Mark Elder and the Hallé surpassed any other account of Parsifal that Michael Tanner has heard

The Proms season of Wagner operas — pity they didn’t do them all; Die Meistersinger would have been specially welcome, since no one else is doing it either — concluded appropriately with Parsifal, conducted by Sir Mark Elder. The conducting at all these performances has been remarkably good, but in some respects Elder was the most striking of all. Working with his orchestra, the Hallé, he produced an account of this miraculous score which, for a combination of passion and precision, surpassed any other that I have ever heard. Without for a moment stinting on climaxes, Elder and the Hallé explored and expounded the refinements and economies of Wagner’s subtle masterpiece to a point that would have left Boulez open-mouthed with admiration. That meant that tempi were for the most part broad, but so sure is Elder’s grasp that that made the overall structure of the work all the more apparent.

It led, for me at least, to one revelation: the Grail scene in Act I can seem too extended, with the sacramental bread and wine being distributed, angelic voices accompanying, then a rather hearty song of knightly thanksgiving, followed by a drawn-out recessional as the knights withdraw and leave the irritable Gurnemanz to snap at bewildered Parsifal. In this performance, the effect was markedly different. The blessing and distribution of the sacrament were suitably ethereal, but then what followed was a stepwise return/descent to the everyday, with the knights confident of their renewed strength, while the orchestra showed how largely illusory that was, with Wagner musing, musically, on what kind of energising process the ceremony had really amounted to; and with the re-opening of Amfortas’s wound, rendered in hideously graphic dissonances, the answer seemed to be dismal. And Gurnemanz’s bad temper, a Shakespearean touch, just capped the demonstration of how transient any moments of grace that come our way are likely to be.