It wasn’t so much that individual instruments stood out as a triumph of the collective, the combined sound being intensely satisfying at every stage. What impressed most was their unerring sense of shifting tempo and dynamics, rising and falling, accelerating and relaxing, textures morphing to drag you with the flow. ![]() That music was played superbly by Balázs Kocsár and the Hungarian State Opera Orchestra. As the torrent of concepts begins to fill the whole space, you realise that there was no need to make sense of them – just abandoning your senses to Wagner’s sublime music tells your emotions everything they need, most especially your empathy. Before the final scene, as our heroes ascend to the Grail castle for the final ceremony of redemption, Almási-Toth and video designer András Juhász project the words for dozens of concepts onto the inside of a long rectangular tunnel, zooming past in an ever-increasing flow (I will lay good money that director and designer are fans of the “through the star gate” scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey). In Hungarian State Opera’s new production, director András Almási-Toth tackles the question head on. How to make sense of it all? Wagner’s libretto asks more questions then it answers, filled as it is with contradictions, rambling narratives and inconsistent character motivation. You can add the Grail, the Spear, chastity, sexual temptation amongst dozens more. ![]() Just three of the myriad themes and symbols that pervade Parsifal.
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