Interview: Jonas Kaufmann
Another month, another Gramophone cover story! (still pinching myself…)
“As you can imagine, it was far from normal!” Jonas Kaufmann is no stranger to the role of Parsifal, but the tenor can have had few stranger experiences than the new production at the Vienna State Opera in April 2021. Dissident director Kirill Serebrennikov, banned from leaving his native Russia, supervised his jailbird Parsifal – a deeply flawed staging in which Montsalvat is a prison, and Klingsor’s magic castle the offices of a glossy glamour magazine – via video conference. Then a Covid surge led to another lockdown, restricting the run to a single performance, live-streamed from an empty opera house.
Read full interview in the March 2024 issue of Gramophone