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.

Review of Concerto Budapest with Angela Hewitt

                                

Angela Hewitt (cr Fotograf Ole Christiansen)

Touring international orchestras are back, thanks to the mighty IMG, and the Bridgewater Hall mustered a small but very enthusiastic audience to welcome Concerto Budapest (formerly the Hungarian Symphony Orchestra) and its chief conductor and artistic director, András Keller, along with Angela Hewitt, the peerless pianist who is always a draw in her own right.

The programme offered to Manchester (slightly different from other venues so far on the tour) had two pieces full of folksong and dance and two mainstream classical ones.

Top of the menu was Kodály’s Dances of Galánta – played for the first time on the tour but no doubt bread-and-butter to these musicians back home. Their string tone is rightly something to be proud of, and the eight celli made a superb start to the piece (the following string playing wasn’t as clean and precise as the Bridgewater Hall acoustic really needs, but it takes a little time to adjust to it – there’s an awful lot of side-to-side resonance in this hall). The music has something of the sound of traditional ‘gypsy’ bands in it, and by the fast bit near the end there were grins all round – they were enjoying doing it.

Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody no. 1, played after the interval, had much of the same feel to it (and gave the percussionists of the orchestra something to do: their two harps and a most self-effacing pianissimo triangle made their delicate contribution).

But before that there was Angela Hewitt. You could hardly get more mainstream than Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 23 in A major (K488), and she plays it with good old-fashioned well-pedalled smoothness and grace. The orchestra, too, was suavity personified, and its principal bassoon had his best vibrato to show off, along with the principal oboe’s most expressive style, in the second and final movements.

Angela Hewitt’s playing is beautifully proportioned and finely calculated. Mozart’s (his own) first movement cadenza brought a flash of drama to the narrative … and I loved the way (being a director-from-the-keyboard herself on other occasions) she conducted the players back into action herself at the recapitulation. She played the gloriously elegiac central Adagio una corda but with some surprise emphases to stimulate the imagination.

To remind us of her expertise in interpreting baroque keyboard music for the modern piano, she returned with an encore in the shape of a Scarlatti sonata.

Last there was Beethoven’s Fifth. Strings were slightly reduced for this (they had been cut right down for Mozart), but there were modern timpani. There was plenty of energetic articulation in the opening movement, and intriguing crescendos on held notes from the wind players. The speeds of the remainder were mainly brisk, though sometimes variable in a nicely Romantic way, and the horns and trumpets (three of the latter, with shared duties on the top line, to keep their sound brightly dominating everything else) made a powerful contribution.