I doubt it - the whole principle of an "international" opera-house (as compared to a "company" house) is that there is almost no "company" at all...  the only people on contract are a smallish team of "comprimario" singers.  The ROH prefers to work on a "cherry-picking" basis for casting, selecting "the best in the world" to come and do only what they excel in.  It couldn't keep them on-salary if it wanted to,  nor would it have the roles season-through for them to sing.  Once this RING is over, Wagnerian singers will be surplus to requirements at the ROH for a while.  And the ROH public pay for exactly this kind of set-up. 

Whether they ARE the "best in the world", or whether the way in which productions are quickly rehearsed with a team which hasn't met before and won't meet again produces the best results remains an open question.  My own feeling is that there are not monochromic answers to these questions,  and each case has a different answer.   Casting operas which depend first-and-foremost on grandi voci - for example the upcoming DON CARLO at ROH - is inevitably going to come-off best in a "cherry-picked for the role" set-up...  the chances a company would have a star Verdian tenor cooling his heels in the corridor and singing small parts in other stuff meanwhile are low indeed.  Conversely, other repertoire - let's say Janacek - seems to prosper under a "company" set-up.  Having said that, the ROH have done some fine Janacek performances.  Sadly it all comes down to money in the end - if there were an infinite pot of lucre to fund uncompromised excellence,  these choices might crop up less?   But even so, there will always be a public hungry to see "stars", and not the same old familiar faces...  even if the familiar faces are good ones....

Thanks for this, Reiner - I'd have missed it otherwise.

One obvious question to the Simon Heffer "follow Wagner's stage instructions" school - what do you do when there aren't any?  I've just had a quick skim through my score of Gotterdammerung and what seems to happen is that Wagner sets the scene and then throws in the occasional comment - there are pages and pages with nothing at all.  So, during their love duet, faced with the absence of stage directions, do Siegfried and Brunnhilde just stand and sing, or what?  And wouldn't that approach be rather, er, boring?

And - to take for me one of the most powerful scenes in the Ring - the scene where Waltraute visits Brunnhilde.  One looks for the stage instructions ... and there aren't any.  But the music clearly tells us that emotionally there is an awful lot going on here.  Doesn't Heffer want a director and singers to seek to portray the complexity of the relationship between the sisters who have gone such separate ways?

Reading this piece I really wondered whether Heffer and his ilk are actually afraid of the Ring - he seems to want an anodyne Ring without challenge or provocation, providing comforting stage pictures which serve to place distance between the audience and this profoundly subversive work.  Heffer's Ring in my view is no Ring at all

It sounds to me like Heffer didn't understand the purpose of the article...either that, or it was inadequately explained to him.

That said, I'm not unsympathetic to his viewpoint and am glad that he's stuck his head above the parapet to defend Otto Schenk's production....which I still think is an excellent introduction for someone new to the Ring.

And, let it be remembered, Heffer is a conservative with a small and large 'c', so his views shouldn't surprise us.....though Wieland Wagner, whom he obviously admires, could hardly be spoken of in the same terms.  Though I do wonder if Heffer (who was born in 1960) ever actually saw any of WW's productions....

Personally, I'm happy to watch a 'radical' Ring if the concept has been properly thought out and if the stage pictures emerge naturally from the text.  I've only seen the Chereau Walkure and that was some years ago, but it looked impressive to me.  Couldn't stand the botched fist (Gotz Friedrich?) production that was on BBC2 in 1990, though...