A completely satisfying operatic experience: Opera North’s Parsifal reviewed

When Parsifal finally returns to Montsalvat, it’s Good Friday. He’s trodden the path of suffering but now the sun is shining. Confused, he turns to the aged and broken Gurnemanz: why, on this day of utmost grief, does not the whole of nature mourn? Gurnemanz gestures at the woods and meadows, glowing, as Wagner tells us, in the morning light: ‘You see, it is not so.’ At this point in Opera North’s new concert staging, Parsifal (Toby Spence), Gurnemanz (Brindley Sherratt) and Kundry (Katarina Karneus) are sitting on the lip of the stage, as if having a quiet chat and – with a gentle relaxation of the shoulders, the smallest widening of the eyes – somehow embodying between them all the wonder, tenderness and slowly dawning hope of some of Wagner’s most profoundly compassionate music.

It’s in scenes like these that Wagner is supreme. Wotan’s final embrace of Brünnhilde, the quintet in Die Meistersinger: the action still has some way to run, but the emotional narrative has reached its resolution, and after a moment of intimate, ecstatic shared realisation, the story strides on to its fulfilment, transfigured by the glow of that understanding. The universe is suddenly greater than you ever imagined. Four hours in, Sherratt was singing with undimmed nobility and richness, while Spence’s everyman Parsifal sat in his bloodied white shirt, comprehension spreading across his features like spring sunshine. And Karneus, blue-clad like the Madonna, turned slightly into the light where we could see her face – which had somehow aged and de-aged by decades over the course of the evening – suddenly relax, for the first time, into simple joy.