A five-hour opera at Lanaudière festival
Lanaudière take on Wagner’s opera runs more than five hours but offers the possibility of transcendence
The Lanaudière Festival concludes its 2017 season with a Bühnenweihfestspiel. You might want to dress accordingly.
Or simply arrive in a devotional frame of mind. Wagner’s Parsifal — subtitled by the composer as a “festival play for the consecration of the stage” — is a solemn undertaking.
And substantial. Given in concert and uncut, the opera will run more than five hours with two intermissions (after the first of which, in Bayreuth at least, applause is supposed to be reverentially withheld). Expect to exit the Fernand Lindsay Amphitheatre around 10:25 p.m. Sunday — after arriving in daylight for the start at 5 p.m.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin is at the helm of the Orchestre Métropolitain and its chorus. This will be his first Parsifal, but not his last. In February the future music director of the Metropolitan Opera leads a run at the New York house of a production directed by his fellow Quebecer François Girard.
Opera at Lanaudière is not unprecedented. In 1993 Charles Dutoit led the OSM through Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila. In 2007 Kent Nagano gave us Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. There have been other examples.
Four years ago YNS conducted the OM through Lohengrin at the Amphitheatre. This was his debut as a full-length Wagnerian.
“It would be hard to imagine a more radiant treatment of the opening pages,” declared the Montreal Gazette.
Of course, opera takes more than a conductor. The Lanaudière cast features in the title role Christian Elsner, a veteran German tenor who has recorded the part. As the reluctant seductress Kundry, we hear Mihoko Fujimura, an established Japanese
mezzo-soprano who has sung this role at Bayreuth.
Not that the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, the theatre built to Wagner’s specifications where Parsifal was given its première in 1882, necessarily represents the contemporary gold standard. Last year the Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons took a walk rather than collaborate with a version that transplanted the story from 10th-century Spain to war-torn contemporary Iraq, where the Knights of the Holy Grail were portrayed as persecuted Christian monks.
With sectarian tensions in Germany running high as a result of the refugee crisis, the Festspielhaus was surrounded by heavy security.
All the same, the production was judged to be only moderately weird by European standards and indeed received some strongly positive reviews.
Lanaudière will not summon any provocations. All it can offer is music. Sitting through a concert performance of Wagner’s slow-moving valedictory opera might sound like a challenge. It can also be welcomed as an occasion to adjust your spiritual clock and make time for a transcendent experience.
Parsifal is imbued with symbolism. The innocent youth of the title, after thoughtlessly killing a swan, meets up with the knights, who are custodians of two holy relics: the spear that pierced the side of Christ and the cup in which His blood was collected (i.e. the Holy Grail, which was possibly also used at the Last Supper). Their leader Amfortas (Brett Polegato) suffers from a wound that will not heal, inflicted by the evil magician Klingsor (Boaz Daniel).
The veteran knight Gurnemanz (Peter Rose) offers backstory and earnest commentary, but the focus remains on the title character (known as Percival to English-speaking devotees of Arthurian legend). He enters Klingsor’s domain and emerges uncorrupted by its temptations, although a kiss from Kundry has a transformative effect on his awareness of his mission.
The extent to which Parsifal can be considered explicitly Christian in its message is still debated. Our hero makes the sign of the cross when he intercepts Klingsor’s spear. (Or is supposed to. Girard dispensed with this gesture in the Met production as it was staged in 2013.) Something strongly resembling communion unfolds in Act 1 when the Grail is revealed. Act 3 takes place on Good Friday (whence comes the Good Friday Music sometimes heard in concert).
Records show that the visiting Savage English Grand Opera mounted Parsifal in Montreal in 1905 (in English and in defiance of Bayreuth’s claim of a monopoly).
There were staged performances in 1954 in the now-demolished Palais du Commerce featuring a cast derived from the Met roster under the Belgian conductor Charles Houdret.
Of course, the Lanaudière Parsifal will be a first for most people in the audience. Some will recall an OSM performance of Act 2 in 1991 with Siegfried Jerusalem in the title role and Jessye Norman as Kundry. The late Franz-Paul Decker was in charge of this concert, one of my top five experiences in Place des Arts.
“The spell that Parsifal can cast in a glorious performance is difficult to explain to non-believers in the Wagnerian creed, but it rests heavily on the mesmerizing power of pure ritual and ritual’s handmaiden, ecstatically solemn music.” So wrote New York Times critic Donal Henahan in 1985 about a Met performance bringing together Jon Vickers and Leonie Rysanek under the baton of Nézet-Séguin’s predecessor, James Levine.
Nézet-Séguin and the OM are not the only combo involved in the final Lanaudière weekend. On Saturday night Nagano and the OSM with the OSM Chorus perform Fauré’s soothing Requiem. Soprano Sumi Jo and baritone Jean-François Lapointe are the soloists. Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 is the bracing starter. The concert follows a night of Tchaikovsky (Piano Concerto No. 1 with Yulianna Avdeeva as soloist) and Brahms (Symphony No. 2).
Note that the OSM and OSM Chorus under Dutoit in the late 1980s recorded Fauré’s Requiem for Decca and brought it to Carnegie Hall. Dutoit remains a go-to guy for this work. He led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a run of performances in April. The program began with the Good Friday Music from Parsifal.