The Metropolitan Opera has announced that Yuval Sharon — co-founder of the revolutionary Los Angeles opera company the Industry — will direct a new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle beginning in 2028, culminating in the full four-opera cycle in 2030. Sharon also will direct a new production of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” in 2026. An opera company’s stature, and even an art capital’s cultural repute, can rise or fall depending upon its ability to mount a “Ring” cycle.
Los Angeles Opera has had but one. Its influence, for better or worse, can last decades. Although the Met has a glorious history of magnificently sung and conducted “Rings,” it has never had an important production.
Its theatrically ineffective and technically problematic last one, directed by Robert Lepage , became a running joke. Certain to shake things up, Sharon is a brilliantly disruptive Wagnerian who has staged an exceptional, transgressive “Lohengrin” for the Bayreuth Festival and an arrestingly futurist act of “Die Walküre,” from the “Ring,” at the Hollywood Bowl. L.
A. Opera’s production by the avant-garde German director Achim Freyer, on the other hand, was one of the most imaginative (and controversial) “Ring” productions attempted in the U.S.
, and Sharon was Freyer’s assistant director. The results of that “Ring,” the center of a citywide arts festival, proved decidedly mixed. The expense, which took years to pay off, put the company in what ha.