Visions of ‘Parsifal’: Hugo Shirley is perplexed by an enigmatic staging of Wagner’s elusive masterpiece

Review of Parsifal, directed Castellucci, conducted Haenchen, Brussels, 2011.

July 2011, Volume 5, Number 2, 82–5.

La Monnaie prides itself on its adventurousness. Inviting Romeo Castellucci, the darling of Italy’s avant-garde theatre scene, to make his operatic debut with a new Parsifal was never going to do that reputation much harm. The performance I attended, however, was not without its challenges: a transport strike delayed the start by half an hour; in the title role, the American tenor Andrew Richards had been struck down by a cold. Richards sang the first two acts, with few appreciable problems, but his understudy, the highly promising Willem Van der Heyden, sang the third act from the side of the stage. It says something about Castellucci’s production that, as Richards mimed, I wondered whether such an arrangement was in any way detrimental to the sense of drama.