Parsifal - Opera North

[Belgrove]

Opera North’s successful semi-stagings of large works continues with Parsifal, opening in June at Leeds and then on tour.

https://www.operanorth.co.uk/whats-on/parsifal-2022/

Toby Spence and Brindley Sherratt debut as Parsifal and Gurnemanz respectively, and Richard Farnes adds to his impressive repertoire for conducting Wagner. Anyone going?

[Pulcinella]

Probably not, nor to their September/October offerings, but looking forward to Tosca, Vixen, and Ariadne in January/February/March 2023.
10% off if we book all three!

[gradus]

Opera North’s successful semi-stagings of large works continues with Parsifal, opening in June at Leeds and then on tour.

https://www.operanorth.co.uk/whats-on/parsifal-2022/

Toby Spence and Brindley Sherratt debut as Parsifal and Gurnemanz respectively, and Richard Farnes adds to his impressive repertoire for conducting Wagner. Anyone going?

For Wagner and Parsifal in particular I prefer semi-stagings or even concert performances as I'm one of the reactionaries who cordially loathe most of the production ideas foisted on opera audience in recent years.

[gurnemanz]

My first live Parsifal was Boulez at the Proms when I stood in the Arena over two evenings in 1972. My next one was also a concert performance, Herbert Kegel in Leipzig in 1975 with René Kollo in the title role and finally Rattle at the Proms (sitting down) in 2000. All three most rewarding. However, I would always prefer a staging, even if dotty. Wagner wrote Gesamtkunstwerke. He hardly wrote anything which was not intended to be staged, even stipulating that Parsifal should only ever be done at Bayreuth.

I have only seen two staged performances - ENO and ROH - but have also seen some really stimulating streamed versions, including the Laufenberg of late at Bayreuth, with the excellent Georg Zeppenfeld as my namesake. The only time we've attended a live opera stream at the cinema was the New York staging a few years ago with Jonas Kaufmann as Parsifal and René Pape as another riveting Gurnemanz. (There were six of us in attendance at the six-hour screening in a nearby Swindon multiplex, including a couple with a bottle of red wine).

The Hans-Jürgen Syberbeg movie is also a major contribution.

I will take any opportunity to attend Parsifal and hope to make it to Opera North but fear that practical circumstances, including an impending hip replacement, may intervene.

[jonfan]

Yes I'm going to one of the Leeds performances. My only concern is that it's in the Grand Theatre and not the Town Hall. A piece like this needs as much bloom around the sound as possible. The last time I saw the opera was in Bayreuth in 1976, Horst Stein conducting and Kollo in the title role. I'm sure Opera North under Farnes will give an account as good if not better.

[CallMePaul]

Opera North’s successful semi-stagings of large works continues with Parsifal, opening in June at Leeds and then on tour.

https://www.operanorth.co.uk/whats-on/parsifal-2022/

Anyone going?

Hopefully yes, probably to a midweek performance in Leeds. Pity that its semi-staged rather than fully staged, though, even though semi-staging worked OK for Turandot.

[kuligin]

[QUOTE=jonfan;881824My only concern is that it's in the Grand Theatre and not the Town Hall.
QUOTE]

I have found from hearing Wagner in theatres much smaller than Leeds, Rheingold in Freiburg, Meistersinger at Meiningen, that Wagner works very well in such theatres, in fact “lesser”” singers can perform it when they would be lost in say the Coliseum

I will not be attending as I want my operas staged. This performance rather gives the lie to the excuse that the Ring was performed at the Town Hall due to the small Leeds pit. The real reason is money, they can afford a good cast if few performances are given,and there is little touring.

I am sure this will be a success and will be marketed as an example of the good health of ON. In fact it will have little resemblance to their staged work which is variable, the recent Alcina being a shambles, advertised as “sustainable production”, what we got was some chairs duly thrown about in part 2, worse only one of the singers Ffleur Wyn was up to her part. Whether spending their limited funds on the annual upstaged extravaganza is the best approach is questionable.

I would love to see a staged Parsifal again, I have seen 4, the ENO “ railway tracks “ production twice, excellent singing but the production not in sympathy with the music, twice at the ROH. I can recall Sir John Tomlinson having to crawl out of a small Green tent at the beginning of Act 2. Most memorably as a young man I heard Horenstein conduct it in 1973, upper slips, less than a £1!

