When this production inaugurated Dresden’s takeover of the Berlin Philharmonic’s Salzburg Easter Festival, the critical reaction gave thumbs up to conductor, orchestra and singers. A decade ago, with a senior generation of singers including Plácido Domingo and Waltraud Meier, Thielemann recorded a live Parsifal in Vienna, making fullest use of extreme tempo contrasts and of Wagner’s pauses in the Amfortas monologues and around Kundry’s Act 2 ‘…und lachte’. That journey is continued here, together with a general darkening and thickening of textures and a bass sonority of which Furtwängler would have been proud. The singing cast are very fine and, like his players, seem to have studied with their conductor in Goodall-like detail. Botha certainly provides fine singing in the title-role. But this is a stage production and, Pavarotti-like, he barely reacts, let alone acts. The production has found ingenious ways of working around him but to have the central character reduced to a costumed, singing Evangelist is difficult, to say the least – especially because the musical interpretation is so closely tied in with the multi-layered staging of Gelsenkirchen Intendant Michael Schulz, designer/sculptor Alexander Polzin and choreographer/dancer Annett Göhre. Polzin’s glass columns, statues and desecrated raked rostra are neither of Wieland Wagner-ish abstract beauty nor represent anything real or historical. They provide atmospheric symbolic space for the characters to meet in.

One revelatory focus of Schulz’s production is the spiritual recovery and cruel, final return to square one of Kundry. She is shadowed throughout by an actor Jesus from the cross who ‘dies’ with immense effect at the first musical peak of the Good Friday spell. He is replaced by an unmarked, reborn Christ who is then rejected and wounded by the revived Grail knight. Another highlight is the near-deranged agony of Amfortas (Wolfgang Koch), unable to perform his Grail office because of lust, graphically represented as he sings (well) ‘Wehvolles Erbe’ surrounded by topless, tattooed dancers. Both Grail scenes are fully staged, rather than just stood and sung, and are almost unbearably moving.

You’ve read enough now to know whether you’ll be intrigued or walk away screaming. All credit to Thielemann and the festival administration for beginning a new Salzburg regime with such a strong event.