Showing posts with label Jonas Kaufmann. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jonas Kaufmann. Show all posts

Monday, February 10, 2014

Um, in case you were wondering where I was...


...I've been in New York and - in between shopping, museum-hopping and seeing all my oldest and dearest friends - spent a rather pleasant hour in a press room at the Met with a certain tenor, who recovered from his bout of flu in time for a good chinwag. I've been trying to make this happen for years rather than months...and it was worth the wait.

JFK - Jonas Fluey Kaufmann, natch - is in NY preparing for a new production of Werther, which opens on 18 Feb, directed by Richard Eyre and also starring the glorious Sophie Koch as Charlotte (see the new issue of Opera News, just out, for my cover feature about her). HD cinecast is on 15 March. Be there. You'll like it.

It was also wonderful to see Glyndebourne's production of Billy Budd - imported wholesale, orchestra, chorus, Marks Elder and Padmore and all - receive a massive ovation at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the other night. New Yorkers, you have two more chances to see it this week. Here's a rave review from the New York Times.

Just flew home from...JFK. Incredibly, only 5 hrs 40 mins.

Saturday, November 23, 2013

A soapbox and an orange tree

A weekend full of anniversaries kicks off with a new weekly "soapbox" slot, which the stringed instrument dealers Amati.com have asked me to write. They've even drawn me standing on one!


You can read my first Soapbox tract here. It's about Great Britten, of course.

And so tomorrow it is the world premiere, as rehearsed reading, of my new play Sins of the Fathers, about Wagner, Liszt and Cosima, at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond. Info here. Call the box office for returns.

What does a playwright do all day once the thing is written and delivered? Well, I've been hunting for candle glue, preparing some labels for the bottle of magic wine and sourcing Wagner's dressing gown. Social media proved worth its weight in gold where the latter was concerned: an appeal on Facebook ("Urgent: need a silk dressing gown for Wagner, must fit John Sessions") has produced a friend - the real sort, not only the Facebooky sort - who inherited an antique silk red paisley number from her great-uncle that fits the bill to perfection. Now we just have to find the right something for Liszt to wear. A cravat should do the trick.

From this anniversary line-up, Verdi is missing. Only one thing for it: over to Jonas...






Wednesday, October 09, 2013

Verdi bicentenary: Anja Harteros and Jonas Kaufmann in Don Carlo



It's Verdi's bicentenary today and as everyone is choosing their favourite bits, here is one of mine. I've been lucky enough to hear these two in this opera twice this year - once at Covent Garden, once in Munich. Life in music just doesn't get any better than that.



Monday, August 19, 2013

At the risk of being a bit predictable...

...here's JK making his new album of GV. You'll want to hear this, believe me, and you'll particularly want to hear the bit from Otello.



There's a moment near the start of the film where he clutches his phone rather pointedly. I reckon that's when a text arrived from his press agent saying "oh no, another message from that blasted English journalist begging us for an interview in Munich/Salzburg..." (Nah, just kidding... in fact they've all been really helpful, for which I'm grateful. But 0 interview for JD yet.)

I tried. I really did. But time was there none, it seems. More about Munich and the opera festival as soon as there's a little, er, time - of which I am very short at the moment too.

Monday, July 29, 2013

A very spoilt opera lover's home thoughts from abroad

So last night, here in Munich, I heard Don Carlo with Jonas Kaufmann sounding perhaps the best I've ever heard him (and you know how good that is), Anja Harteros sounding like a platinum-plated Maria Callas only possibly better, Rene Pape sounding like King Marke as King Philip II and a baritone new to my radar, Ludovic Tezier, as Rodrigo sounding like a presence who will dominate his repertoire to very fabulous effect for years to come. How many great voices can you have on a stage at any one time? It occurs to one that - perhaps unusually for a Verdi performance - one could reassemble the same team for a certain thing by Wagner to fine effect, one named Tristan und Isolde...

