Time moves differently in San Francisco Opera’s Parsifal. Under Eun Sun Kim’s baton, Wagner’s score breathes with a kind of suspended inevitability, while movement and light unfold in ritual slow motion, evoking a theatre of Baudelairean correspondences, where sound, image and gesture seem to mirror one another in continual exchange.

Guided by Matthew Ozawa’s contemplative direction, the Buddhist ideas of compassion and release that fascinated Wagner come gently to the fore, distilling the emotional charge of his final opera into a lingering radiance suffused with empathy.

This Parsifal marks the company’s first staging of the work in a quarter-century – the timespan Wagner needed to create the Ring – and the culmination of Matthew Shilvock’s long-held ambition to return Wagner’s artistic testament to the War Memorial stage. Nearly a decade into his tenure as general director, that quest has yielded a production whose coherence lies less in interpretation than in its intently sustained tone.

As the Prelude’s final bars hover on an unresolved musical question, two young Grail squires are shown sleeping beneath a slow-turning sky while their effigy-like doubles slowly ascend above them in silent levitation, drawing us at once into the production’s peculiar dream logic.

The unit set by Robert Innes Hopkins comprises two large discs that revolve in opposite directions, shaping the transformations of each act while suggesting a world caught in perpetual motion. Yuki Nakase Link’s lighting deepens that sense of flux, unfolding with hallucinatory fluidity – whether in the forest’s quiet dawn glow or the fevered colours of Klingsor’s magic garden, which drain to near-black for Kundry’s central confrontation with Parsifal, or the final scene’s ambiguous amber cast.

Within this shifting atmospheric architecture, the singers move with ritual precision, their gestures shaped by Rena Butler’s choreography, which draws on the slow articulations and charged stillness of Butoh and Noh theatre.

In an impressive performance, Brandon Jovanovich traced Parsifal’s passage from bewildered innocence to hard-won compassion, drawing on a singer’s instinct for colouring thought in sound. He depicted a ‘holy fool’ who moves with the unresolved trauma of his mother’s death and uncomprehended guilt. His voice carried the weariness of experience in the third act, after the knight has returned from his years of long wandering, yet his final benediction felt tenderly human – redemption as simply the capacity to feel another’s pain.

In his first experience of the Grail Temple, when he saw Amfortas convulsing in silent gestures of intense agony during the service, Parsifal instinctively mirrored him, signalling his first awakening to compassion. As a notably young Amfortas, Brian Mulligan made that suffering starkly physical, embodying the Grail keeper’s agony and alienation in equal measure in bold, dark tones.

Tanja Ariane Baumgartner drew the evening’s most complex, changeable and engaging portrait as a Kundry who inhabits extremes. In the first act, she was a lurking, punk-like rebel, only to fall back under Klingsor’s sway in the second – half-addict, half-accomplice – her struggle with Parsifal unfolding as something raw and unscripted rather than predictable seduction. Above all in Kundry’s three-pronged assault – mother, lover, penitent – Baumgartner used the full expressive range of her voice to searing effect.

Jessica Jahn’s imaginative costumes strikingly visualised Kundry’s contradictions: shaggy, feral creature; shamanistic witch; spectral seductress; penitent Magdalene; and, in the closing image, serene co-redeemer beside Parsifal.

Jahn’s elaborate headpieces and sculpturally stylised robes turned the Grail ceremony into a vision at once archaic and alien, while subtler Eastern inflections, such as the Zen-like simplicity of Gurnemanz’s robe, grounded the mysticism in calm restraint. In the role of the elder, monk-like sage, Kwangchul Youn’s steady, resonant bass seemed steeped in the patience of one who has outlived both faith and doubt. The Good Friday music emerged as a moment of grateful awareness amid the parable’s circling sorrows.

Falk Struckmann’s Klingsor was thrillingly unhinged, a figure of terrifying, vindictive rage, his powerful baritone cutting through orchestral textures with bitter force. As an unseen, sepulchral Titurel, David Soar echoed a stone guest of a different kind.

The Flower Maidens blended in voluptuous waves, their lyrical charm edged with Siren-like danger, while the Grail chorus encompassed funereal weight and the soaring radiance of the final pages, despair lifted into light.

