“The word we still use is ‘pilgrimage,’ ” writes David Allen in Tuesday’s (8/7) New York Times. Germany’s Bayreuth Festival “retains its mystical air…. Bayreuth, however, is currently not the pre-eminent place to worship Wagner’s music… For that, one must head to the festival’s perennial rival, Munich and its Bavarian State Opera. That was my conclusion after spending the last two weeks of July taking in the offerings of both theaters…. Kirill Petrenko, the diminutive, Omsk-born general music director of the Bavarian State Opera, and the future chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, is spoken of with quiet awe in these parts…. Mr. Petrenko’s Wagner is not quite like any I have heard before…. The word that kept coming back to me was flow…. It’s molten, combustible, an eruption of color…. The last act of ‘Parsifal,’ for instance, usually comes as a pious unfolding of the liturgy, but here it was volatile, unstable, dark. You were barely aware that the drama was being pulled along.… [At a] performance I dropped in on, Bayreuth’s ‘Ring’ for children … the story and the music captivated for its two—as opposed to 15—hours. The kids seemed rapt. Their pilgrimages had begun.”
Posted August 8, 2018
