A thunderous hammering of toes on the ground greeted the curtain calls of Parsifal, semi-staged by Opera North at its house venue, the Grand theatre, Leeds, earlier than touring all through this month. This noisy physicality added to the collective pleasure distinctive to a fantastic stay efficiency. The epic size – 5 hours with two intervals – of Wagner’s final music drama, and the grandeur of its redemptive ending, virtually ensures a heat response, even when its quasi-religious state of affairs stays obdurately opaque. The excellent forces of Opera North, performed by its former music director Richard Farnes, made Tuesday’s efficiency one to recollect.
The corporate’s Wagner journey started in 2016 with profitable live performance stagings of the Ring. Its first Parsifal has orchestra and conductor on stage, the motion going down in entrance and behind in Sam Brown’s easy however placing staging, ingeniously lit by Bengt Gomér. A board of lights variously glimmers and dazzles to counsel the energy and decay of the grail brotherhood at Monsalvat. (Different venues might be live performance stagings solely.) The infant on the finish is cheesy, and the knights, with their hoods up, have the look of hobbits, however the whole lot else works nicely. Particular reward to Robert Hayward’s high quality Amfortas, the stricken chief who sings nobly and has to endure the indignity, half-naked, of his sanguivorous knights feasting on his wound. They could have been appearing however it appeared hideous.
If the central theme of this 1882 opera is compassion, its chief advocate is Gurnemanz, whose two large narrations, within the first and third acts, work as buttresses to the whole opera. Within the Lancashire-born, world-class bass Brindley Sherratt, making his debut because the veteran knight, Opera North has a star. His present for lyrical Italianate repertoire, for which till lately he was higher identified, brings radiance to a task that may sound booming. His supply had readability and selection, each be aware safe. Bass voices take time to ripen: his is at its greatest.
All spherical this was a powerful forged. As Parsifal, additionally making his function debut, Toby Spence has supreme vocal confidence but in addition negotiates intelligently the calls for of being each catalyst and foil, destroyer and redeemer. Katarina Karnéus, as Kundry, is powerful on this complicated determine’s completely different guises, with terrifying and good high notes in her Act 2 outpouring. Derek Welton made a direct impression because the magician Klingsor. The remainder of the forged – together with Titurel (Stephen Richardson), the Esquires and Flowermaidens, in addition to the enlarged refrain – gave sterling performances. Farnes’s pacing retains the music transferring, however permits the important area and amplitude wanted. David Greed, chief of Opera North’s excellent orchestra for its whole 44 years, will step down on the finish of this tour. His successor may have a job to maintain the string sound as luminous and exact because it was right here.
Tchaikovsky’s views on Wagner swerved from admiration (of the music) to rebuttal (of the related cult and the mumbo-jumbo that went with it). The Russian composer’s personal good opera, Eugene Onegin (1879), primarily based on Pushkin and blessedly free from metaphor, is as direct a summation of human expertise as you might hope to search out. Opera Holland Park opened its 2022 season with Julia Burbach’s manufacturing, performed by Lada Valešová and designed by takis. On the second efficiency final weekend, not the whole lot gelled vocally however many key moments proved arresting, capturing the work’s depth and keenness, particularly on the shattering midpoint, when the drama spins uncontrolled.
Burbach makes us assume laborious concerning the opera’s inside world, maybe at occasions confusingly for these unfamiliar with the story, however all the time perceptively. Every character – the vulnerable Tatyana (Anush Hovhannisyan); her vivacious sister Olga (Emma Stannard); the brutish however beguiling Onegin (Samuel Dale Johnson); the tragically ardent Lensky (Thomas Atkins) – is sympathetically dealt with. The interval staging seems to be good-looking, with elegant, adaptable units in shades of ivory. Onegin and Lensky are compelling and nicely matched. Supporting roles are expertly taken, particularly the Larina of Amanda Roocroft, herself as soon as an excellent Tatyana, and Kathleen Wilkinson’s Filippyevna. The revamped OHP stage, within the spherical with the Metropolis of London Sinfonia within the center, is a much more satisfying expertise for the viewers however nonetheless presents issues of ensemble. You may make sure that OHP, an organization with a “naught availeth” ethos, will work quick to resolve this.
The visionary notions of Alexander Scriabin make Wagner’s seems to be lucid as compared. They can't be compressed into a brief paragraph. Let’s stick along with his synaesthesia, which in his case meant perceiving sound as color. For his tone poem Prometheus: Poem of Fireplace (1910), for piano and orchestra, he dreamed up a lightweight scheme, utilizing a specifically invented “keyboard for lights” to intensify the expertise. Daring Tendencies, residing as much as it title, opened its formidable 2022 season, which takes place in a south London multi-storey automotive park, with a sold-out Scriabin double invoice.
Carried out by the Philharmonia, full with “stay” lighting trustworthy to the rating’s directions, the Poem of Fireplace was in each aural and visible sense a blast. If you'd like cosmic, it was cosmic. Samson Tsoy triumphed because the intrepid piano soloist. Gergely Madaras was the spectacular, authoritative conductor, protecting a grip on this seething multicoloured ocean of orchestral sound. Compared, the Poem of Ecstasy (1908), dominated by an irrepressible solo trumpet, is extra simple and merely orgiastic. It was written in a tiny rented room on the Italian Riviera, noisy with road sounds and trains roaring previous the window. It may need been designed for this now famend automotive park. The season runs till September. Attempt it.
Star scores (out of 5)
Parsifal★★★★★
Eugene Onegin ★★★★
Scriabin: Poems of Ecstasy and Fireplace★★★★★
Parsifal excursions till 26 June
Daring Tendencies’ stay programme continues till 10 September
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