But oh dearie dearie dear... I went and missed Barenboim's Gotterdammerung at the Proms, and today have been inundated with messages full of overjoy, overwhelmedness or plain old Schadenfreude from those who were there, or heard it on the radio, or who are calling for a Ring cycle to become a regular feature of the Proms, please, something I will second with all my heart (provided it's done by the right performers). After a 20-minute ovation, Barenboim made a speech declaring that what the audience had been through with him and his musicians was something he had never even dreamed of. Can't manage to embed the code for some reason, so please follow this link to hear it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01ddfdr

Extra plaudits for the Proms this year for having made me seriously question the wisdom of taking a summer holiday abroad while they're on.



Monday, July 15, 2013

Favourite things: Kaufmann sings 'Die schöne Müllerin'



The other day I was out for a walk in Richmond Park and I spotted a pair of shoes abandoned next to a Bächlein. While I doubt that Schubert or the young miller protagonist in this heart-rending song-cycle would actually have worn blue suede loafers (they're more Elvis, perhaps), I've had this music on the brain ever since. Who better to listen to than Jonas Kaufmann and Helmut Deutsch?

Thursday, July 04, 2013

Jonas to the rescue!

The Munich Opera Festival, which is in full swing for July, is doing wall-to-wall Verdi and Wagner this year. Last night it was Lohengrin. The tenor went ill. Who can you get to replace that at short notice? Hmm, how about that local bloke who knows the role?


Text from my spy says simply: "Jonas sensation, audience went nuts."

Kaufmaniacs should log on tomorrow when the Staatsoper is webcasting Il trovatore, with JK as Manrico, a role he's just been singing for the first time, with Anja Harteros - another local - as Leonora. My spy says that's sounding a bit good too. Webcast is free and starts at 7pm over there (so 1 hr earlier in UK and 6 hrs earlier in NY).

Friday, June 21, 2013

Kaufmann is going to Sony

The other week an editor friend mentioned, en passant, that he'd phoned Decca asking for some pics of Jonas - only to be told to call Sony Classical instead. Ooh la la, we thought. It's all official now, and the great tenor has indeed jumped ship. We can expect a Verdi album imminently.

Meanwhile he is at the Bayerische Staatsoper rehearsing Il Trovatore with Anja Harteros for the Munich Opera Festival. I'm reliably informed that they are both sounding absolutely fantastic. We can all watch their live webcast from the theatre on 5 July.

They're also doing Don Carlo - and I may even get to see this at the end of the festival. Here's last year's backstage glimpse (in German).

So for Decca today, it's one in and one out, and probably time for the weekend.




Saturday, May 18, 2013

Kaufmann. Winterreise.

Look what's popped up on Youtube: complete audio of Jonas Kaufmann's Winterreise recital at the Konzerthaus, Vienna, 6 April 2013. Helmut Deutsch is at the piano. Apparently JK was not feeling on best form just then - he was recovering from the lurgy that knocked him out of two Vienna Parsifals. It's remarkable nonetheless.

Prepare to listen by getting yourself a cuppa, a box of hankies and a DO NOT DISTURB sign.

(UPDATE, 5.40pm: An appreciative reader has just tweeted to remark that this is good alternative listening for anyone trying to avoid the Eurovision Song Contest tonight...)


Sunday, May 12, 2013

Sunday roundup from a very busy week

I've been burning the candle at both ends, to coin a phrase. It beats the hell out of sitting alone at home watching repeats of Midsomer Murders - something I have resolved never to do again.

Last Saturday, Don Carlo at the Royal Opera House. You wake up, the sun is shining, you're free, it's opening night at Covent Garden, Jonas is singing and you're not there? Unthinkable! I scooped a return and drank long and deep of the genius of Verdi. It was almost impossible to imagine a finer cast. Sometimes when Kaufmann is on stage, the rest can fade to insignificance, but here his peers matched him moment for moment.

