Assessment of Opera North’s Parsifal on the Bridgewater Corridor

Richard Farness conducting the Orchestra of Opera North in Parsifal

The primary of Opera North’s live performance corridor
shows of Parsifal was an impressive musical
expertise, however, to anybody who noticed the totally staged model in Leeds, it additionally confirmed
how a lot the sources of an actual theatre had been absent.

In fact you by no means miss what you didn’t
learn about. The soloists – and, significantly, these with lesser roles now
honoured with crimson chairs of their very own front-of-stage – had been all keenly in a position to
convey character and emotion by easy gestures and clever
positioning alone, and the story was simpler to comply with in some methods by utilizing one’s
personal creativeness than when deciphering a director’s spin introduced as
graphically as this had been.

“Assume, once we speak of horses, that you simply
see them …” mentioned Shakespeare’s prologue to Henry V, and it was that kind
of train. Assume, when Parsifal says he’s holding a spear, that he actually is, and so forth.

What’s extra, the Bridgewater Corridor acoustic
added a dimension of readability and thrill to the sound of singers and orchestra
that few theatres may emulate. Wagner designed the entire work to be a form of
quasi-religious expertise, and the corridor’s near-cathedral-like resonance helped
give that feeling.

However maybe the main Flowermaidens, seated
in black clothes, couldn’t handle to be alluring fairly as a lot because the
writer-composer may need preferred, and the total refrain, highly effective in numbers and
voice as they at all times are, appeared the identical in serried ranks, whether or not personifying
chaste knights, temptresses or the angelic host.

As in another Opera North concert-hall
variations of operas, with out even digital projected settings (and so they used
solely the minimal stage lights, not the total obtainable rig) the music was the
level, and the entire level. Richard Farnes, seen this time in a centre-stage highlight,
was visibly the Wagner conductor par excellence, guiding each observe and nuance,
pacing the entire big construction with each dramatic pleasure and meditative
depth, and the orchestra performed splendidly for him. They, and he, know that it
typically issues to carry the decibels down slightly bit in order that voices will be
heard with out pressure, however once they (particularly their heat and fantastic brass)
actually opened up, the end result was spine-tingling. And the refrain, too, made
superb sound.

The principals, as I’ve mentioned in one other
place, are about as close to to a dream line-up as you might get, and each certainly one of
them was on type for this efficiency. Brindley Sherratt sustained his wealthy
tone all through the marathon but in addition managed to get older for the ultimate act
by stance and manner alone; Derek Welton made Klingsor a extremely
vicious-looking however wonderful-sounding baddie; Robert Hayward was noble and
affecting as Amfortas, and Katarina Karnéus conveyed exceptional depths of
psychology whereas singing beautifully. Each she and Toby Spence (who stuffed the
area with some ringing high notes) appear to have deserted the beatific grins of
the Leeds first night time and located a subtler manner of portraying blessedness: that’s
good.