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Knight fever: Simon O’Neill in the title role with Angela Denoke as Kundry in Parsifal at the Royal Opera House. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Knight fever: Simon O’Neill in the title role with Angela Denoke as Kundry in Parsifal at the Royal Opera House. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Parsifal – review

This article is more than 10 years old
Royal Opera House, London
The literal and the lofty collide in Royal Opera's epic production of Wagner's great swan song

Religiosity, illness, sex: Wagner chose heady ingredients for Parsifal, his last opera, which took nearly four decades to reach fruition. This tale of the "pure fool" who can bring salvation to the sickly Grail brotherhood remains the composer's most dramatically repellent – there are other contenders for that title – yet his most musically potent. In the closing pages of the score, when suppurating wounds have healed and any confusion (or longueurs) of the previous five hours is washed away, the score ratchets up a gear, dazzling the senses in a great meteor shower of sound. Those massed male voices, the colossal, tolling bells and thudding timpani of the finale, pound through your brain for days to come, even if you curse their very existence.

This was certainly the impact of the Royal Opera's new Parsifal, directed by Stephen Langridge, designed by Alison Chitty and conducted, with a steely-nerved amplitude and restless attention to detail, by the company's music director, Antonio Pappano. He is not one to boast, as Pierre Boulez did in Bayreuth in the 1960s, of conducting the swiftest account of the work ever and stripping away all that dubious ritualistic solemnity and miasmic mysticism. Instead, Pappano yielded to its grandeur but refused to be swamped by it. Far from losing a half hour, as Boulez claimed, he probably added one.

We rush to heap praise above all on the singers: this was a mighty cast and their collective cheers and applause were deserved. But in Wagner there is no rest for orchestra or conductor. The Royal Opera orchestra played with nuance, concentration and vigour, spinning glistening colours with endless variety. I heard only one real mishap the entire duration, a feat in itself. Think of the violinist who has to hold up his or her bowing arm for nearly two hours without let-up the next time you grumble about the long intervals which turn Wagner operas into a marathon activity best suited to the leisured classes.

Out of a tiny handful of musical motifs Wagner plants a forest of ideas, dominant among them the so-called "Dresden Amen", that six-note sequence which is used to conjure the mystical powers of the Holy Grail. Its repeated appearances underpin and support the text – Wagner's own, inspired by Parzival, an epic poem of the 13th century. The more you read it, the more it seems a wild piece of bunkum, ecumenical, lofty and infuriating. What is Wagner trying to tell us about Christianity, Buddhism, race, blood, sin, redemption?

In Langridge's production, laden with signposts and visual rubric, there was plenty of opportunity to ponder these questions. The touchstone was Francis Bacon. In Chitty's clean, far from mystical designs, a central cube variously appeared as light box, display case or a Damien Hirst-like tank. The curtain rises on Amfortas in a hospital bed, alone in the box. He might well have been a pickled shark. Gerald Finley acts so well that the staggering and wincing of a man in pain was only too convincing. He put that same pallor and world-weariness into his voice, a risk since some might think he had forgotten how to sing, which paid off.

If at times the interpretation felt too literal, it worked hard to amplify the foggy drama and its backstory using tableaux: how Amfortas sustained his wound (via Kundry's kiss), or why Klingsor is so emasculated (self-castration). The Grail chamber is opened to reveal – quelle surprise – not a chalice but a boy, naked save for a loin cloth. My colleague Andrew Clements was not alone in suggesting that the production was stripped of Christian iconography. To me it seemed stuffed with it: in a direct biblical reference, the spear is used to pierce the Grail child's side. The boy's slumped body mirrored the descent from the cross. The red-tressed Kundry is in Mary Magdalene mode. Parsifal is what you make of it. The music alone brings coherence.

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At the end of Act II, the outcast magician Klingsor tosses the coveted holy spear at Parsifal intending to wound him. According to Wagner, after hovering in the air the sacred weapon falls into Parsifal's hand, Klingsor's iniquitous kingdom collapses and Parsifal hurries off ready to redeem all and sundry. Here Klingsor walks over and blinds Parsifal, who then staggers off in Lear-like pathos. Blindness is indeed mentioned in the text but surely it is meant symbolically?

The action was updated to a more-or-less fascistic 1940s setting, with the Flower Maidens in black belted coats and headscarves, discarded to reveal short, spangly and sequinned cocktail dresses from a later era. The knights of the Grail carry guns. Klingsor wore the long black leather overcoat which Willard White has worn in many roles in many productions and in which he looks his finest. White retains plenty of vocal strength too, as does the magnificent Robert Lloyd as an ancient Titurel.

Simon O'Neill in the title role has a reedy, bright timbre. Angela Denoke as Kundry, looking terrifyingly emaciated and shaven-headed at the start but ever compelling, has a muscular, unadorned quality to her voice, and René Pape as the wise, troubled, authoritative Gurnemanz, is warm and rich in tone. This resulted in an arresting interweaving of voice types. Pape won special cheers, but Gurnemanz usually does. He's the nearest to an ordinary chap we get in this opera, even if he did look like an off-duty Bavarian civil servant. Hear Parsifal on Radio 3 on Wednesday from 4.45pm or see it in cinemas on 18 December.

Two other events to mention: an explosive account of Shostakovich's Piano Quintet at Wigmore Hall by the Pavel Haas Quartet (who also gave stylish energy to quartets by Schubert and Britten) with the 22-year-old Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov. Catch him in 2014 if you haven't already. And in this year's British composer awards, names new and familiar and all male won in 13 categories. Harrison Birtwistle, the most nominated as well as the most successful in the awards' history, won for his piano piece Gigue Machine. "Nicolas Hodges is becoming my Peter Pears," he joked, referring to the pianist he regularly writes for. Colin Matthews, Brian Elias, James MacMillan and George Benjamin also triumphed. Rodrigo Barbosa Camacho won the student category for American CandyWhat the hell is Yellow No. 6?!? for solo viola (Sarah-Jane Bradley, playing and narrating) and a bag of marshmallows. Who said the classical music world was straitlaced? Maybe the man in the stalls at Parsifal who arrived clutching two teddy bears was not so odd after all.

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