This appears to be the one performance that the scheduled soprano, Anja Harteros, was able in the end to do, and the first time I've managed to hear her live. Her voice has an almost uncanny beauty along with extraordinary range of expression: the deepest levels enhanced by taut, dramatic diction, the uppermost soaring with rare 100-carat sheen. She's the perfect stage partner for Kaufmann, matching his sensitivity to nuance and blending with his multifaceted colourations, the final duet daringly hushed. Mariusz Kwiecien's double-edged charm and rich-flowing baritone, as Rodrigo, might otherwise have stolen the show, while Ferruccio Furlanetto's magnificently tortured and heartbreaking Philip II threatened to do likewise, with the type of voice and interpretation that brings every twist of phrase and fortune into close-up. Eric Halfvorsen's Grand Inquisitor rose to the challenge of one of Verdi's nastiest and truest personalities. In the pit, Tony Pappano and the orchestra plunged through the four-and-a-half hour span with passion undimmed; and the chorus was absolutely on fire for the auto da fe, a scene in which the confluence of symbol and drama could scarcely be finer.

Carlos is, after all, a German romantic hero - by Schiller - in all but moniker, a soul whose obsession with Elisabeth after one scant encounter in the forest can match that of Goethe's Werther for Charlotte. Flanders is Elisabeth; the burning heretics are the heart of Carlos, who burns inwardly for breaking the taboo of aching for his stepmother. Freud might have enjoyed that final moment of farewell when he addresses Elisabeth as 'mother'. What happened to Carlos's real mother anyway? We are not told.

Lianna Haroutounian has since stepped into Harteros's shoes, making her ROH debut; and the churlish anonymi grumbling on the ROH comments boxes that the house should have had a "name" as second cast may want to think again. Fiona Maddocks's review today declares: "Haroutounian seemed to pull forth ever-increasing vocal powers until you thought her heart, or yours, would burst."

On Tuesday we had the first run-through at home of the Hungarian Dances concert with the new team for the Ulverston and the St James Theatre June performances. David Le Page (violin) and Anthony Hewitt (piano) used to be duo partners in their teens, but hadn't met in 23 years...yet it was as if they'd last seen each other yesterday. And the intensity of their musical response to the story took me completely by surprise. It felt as these concerts probably should: we may be a reader and two musicians, but their engagement with the drama and the emotions in the narrative bounced different angles into the music, while their impassioned interpretations made me see new and darker corners in my own text. It was as if we all made music together, essentially. I'm hugely grateful to them and excited about sharing a stage with them. Ulverston is on 8 June, the St James Theatre Studio in central London is on 11 June, and booking is open.

On Wednesday, to St John's Smith Square to hear Angelo Villani in recital. Angelo, you remember, is the Italian-Australian pianist we talked to a little while back when he started to make his comeback after 20 years away from the concert platform due to a trapped nerve in his shoulder. He performs in white gloves. And there's something of the white gloves about his musicianship too, in the best sense: while some complained that the programme he chose consisted more of the slow and soft than the barnstorming so many people seem to expect of concert pianists these days, that was actually the point.

Whether in the freely-calibrated rubato of the Chopin Nocturnes Op.9, two of the Liszt Petrarch Sonnets and the Ballade No.2, or the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, adapted from Wagner by various hands including Von Bulow, Liszt and Villani himself, his exceptional and microscopic sensitivity, the way he immerses us in sonority, allows us to soak up the edges of vibration as if letting subtle-coloured dye infiltrate and diffuse through our inner worlds. It's unusual and it may not be for everyone, but this is fine-art pianism and it is good to know that it hasn't been entirely lost in the outside welter of the (largely positive but often noisy) Lang Lang Effect.

There's a wonderful story about Daniel Guilet, the founding violinist of the Beaux Arts Trio, as a young lad meeting Fauré in the foyer of the Paris Conservatoire. Monsieur le Directeur, as Fauré was then, said to Daniel: where are you going in such a hurry? "My violin lesson, sir." Ahh, said Fauré. You'll go to your lesson and you'll learn to play fast and loud. But to play slow and soft: that is really difficult.

On Thursday, my mates from the Culturekicks blog took me to the trendiest gig in town: The Knife, at the Roundhouse. I'll be writing about it more fully for them, but in brief, the experience was a polar opposite from Angelo's concert (=ear protectors) and in other ways just like the Proms, because if you're my height you can't see much. Music: Nordic Noir without the murders. More about it soon.

