CDs / DVDs

www.instantencore.com, 05. November 2013
... If you read until here, I guess you're protesting that I talk too much about the production and not as much about musicians. Musically I loved the show too. First of all I liked the pace and the clear/clean sounding Parsifal sculpted by Maestro Hartmut Haenchen. It reminded me of his unforgettable conducting in his previous Parsifal --at Opéra Bastille, in a production signed Krzysztof Warlikowski (criminally ditched by the current artistic management of the Paris Opera). An important difference is that auditorium at La Monnaie is smaller than in Paris, and you can better pick up the analytic features of Haenchen's reading of the score: not a single note is immersed in noise; every note is given a great deal of attention. At Opéra Bastille, on the other hand, he worked more on emphasizing the grandeur of the score, which particularly works on you if you're sitting in a large auditorium such as the one at Bastille.