Eun Sun Kim continues to show how rapidly she has been deepening her grasp of Wagner. Leading the San Francisco Opera Orchestra at its most supple and responsive, she favoured translucence over monumentality, drawing out the music’s inner colors and quiet currents rather than imposing a grand scheme. She tuned persuasively into the production’s contemplative spirit, though for the dark, driven music of Klingsor’s realm, she was able to summon an exciting dramatic force that recalled the fire of Wagner’s earlier operas. Kim homed in not so much on the work’s solemn grandeur as on its quest for inward release.

In an era when political leaders have taken to mocking empathy itself as weakness, this Parsifal felt like quiet resistance – music insisting on its own humanity.

Thomas May | October 31, 2025

Conductor Eun Sun Kim and a committed cast make Parsifal soar at San Francisco Opera

Magnificent in every way, San Francisco Opera’s Parsifal created a spellbinding five hours in the first performance on Saturday afternoon. Eun Sun Kim’s conducting and the responsive, sonorous contribution of the entire orchestra shaped Wagner’s time-stopping score with power and finesse. A cast with no weak spots delivered something close to perfection, and Matthew Ozawa’s resourceful, eye-catching production enhanced a story that can have its stagnant moments.

The first of five scheduled performances was simply overwhelming in its riches. Kim laid the foundation with a prelude that savored the silences between the introductions of the main leitmotifs that would permeate the entire score. Each phrase was shaped by distinctive dynamics and textures, meditatively at first, and reaching a series of majestic climaxes that somehow promised there was much more to come. The details she found brought softly expanding colors to these motifs throughout the performance, and the pace was dignified with no dallying. This orchestra has never sounded better.

Matthew Ozawa’s 2022 production here of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice mined the emotional depths of that story. For Parsifal he zeroed in on the key themes at its core – connection and empathy, compassion and forgiveness. The curtain rose on two acolytes of the Holy Grail order asleep in a pre-dawn forest, connected to each other by a long braid of hair. Suspended above them were two similar figures, connected by a gleaming chain. To the gentle zephyrs of the prelude’s closing phrases, the floating pair rose slowly and disappeared, presumably to heaven.

A lacy cloud of intricately interwoven lines hovered over an array of pillars in Robert Innes Hopkins’s set, suggesting the canopy of a forest. For the transition to the Grail ritual, the cloud lifted and rotating platforms realigned the pillars to become the columns of the knights’ religious sanctuary. A system of arches and trusses dropped slowly from above to complete the image of a medieval church. It felt as if the sanctuary had emerged magically in the forest.

Throughout the opera, projections provided striking and slowly-changing backdrops of skies. Lighting designer Yuki Nakase Link illuminated each moment with gradually morphing colors and, at the very end, the lighting culminated in a luminous golden glow that spread past the stage to the entire theater.

Extra characters added visual interest. A dancer portrayed Parsifal’s mother and interacted with him when he referenced her in narrating his back story. In the religious rituals, three dancers (choreography by Rena Butler) added depth to the rituals by enhancing what was going on rather than distracting. They also played a critical role in Parsifal catching the spear in Act II. During the opera’s several long narrations, Ozawa kept other members of the cast involved.

Everything about this production was stylized or at least exaggerated. This actually took a cue from Wagner, who used Buddhist, Hindu and Pagan cultures to expand on Christian lore. Jessica Jahn’s costumes alluded to science fiction exaggeration, among them an enormous ring of a collar on Amfortas’s robe and creased headpieces for the Grail knights. Two long strips of black cloth stretched like wings from Klingsor to both sides of the stage. They made him look terrifying and, at the same time, suggested that he too was trapped by his own sins.

It is always the music that matters most, of course. All five principals and the fourteen others in the cast list delivered with top-tier quality. They not only sang gloriously but conveyed the traits of their characters with distinction.

Four of the five principals have impressed in previous Wagner roles here, and the one company debut was a stunner. As Kundry, German mezzo-soprano Tanja Ariane Baumgartner unleashed a voice that could caress the sensuous music of her attempted seduction of Parsifal while under the spell of the evil Klingsor, and it rattled the walls with terrifying power in a mad rage when she was rebuffed.

In his previous ventures into Wagner starring roles in San Francisco (Lohengrin, Walther in Die Meistersinger, Siegmund in Die Walküre), tenor Brandon Jovanovich brought a lyric sound and plenty of power. His Parsifal topped them all. Singing with disarming ease and clarity he vividly traced the character’s journey from foolish youth to virtual saint.