The great thing is that in this extraordinary world, and especially in this matchless city of ours, there's room for everything: music of different eras, angles, twists, turns, scale, substance and aspect. Try to do it all, if and when you have the chance. Because each experience feeds the next.

Last but not least, yesterday I went to a school reunion and saw friends I haven't seen since our A levels, more years ago than I'd like to admit, and they hadn't changed a bit. Time's a funny old thing. Just as an opera that is well over 100 years old can feel as fresh and relevant in terms of drama and emotional impact as an electro-post-pop band, the passing decades simply disappear when people's energies connect, reconnect and blossom. Yes, this was quite a week...


Sunday, April 28, 2013

DH Lawrence for spring. Plus a bit of Wagner...

The Enkindled Spring

By D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
 
This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost.
 
 
To match this, here's Jonas singing 'Wintersturme...' from Wagner's Die Walkure, because - why not?
 
 

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

"Jonas Kaufmann is an honorary Londoner"


Der Jonas's love-in with London continued as he scooped two prizes at the inaugural International Opera Awards last night. Commenting in The Evening Standard, which supported the event in association with Opera Magazine, the editor Sarah Sands praised London as a magnet for international levels of excellence and - while reminding us that we need to raise our own game to be able to compete in our own capital city - pointed to Kaufmann as a prime example of the world-class talent that comes here to shine.  
"Pity the English tenors up against the winning German Jonas Kaufmann," she writes. "I watched him performing Verdi and Wagner at the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday and he was perfectly at ease with both composers and all nationalities. It is voice without borders...Jonas Kaufmann is an honorary Londoner now, as far as I'm concerned."
Jonas himself, interviewed in the paper, makes straightforward and utterly pertinent remarks about why opera is for everyone. On the website, the Standard has a video of him receiving his prize.

Jonas won the Male Singer award and the Audience Prize. Other key awards included Nina Stemme for the Female Singer award, Sophie Bevan for Young Singer, Tony Pappano for Conductor, Dmitri Tcherniakov for Director, George Benjamin's Written on Skin for Premiere, Christian Gerhaher for CD, Oper Frankfurt for Opera Company and Sir George Christie of Glyndebourne for the Lifetime Achievement Award. The full list is here.

It's a warm, warm welcome from us and, one suspects, most of the music business to the UK's first full-scale prize glitter devoted entirely to opera. The more it can be celebrated, the more people hear about Jonas, Nina, Sophie and then hear their voices, the better. And if Jonas should ever decide he does want to become a Londoner, we'd be queuing up to show him the town.

Monday, April 22, 2013

Jonas Kaufmann, swamped with red roses

Now, look. We have the Internet. We have Social Media. We have Instant Messaging. We have Facebook Chat. We have, for goodness' sake, the telephone. We have any number of means of communicating with our fellow human beings, in the same business or otherwise. 

So how can it happen that people go and schedule a Jonas Kaufmann concert at the Royal Festival Hall and a two-hander with Juan Diego Florez and Joyce DiDonato at the Barbican on the same flippin' night?

The fact that the inaugural Opera Awards are taking place tonight at the Park Lane Hilton, presenting prizes in 23 categories in front of 700 people, is probably a complete coincidence...

As it was, we had to choose, and I chose Kaufmann. There was Verdi and there was Wagner, and OK, it was one of those dates that pad out the sung programme with under-rehearsed orchestral extracts - but it was still Kaufmann. 

He started off by charming everyone with a little speech about why he was using the music. He doesn't usually, he insisted, but he's had so much to deal with these past few weeks...and he didn't want us all to sit there watching him sweating and shaking and suffering, so...well, fair enough. 

Wagner or Verdi, then, Jonas? Both, he says; and proceeded to prove that singing the one to near-perfection in no way precludes doing likewise for the other.

