 While
Parsifal’s home shrine of Bayreuth seems increasingly unwilling
to shed design and historical baggage, François Girard’s
production for New York’s Metropolitan Opera simply asserts
Wagner’s core values of compassion, understanding and sanctity
without distortion. The grail brotherhood, white-shirted and
separated from the community’s veiled women by a stream flowing
bloody and/or polluted until the end, meets at the start. It’s a
larger audience for guardian Gurnemanz’s narrative of past
misdeeds than intended – but then the vast Met stage is no place
for intimate confessional. And the whole journey, crossing the
bloody pool of Klingsor’s dark kingdom to hard-won redemption,
is cleanly proportioned against the changing videoscapes of
Peter Flaherty’s projections.
Only Hans Hollman’s vision
for Zurich sometimes surpasses Girard’s on DVD, chiefly in the
Act I ritual, but it can’t boast as uniformly remarkable a cast.
Kaufmann is the Parsifal we’ve all been waiting for, plausible
as handsome lad and stricken wanderer, even if the voice travels
contrariwise from dark to bright. Matching his agonies are those
of Peter Mattei’s Amfortas and Katarina Dalayman’s lustrous,
secure Kundry, while the relaxed, minimal gestures of René
Pape’s Gurnemanz bely the vocal armoury he unleashes in the last
Act. Gatti’s pacing isn’t my ideal – inclining to
Knappertsbusch’s Bayreuth deliberation rather than Haitink’s
model naturalness in Zurich – but on its own terms it’s
remarkable. In the short interval chats likeable bass Eric Owens
gets thoughtful comments from the main personalities involved.
|