In the taxing role of the wounded knights’ leader, Brian Mulligan’s steady and beautifully expansive baritone conveyed Amfortas’s pain without missing a note. And as Gurnemanz, bass Kwangchul Youn (recently Sarastro in The Magic Flute and King Marke in Tristan und Isolde here) commanded the stage in his long Act I narration despite a bit of a wobble to his well-grounded voice, and he sounded strong in Act III.

As the malicious Klingsor, veteran bass-baritone Falk Struckmann, who was Alberich in the company’s 2018 Ring cycle, bent his powerful and intensely focused voice into a sound to savor, deploying sneers and cajoles as needed.

Many of the smaller roles – esquires, knights and flower maidens with solo lines – were sung by Adler Fellows in the company’s affiliate artist program. It is difficult to select standouts: they were all terrific, as was bass David Soar as the offstage voice of the old king Titurel.

One element that stood out was the unusual portrayal of Kundry. She is always a mysterious character, with a back story of previous lives, cursed by Klingsor to seduce victims for him. In Wagner’s original version, Kundry dies at the end. In Ozawa’s version, having accepted Parsifal as her redeemer when he finally finds his way back to the Grail knights, she not only joins with Parsifal in bringing out the Holy Grail, but in a touching final tableau she raises the goblet along with him, as Kim and the orchestra made those final phrases float from the pit in quiet ecstasy.

This ‘happy ending’ certainly tracked with the production’s emphasis on forgiveness and compassion.

Harvey Steiman | 27/10/2025

Parsifal Triumphs at SF Opera

After a 25-year absence, Richard Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal, is back at San Francisco Opera in a musically and theatrically stunning new production.

It’s a triumph for Music Director Eun Sun Kim. After 2023’s Lohengrin and last year’s Tristan and Isolde, you could reasonably expect great work from Kim, and she delivers a powerhouse interpretation of subtlety and majesty. The orchestra is in tremendous form from the most transparent to the weightiest moments, playing together like a single gigantic instrument.

Director Matthew Ozawa’s productions of Beethoven’s Fidelio and Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice left strong and mostly positive impressions, but those operas are straightforward compared to the thickets a director must navigate in Parsifal. The director’s approach includes some interventions that literalists will object to; this reviewer found them dramatically keen and effective.

Wagner’s libretto, derived from Arthurian legends, Christianity, and Buddhism — a late interest of the composer — tells of an order of knights who guard the Holy Grail, a vessel imbued with miraculous powers and containing Jesus Christ’s blood, captured during the crucifixion.

The drama hinges on whether an ignorant, loutish youth who wanders into the knights’ domain is the “pure fool” who, through compassion, might somehow heal the knights’ leader, Amfortas, who committed a great sin and now suffers from a wound that will not heal. We hear all about this, and more, from bass Kwangchul Youn as the wise old knight Gurnemanz, singing the long role in magnificent voice and with tremendous gravity and authority.

The plot follows the spiritual growth of the titular hero from ignorance to compassion. In Brandon Jovanovich, the production has an ideal Parsifal: his big, golden tenor voice combines with an earnest stage presence that makes his character’s path to enlightenment wholly believable.

That journey begins with his first entrance, when he shows some remorse after killing a swan. And during the long Act 1 Grail ceremony, where the knights partake of the Grail’s sustenance, Jovanovich radiates puzzlement and curiosity.

In Acts 1 and 3, Ozawa rises strikingly to the challenge of creating visual interest where there’s little action. The knights, dressed in shades of cream, stand arrayed on the rising concentric circles of Robert Innes Hopkins’s elegant set.

Three dancers, dressed in red robes and white headdresses, assist Amfortas (baritone Brian Mulligan, singing gorgeously, if a bit stolidly) during the Grail ceremonies, moving in graceful concert and enlivening the ritual. Are they handmaidens of the Grail? No one familiar with The Handmaid’s Tale can fail to make a connection between what they’re seeing and what’s in Margaret Atwood’s novel and its various dramatic adaptations, though the dancers’ behavior doesn’t reflect what’s in those works. Jessica Jahn’s beautiful and evocative costume designs, as well as Yuki Nakase Link’s moody lighting, do much to set the scenes effectively.

