Wagner: Parsifal album review – Elīna Garanča is extraordinary in a very fine account of Wagner’s fascinating score

Sony Classical, four CDs
This new recording is taken from stage performances of Kirill Serebrennikov’s divisive 2021 production for Vienna State Opera. Jonas Kaufmann leads a superb cast with Philippe Jordan conducting a recording that is amongst the finest Parsifals on disc

When it was unveiled in 2021, the Vienna State Opera’s production of Wagner’s final music drama seems to have provoked a mixed reaction. While there was almost uniform praise for its musical qualities, opinion was very much divided on the merits and relevance of the staging, directed by the Russian film-maker, Kirill Serebrennikov.

Reliving his experience of imprisonment for fraud and subsequent house arrest four years earlier, Serebrennikov had set Parsifal in a “detention centre for criminals” (by implication somewhere in Russia), in which the self-harming Amfortas was a dissident, protesting against the inhumane prison conditions, and Gurnemanz the inmates’ effective leader (and in-house tattooist). Kundry was a visiting journalist and Klingsor her magazine publisher, while Parsifal himself was another of the prisoners, who in the first two acts had an onstage double, reliving his experiences as a younger man through a series of flashbacks.