Boulezian

Lugansky - Schumann and Chopin, 12 May 2026

2026-05-13T11:25:27.641+01:00

Wigmore Hall

Schumann: Kinderszenen, op.15; Humoreske in B-flat major, op.20
Chopin: Preludes, op.28

Nikolai Lugansky (piano)

The first movement from Kinderszenen announced, if a little stiffly, an absorbing recital of Schumann and Chopin from Nikolai Lugansky. We can all, to be fair, take a little time to get going. Thereafter, I had few, if any, reservations concerning playing that combined musical integrity and superlative playing to great effect. Indeed, recalling my previous most recent visit to the same hall, Lugansky’s performance was, if not necessarily superior to, certainly less wilful than Pavel Kolesnikov’s markedly different conception and execution last month. The relationship between pieces penetrated to the heart of opposing forces in Schumann’s music. Dazzling fingerwork in ‘Hasche-Mann’ seemed to enable, even to necessitate, yielding in ‘Bittendes Kind’, which in turn led to greater freedom in ‘Glückes genug’. ‘Träumerei’ dreamed, yet carried on, finely shaped without sounding unduly moulded, instigating an infectious response in ‘Am Kamin, that yet at the outset seemed possessed of an almost Mozartian sadness beneath the surface, albeit soon dispelled. For contrasting characteristics were certainly present within pieces too, as in ‘Ritter vom Steckenpfered’, indeed there almost disturbingly so. Changes of mood and complexity led us seemingly inexorably to ‘Der Dichter spricht’, blessed by touching nobility and considerable poetic depth.

Humoreske furthered that kaleidoscope of moods, unfurled both within and between movements. The ambiguity of the first, for instance, suggested very much a knife-edge, which could go either way. Ultimately, it was Schumann’s poetic idea, once more, that held things together—an idea, of course, brought into being in performance by Lugansky. That Schumann was a Romantic and Romanticism was above all a literary movement that came to influence and shape other art forms may seem obvious points to make, but they can readily be forgotten; certainly not here, as a parade of characters and narrators made their presence felt. Voicing of lines unlocked many a door, to exultation as well as quandary. The work’s undeniable formal complexity was shown, ultimately, to rest above all upon questions – perhaps answers too – of feeling.

Chopin’s Preludes followed, again very much a cumulative sequence, the C major opening succinct, laconic, Webern-like in essence if hardly language, a brief-curtain raiser to a further parade of characters, emotions, and more. Lugansky’s A minor Prelude captured beautifully both tension and ultimately marriage between hands: a technical problem (and opportunity) brought to étude-like musical life. Bright, gymnastic, liberated by the keyboard, its G major successor in turn necessitated both sadness and inner strength in its E minor counterpart. We heard and felt Schumannesque flickering in volatility, engrossing tumult, Bachian homage in harmony and counterpoint, and jet-black malevolence (as in the E-flat minor and F minor preludes). There was also plenty of time and space for reflection, the D-flat Prelude – ironically, given its ‘Raindrop’ nickname – clearing the skies magically, only for them to darken again in its ominous middle section, the close nicely ambiguous as to which had won out. If, in the end, blistering, tragic vehemence won out (G minor as well as the final D minor) then memories of much else, as in the Schumann works, persisted. There was no either/or.

Nor, indeed, was there in three finely contrasted encores, at least taken as a whole. The A-flat ‘Duetto’ Song Without Words brought Mendelssohn closer still to Schumann, Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu no less magical, yet more overtly thrilling. I am not sure I have ever heard the latter better played. Likewise Rachmaninov’s C minor Prelude, op.23 no.7, sounding as the composer’s piano music always should: music for the Steinway.

