Healing the Wounds: Barry Millington welcomes the blood-spattered Met ‘Parsifal’ into his own home

Review of Parsifal, directed Girard, conducted Gatti, New York Met, 2013 (Sony, 2 DVDs).

July 2014, Volume 8, Number 2, 80–82.

As is the general rule these days, this Metropolitan Opera production of Parsifal can be experienced in at least three ways. First there’s the old-fashioned way, in the opera house, in the same physical space as the performers. Then one was able to see it when it was streamed live into cinemas. And now, thanks to this two-DVD set from Sony, one can enjoy it in the privacy of one’s own home. I cannot comment, except from hearsay, on the cinema experience, but I did see the last performance of the run on 8 March 2013 at the Met. As I wrote at the time, in this journal, an indisputably magnificent performance vocally, and a resonant, intelligent production (by François Girard), were vitiated to some extent by the cavernous space of the Met, with musical/verbal enunciation and production details alike repeatedly compromised. I am told that there were no such problems in the cinema and certainly on DVD it is possible to register both far more satisfactorily.