[Photo/China Daily]

The 24-hour Ring by Tyrolean Festival Erl and Gustav Kuhn

Date: Oct 17－11 pm; Oct 18－11 am

Venue: Shanghai Symphony Orchestra Hall

Price: 280-680 yuan

As the stage director and producer, Gustav Kuhn uses a modern dress setting with the resultant anachronisms. The gods are a set of cocktail drinking hedonists, with Donner as a competitive hammer-thrower and Froh rigged out in golfing gear. The Giants are baseball and ice-hockey players respectively and Loge is a nattily suited fixer with a mobile phone. Besides, Kuhn's use of the available space makes this opera vivid: The Nibelungs play their anvils from the side aisles, and then run through the whole hall when terrified by Alberich; characters often enter from behind the audience; Siegfried's boat is carried down the center aisle by the firemen, and horn players pop up in the audience.