Das Rheingold, Opéra de Marseille, 10 May 2026

2026-05-12T15:17:00.003+01:00

Opéra Municipal de Marseille

Images: Camille Rovera

Fricka – Marion Lebègue
Freia – Élodie Hache
Erda – Amandine Ammirati
Wellgunde – Marie Kalinine
Flosshilde – Lucie Roche
Wotan – Alexandre Duhamel
Alberich – Zoltán Nagy
Mime – Marius Brenciu
Donner – Yoann Dubruque
Froh – Éric Huchet
Loge – Samy Camps
Fasolt – Patrick Bolleire
Fafner – Louis Morvan

Director – Charles Roubaud
Assistant director – Jean-Christophe Mast
Costumes – Katia Duflot
Set designs – Emmanuelle Favre
Lighting – Jacques Rouveyrollis
Video – Julien Soulier

Orchestra de l’Opéra de Marseille

Michele Spotti (conductor)

Thirty years since Das Rheingold – or L’Or du Rhin, as it was dually advertised – was last staged in Marseille, it returns as part of what I assume to be a new Ring, directed by Charles Roubaud and conducted by the Marseille Opera’s music director (also incoming Principal Guest Conductor of Berlin’s Deutsche Oper), the energetic and highly talented Michele Spotti. Marseille’s handsome art deco opera house is celebrating the occasion in some style, including an outing on the staircase for Erda’s stylish costume of thirty years ago (director also Charles Roubaud, designer Katia Duflot).

This too is stylishly conceived, evoking a time when the house was new: round about 1930, I should guess. The opening scene takes place, as in a sense it should, beneath the bank of the Rhine, albeit in the guise of a ‘Rheinbank’ vault. As the Prelude progresses and the curtain rises, a cleaner goes about his business, dreams of ‘higher’ things on his mind as his theatrical sweeping, in time with the music’s close, suggests. This is Alberich, soon to be teased by glamorous employees indeed, Rhinemaidens with keys to the safe and its gold bars. So, if Wagner dramatises primal conversion of value-free gold into capital, here we see a redramatisation such as happens every day, indeed every second, in our accursed age of capital. There never was a golden age: on that Wagner is clear. As we did with Patrice Chéreau at Bayreuth and have done many times since, we witness a specific case of Alberich’s ‘theft’ – in essence, he simply offers the asking price, though that is already to argue in the language of private property and capital – in a world created by the gods and yet already shaped by his forerunners.

The second scene introduces us, as one might expect, to older ‘money’ and power. Here, is a gilded age, redolent in particular of the United States, the age of Gatsby – they were careless people, Wotan and Fricka – with art deco to boot. It does not portray the house or its origins directly, but one might be led, as one is with the North American trappings, to reflect in kind. A nice touch is an ornamental, visibly protected tree in the corner, the light of Freia’s apples extinguished following her abduction. Another is that an Empire-State-Building like Valhalla can be partially seen, through the mists: yes, as Wagner intended, albeit for the age of King Kong. Video projection enables us to witness Alberich’s transformations in Nibelheim, whilst we hear him when invisible via totalitarian tannoy. Such points of detail are welcome, not because everything necessarily has to be done in this way, but because they anchor the drama with stage action that has been thought through. The beginning of the final scene I found a little disappointing: empty, without much to look at or have one think, but perhaps that was the point, prior to entry into the new tower via gilded lift (ring any bells, Donner(ld)?)

Spotti’s musical direction was resourceful, given the relatively small orchestra at his disposal. Wind naturally came more to the fore than they might usually do, but that opportunity was seized to have us hear a good deal of that detail. Not that the Marseille strings were underwhelming, far from it; at their best, they played with an appropriately golden sheen. Some musicians were heard from beyond the pit, a pair of harpists in a box above included. The latter certainly worked hard for their gold. If there were a few awkward corners – this is far from an easy score for any orchestra – Spotti marshalled his forces with flair and assurance. It was a relatively broad reading - just over two-and-a-half hours, I think – but only occasionally, above all during the beginning of the final scene, did tension sag. I have heard many performances considerably more lacking in starrier houses.

