British author and music journalist Jessica Duchen returned from yesterday’s live broadcast of Parsifal from the Met with a head full of inspiration.
She put those thoughts into a particularly well wrought critique of the production, concluding with a much broader meditation on the wonder that is Wagner’s craft, and how this opera’s Holy Grail could be used as a metaphor for our own relationship to music.
I don’t want to post excerpts here, because I don’t think that would do Duchen’s essay justice.
You’ll find Duchen’s blog post here. You may, however, want to use the following for your Wagnerian reading soundtrack, even if it’s not from Parsifal — it’s young Latvian pianist Vestard Shimkus playing Glenn Gould’s transcription of the Siegfried Idyll with great verve (Shinkus will be making his Toronto début at the Glenn Gould Studio in a month, details here):
John Terauds