Wagner once said that Parsifal was not an opera but a “stage consecration festival play” — Bühnenweihfestspiel — and the distinction matters more than it might seem. This is music that insists on a particular atmosphere the way a cathedral insists on silence. Get the acoustics wrong, get the tempos wrong, get the inner voices muddied in the strings, and the whole edifice of compassion and redemption collapses into mere religiosity. Valery Gergiev, working with his Mariinsky forces in what appears to be a live or near-live recording from St. Petersburg, mostly gets it right — and in certain crucial respects gets it more right than most conductors working today.
Start with the sound itself. The Mariinsky Hall, captured here in hybrid SACD by producer James Mallinson and his engineering team, has a transparency that suits this score almost uncannily well. Wagner’s orchestration in Parsifal is famously unlike anything else he wrote — the textures are thinner, more suspended, as if the music is trying to dissolve into light — and you need a recording environment that doesn’t fatten everything up into Wagnerian beef stew. This one doesn’t. The very opening of the Prelude, that long, aching statement of the love feast theme, floats in the air without heaviness, and you can hear the countervoices in the violas doing their quiet, essential work underneath.
The grail scenes are another matter entirely — and here Mallinson’s spatial engineering earns its keep. Voices descending from above, Titurel’s hollow, cavernous utterances wrapped in what sounds like genuine architectural echo — it creates the sensation of ceremony rather than theater. Which is precisely what Wagner intended.
Gergiev has always been a maestro of volcanic instincts and occasional rhythmic sloppiness, and you sense both qualities here. His Act 2 — Klingsor’s castle, the flower maidens, the great seduction scene — crackles with a nervous, shifting energy, the orchestra darting and slithering in ways that Klemperer never would have permitted but that feel absolutely true to what Wagner wrote. Compare this to, say, Karajan’s 1980 DG recording, which is ravishingly exquisite but hermetically sealed — Karajan understood the sacredness and somewhat underplayed the sorcery. Gergiev tips the balance the other way, and I find I don’t mind.
Then there’s René Pape as Gurnemanz. This is the reading around which the whole recording coheres. Gurnemanz is in some ways the most demanding role in the opera — not vocally, exactly, but dramatically, because he must sustain enormous stretches of narrative in Act 1 without the benefit of action, and he must make you care. Pape does something very specific and very intelligent: he differentiates. When he’s recounting the straightforward history of the Grail brotherhood, the voice settles into a kind of dignified, four-square authority. But the moment Klingsor enters the story, something shifts — the tone darkens, loosens slightly, as if Gurnemanz himself is unsettled by the memory. That’s not just good singing. That’s storytelling.
Violetta Urmana’s Kundry is formidable in the second act, where the role demands everything at once — seductress, tormented servant, something almost demonic underneath the beauty. Her “Ich sah das Kind” is devastating, the voice carrying genuine weight without ever turning shrill in the upper register. Gary Lehmann’s Parsifal is serviceable and honest — he has the right kind of clear, somewhat ingenuous tenor sound for a character who is, after all, supposed to be a holy fool — though he doesn’t quite have the last degree of luminosity that Jon Vickers brought to the role in the old Knappertsbusch Philips recording, or that Klaus Florian Vogt brings today. Evgeny Nikitin makes a convincingly anguished Amfortas, and Nikolai Putilin’s Klingsor has a wiry, unpleasant edge that the role requires.
Parsifal is Wagner’s most demanding work for a listener — it asks you to suspend not just disbelief but impatience, to give yourself over to a pace that feels geological — and it remains one of the few pieces of music I know that can, under the right circumstances, produce something close to a genuinely altered state. This album doesn’t quite reach the metaphysical extremity of Knappertsbusch’s 1962 Bayreuth performance, which remains the benchmark precisely because it sounds as if it were recorded inside the myth itself. But it is a serious, often deeply beautiful Parsifal, and with Pape anchoring it and the Mariinsky playing with this degree of sensitivity, it belongs in any serious collection of the work.
Recommended without hesitation. With one or two reservations noted.