His Verdi selection was well planned, traversing the composer's development from the cod-Rossini idiom of the overture to Luisa Miller and the aria "Oh! Fede negar potessi...Quando le sere al placido"; through Simon Boccanegra - "O inferno!...Cielo pietoso, rendita" emerged as an absolute masterpiece in his interpretation - towards the ever-growing sophistication of Don Carlo ("Io l'ho perduta....Io la vidi") to La forza del destino ("La vita è inferno all'infelice...O, tu che in seno agli angeli").
 
This Verdi singing had everything: unleashed power matched by ever-alert nuance, tender covered tone balancing taut rhythms, expressive enunciation colouring mellifluous phrasing. Above all, Kaufmann's identification with the drama came across as utterly genuine. Many of these arias were pieces most of us have not heard him sing before. Therefore much anticipation had focused upon what he'd do with them; and he did not disappoint.

The Wagner extracts, though, are all on his recently-released album (of course) - and in some cases his performance even exceeded the achievements of the CD. The extremely extended Siegmund cries of "Wälse" suffer on the disc from a little drifting intonation, but not for a moment yesterday. Precision, power, character, colour, intelligence and that unmatchable, unmistakeable Kaufmann tone: it was all there and who could ask for anything more? 

The special truc about Kaufmann is that he is a musician first and foremost: one who expresses his innate, sterling-quality musicianship through a voice that happens to be a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon. This is rare. And he can act; and he looks great. All of that is a bonus.

He brought us a powerful, bitter Siegmund, a disingenuous Walther "Am stillen Herd" (we longed for the Prize Song but didn't get it) and his magnificently tormented "Amfortas! Die Wunde" from Parsifal - the opera that works least well as bleeding chunks at any time. (Pictured: Kaufmann as Parsifal at the Met.) Yet of the whole programme, the Wagner encores stand out as the most cherishable moments: two of the Wesendonck Lieder, "Schmerzen" and "Träume", sung entirely as the Lieder they are rather than as opera manqué, the emphasis falling upon the poetry, the intimacy, the sensibility. And "Winterstürme" from Die Walküre brought us an assurance that after this awfully long winter, spring really had come at last.

So had the flowers. Rarely do we see a man showered with bouquets of red roses to this extent -  brought to him on stage, but also handed to him from the audience. One lady trotted to the front with a red shiny bag to give him, content invisible. Let's hope it was chocolate. He deserved some.

The Florez/DiDonato concert sounds like a classier event, as far as peripheries are concerned - the RFH audience had to deal with a programme sprinkled with ridiculous misprints (Wagner was in the Dresden Uprising in 1949?), equally ridiculous summaries of entire opera plots yet no song texts, and huge pin-up style photos of our tenor (well, that's OK to some...). But all credit to the Philharmonia and conductor Jochen Rieder for delivering much better than the other orchestra did last time Kaufmann sang a Gubbay gig, even if - thanks, I fear, to the RFH acoustics, which have been  infuriatingly biased against the treble ever since the refurbishment - the brass drowned the upper strings at every turn. A guest clarinet in the form of Andrew Marriner proved worth his weight in gold

UPDATE, 3.40pm: There was a fourth encore. It was Verdi's 'Ah, la paterna mano'. I missed it. I thought it was all over...Fortunately, though, someone filmed it and has put it on Youtube. Here it is.



 

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Kaufmann on Wagner and anti-Semitism

[First of all, wanted to let you know that I'm on BBC Radio 3's IN TUNE today between 5 and 5.30pm, talking about the Royal Philharmonic Awards shortlist, which is being announced this afternoon.]

In an interview with Mannheim Morgenweb the one and only Jonas Kaufmann talks about - among other things - Wagner, anti-Semitism and how to separate them. Below are a few  highlights (any mistakes are either mine or Google Translate's) and the whole thing in German is here. In case you didn't know, he is giving a recital with orchestra in London at the Royal Festival Hall on 21 April including arias by the anniversary boys Verdi and Wagner.


... it appears that you currently working a lot on your piano. Optical illusion?

Kaufmann: No, do not be fooled. I lay on the soft and subtle sounds at least as much value as the large and dramatic. An old rule for singers is: only those who have a sonorous piano can develop a healthy forte. But this concerns not only technical matters, but above all the artistic.

