Wagner's Parsifal was presented as part of THE RYEDALE FESTIVAL and performed by THE HALLE ORCHESTRA.
York Minster might be felt to be the perfect setting for a concert derived from Wagner’s final music drama, the third act of which serendipitously takes place on Good Friday. Well: a couple of days early makes no difference and in the week in which Notre Dame succumbed to flames, I’m sure many audience members were minded to reflect on how fortunate we were to enjoy great music-making in such a splendid setting - even if the scaffolding necessitated by the East Window restoration meant the view from the nave wasn’t as picturesque as it could have been.
Parsifal is the story of ‘Pure Fool’ - an orphaned boy who can only express himself through violence - who finds redemption by returning the stolen sacred spear that pierced the side of Christ to a community of knights in ancient Mosalvat and, in so doing, taking his place as the leader of their order. Unlike other Wagner music-dramas, it is carefully written for voices and no superhuman demands are made on the singers, though it is hardly without its challenges. The old grail knight Gurnemanz, who has the longest part in the opera, is required to do a lot of what we now call ‘info-dumping’ while maintaining interest and Kundry - a sort of maid-of-all-work for the knights who has an unsuspected alternative existence in the second act - has barely anything to sing in Act 3. The only high voice to get a substantial airing in the act is the titular knight himself, but the role is so considerately written by Wagner that there is never any question of the strain or fatigue that afflicts singers of the other big Wagnerian tenor roles like Siegfried or Tristan.
Sir Mark Elder is coming to the end of his tenure as the Halle’s musical director and he will be much missed. The bond between orchestra and conductor is palpable and affectionate: he is probably the most beloved chief they have had since Sir John Barbirolli and he leaves the orchestra with musical standards and morale improved immeasurably from when he took over in 2000. As a Wagner specialist, this was very much his home territory, as anyone who has enjoyed his semi-staged concert performances of the Ring operas over the last ten years will attest and he brought to the performance the same assurance with Wagner’s long paragraphs, significant pauses and glittering chorales that have become a trademark. It was all there in the opening account of the prelude to Act 1, beautifully spaced and shaped with the cavernous acoustics of the Minster providing ravishing sound. There was plenty of it, too, in the mediative prelude to Act 3 which followed on without an interval, the superb interplay of strings and brass leading the way into Kundry’s first inchoate cry of agony. The Halle Choir augmented by singers from the Royal Northern College of Music and York University also made their mark, exploiting the Minster’s panoramic acoustic with a slow, extended entry onto the stage platform.
But, alas, these acoustics were less kind to individual voices and the soloists tended to get lost in the vast spaces: articulation was blurred and those unfamiliar with the text (printed in the programme, in the absence of surtitles) could have been forgiven for thinking they were listening to some long tone poem with vocal obligatti. That was certainly how it came across from my position, halfway down the nave. On this basis, I found it hard to judge the contributions of Nicky Spence (Parsifal), Michael Krauss (Amfortas), Gabor Bretz (Gurenmanz), and Molly Barker (Kundry). A splendid rendering of the instrumental score, nevertheless.
Reviewer - Richard Ely
on - 17/4/19
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