13895 Wagner News 174 - Wagner Society of England

PARSIFAL Á LA RUSSE
OR THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE MISSING KUNDRY
Mariinsky Opera in concert, Barbican Hall, 3 April 2012
Katie Barnes
The Mariinsky Opera's Ring at the Royal Opera House in 2009 was often excellent,
frequently intriguing, but patchy. My expectations for this concert performance were
consequently not pitched too high. But this was music-making of quite a different order
to that uneven experience. Where his Ring was choppy, Gergiev's Parsifal was composed
of long, stately, gracious arches of music.
The brightness of the solo trumpet stood out against the depth of the other brass
instruments, its edginess giving the soft, lapping sounds of the Prelude a suitable sense of
unease, and the massed brasses for the Dresden Amen sounded majestic. The wonderful,
sonorous strings were gentle, soft and caressing, but capable of creating huge, supple
waves of sound. Gergiev and his forces created a realm of sound which enclosed the
audience from the outside world, just as the Grail knights are enclosed from the world in
Monsalvat.
I was moved to wonder what Wagner would have made of a concert performance
(with the orchestra spread out over the platform) of the opera he wrote for Bayreuth,
where the orchestra is concealed from the audience. The principals used their scores and
were, unhelpfully, relegated to two banks of seats at either side of the platform, facing in
towards the conductor. This meant that they had to sing while hemmed in by the orchestra
and each other, and those in the inside seats were blocked off from sections of the
audience. The offstage horns sounded from behind the platform and Titurel and the
excellent Tiffin Boys' Choir were ensconced in the side of the Balcony. It was a pity that
the recorded bells sounded so artificial, and it was deeply unsatisfactory for Amfortas and
Parsifal to leave the platform with unbecoming haste after they had finished singing in
Act I, leaving Gurnemanz with no-one to address at the end. But even this paled beside
Kundry's failure to put in an appearance at all in Act III, leaving an anonymous chorister
to sing her two words. Why on earth did Gergiev allow it?
All but one of the leads were already known Wagnerian quantities in the UK, having
been in the 2009 Ring. The exception was Yury Vorobiev, a baby-faced bass who looked
absurdly young to play the venerable, wise Gurnemanz. When he first came onto the
platform, I decided that he had no right to be performing the part at his age, but when he
sang, I changed my mind within seconds. This is a beautifully formed, rounded voice for
which this massive role appeared to hold few terrors. He portrayed a sweet, gentle, lyrical,
serene Gurnemanz, a long way removed from John Tomlinson's fierce old warrior. This is
still a work in progress – he had to battle with the orchestra during the Act I narrative of the
building of Monsalvat and the blessing in Act III. He still lacks a little staying power, and
time will bring the voice more incisiveness. But he triumphed despite having to face
obstacles encountered by few Gurnemanzes, unfairly placed furthest upstage, hemmed in
by double basses and masked by his colleagues. I was also hugely impressed by his dramatic
intelligence. He was the least experienced of the principals, yet it was he who could
instantly create atmosphere with a look or gesture. He interacted well with his colleagues
(and when Parsifal abandoned him too early in Act I, his disdainful glace at the empty chair
beside him said volumes). In Act III, when he had to sing the long first section standing
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