Zoltán Nagy’s Alberich would have graced any house, conceived and brought to life with a theatricality that did not preclude but rather gave birth to musical excellence. His way with Wagner’s words was similarly captivating. Much the same could – and should – be said of Samy Camps’s Loge, a definite star turn. Alexandre Duhamel’s Wotan was more mixed: initially sounding somewhat parted and unusually vibrato-laden, though it improved. Marion Lebègue made the most of Fricka, bringing words and music vividly off-page on-stage. Gangster giants – dead ringers, as it were, for Babylon Berlin’s Ringverein – were presented by Patrick Bolleire and Louis Morvan, the dark brutality of the latter’s Fafner properly chilling. A fine trio of Rhinemaidens and, in general, a cast with excellent ensemble contributed to the important lesson, familiar to many of us in London from Regents Opera’s ringside events, that Wagner should not, should not be left solely to our metropolitan theatres. Emphasis, in both cases, on story-telling and character definition, not eschewing conceptual apparatus yet also not being overwhelmed by it, forms a crucial part both of our operatic ecology and of a continuing tradition of Wagner as nineteenth-century theatrical drama that can yet speak to us today.

RPO/Petrenko - Messiaen, 23 April 2026

2026-04-24T13:00:00.007+01:00

Royal Festival Hall

Turangalîla-Symphonie

Steven Osborne (piano)

Cécile Lartigau (ondes Martenot)

1927 Studios (animation)

Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

Vasily Petrenko (conductor)

Images: Andy Paradise

Messiaen was never one to do things by halves. We might think his Turangalîla-Symphonie offered enough in sensory overload without adding further to it; we might have good reason for doing so. Yet, for one night only, in the particular setting of the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes ‘multi-arts festival powered by orchestral music’, it gained – doing things by doubles rather than halves, one might say – a silent film and narrative from 1927 Studios. Their work may be familiar from a Magic Flute and Petrushka/L’Enfant et les sortilèges double-bill for Berlin’s Komische Oper during its Barrie Kosky years; it is inventive, witty, and absorbing. Here, a film engaging with some varieties of ‘love’ – ‘whatever that means’, as once upon a time a prince might have said – accompanied or, perhaps, was accompanied by a performance of Messiaen’s irresistible, outrageous exploration of still more of those varieties, from the human physical to that of the universe itself (in whatever sense you can imagine).

As the film, beautifully, intricately put together and acted, starring Jake Cecil as a dashing Tristan-ish knight and Esme Appleton as his tragic, Isolde-like bride, unfolded, so did its soundtrack ‘live’. Of course, that has problems from a purely musical perspective. I began to feel guilty about the lack of attention, or perhaps better the divided attention, I was according the performance ‘itself’. But would I feel that if it were an opera? (There is an LPO Wozzeck to come this weekend, though I shall not be attending.) Does it matter? The two did not merely mirror or follow one another, but for the most part they complemented. And when I decided to focus my visual gaze on the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Vasily Petrenko, I could still do so and hear what was a fine, tautly conceived and executed Festival Hall performance.

Petrenko, moreover, gave a well-judged, engaging spoken introduction to the event, as well as making a knowing, winking cameo as the wedding’s music director on film. Messiaen in any case, was still very much there, in all his multicoloured, synaesthetic, infectious craziness. No one will have failed to feel the motor rhythms, the repetitions and variations of figures, the confrontations between different conceptions of time, nor have been seduced by the array and interaction of harmonic and timbral colour—whether from the RPO, Steven Osborne’s titanic, all-encompassing interpretation (this was no mere execution) of the piano part, or the soaring presence of Cécile Lartigau’s ondes mardenot. There were passages of extraordinary magic, the cool blue and hue lingering glances at sleeping bodies in the ‘Jardin du sommeil d’amour’ finding music and animation in perfect complement. The crazy flower-(power)-love of the preceding ‘Joie du sang des étoiles’ may never quite be the same again, though whenever is it? No artwork stands still in a world of performance; nor should it. This was a journey to the cosmic such as one could imagine Stockhausen dreaming, albeit with a little – just a little – more self-control.

