Jamie Barton provides the dramatic spark as the haunted, raddled Azucena — she chomps into text and music alike with wonderful vibrancy.

American mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton was a glorious Brangäne, filling out Wagner’s vocal lines with her plush, rich, warmly burnished mezzo voice.

Jamie Barton couldn't have been more captivating, full of pain and longing. Some of her sentences had a beautiful pleading intensity, made all the more powerful by the graceful control she displayed.

Jamie Barton’s Mother Marie couched difficult truths in a plush voice — warm and consoling but also exacting and uncompromising.

The most musical moments of the show. What intentionality in the pathos of her Amneris, what suffering! What a moment in her supplications to the priests! What accents, what fury... and what penetrating intensity!

As Ježibaba, Jamie Barton relished her witchy duties and gave an unstinting performance with clarion tone especially at both ends of her voice.

Sovereign of legato, the American mezzo deploys silver and copper colors throughout her register, whose iridescent reflections go so far as to create light.

Jamie Barton made a generously warm-voiced and sensitive Angel, rising to the most glorious final “Alleluia” at the Proms in half a century.

Barton’s magnificent Brangäne was as authoritatively acted as it was movingly sung, an embodiment of the role in a production that fixed relentless attention on its principals.

A better cast imaginable for Das Rheingold is hardly imaginable. The chance to hear the American mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton in one of her best roles, that of Wotan's wife Fricka, is very special.