San Francisco to bring back Zambello’s Ring in 2028
San Francisco Opera has been hinting at it for several years, and it was finally officially announced that the company will mount Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in June 2028 Three complete cycles are planned, with additional performances of each of the four operas in seasons leading up to it.
Eun Sun Kim, only four years into her contract as the company’s music director, will be conducting her first complete Ring cycle. In the recent announcement before media and donors Kim noted that she has worked as an assistant on previous cycles, including three at the Bayreuth Festival.
She has been pointing toward this with her first three operas in her first years here. The three Wagner operas she has conducted here reflect the trajectory of Wagner’s increasingly complex composing: Lohengrin (in 2023). Wagner’s first successful opera, followed by Tristan und Isolde (in 2024), written when the composer set aside Siegfried (the third of the Ring’s operas) before its third act and returned to it with much more complex and expressive music. His last, Parsifal (last performance 13 November), she suggested, raised the bar even higher.
American bass-baritone Brian Mulligan, announced as Wotan, and New Zealand tenor Simon O’Neill as Siegfried both have delivered brilliant work in those recent performances in San Francisco. In performances I have reviewed Mulligan excelled as Amfortas in Parsifal and Telramund in Lohengrin, and tenor O’Neill was especially moving as Tristan and powerful as Lohengrin. American soprano Tamara Wilson will be making her company debut as Brünnhilde. I reviewed her winningly detailed performance in Santa Fe Opera’s Die Walküre earlier this year.
The remaining cast will be announced over the next year or so, said general director Matthew Shilvock, who joked that no amount of bribery would get him or his staff to leak the choices.
The production will be Francesca Zambello’s, shared with Washington National Opera. Built on American images and references, it was seen here in 2011 and 2018. Zambello has a long history in San Francisco, dating from 1983 when, as an assistant director, she pioneered projected titles, writing them for the debut of Nicholas Lenhoff’s Ring production (1983-1985). Zambello updated her production in 2018 with new background projections, among other tweaks, and presumably will update it again for 2028.
Zambello has directed a long list of other operas here, starting with La voix humaine in 1986. More recently her San Francisco assignments have included Carmen, Faust, La bohème, Prince Igor, Luisa Miller, Jenůfa, Porgy and Bess, Show Boat, Aida, and premieres of Christopher Theofanidis’s Heart of a Soldier and Marco Tutino’s Two Women.
The 2028 cycles are planned for 13–18 June, 20–26 June and 27 June-2 July. Dates for the standalone performances and possible streaming availabilities are to be determined.
Click here for the official press release.
Harvey Steiman
Featured Image: scenes from Francesca Zambello’s Ring cycle (2018)