Messiaen doubled, then, or halved? Both are a little extreme as perspectives. Having seen and heard Turangalîla like that, I should probably rather do so on its own, ‘neat’, next time. (Or perhaps, I should rather have done that first, ‘progressing’ to the ‘augmented reality’ of this evening’s show.) No one, however, is claiming that I should do otherwise. This was, by its nature, a one-off, even if it finds itself repeated elsewhere—as I suspect it will be (and probably should). I loved the Stravinsky-Ravel double-bill nine years ago, whilst feeling circumspect about the Magic Flute than many. Nothing will be for everyone; more to the point, works will always survive and usually grow from such encounters. So, we should hope, will audiences. This was not simply an outreach exercise, but a fascinating experiment in its own right; if it has worked as the former too, we shall all be the better for it.

The Rape of Lucretia, HGO, 22 April 2026

2026-04-23T13:31:00.002+01:00

Jacksons Lane Theatre

Female Chorus – Olivia Rise Tringham
Male Chorus – Daniel Gray Bell
Lucretia – Emma Roberts
Tarquinius – Stephen Whitford
Collatinus – Oleksii Zasiadko
Junius – Maximilian Catalano
Bianca – Mia Serracino
Lucia – Nikki Martin

Directors – Eleanor Burke, Alex Gotch
Designs – Jennifer Gregory
Lighting – Cheng Keng

HGO Orchestra

Oliver Cope (conductor)

The Rape of Lucretia remains considerably less popular than its predecessor Peter Grimes, but it is to my mind the more interesting work (in Britten’s operatic œuvre second only to The Turn of the Screw). It is, to be sure, more problematical, whether straightforwardly in subject matter or in the ever-disconcerting – to many, downright offensive – Christian moralising of the close, but its musicodramatic construction is more sophisticated, if at times a touch overdetermined in its apparent determination—not only musically to illustrate as many aspects of the libretto as possible but also to treat them as motivically and even harmonically generative. Even that, though, ends up a fruitful part in questions of relationships between words, music, and staging.

At any rate, this marks another triumph for HGO: excellent in every respect. Perhaps first and foremost, given the nature of the enterprise, every member of the cast shone vocally and dramatically, whether individually or as part of an ensemble both tightknit and protean. Months of hard work have once again paid off handsomely, in an evening all who attended, let alone participated more actively in, will remember for some time. As Lucretia, Emma Roberts had far from the easiest role (not that there necessarily is such a thing). Unsullied virtue may come across as a little bit dull, however admirable. Her dramatic trajectory was planned and projected with great skill, engaging sympathy as well as admiration early on, and grasping the final moments of her life with an uncommon terror and horror that registered all the more powerfully for their lack of exaggeration, all securely rooted in text (of opera and production alike). Stephen Whitford’s Tarquinius trod with similarly uncommon security the tightrope between engaging just enough sympathy to portray the prince as a character at all, and ensuring the horror of his deed and his steps toward it engaged and repelled as they should. He was ‘panther agile and panther virile’, but also crucially a person who was far from sure about what he would do, and who could well have backed out of that: doubtless credit to Eleanor Burke and Alex Gotch’s production too.

Olivia Rise Tringham and Daniel Gray Bell complemented one another intelligently, dramatically, and movingly as male and female Chorus, their interaction with characters emphatically onstage a welcome addition of human and dramatic complexity. Their way with words – and there are many of them – was irreproachable, both in themselves and in their relationship to music in their vocal lines. Oleksii Zasiadko offered a dark-hued, compassionate Collatinus, nicely supported by Maximilian Catalano’s alert, developing conception of Junius. Mia Serracino as Bianca and Nikki Martin as Lucia distinguished themselves, both in performance and from one another in Lucretia’s household, anchoring the events in a world that might well have remained as it was yet could not, ensemble singing here as elsewhere key to that transformation. All of these young singers showed themselves to possess equal aptitude for and commitment to the dramatic stage. I imagine we shall have good opportunity to see and hear all of them in this context as well as in the concert hall in the years to come.

