His was a take on the score both muscular and swift, blessedly so for a show that ended well after midnight.

James Gaffigan, typically lively on the podium for what is his first run of a full Wagner opera, sparked up a feisty intensity that supplied the energy the staging tended to resist, pushing the drama hard but not harshly.

There is a refreshing feeling of trust to it all, a sensible desire not to get in the way of what clearly remains to these young collaborators a basically human story - and a willingness, perhaps above all, to make space for the music. Soto’s costumes hint at abstraction, rather than declaim distance as a goal. The spare set, from blueprints by the architecture and design firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero, consists of four angled walls of mottled gray - cutouts evoking a castle tower, say, but no more than evoking it. Heijboer Castañón and Winokur offer no drastic interventions in the plot, just a delicate understanding of it as a tale of intimacies, friendly and erotic alike.

Santa fe opera 2022