Lockdown Grail: Vienna’s Covid-struck ‘Parsifal’ is now available as a thought-provoking CD set, writes Arnold Whittall

For Easter 2021, the Vienna State Opera planned a new production of Parsifal, designed and directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, conducted by music director Philippe Jordan at the beginning of his short tenure and with a premium cast including Jonas Kaufmann, Georg Zeppenfeld, Elīna Garanča, Ludovic Tézier and Wolfgang Koch. Then came Covid, but temptations to cancel were resisted, and what resulted was a single streamed staging on 11 April 2021, without audience. That, together with a preliminary session three days earlier, was recorded for future audio-only release; what I am reviewing here is the sequence of forty-three sound files made available by Sony in advance of the actual CD set.