraid of being injured, the singers seemed ill at ease, the acting an afterthought. Millions of dollars - and a reinforcement of the theater’s stage - in the making, the 90,000-pound set kept malfunctioning. When it was new at the Met, nearly a decade ago, Mr. I hadn’t thought it possible: Robert Lepage’s much-warred-over production of the “Ring” now makes for decent drama. His words rang true as I watched the four-opera “Ring” over four evenings, 18 hours in all, at the Metropolitan Opera last week, the finale of the company’s two-month Wagnerian immersion. “Today you’ve witnessed it,” the god Wotan tells his wife in Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen.” “Learn that a thing can suddenly happen that’s never happened before.”
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