[jonfan]

[/QUOTE] This performance rather gives the lie to the excuse that the Ring was performed at the Town Hall due to the small Leeds pit. The real reason is money, they can afford a good cast if few performances are given,and there is little touring.[/QUOTE]
I have a feeling the orchestra will be on the stage. The Ring at the Town Hall was an enormous success, especially artistically; standing up with the best anywhere in the world IMHO. The size of the Town Hall allowed the correct number of harps Wagner asked for to be employed, no expense spared there! A good cast and plenty of touring as well; what’s not to like?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

… what’s not to like?

As you suggest, it’s probably down to money. Opera North did Tannhauser a few years ago, fully staged in the Grand Theatre. They also did a fully staged Aïda, which was very fine indeed.

I wasn’t able to see the Ring cycle in Leeds Town Hall, but I did see Götterdämmerung at the Lowry in Salford. Visually it was dreadful. If Opera North had anything like the funding available for London companies, they might not have to limit themselves to what are effectively concert performances more and more.

[Simon B]

If Opera North had anything like the funding available for London companies, they might not have to limit themselves to what are effectively concert performances more and more.

While undoubtedly true in itself, challenges to this reasoning become apparent as soon as you scratch below the surface.

By a huge margin, the lowest subsidy per seat/ticket* of all major UK companies is granted to... the Royal Opera House.

*This is an important distinction and I can't immediately verify which it is. The result is even more challenging if it's per-ticket as the ROH routinely runs much closer to capacity than any of the others.

I'd have to look up the exact figures (there were a couple of analyses in recent years whose results are in the public domain) but it's something like:

£30/seat at Covent Garden
£60/seat at WNO
£100/seat at ENO
£110/seat at Opera North

There are of course myriad reasons for this. The fact remains that for each person who actually goes to ON or WNO, even with their generally very careful use of limited resources, it's very expensive in subsidy per capita. ENO is a debate for another day...

Declarations of interest: ON regular, mostly in Leeds or Nottingham, don't live in England, let alone London.

[kuligin]

That is very surprising even when taking in the cost of moving productions around the country.

To reply to “What’s not to like”, well the last two performances I saw, Alcina very poor, Marriage of Figaro mediocre. ON are now nothing like the company that gave us Ariane et Barbe Bleu, Love of Three Oranges, Boris Godunov in the Daniels era. I support them like I would support my local football team through good times and bad, at least for staged operas other than Verismo, and even then I have sat through the Girl of the Golden West, but I am in trepidation of how they will perform Ariadne auf Naxos

I had put it down to money, the repertoire has shrunk, we no longer get 9 operas, now usually a musical and a concert performance. Perhaps the audience has shrunk or is more conservative but I am sure that money is the underlying reason. Talking of Opera in small houses, I went on a trip to see Die Vogel and Bianca e Falliero, being works unlikely to be seen in the UK, having a free day between them I saw Elektra at Wiesbaden, it was overwhelming in a small house but then the title role was sung by Catherine Foster, unknown to me but she sings at Bayreuth.

[Simon B]

That is very surprising even when taking in the cost of moving productions around the country.

Agreed that the (or at least a) big problem is money. The root cause is more to do with achievable income than anything else.

The ROH puts on around 200 main stage performances a year between the opera and ballet companies - sharing a pool of 1.5 orchestras-worth of players. If I recall correctly, for the last year pre-pandemic this was on a total annual income of about £130m, of which less than £30m was subsidy. That's pretty much an inversion of the subsidy ratio of all the other companies. £130m over 200 performances would be £650k per performance, £295 per seat with a capacity of 2,200 which is mostly filled.

The ROH obtains large sums in private donations from corporate and individual benefactors. Under pressure to do so, it has also got very good at generating revenue from sources other than ticket sales like merchandising. Crucially, and despite all this, it still charges 4-5x as much as WNO/ON for many of its seats. Taken together, the economies of scale of 200+ shows a year and the ability to raise this much revenue from a large audience are how the ROH is able to afford to "do it properly" while continuing to allow oiks like me in to the cheap seats/standing places for £10-£20.