Act 2, by far the liveliest of the three, shows us the start of Parsifal’s journey to enlightenment. Now clad in medieval Japanese armor, he finds himself in the evil sorcerer Klingsor’s realm. Klingsor, wishing to become a Grail knight, castrated himself because he could not control his own sexual urges, but the knights rejected him. It is Klingsor who wounded Amfortas, using the knight’s own spear, a weapon that pierced the side of Jesus during the crucifixion.

Klingsor — bass-baritone Falk Struckmann, terrifyingly malevolent in voice and manner — has enslaved Kundry, a mysterious woman, hundreds of years old, who voluntarily serves the Grail knights, playing both sides of the opera’s good/evil equation.

Klingsor’s mostly bleak realm includes a magic garden inhabited by gorgeously costumed flower maidens, who try, as a group, to seduce Parsifal. Ozawa adds dancers, both male and female, to the maidens — and later in the act, Parsifal’s mother (dancer Charmaine Butcher).

Tanja Ariane Baumgartner makes an impressive company debut as Kundry, with an imperious manner and blazing mezzo-soprano. She steps in, at Klingsor’s insistence, recounting her history and Parsifal’s. Her costume mirrors that of Parsifal’s mother, Herzeleide (heart’s suffering), setting up an uncomfortable, thought-provoking correspondence between the characters.

Failing to seduce him, Kundry curses Parsifal to years of wandering, and Klingsor tries to kill him. Parsifal catches the hurled spear, destroying the sorcerer and the realm. As in many productions, there’s no castle to collapse and thus no visual analog to the cataclysmic music.

At the opening performance, Jovanovich apparently suffered a vocal mishap during Parsifal’s climactic cry “Amfortas! Die Wunde!” (Amfortas, the wound!). He was somewhat diminished in volume and sang carefully through the rest of the opera.

In the last act of this nearly five-hour journey of transformation and transcendence Parsifal returns to the Grail’s realm, now blighted and decayed. It’s Good Friday, and Amfortas is unable to fulfill his office. Parsifal heals him with the spear and, taking over the ceremony, makes it clear that he is the new king of the knights. And in Ozawa’s feminist-inflected vision, he has a queen in the newly baptized Kundry.

Lisa Hirsch | October 28, 2025

Forget the sacred mystery — San Francisco Opera’s ‘Parsifal’ is pure, dazzling spectacle

Not five minutes after the curtain rises on the San Francisco Opera’s radiantly beautiful new production of Wagner’s “Parsifal,” director Matthew Ozawa offers the audience a single unforgettable stage image.

In the forest belonging to a knightly order that guards the Holy Grail, a few of the order’s young acolytes are revealed asleep on the ground. As the faint light of morning begins to peep through the trees, two of them, joined by a long single strand of braided hair, suddenly begin to levitate slowly off the ground. They remain stretched out horizontally in midair until they disappear up into the flies, whereupon the action begins.

Do we understand what this is supposed to signify? No. Will we have gained insight into the question when the final curtain drops five hours later? Also no. All we have is the tender, simple loveliness of the moment, and it’s enough.

That initial ploy could stand in for the entire production, which opened at the War Memorial Opera House on Saturday, Oct. 25. In tackling Wagner’s final and most enigmatic operatic creation, the company has deftly bypassed all the piece’s most intractable challenges — its static dramaturgy, its talkiness, its indecipherable religious framework — and opted instead to dazzle the eyes and ears.

This, I think, is the correct “Parsifal” strategy. There’s no obligation to take seriously the opera’s air of sacramental mumbo jumbo, with its babble about sin and redemption and purity, just because Wagner and his followers have done so.

Instead, the Opera has given its audiences what we need most. There’s a strong, almost flawless cast on hand, including tenor Brandon Jovanovich in the title role and the German mezzo-soprano Tanja Ariane Baumgartner in an electrifying company debut as the shadowy seductress Kundry. The visual aspects of the production are sumptuous and engaging. There are dancers, operating as part of the piece’s fluid, elusive world.

Perhaps most heartening for the company’s patrons, Saturday saw the latest Wagnerian triumph by Music Director Eun Sun Kim, whose approach to the composer’s titanic scores — a blend of heroism and probing intimacy — continues to pay dividends. Under her guidance, the Opera Orchestra mustered the gauzy delicacy that is the distinctive province of parts of the “Parsifal” score, as well as the supercharged orchestral rhetoric that registers as “Wagnerian” in any context.