What position do you refer in the matter of Wagner? Can you separate the wonderful work of vile anti-Semites?

Kaufmann: Wagner's anti-Semitic writings and his self-esteem will always be a stumbling block. Even militant Wagnerians wish sometimes that he had only composed, and not written so much. But as for your question, I think you should separate work and man, just as one should distinguish the anti-Semitism of nationalists like Wagner from the antisemitism of the Nazis.

Does that work?

Kaufmann: The fact that Wagner's works have been abused by the Nazis does not alter their artistic importance. They belong to the greatest. Many Jewish artists who were expelled by the Nazis from Germany and Austria have also recognised this: singers like Friedrich Schorr had no problem with Wagner being performed at the Met. And someone like Daniel Barenboim has long worked for the performance of Wagner in Israel to be allowed. 



Thursday, March 14, 2013

A solution to vocal problems? Oh yes! Oh yes!

Argy-bargy at the Royal Opera House press conference yesterday: in the course of a highly operatic morning, Tony Pappano had a go at everyone about the misinformation and conspiracy theories that circulated around the Robert le Diable cast changes a few months back.

Leaving aside the possibility that the work itself is jinxed and should just be quietly buried...what happened, Pappano said, was this: first Florez decided against moving into heavier repertoire, following an unhappy experience with the Duke of Mantua; next, Diana Damrau got pregnant; and though Maria Poplavskaya was ill, she then recovered and went back into the show because her doctor said she was was well enough to do so. The saga with Jennifer Rowley is another issue altogether...

Apart from that, there's plenty good stuff next season including a recital on the main stage by Jonas Kaufmann, who'll also be singing in Puccini's Manon Lescaut; three Strauss operas for the composer's anniversary year, including Karita Mattila in Ariadne auf Naxos; Faust with Calleja and Terfel; Les Dialogues des Carmelites with Magdalena Kozena on stage and Simon Rattle in the pit; a new production of Parsifal; and a lavish, expensive staging together with the Royal Ballet of The Sicilian Vespers. In ballet, there'll be a full-length creation by Christopher Wheeldon based on Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale, with a new score by Joby Talbot, and Carlos Acosta will be in charge of a new staging of Don Quixote. Sales are up, with ballet reaching 98% of box office and opera hot on its heels (so to speak). More opera 13-14 news here. More ballet 13-14 news here.

Still, it was clear that TP is fairly fed up with singers who cancel, and that it does happen more than it used to.

What to do? Maybe the ROH needs to invest in some vibrators.

This is not a joke. (At least, I don't think it is.) Just look at this news from the University of Alberta:
Vibrators are being used by researchers at the University of Alberta to help give actors a little bit more vocal power. The team of researchers found that pressing the sex toys against the throats of actors helps to give them improved projection and range – vocally, of course.
“You can actually watch on a spectrograph how vocal energy grows,” said David Ley, who worked on the project. “Even when you take the vibrator off, the frequencies are greater than when first applied.
He said he has used this method with singers, schoolteachers and actors, and so far the vibrator technique has always worked...
Ley headed over to a local love shop in search of some hand-held vibrators in order to test out whether they could help release various forms of muscular tension. He was looking for a vibrator with a frequency somewhere between 100 and 120 hertz, which is close to the range of the human voice. Once he applied the vibrator to an actress’ neck over the vocal cords, she was able to produce striking results.
(As reported on RedOrbit - Your Universe Online - read the whole thing here.)

Sunday, March 03, 2013

Jonas Kaufmann and the Holy Grail


(I didn't quite mean to write all this when I sat down this morning. It was going to be a straight review of a cinecast. But no. Please get a cuppa, then fasten your seatbelts.)

Every now and then, a writer regrets something. Today: two things. First of all, I think I once said something sniffy about opera cinecasts. I take it all back.

