Review of Opera North's Parsifal at the Bridgewater Hall

 

Richard Farness conducting the Orchestra of Opera North in Parsifal

The first of Opera North’s concert hall presentations of Parsifal was a magnificent musical experience, but, to anyone who saw the fully staged version in Leeds, it also showed how much the resources of a real theatre were absent.

Of course you never miss what you didn’t know about. The soloists – and, particularly, those with lesser roles now honoured with red chairs of their own front-of-stage – were all keenly able to convey character and emotion through simple gestures and intelligent positioning alone, and the story was easier to follow in some ways by using one’s own imagination than when interpreting a director’s spin presented as graphically as this had been.

“Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them …” said Shakespeare’s prologue to Henry V, and it was that sort of exercise. Think, when Parsifal says he’s holding a spear, that he really is, and so on.

What’s more, the Bridgewater Hall acoustic added a dimension of clarity and thrill to the sound of singers and orchestra that few theatres could emulate. Wagner designed the whole work to be a kind of quasi-religious experience, and the hall’s near-cathedral-like resonance helped give that feeling.

But perhaps the leading Flowermaidens, seated in black dresses, could not manage to be alluring quite as much as the writer-composer might have liked, and the full chorus, powerful in numbers and voice as they always are, looked the same in serried ranks, whether personifying chaste knights, temptresses or the angelic host.

As in some other Opera North concert-hall versions of operas, without even electronic projected settings (and they used only the minimum stage lights, not the full available rig) the music was the point, and the whole point. Richard Farnes, seen this time in a centre-stage spotlight, was visibly the Wagner conductor par excellence, guiding every note and nuance, pacing the whole huge structure with both dramatic excitement and meditative depth, and the orchestra played wonderfully for him. They, and he, know that it often matters to hold the decibels down a little bit so that voices can be heard without strain, but when they (especially their warm and wonderful brass) really opened up, the result was spine-tingling. And the chorus, too, made glorious sound.

The principals, as I’ve said in another place, are about as near to a dream line-up as you could get, and every one of them was on form for this performance. Brindley Sherratt sustained his rich tone throughout the marathon but also managed to grow older for the final act by stance and demeanour alone; Derek Welton made Klingsor a really vicious-looking but wonderful-sounding baddie; Robert Hayward was noble and affecting as Amfortas, and Katarina Karnéus conveyed remarkable depths of psychology while singing superbly. Both she and Toby Spence (who filled the space with some ringing top notes) seem to have abandoned the beatific grins of the Leeds first night and found a subtler way of portraying blessedness: that’s good.