Going Round in Circles: Matthew Rye warms to the visual world conjured up by Achim Freyer for ‘Parsifal’, but is not wholly convinced by its deeper meanings

Review of Parsifal, directed Freyer, conducted Nagano, Hamburg, 2017.

March 2018, Volume 12, Number 1, 78–80.

Design-led opera productions haven’t always received a good press from the point of view of the actual stage direction, which can sometimes seems tacked on to the visual aspect. With Brecht disciple Achim Freyer one doesn’t perceive the same problem, for here is a stage director and visual artist in one – someone who can put the gesamt into the Kunstwerk, one might say. Having famously, if not infamously, tackled the Ring in Los Angeles and Mannheim (see my review of the ‘making of’ DVD of this latter production in the last issue), he has now brought his own distinct visual and dramatic style to bear on Parsifal, in a new production that opened the season in Hamburg.