13 Jul 2010
Parsifal on Blu-Ray
In 1881 Wagner and his wife were discussing the myth of Eros and Anteros, and Wagner remarked, “Anteros is Parsifal.” Wagner considered Parsifal a figure opposed to sexual love, Eros’s opposite.
The Sixteen continues its exploration of Henry Purcell’s Welcome Songs for Charles II. As with Robert King’s pioneering Purcell series begun over thirty years ago for Hyperion, Harry Christophers is recording two Welcome Songs per disc.
In February this year, Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho made a highly lauded debut recital at Wigmore Hall - a concert which both celebrated Opera Rara’s 50th anniversary and honoured the career of the Italian soprano Rosina Storchio (1872-1945), the star of verismo who created the title roles in Leoncavallo’s La bohème and Zazà, Mascagni’s Lodoletta and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.
Collapsology. Or, perhaps we should use the French word ‘Collapsologie’ because this is a transdisciplinary idea pretty much advocated by a series of French theorists - and apparently, mostly French theorists. It in essence focuses on the imminent collapse of modern society and all its layers - a series of escalating crises on a global scale: environmental, economic, geopolitical, governmental; the list is extensive.
Amongst an avalanche of new Mahler recordings appearing at the moment (Das Lied von der Erde seems to be the most favoured, with three) this 1991 Mahler Second from the 2nd Kassel MahlerFest is one of the more interesting releases.
If there is one myth, it seems believed by some people today, that probably needs shattering it is that post-war recordings or performances of Wagner operas were always of exceptional quality. This 1949 Hamburg Tristan und Isolde is one of those recordings - though quite who is to blame for its many problems takes quite some unearthing.
The voices of six women composers are celebrated by baritone Jeremy Huw Williams and soprano Yunah Lee on this characteristically ambitious and valuable release by Lontano Records Ltd (Lorelt).
As Paul Spicer, conductor of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir, observes, the worship of the Blessed Virgin Mary is as ‘old as Christianity itself’, and programmes devoted to settings of texts which venerate the Virgin Mary are commonplace.
Ethel Smyth’s last large-scale work, written in 1930 by the then 72-year-old composer who was increasingly afflicted and depressed by her worsening deafness, was The Prison – a ‘symphony’ for soprano and bass-baritone soloists, chorus and orchestra.
‘Hamilton Harty is Irish to the core, but he is not a musical nationalist.’
‘After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.’ Aldous Huxley’s words have inspired VOCES8’s new disc, After Silence, a ‘double album in four chapters’ which marks the ensemble’s 15th anniversary.
A song-cycle is a narrative, a journey, not necessarily literal or linear, but one which carries performer and listener through time and across an emotional terrain. Through complement and contrast, poetry and music crystallise diverse sentiments and somehow cohere variability into an aesthetic unity.
One of the nicest things about being lucky enough to enjoy opera, music and theatre, week in week out, in London’s fringe theatres, music conservatoires, and international concert halls and opera houses, is the opportunity to encounter striking performances by young talented musicians and then watch with pleasure as they fulfil those sparks of promise.
“It’s forbidden, and where’s the art in that?”
Dublin-born John F. Larchet (1884-1967) might well be described as the father of post-Independence Irish music, given the immense influenced that he had upon Irish musical life during the first half of the 20th century - as a composer, musician, administrator and teacher.
The English Civil War is raging. The daughter of a Puritan aristocrat has fallen in love with the son of a Royalist supporter of the House of Stuart. Will love triumph over political expediency and religious dogma?
Beethoven Symphony no 9 (the Choral Symphony) in D minor, Op. 125, and the Choral Fantasy in C minor, Op. 80 with soloist Kristian Bezuidenhout, Pablo Heras-Casado conducting the Freiburger Barockorchester, new from Harmonia Mundi.
A Louise Brooks look-a-like, in bobbed black wig and floor-sweeping leather trench-coat, cheeks purple-rouged and eyes shadowed in black, Barbara Hannigan issues taut gestures which elicit fire-cracker punch from the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
‘Signor Piatti in a fantasia on themes from Beatrice di Tenda had also his triumph. Difficulties, declared to be insuperable, were vanquished by him with consummate skill and precision. He certainly is amazing, his tone magnificent, and his style excellent. His resources appear to be inexhaustible; and altogether for variety, it is the greatest specimen of violoncello playing that has been heard in this country.’
Baritone Roderick Williams seems to have been a pretty constant ‘companion’, on my laptop screen and through my stereo speakers, during the past few ‘lock-down’ months.
Melodramas can be a difficult genre for composers. Before Richard Strauss’s Enoch Arden the concept of the melodrama was its compact size – Weber’s Wolf’s Glen scene in Der Freischütz, Georg Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Medea or even Leonore’s grave scene in Beethoven’s Fidelio.
In 1881 Wagner and his wife were discussing the myth of Eros and Anteros, and Wagner remarked, “Anteros is Parsifal.” Wagner considered Parsifal a figure opposed to sexual love, Eros’s opposite.
But maybe he didn’t imagine a staging of his opera quite as anti-erotic as the Badener Lehrstück version found on this DVD.
This is an impressive performance. Nikolaus Lehnhoff places the opera at the burnt-out end of the road: a railroad track breaks off in the middle of nothing; the floor of the Grail castle curves up steeply at the back, until the chairs shoot out directly from the wall—it’s a castle in a different dimension, unavailable to human beings. The Grail knights look cadaverous in Act 1, and in Act 3 are dusty remnants of cadavers. Amfortas is a single big wound, wrapped in mummy bandages; Titurel is a figure from nightmare, a skeleton in chain mail, his hands mere phalanx-bones tipped with long claws. The inspiration for the whole production seems to be T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem in which elements from the story of the Fisher King and the Grail Knight are perched uncomfortably on a ruined industrial landscape, where the river sweats oil and tar, and the taxi throbs and waits.
If Klingsor’s magic garden is magical, it is a sour sort of magic. The Kabuki Klingsor inhabits a sphere, as if he were in a subspace of his own, yet another orthogonal from the plane of reality; his castle is a magnified female pelvis-bone, a sort of Bowel of Bliss. The flower-maidens wear unadorned shifts, flowery only in that the sleeves crescendo out into great bell; Kundry herself is almost immobile, encased in a carnation-ball of petals; slowly she divests herself of her costume, unburdens herself of the director’s system of metaphor, becomes an urgent, furiously sexy presence. When the castle collapses, some bits of rubble fall on the stage, but since the stage has been basically rubble from the opera’s beginning, the presence of yet more dreck is not strongly felt.
This is Nietzsche’s dream production of Parsifal, stripped of most of the Christian elements that he loathed. When Parsifal enters in Act 3, he stalks in all in black, wearing a harness of arrows arranged in a fan, and a helmet of raven feathers, as if he were both St. Sebastian and hell’s own Papageno (that pure fool of another age). Wagner asks him to transfigure and be transfigured; but Lehnhoff offers him little of either, though he allows Parsifal to assist the death-eager in the process of dying.
The singing is good, especially Waltraud Meier’s alert, beautifully felt Kundry, and Christopher Ventris’ smartly foolish Parsifal. Thomas Hampson’s voice is a little soft-grained for Amfortas, but he is, as usual, good to hear; Matti Salminen is authoritatively irritable as Gurnemanz; Bjarni Thor Kristinsson—strong, not at all aged, with a kind of beyond-the-grave heartiness—makes more of Titurel than I would have thought possible. The Blu-Ray image is sharp—seeing the production with such clarity seems to intensify the intelligence of Lehnhoff’s extremely intelligent design.
Daniel Albright