Just imagine a world where we can all go to the cinema and see a simultaneous relay of something happening 3000 miles away that is perhaps the finest performance possible today of one of the greatest operas ever written. To experience it would otherwise cost us a transatlantic air fare, a New York hotel and several hundred $$$s in tickets booked about a year in advance. Yet there it is, splayed across a big screen a mile up the road, in high definition picture and rather good sound, and we are sharing it not only with our full-house cinema and the theatre where it's happening, but also with packed cinemas all over the country, all over the continent, all over the globe. And the radio audience as well. Folks, we are in that world. We should be so lucky.

As I said before, it's not the same as a live performance. But my goodness, we still get the experience, and it is full on, and it is everywhere. It's an extraordinary feat of technological expertise and I can only take off my leopard-print hat to those who developed it. Yesterday's Parsifal offered Jonas Kaufmann wrapped, this time, in a solar storm: a flicker of sound loss here and there, for a fraction of a second, was apparently due to flare-ups on the sun. The system must, on the whole, be pretty robust.

The second thing I regret is my early years as a Wagnerphobe. As a kid in north London I swallowed all the usual rubbish and never dared touch it. That's another topic... but the essential point is that my mind remained closed to this music for a long time. And I was missing out. And if you are in the state I was in, then the chances are that you, too, are missing out on what could potentially be a life-changing experience. Better late than never.

The Met's Parsifal is directed by Francois Girard - whom you may know for his films such as The Red Violin and 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould. Interviewed by the HD screening's presenter for the occasion, the bass-baritone Eric Owens (a brilliant Alberich), Girard commented that the way to tackle Parsifal is to go back to the music. To paraphrase: everything you need is already in there. 

Like many of the most satisfying Wagner directors, he has focused on strong imagery that is sophisticated yet never cluttered: huge scale, powerful effects of light and colour. The concept, if concept it is, is "post apocalyptic" - whether induced by war, meteor or global warming is immaterial, but occasionally there's the sense that we are in another galaxy, as vast planets rise in the background. Act I's processional music finds the knights assembling to observe an other-worldly light show - an aurora borealis of sorts.

One danger of Parsifal is that, given the music's timeless spans of quietness and anguish, the action can become static, yet Girard never allows this to happen. The knights in Act I - white shirt, black trousers - form a circle that seems to breathe with the music, opening and closing like a flower as they bend together; their movements amplify the emotions and the narrative in a stylised yet subtle way. Klingsor's realm is framed by vast walls that spill light and blood from their edges, while the floor is filled with blood-like liquid. Here the flower maidens are amplified by dancers: again, blocks of motion, spears catching the light, strong, simple, focused, both striking and sinister in effect.

But above all, Girard has got to the heart of the work by drawing out its compassion. That is the opera's theme: Parsifal is "the fool made wise by compassion". So we need to see on stage exactly what this compassion is. It is everywhere it needs to be, but especially in the characters' tenderness towards one another in the context of a devastated world. The swan episode is heartbreaking (OK, the swan looks a little woolly, but Rene Pape as Gurnemanz manages to convince us it is real), for you can well imagine that in a world where water is reduced to one blood-stained trickle of stream, a swan is a precious rarity indeed. The geometry of the swan's wound and Amfortas's is clear as daylight - red stain on white - but the symbolism is never hammered at us.

Kundry's tenderness for Amfortas; Gurnemanz's tenderness for Kundry, who ultimately dies cradled in his arms; the rebuttal of those who reject such empathy; and Parsifal's final reappearance, harrowed and aged over we don't know how long, presenting himself for Gurnemanz's annointing not with arrogance but remarkable humility as he declares that he will be king. This overwhelming sense of connection and compassion seems in no way contrived: it is there, in the music and the text, and all Girard has done is to take it on its own terms and bring out the best in it. An opera director gets a standing, yelling ovation? Unusual - but this one does. He deserves every second of it.

