PARSIFAL
The concert version of
Richard Wagner’s Parsifal at the Turku Music Festival was a wonderful
experience. The venue itself was perhaps not the best possible on a warm summer
day, since the temperature in the Turku Concert Hall rose to uncomfortable
levels during the five hour performance, but fortunately the excellent soloists
compensated the sauna-like conditions.
The festival showed a (according
to their words moderately) shortened version of Parsifal and the length was
announced to be four and a half hours. However, the intervals were longer than
they should have been, so the final length of the opera was five hours. There
has been some critique about the shortening, but there certainly remained
enough of the beautiful music that at least on Saturday the audience was
satisfied.
The biggest credit on
the success of the evening goes without any doubt to the soloists. Klaus
Florian Vogt was a phenomenal Parsifal: gorgeous voice and even in the concert
version his acting was striking. Karita Mattila was also a very good Kundry,
even though this was her first time in this role. Matti Salminen did an
impressive performance as Gurnemanz despite that fact that his voice did not
carry anymore as well as in his youth. But his experience compensated that
easily. Originally Tapani Plathan was supposed to sing as Klingsor, but due to
illness Robert Bork sang instead. He turned out to be a superb singer, so I definitely
wasn’t disappointed. Juha Kotilainen’s small role as Titurel was formidable. In
the last few performances of Kotilainen that I have seen, I have actually got
an impression that his voice and acting improve with age like a good wine. Also
Waltteri Torikka sang well in the role of Amfortas: his voice functioned well
and even performing was quite ok for a concert version. Chorus Cathedralis Aboensis
sang all right; the sopranos sounded every now and then really good, but compared
to the soloists, the chorus’ performance was rather soulless.
The music of Parsifal
is so awesome that one always hopes that each part of the opera were equally
good, but in this performance the minor shortages in some parts were
compensated by the excellent soloists, so the opera was without doubt worth a
trip to Turku.
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| Turku Concert Hall |
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| The performers |
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