Jovanovich’s success as Parsifal, the “innocent fool” whose naivete ultimately sets things right among the Grail-watchers, was practically foreordained. His Wagnerian track record in San Francisco (including appearances in “Die Walküre,” “Lohengrin” and “Die Meistersinger”) has consisted of a series of triumphs. But this role, with its unruffled nobility, may be the one best suited to his smooth-grained sound.

Baumgartner’s appearance, though, came as a thrilling surprise, a powerhouse combination of capacious high notes and theatrical urgency. Because Kundry spends much of Act I engaged in a sort of feral barking, it wasn’t until the more extended and demanding music of Act II that we got a full sense of the greatness of Baumgartner’s artistry; at that point, though, the performance surged to life.

The rest of the cast was no less impressive.

As Amfortas, the wounded ruler of the Grail, baritone Brian Mulligan sang courageously, letting us hear the chronic pain that undermines the character’s regal strength. Baritone Falk Struckmann contributed a brilliantly malevolent turn as the evil sorcerer Klingsor.

Bass Kwangchul Youn lacked something of the requisite vocal gravitas of the elder knight Gurnemanz, but he came through handsomely in the final act.

The Opera Chorus, led by John Keene, sounded alternately robust and seductive, as the moment demanded.

In addition to its musical rewards, this “Parsifal” was a cornucopia of visual delights. Robert Innes Hopkins’ sets, evocatively lit by designer Yuki Nakase Link, conjured up a range of magical, hard-to-place milieus, from woodlands to castles and beyond.

Jessica Jahn’s irresistible costumes included translucent blue, green and yellow outfits for Klingsor’s Flower Maidens, and elaborate white robes for the Grail’s knights that looked like whimsical blends from “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Seven Samurai.”

Choreographer Rena Butler, faced with the thankless task of introducing dance into scenes where it doesn’t obviously belong, rose superbly to the assignment with simple but elegant pirouettes and rounds. Ozawa’s staging allowed much of the action to unfold in a sort of rapturous haze, as if teetering on the brink between dreams and wakefulness.

Joshua Kosman | Oct 26, 2025

After A Long Absence, ‘Parsifal’ At SF Opera Approaches Holy Grail

San Francisco Opera has a long, prolific, often distinguished history with Richard Wagner’s operas, yet one of the mature canon of ten — his final work, Parsifal — has been underrepresented. It had to wait until 1950 for its first complete SFO staging, and after just six productions over a span of 50 years, it hadn’t been performed here since 2000. Maybe it’s better doling out productions of this opera sparingly so that each performance becomes a special event the way, say, Beethoven’s Ninth and Mahler’s Second Symphonies were before performances of them saturated our concert hall schedules.

In any case, in its new Matthew Ozawa-directed production, SFO seemed to go out of its way to make this Parsifal something to remember. The superbly prepared 77-piece orchestra stuffed the large War Memorial Opera House pit. A hundred performers, including the 72-member chorus and nine dancers, occupied the stage. They got top-flight singers with not a weak link in the cast. The lighting was enlightening to the storyline, the costuming was imaginative, and in the case of the Flower Maidens scene in Act II, wildly colorful. And lo and behold, the total effect was greater than the sum of its considerable parts. It was a glorious performance on Oct. 25 — for me, a deeply moving one that struck at the heart of what can be an ecstatically radiant score under the right conditions.

As per his intentions, Ozawa’s staging ideas were of an ecumenical nature, a blend of several colliding performing traditions, whether from East or West, without one dominating the other. Nor were there any regie theatre distractions that shoehorned the opera into a specific period. A lot of the stage action was executed in slow motion à la Japanese Noh classical dance theatre, which is well attuned to the meditative pacing of the music. (The late Robert Wilson’s famous production, as seen at LA Opera in 2005, was even more entrenched in that ethos.) The overtly Christian elements were toned down; Parsifal didn’t make the sign of the cross after catching Klingsor’s spear, here delivered to him physically instead of him plucking it out of thin air.

