Concert Review: The Master's Singer

Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin play Mozart and Bruckner.

by Paul J. Pelkonen

Richard Wagner (left) greets Anton Bruckner in Bayreuth in 1873.
Silhouette by Dr. Otto Böhler from Wikipedia Commons.

The nine-concert Carnegie Hall marathon featuring conductor Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin reached its first milestone on Saturday night. This concert, the third in the series and the last of the opening triptych featured Mr. Barenboim leading his forces in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24, paired with the Symphony No. 3 of Anton Bruckner. This symphony bears the nickname "Wagner." It was one of two works that Bruckner brought to Bayreuth on an 1873 visit, where he and Richard Wagner discussed music over many a pint of beer.

DVD Review: The Vault of Heaven

The Barenboim Parsifal finally arrives on DVD.
by Paul Pelkonen

Femme fatale: Waltraud Meier casts a spell as Kundry in Act II of Parsifal.
Image © Euro Arts/Berlin Staatsoper.

This video of Wagner's Parsifal, shot for Teldec in 1992 at the Berlin Staatsoper is notable for its strong, youthful cast of major Wagner singers and its stark production values. These come from director, Harry Kupfer, a proponent of the "older" school of regietheater, in that his ideas actually work. Mr. Kupfer transport the valued mystic objects (the Grail, the Spear) in a vast subterranean bank vault, a shifting puzzle box with moving walls and a huge vault door predominating the action. 

Twenty years ago, this was one of the first "concept" Parsifals released on home video to break away from the standard image of knights in robes and helmets and flowery tarts frolicking around the opera's clueless hero. Happily, Mr. Kupfer's ideas hold up well. His claustrophobic setting is populated by weak, tottering Grail Knights that treat their daily worship as a narcotic fix. Amfortas (Falk Struckmann) is a haggard mess, with a very visible wound in his side. At the opera's end, he dies, and Kundry lives.

If you're acquainted with this opera, you know that nothing happens for the first half of Act I. Then Parsifal (Poul Elming) blunders into the vault. He is taken to a strange Grail ritual where Amfortas is placed on a sort of metaphorical spear point, and lifted high above the Knights to "trigger" the Grail's magic. Klingsor's realm (on the other side of the vault door) is a mirror image. His "magic garden" is a matrix of CRT screens, populated by vapid models in various stages of undress. At the end of Act II, Parsifal sets off a massive system crash.

Opinion Piece THE RANT: Death by Shrinkage

So I'm in the Virgin Megastore last night in Times Square, perusing the classical department--or what is left of it. When this store opened, the classical music section took up nearly two rooms. Now, it's two racks and a wall display. Still well-stocked, but small--and I couldn't find the Brahms serenades I wanted.

Daniel Barenboim

In the last ten years, the classical music recording industry underwent a rapid downsizing. Long gone are the good old days when operas would be recorded simply to satisfy a singer's ego (Pavarotti's disastrous Otello comes to mind) or a conductor's. Sometimes the latter projects would move forward even if the singers weren't available--does anyone remember the aborted Decca Ring Cycle that they couldn't find a qualified Siegfried for?

Now granted, the last ten years haven't been a total disaster--there are still good, important opera recordings being made and the market is flooded by a lot less crap. Better digital remastering processes have resurrected many classic recordings, at lower prices, that sounded thin and gritty in their initial CD releases. And improvements in CD packaging (mostly the elimination of the jewel case in large box sets, e.g. the DGG Collector's Edition) have gone from door-stops to pocket size, making room for more good music on the shelf.

But it's still not a perfect world. The death of Tower Records and the downsizing of large retail chains has hurt the sense of community among listeners--to put it simply there are fewer places to hang out and geek about the music we are all so passionate about. Maybe some enterprising individual should start "listening clubs" or "music lounges"--but then if we were all there and plugged into headphones there wouldn't be any dialogue either.

On a more cheerful note, I picked up a couple of interesting box sets--including a compilation of Daniel Barenboim's '70s recordings of Chopin, Mendelssohn, and Liszt, including some rare Wagner transcriptions that I'd never heard before--and a Beethoven cycle by Emil Gilels, left unfinished due to the death of this great pianist.

Photo © Monika Rittershaus, for Teldec International