“The visual language developed across Atlanta’s Ring reached its fullest realization here. Scenic and projection designer Erhard Rom again employed a multimedia environment in which physical scenery and projected imagery continuously interacted. Throughout the evening, projections became an active storytelling element rather than decorative enhancement, creating a cinematic sense of movement during Wagner’s extended orchestral transitions and scene changes. The technique proved especially valuable in a work whose architecture frequently requires the audience to remain immersed in the narrative during lengthy orchestral spans. Rather than interrupting momentum, these interludes often became among the production’s most evocative moments.”

“…created a visual world in constant transformation. Images emerged, dissolved, and reappeared like fragments of memory. Fire, water, sky, and ruin became recurring visual motifs…”

“…..the production occupied an intermediate space where myth and psychology coexisted. The visual world often felt less like a historical setting than a landscape of memory and consequence.”

“… the production’s visual and musical elements converged with striking effectiveness. Fire and water—elements repeatedly invoked throughout the opera and highlighted in the production’s visual design—assumed their symbolic roles in the final catastrophe…..The closing moments brought a palpable sense that an enormous narrative had finally completed its arc.”

-Mark Gresham, EarRelevant

“The multimedia approach of Atlanta’s creative team…… (including the scenic and projection designer Erhard Rom, costume designer Mattie Ulrich and lighting designer Robert Wierzel) ……stage action combined with multi-level projection creating an almost holographic three- dimensional spectacle...the stage world of Wagner’s vision…. which in his day could have existed only in his imagination.”

“… the projected scenes came to the fore in the orchestral interludes, making these integral to the work’s dramatic development”

“The Atlanta team brought all their resources to bear on Wagner’s apotheosis, a cataclysm of fire and water…and hope of a new world…An epic ending indeed…. there was not a single weak link, vocally or dramatically, in this production……a world-class addition to the Wagner canon.”

-Stephen Golding, Opera Magazine

“Erhard Rom (scenic and projection designer) frames the action inside a brutal, violent society suggestive of modern fascism, rendered through looming brutalist architecture and striking digital imagery. Mattie Ullrich’s costumes — some ancient, others militaristic and unsettlingly contemporary — emphasize the timelessness of Wagner’s tale.”

“the final moments offer a surprising note of hope as nature reasserts itself amid civilization’s collapse, reaching toward an unmistakably contemporary message: There is no Planet B.”

- Pauk Hyde, ARTSATL

“The Brutalist geometry of the set design gave unmistakable fascist undertones, offering a certain political resonance and relevance, highlighting the theme of power and corruption.”

“Visually striking from start to finish, the Atlanta production skillfully balanced traditional imagery without pushing too hard to be novel, while still embracing modern technology and social relevance. Projections designed by Erhard Rom were cast on a massive canvas that spanned the stage, digitally realizing some of the composer’s more complicated stage directions and pushing past the limitations of physical props.”

“The projections added a visual spectacle to the orchestral interludes. During the robust performance of Siegfried’s Rhine Journey, the stage shimmered with images of the river and dancing cascades.”

“a luminous projection of the moon cast above the funeral procession is an image I won’t soon forget. Things could only go up in flames from there, and a torch-bearing Brünnhilde ignited the final immolation scene. Searingly dramatic and with glorious orchestration to boot, it reached a close worthy of…Wagner’s massive conception…”

-Sam Jacobson, BACHTRACK

“….scenic and projection designer Erhard Rom has come up with nifty ways to suggest these supernatural phenomena, especially the final conflagration, engulfing the stage image in digital flame- a vision of apocalypse.”

“Zvulun and Rom apply some revisionist touches that veer away from Wagner’s iconography but work to illuminate the drama. The Norns deliver their auguries from a decaying library, it’s dusty tomes presumably containing the history of the world whose end they foretell. The Gibichungs’ Hall is a brutalist office complex spectacularly realized in Rom’s hyper-realistic, seemingly three- dimensional projections”

-Fred Cohn, Musical America

“The integration of physical scenery with an 80-by-40-foot LED wall was impressively persuasive in using digital space to extend the spare theatrical architecture.”

“Especially effective was the cold and coercive atmosphere of the Gibichung palace. Massive physical piers and blackened framing opened onto projections of receding slabs, catwalks, windows, and voids. Hagen’s nocturnal scene acquired a chamber-horror intimacy, with Alberich creeping out of the upstage shadows. In Act III, the Rhine seemed to return as an underworld, bathed in yellowish light and now degraded almost beyond hope.”

-Thomas May, Memeteria

“….mix of tradition and innovation….”

“The setting is realized in stark Brutalist style…. Using a combination of physical stage elements and digital projections on a massive LED screen, the hall expands into a sprawling complex that appears to stretch into infinity.”

“Valhalla is depicted through digital recreations of tall, gleaming glass towers, the likes of which can be found in … any…metropolis. During the ‘Immolation Scene’, Brünnhilde sings alone on the stage, engulfed in a raging fire with her steed Grane furiously racing through the flames.”

“Götterdämmerung succeeds on every level.”

-Rick Perdian, Seen & Heard International

“consistent in its balance of the world of Nature, associated with the hero and heroine, and the fascistic realm of the Gibichungs. Clad all in black, they maintained cold, rigidly Brutalist surroundings (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe seemed to be their architect), with omnipresent concrete juxatposed by designer Erhard Rom—who also did the many fine projections”

-David McKee, David McKee