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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
This is the recording that Alan Bates as the hero of Simon Gray's play 'Otherwise Engaged' kept trying to listen to, but kept getting interrupted before he could get beyond a few bars.
What he would have heard if he'd got to the end would have been perhaps the best sung of all Parsifals. The cast is a starry one (certainly for its time) and they all acquit themselves with more than usual credit.
Top of the list belongs to Gottlob Frick singing this Gurnemanz as his swansong to the recording studio. If you think of him only as the pitch black villains of Walkure and Gotterdammerung or the authoritarian rulers of Lohengrin and Tannhauser, think again. This is a warmly wise mature Knight of the Grail whose every word and musical phrase is deeply considered and sung with meaning and understanding. No garrulous old bore, this. Fischer-Dieskau, too, brings all his experience of lieder singing to bear on the text and the music. This Amfortas is no mere cypher, but an honourable, flawed and deeply anguished man. Christa Ludwig presents all the sharply contrasted facets of this profoundly complex character to her portrayal of Kundry. Maybe she lacks just the last volt of electricity generated by Martha Modl in Act 2. The one slightly weak link in this estimable array is Rene Kollo, a rather bland Parsifal with insufficient distinction between the 'reine Tor' who erupts on the scene in Act 1 and the wiser, older, world-weary black knight who trudges into the final Act. A glance down the cast list reveals strength in depth right down to a list of Flowermaidens that includes Kiri te Kanawa and Lucia Popp.
As for the conducting, Solti is Solti - exciting, precise, a little hard-driven at times and inclined to be episodic. As always, he draws ravishing sounds from the Vienna Philharmonic and his familiar Decca engineers do him proud by the standards of the day.
This is certainly a candidate for a top recommendation Parsifal with its great singing cast and its (relatively) modern sound. Personally, though, I'd go back to the 1951 Knappertsbusch and settle for the more dated sound.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
I have owned the 1962 Bayreuth performance conducted by Knappertsbusch for twenty years and one cannot help noticing, especially as compared to the Decca version, the disadvantages of the Festpielhaus's covered pit: loss of high frequencies and orchestral colour and restricted dynamic range so that the experience is less moving and thrilling than Solti's version. If only I had bought it earlier! In every way it is outstanding: no expense was spared to get the best possible cast, down to Kiri Te Kanawa as one of the Flower Maidens. The Vienna Boys' Choir is also striking in the Temple scenes. The recording is vintage Decca with orchestra and singers perfectly balanced and with plenty of depth of perspective so that one has the impression of watching a stage performance.
Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic are wonderful throughout, ecstatically uplifting, and Solti knows just how to pace this work so that it never once hangs fire not even during Gurnemanz's monologues (Gottlob Frick must of course take a lot of credit too); indeed, the opera seems amazingly short (and there is nothing longer or more tedious than a bad "Parsifal"). Solti also brings out more orchestral detail and colour than most, maintaining constant interest and fascination. He sees the work more as drama than as a religious work. I personally find Wagner's religiosity cloying and sentimental, so welcome a version in which this aspect is not over-stressed.
One is left wondering if this isn't after all Wagner's masterpiece. Certainly I have never heard a performance to match this one though, if you can afford it, Knappertsbusch's Bayreuth version deserves a place on the shelves too, offering as it does a very different view of "Parsifal".
P.S. Having said that about the Knappertsbusch version, I no longer feel any desire to listen to it. Listening to "Parsifal" being only an occasional experience, I prefer it to be an exceptionally inspiring one - and that means Solti and the VPO.
Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic are wonderful throughout, ecstatically uplifting, and Solti knows just how to pace this work so that it never once hangs fire not even during Gurnemanz's monologues (Gottlob Frick must of course take a lot of credit too); indeed, the opera seems amazingly short (and there is nothing longer or more tedious than a bad "Parsifal"). Solti also brings out more orchestral detail and colour than most, maintaining constant interest and fascination. He sees the work more as drama than as a religious work. I personally find Wagner's religiosity cloying and sentimental, so welcome a version in which this aspect is not over-stressed.
One is left wondering if this isn't after all Wagner's masterpiece. Certainly I have never heard a performance to match this one though, if you can afford it, Knappertsbusch's Bayreuth version deserves a place on the shelves too, offering as it does a very different view of "Parsifal".
P.S. Having said that about the Knappertsbusch version, I no longer feel any desire to listen to it. Listening to "Parsifal" being only an occasional experience, I prefer it to be an exceptionally inspiring one - and that means Solti and the VPO.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
I have the fifties Knappertsbusch recording, and agree with the concensus that it enshrines a perfect reading of the spiritual dimensions of the work. However, we should remember that this is Wagner, and the profane and carnal is every bit as central to his vision as the metaphysical elements. It is the vital sysnthesis of these two paradigms that make the Solti interpretation the most energised and complete on disc. That this supreme interpretation is sung so brilliantly by the finest cast on record (Frick surpasses even Hotter as far as I am concerned) and recorded with such clarity and richness makes this an automatic first choice for this difficult (in all kinds of ways) but utterly transforming masterpiece.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Parsifal,
We knew this could only be good. The recording has lived up its reputation and to our expectations and it arrived speedily, well in time for Christmas.
Published 4 months ago by Eliza
Most Dramatically Effective Recording of This Opera
The standard comment on this recording, as on most of Sir Georg Solti's work, is that it's too intense and visceral and 'lacks spirituality'. Well, maybe so.... Read more
Published on 30 July 2008 by Wakefield, 2011
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