Parsifal’s absent mother, mentioned in the libretto but never seen, actually appeared as a young dancer (Charmaine Butcher), expressively miming the narrative as it goes. Robert Innes Hopkins’ Act I set was a simulated forest with stylized branches hovering over the stage, gracefully moving about in the Transformation scene to reveal a multi-stepped platform atop which rests the Holy Grail. Cascades of dry ice fog raced down the curtains on the left and right in Act II like water slides at a theme park. By Act III, it was as if the trees were stripped bare of leaves and branches, leaving behind metallic octagonal columns (perhaps making a statement about man-made climate change?).

Now, let’s get to an always-intriguing element in any work of extravagant dimensions — the timings. Parsifal is one of the lengthiest operas in the repertoire, rivaled mainly by two other Wagner Gesamtkunstwerken: Die Meistersinger and Götterdämmerung. This performance was quite fast, about 228 minutes (excluding intermissions), which is in line with a recently unearthed, newly released 1938 broadcast at the Metropolitan Opera (with Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior, no less), and approaches Pierre Boulez’s swift Bayreuth performances of the 1960s. On the extreme other end, to give you an idea of the range of speeds, Reginald Goodall’s glacial EMI/HMV (now Warner Classics) account from 1984 clocks in at a whopping 286 minutes.

Jovanovich telegraphed Parsifal’s maturing arc; Tanja Ariane Baumgartner appeared as a shape-shifting Kundry who ages in reverse. With no need to slow down in order to take in the view, SFO music director Eun Sun Kim was able to produce a ravishing Act I Prelude, revealing a golden sonority from the opening notes, with a deep bass end and high-quality brass playing. At Kim’s tempi, Act II felt a bit like the scherzo in a three-movement symphony, with the Flower Maidens and initial Kundry scenes forming a kind of double Trio within that structure. And Act III built steadily to a devastatingly beautiful statement of the Good Friday music and exquisite treatment of the orchestral interlude leading to the final scene. This was the most impressive showing of what Kim is capable of that I’ve experienced yet — and we’re told that a San Francisco Ring cycle under her direction is on the drawing boards (dates as yet undetermined).

In the title role was a familiar Wagnerian face in San Francisco, Brandon Jovanovich. From his youthful Siegmund in the SFO’s 2011 Die Walküre that ripened in the production’s 2018 revival, Jovanovich has become a mature Heldentenor. He telegraphed the evolution of Parsifal at the end of Act I; the supposedly naïve, uncomprehending fool clearly experiences some form of painful, unconscious preliminary awareness of Amfortas’ struggles and what the Holy Grail ceremony means.

The high priest Gurnemanz is a killer of a role. For about three-quarters of an hour in Act I, it is for all intents and purposes a continuous solo vocal recital with nowhere to hide. The veteran South Korean bass Kwangchul Youn delivered a strong showing from his first entrance onward. He conveyed a convincing amount of dignity and poise, the voice occasionally exhibiting a slight wobble, though well within the context of his aged character.

Swiss mezzo-soprano Tanja Ariane Baumgartner seemed to age in reverse as Kundry — an old woman with a towering mess of white hair in Act I, giving way to a younger, dark-haired, purely seductive, powerful-voiced Kundry in Act II and an even younger-looking, chaste penitent in Act III. Curiously, in this staging, the redeemed Kundry doesn’t fall lifeless at the opera’s close; she is still standing side-by-side with the triumphant Parsifal. Baritone Brian Mulligan’s wounded Amfortas doesn’t lie on a gurney; he is almost always standing upright, albeit in great pain, which his somewhat reedy timbre conveyed convincingly in Act I. We did not see his wound until toward the close of Act III, an illuminated red spot within his robe.

Falk Struckmann’s Klingsor appeared to be wearing a dress — a cross-dressing, renegade former knight? — but that didn’t lessen the impact of his strong, sharply pointed bass-baritone timbre. The voice of the gravely ill Titurel (bass-baritone David Soar) emerged from somewhere in the depths, drenched in reverberation. The San Francisco Opera Chorus sang with fervor and luster, and the monumental bell tolls during the Grail scenes were played on a sampler keyboard, which worked well enough.

The total effect was that of taking Parsifal out of a sealed, sectarian environment in order to make the goals of enlightenment and peace more accessible to all. And that made Wagner’s miraculous score all the more moving and the whole event more special.

Richard S. Ginell | October 29, 2025