Perhaps there have been times in the last 130-odd years when the piece has been better sung, but it is difficult to imagine how. Kaufmann as Parsifal offers tenderness aplenty and that special velvety, covered tone of his when it's needed. But inside that chest (which his female fans will be happy to know is, for much of the time, bared) there is a type of Heldentenor waiting to be unleashed, and in Act II it is given its head. "Amfortas!" He opens up and the voltage can flatten us - not with volume necessarily, but with focus of tone, emotional intensity and sheer musicianship. Kaufmann may be the thinking woman's pin-up, but if he were five foot high and six foot wide yet sang with the same sound, brain and heart, I really think we would still flock to him in the same numbers. [UPDATE: a few males have tweeted a gentle protest that I have only mentioned JK's female fans in this context. Fair enough, chaps - please join us!]

And the rest of the cast matched him. There is a touch of genius in Rene Pape's Gurnemanz: his rich, flowing tone feels effortless, his attention to nuancing of the words made Act I (nearly 2 hours, much of which he carries) fly by, and the empathy of his character shines without being forced. Peter Mattei as the suffering Amfortas reached the same level of wondrous tone and dramatic impact; and in Act III he plunges into Titurel's grave in a gesture that seems to sum up the human tragedy of the whole work. Katarina Dalayman simply is Kundry - a timeless, earth-mother figure, all-giving, loving, exhausted emotionally but never vocally. Around her neck, she wears a variety of symbols: a cross rubs together with a new-age crystal. More of that in a moment.

Biggest credit, perhaps, of all: Daniele Gatti in the pit. It's been much remarked on, in astonishment, that he conducts this five-hour masterpiece from memory, but even more remarkable is what he does with it. In short, he keeps the sound of the orchestra quiet enough for the singers not to have to yell. It's a big orchestra. It takes a lot of doing. But the sounds shift across these vast tracts of music with the transparency and wonder of those aurora borealis images; the atmosphere is hushed, rapt, meditative and filled with a surreal glow; and the textures are clear and flowing enough to allow us to hear the counterpoint and detail that point the way forward to half the masterpieces of the next 50 years.

Act I shows us where Pelleas et Melisande originated. Act II's flower maidens are a signpost to Richard Strauss. Act III is chock-full of late Faure. The Prelude lights the way towards Mahler 9. Origins of late Bruckner and Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius? Look no further. You realise that this is what those composers were all trying to do, and you can't blame them for trying, and you can't help but marvel at the way the fact that they didn't manage to do it nevertheless let them create new paths of their own, with great works the result.

On their knees, palms open to the light, head back, the chorus receives the moment in what can only be described as a state of grace. How Wagner achieves this must be one of music's eternal mysteries. Anyone who has been through a spiritual awakening of any kind, in any religion, or cult, or meditation process, will recognise it. Yet Wagner himself doesn't appear to have been an especially spiritual or religious person beyond his intellectual interest - and in terms of spiritual system, Parsifal is in a world of its own. The focus is obviously Christian, yet Jesus Christ is never mentioned by name. And the blend of eastern myticism and the references to reincarnation (Kundry was once Herodias?) would probably be rejected with a good deal of scepticism by most traditional Christians - wouldn't it?

As for the Grail: it is found. It exists. And it sits in its box. They're not on a quest for it any longer - the thing has turned up, but Amfortas, driven mad by pain, won't allow it out to heal his community. What is Wagner's Holy Grail?


Could it be music? Art itself? 

The channelling through a golden cup/opera/book/painting/other marvel of a holy spirit that can heal us when we let it out and allow its light to shine? 

And perhaps this is why many of us who are neither religious, nor believers, nor fanatics, nor indeed anything but ordinary 21st-century people in a local cinema on a Saturday evening, wept over Parsifal yesterday.

Maybe that is its message for us in 2013. The Grail is found: we know the power of music to change lives and heal souls. It has been proven, time and again. But we still won't let it out of its box - not necessarily out of spite or ignorance or foolishness, but out of pain. Let in the compassion, let in the empathy, and take it up, and let it do its work.

I refer you to the Music Inspirations section of my sidebar for further reading.

(NB: There are various 'encore' screenings, but dates and times vary from cinema to cinema. Our nearest, Richmond Curzon, is on 17 March at 2pm, according to a notice in the foyer yesterday - nothing about it on the website, though.)