The Met'sRing and the Duke'sQueenie Pie

MUSIC

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For glamour in the cast of the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Wagner's Ring—the first installment, Die Walkure, premieres when the season begins this month—look to the impassioned Hildegard Behrens, a West German soprano who gives us something rare on the operatic stage: dramatic truth. She might not pour out the traditional Wagnerian vocal flood, but Behrens blazes with a flame that's surprising and sometimes almost wild. The Ring is the toughest challenge the Met—or any other opera house—can face, and after last year's less than wonderful press and ticket sales, this production should revive both its critics and its audience. Besides Behrens it's got Otto Schenk and Gunther Schneider-Siemssen, who as director and designer of Wagner's Tannhauser some years back devised a stunning brand of realism that's at once true to the nineteenth-century spirit of the work and breathtakingly fresh.

GERGORY SANDOW

Metropolitan Opera House. New York. (9122-317)

You've never heard of the opera Queenie Pie, because Duke Ellington died before he finished it. He wrote it for public TV and meant to double as narrator (between musical numbers), telling the tale of an aging Harlem beauty queen who seeks the Fountain of Youth and instead finds truth of the spirit. The American Music Theater Festival will produce the world premiere this month in Philadelphia, but without Ellington the idea of a narrator didn't seem to make much sense. Solution: commission George David Weiss—who wrote the lyrics for such songs as "Lullaby of Birdland"—to write the libretto Queenie Pie might have had if Ellington had conceived it for the stage from the start. This means that the work in effect needs to be created anew, but Ellington's complex, colloquial magic makes the production worth betting on. —G.S. American Music Theater Festival. Philadelphia. (9/9-9/28)