ON can't realistically do any of that. Pursuing the large pool of people in Leeds/Manchester/Nottingham/Newcastle willing to pay, say £200+ a pop to go to a more lavish-but-still-less-extravagant-than-ROH ON is a non-starter as they don't exist. Even pre-pandemic, filling the venues at a max of 25% of that price mostly didn't happen. Good luck persuading the citizens of any of these cities that local opera goers should be subsidised to the tune of £150 each per go rather than the current £100...

Fortunately the whole business is mostly a lottery anyway. I've stood through plenty of expensively adorned duds and outrages at the ROH. Meanwhile, some of the most memorable things from elsewhere were at ON - Fanciulla del West and Billy Budd for example. I suppose in both those examples the production was a bit low-rent but did the job well enough to support some outstanding orchestral playing and singing.

Not having much in the way of a production for Parsifal could be a blessed relief in my view. Nobody is likely to remotely follow Wagner's original directions or anything in sympathy with them now anyway. My previous encounters with it were at ENO (railway tracks to nowhere and concrete dust) and ROH (involving the grail being a person not an object plus a whole lot of business with a perspex cube). If there was a danger of someone making a decent stab at evoking Monsalvat or some broader alternative interpretation free of incongruities I might feel more deprived by the lack of a full staging...

[Belgrove]

Interesting how folk seem polarised between favouring a fully staged or concert performance. It is a very difficult work to bring off successfully in the theatre, to the extent that I began to believe it was fundamentally flawed as a drama, having seen so many failed productions. It is mostly static and undramatic, the story being advanced through narrative rather than action, and directors become confounded in portraying the abstract philosophical exchanges. Then two new productions came in the same year which revised my thinking. François Girard’s production at the Met looped Elliot’s Waste Land take on Parsifal back into the original, aided with large scale HD video to effect the tricky scene changes and a very strong cast. The production had both spectacle and depth. And Stephen Landridge’s production at the ROH gave the most penetrating, sophisticated and profound treatment of the religious and philosophical aspects that I’ve seen. Yet this production was undermined by poor casting and torpid conducting of the score. If revived with a better cast and conductor (and instilling the inherent danger of the second act where most of the drama lies), this could be one of the finest of productions. Interestingly, Landridge has revealed that Glyndebourne intends to stage Parsifal in a couple of years time - I hope he directs it.

So the challenges of bringing Parsifal successfully to the stage are huge, whereas a concert performance need only paint the gorgeous sound world (where, like radio, the pictures are probably better, but not necessarily revelatory).

On paper, Opera North have assembled a dream team with Spence and Sherratt as principals, and with Farnes conducting - his Wagner is among the best. So I’m looking forward to seeing this in Nottingham.

[gurnemanz]

Interesting stagings which have something to add continue to appear. I watched two on TV over the Covid period:

Last year Arte streamed the latest Vienna State Opera version set in a Russian prison. Jonas Kaufmann, now 50+, is shadowed by an actor as his younger self. I loved Elīna Garanča taking on Kundry for the first time as an alluring visiting researcher taking photographs. Ludovic Tézier as Amfortas, Georg Zeppenfeld in another impressive Gurnemanz reincarnation and Wolfgang Koch as Klingsor, jail director whose flower maidens are his office staff. Beautifully lit and well acted, I thought it had a lot to offer that a concert performance obviously can't.

A different perspective again, I also enjoyed a stream of Opera Vlaanderen. Abstract, pared down + church hall chairs and blood. Extract https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gygziL6OFDc

[Mandryka]

I think a concert performance can work Ok in the first and last acts, but not Act 2. I want to see those flower girls dance, I want to see him give her a big kiss, I want to see the spear being thrown!


In Nike Wagner’s book there’s a description of a production by Robert Wilson in Hamburg I think, which I like to imagine. She says that the revealing thing about this production was that it showed how the characters are isolated from each other, trapped in their own solipsistic worlds. Guernemanz rabbiting on with his stories of the past; Amfortas trapped in his misery, failure, pain; Kundry neurotically driven by something, god knows what.

My strangest Parsifal was at the ENO, with Siegfried Jerusalem singing as a last minute replacement for someone - he sang in German and everyone else sang in English. The night I saw it he seemed very unsure of how to move around the set, he was wearing armour with a big boot which seemed to come undone at some point, I remember this long lace being dragged around.