Opera: Don't be tempted

Salzburg's new Parsifal is coming to Edinburgh this August. But no need to rush, says Hugh Canning

It will be remembered - if at all - as the smells-and-bells Parsifal. In his Salzburg Easter Festival staging of the two "communion" scenes, Peter Stein, doyen of German theatre directors, directs boys to fill the stage with an overwhelming odour of incense, so strong that some of the choristers cough and rub their eyes, while the conductor, Claudio Abbado, has commissioned real bells, made of aluminium and based on the design of those used in Tibetan temples, from a foundry in Heilbronn for the orchestral processionals that introduce these scenes. Their (amplified) sound is equally overpowering, and, particularly in Act III, the Berlin Philharmonic's brass players had their work cut out to be heard over the din.
This is only Stein's second staging of a Wagner opera - the first was a solitary and allegedly disastrous Rheingold at the Paris Opera in the mid-1970s - and it's a co-production with the Edinburgh International Festival, coming our way this August. On paper, it looked alluring: Abbado has not conducted a staged opera in Edinburgh since the famous Berganza/Domingo Carmen in the late 1970s, and Edinburgh will get the Salzburg cast, though not its orchestra. The Berlin Phil would be an extravagance too far for Brian McMaster's budget. Instead, Edinburgh will get another of the Italian maestro's favourite bands, the Gustav Mahler Jugend-orchester (youth orchestra), which gave an unforgettable account of its patron composer's Seventh Symphony three festivals ago.

The Stein-Abbado-Salzburg collaboration has already delivered acclaimed accounts of Berg's Wozzeck and Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, so one can see why McMaster would have licked his lips at the prospect of bringing the director's, and conductor's, first staged Parsifal to Edinburgh; but, sad to say, it's a theatrical non-event, only moderately sung.

That Stein should have so little to say about Wagner's transcendental masterpiece is frankly astonishing, and bitterly disappointing. His stagings of Verdi's Otello and Falstaff for McMaster, when the latter was general director of Welsh National Opera in the 1980s, belong to the most vividly theatrical experiences of my opera-going lifetime, and even though his Pelleas and Peter Grimes for the same company betrayed a deterioration of his intellectual energy and visual flair, nothing prepared me for this blandly literal and clunkily blocked Parsifal in Salzburg. By Salzburg, if not Edinburgh, standards, it looks cheap: Gianni Dessi's minimally representational sets and Anna Maria Heinreich's cod-medieval costumes might pass muster in an amateur staging of Camelot, but they simply won't do for Wagner at one of the cost-liest operatic addresses in the world. Stein and Heinrich were booed by a vocal section of the audience at their curtain call.

I hate to side with the protesters, but if I had paid up to Euro 1,000 -more than £600- for my one-opera, three-concert subscription, I would have been less than pleased. Significantly, the booing came from the cheaper seats at the back of the Grosses Festspielhaus, rather than the front stalls occupied by the jet-setting European super-rich, who still provide the backbone of the Easter Festival's income. (Founded without subsidy by the late Herbert von Karajan as an Easter showcase for his Berlin orchestra, the festival gets minimal funding from the Salzburg municipality and "Land", and now relies heavily on corporate sponsorship, in addition to charging the highest prices for classical music in Europe.) Edinburgh charges much less, of course, but most tickets will still cost £40-£100, a steep asking price for a production that looks dull by comparison with Scottish Opera?s version at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre three seasons ago, and one that fields some very provincial German-based singers. Scottish Opera's Parsifal was a "concept"production by the Romanian director Silviu Purcarete - Klingsor's magic garden transformed into a Victorian whorehouse, with Kundry as a brothel madam- where as Stein's concept is to have no concept of the piece at all, beyond a vague adherence to Wagner's stage directions.

Dyed-in-the-wool Wagnerian traditionalists will doubtlessly applaud this - some did in Salzburg - but Stein's marshalling of his choral forces looked limp and underdrilled at last weekend's first night. This from a director who notoriously demanded, and got, seven or eight weeks of rehearsal for his WNO productions. And he botched the trickiest of Wagner's instructions: the fall from flight of the swan Parsifal shoots in Act I, and Klingsor?s throwing of the spear in Act II. Titters greeted the former, while mocking laughter erupted as the spear juddered down an all-too-visible line and moved backwards as Parsifal failed to catch it. Mercifully, Stein and Dessi spared us the dove that Wagner requires to hover over Parsifal's head at the opera's close; instead, we got an advent- calender star of Bethlehem bursting out of the front "cloth". Better to suggest these visual effects symbolically, or leave them to the audience's imagination, than to realise them as shabbily as this.

Initially, the middle act looked more promising, with an oriental, Herod-in-Salome-lookalike Klingsor running nervously down a dramatic staircase towards his "magic mirror"- a cross between a satellite dish and a radar scanner. But the magic garden was another feebly executed transformation: the flat representing the castle rampart sinks, and a platform with neatly sculpted, calf-high box trees, around which the flower maidens cavort prettily, trundles on.

Even more disconcerting than the visual poverty of the staging is the absence of compelling indiv- idual character portraits - the detailed direction of actors that made Stein's Falstaff and Otello so overwhelming. It may be that Wagner's musical and dramatic momentum is too slow and stately for a director accustomed to Verdi's action-packed scores and scenarios, but he was unable to invest youthful heroic allure in the physically stolid, middle-aged Thomas Moser, whose Parsifal looked as if he had borrowed one of Henry VIII's (later) suits of armour in Act III.

Hans Tschammer's only adequately sung Gurnemanz was a bore, and Albert Dohmen's routine singing failed to convey Amfortas's transcendental pain. Violeta Urmana sang thrillingly as Kundry, but tired audibly towards the end of her Act II narration, and Stein was unable to suggest that any magic was involved in her trans- formation from dishevelled hag to sex goddess. Best of a middling bunch was Eike Wilm Schulte's Klingsor. This isn't a great voice, but every word of the necromancer's text was delivered with point, and he's a whirlwind onstage.

Abbado, looking gaunt, drawn and more than his 67 years after cancer treatment, conjures glorious sounds from the Berlin Phil. Less convincing is his use of boys's voices in the choruses, which Wagner initially wanted, but later rejected. The audience acclaimed Abbado ecstatically, but theatrically this Parsifal is hardly a triumphant Easter Festival swan song (Simon Rattle takes over next year). It will need a lot of work from Stein and his designers to justify importing it to Edinburgh.