This Parsifal surprised me somewhat. My dislike for Thielemann’s Tristan was pretty fierce and I expected little better here–but in fact, his reading is without many grievously bad habits, icy moments, or tics. He keeps the action flowing and brings the opera in at four hours and three minutes; Barenboim and Knappertsbusch and a few others are slower (Kna slower by more than a half hour in the 1951 recording!), the Nagano on DVD is whiplash faster (and much finer in all ways), and Boulez is faster yet. Thielemann’s sense of line is fine enough so that we know we’re hearing a long, well-constructed story, and he knows how to give the Transformation Scenes a weary weight. He emphasizes the wind writing and so we get lots of internal voices, and the brass play gloriously for him.
However, Thielemann does odd things with Wagner’s pauses, occasionally drawing them out to ridiculous proportions–the one after Kundry’s “Lachte!” is so long that I thought my CD player had conked out (it’s 12 seconds long–I’m not kidding). Of course, with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra you’re hardly going to get bloopers, but the sheer beauty of the playing is worth mentioning.
And so, it isn’t the conducting that takes this out of the running for top-three Parsifals. Rather, it is some of the singing. Franz-Josef Selig’s Gurnemanz is young and baritonal and he knows how to play into the text to bring out the character’s discontent, piety, gratefulness–and most vividly, anger and impatience with Parsifal’s ignorance. The problem of course is Hotter: once heard, comparisons, odious or not, are impossible to avoid, and Selig comes up very short. Falk Stuckmann expresses Amfortas’ torment to great effect and Ain Anger’s Titurel is dark and potent without erasing memories of Martti Talvela. The Klingsor of Wolfgang Bankl is a bit light, but boy, does he sound snide and vile! The chorus is, along with the orchestra, a true glory of this recording.
The drawbacks are the tenor and mezzo. Placido Domingo is still remarkable at 64, but there is no denying that his voice sounds worn and almost all of his forte singing is somewhat strained. In the opera’s last moments, when Parsifal enlightens the Grail Knights, a tenor like Jon Vickers (or even with less voice, Windgassen or Siegfried Jerusalem) can bring such exquisite resolution to their suffering with his grace that the entire opera falls into place; here, and elsewhere, Domingo is simply trying too hard. And Waltraud Meier, in what seems like her 400th recorded Kundry, finally has hit the skids: the voice never could pass for lovely or alluring, but by now it’s one big rasp. Her insights into the character remain vivid, but she’s hard to listen to.
Aside from a lot of stage noise–swords? trash bins?–and an occasional tendency for the orchestra to overwhelm the singers, this set is beautifully recorded. You may want to hear it once for its sheer orchestral beauty, but I can think of a bunch of recorded Parsifals that are more satisfying.