I should be similarly surprised if we do not conductor Oliver Cope and the excellent instrumentalists of the HGO Orchestra. There was no need, of course, for any orchestral reduction, however sensitive, in this case. Rather, Britten’s chamber opera could extend itself in visceral claustrophobia – I think such a thing is just about possible – throughout the Jacksons Lane auditorium. The creepiness and atmosphere were well captured, as were moments both of horror and of wonder: the false dawn of Roman sunrise, for instance. Above all, here was the dramatic engine of the entire work, in detail as well as throttle, as well as uncomfortable, even unbearable reference, that fatal late passage with cor anglais solo allusive to and evocative of a Bach Passion or cantata and its theological hinterland in the way direct quotation could not be. Quite what Britten could do, long before Death in Venice, with percussion alone was brought home with equal power. All ensemble members were crucial dramatic participants, as if in a piece of incipient music theatre, Cope’s direction fatal yet human. If I have a cavil – it is really more of a suggestion – it lies with the lack of titles. I can well understand the desire for immediacy, but in such an acoustic, it is not always possible, excellent diction notwithstanding, to discern every word unless one knows it already. It might be worth considering, even for opera in English, as much to help the singers as the audience.

The production navigated a fruitful, productive balancing act between ritual and realism. Set, I think, at more or less the time of composition, in the wake of the Second World War and its horrendous violence, that was present, as was every possibility to draw connections with the horrors of our own age, without making it the point in itself. This was still very much a human tragedy, perpetrated and endured by human beings, in some cases at least making choices of their own. A simple set sufficed in both starkness and versatility. Tarquinius’s attempt to wash himself before departing, violently to scrub his bare skin of the ‘desire’ that lay within him was horrible yet crucial to watch. His night-time pacing within a small maze had one feel there was a real prospect of another outcome, though of course ultimately there was not. The extinction of Lucretia’s orchids, lit and preserved in boxes throughout until sending her message to Collatinus, proved a moment unanswered and unanswerable.

A programme link to Solace Women’s Aid is well worth reproducing here, for any who might need the services of or wish to contribute to London’s largest domestic abuse and sexual violence charity.

Kolesnikov - Schumann, Feldman, and Schubert, 16 April 2026

2026-04-17T11:24:00.001+01:00

Wigmore Hall

Schumann: Kinderszenen, op.15

Feldman: Palais de Mari
Schubert: Piano Sonata no.18 in G major, D 894

Pavel Kolesnikov (piano)

Pavel Kolesnikov is an uncommonly, very particularly interesting pianist and musician. His performances are never ‘standard’ or run-of-the-mill, yet I have no recollection either of finding them perverse or self-regarding. They seem always to take their leave from programming, often remarkable in itself, but as much to the point suggesting a work (sometimes a single piece of movement) might have been performed very differently in a different programme. This recital, with Schumann and Schubert sandwiching Morton Feldman’s final piano work, Palais de Mari, might appear relatively conventional on paper—though how many opportunities do we have to hear that or any Feldman piano music? Schumann and Feldman in particular seemed to inform one another in performances pointing to unsuspected kinship. Yet, whether it were that way around, or more that Kolesnikov’s conception of the three works had prompted the programming in the first place – presumably, some measure of both – artistry and commitment were such, one almost wondered no one had thought of doing this before, whilst the nature of this programming and performing alchemy retained an element of mystery in precisely how and why they complemented one another so well.

Schumann’s Kinderszenen received a captivating performance: rapt, poetic, its contrasts seemingly emanating from the work ‘itself’ rather than imposed upon it from without. Each movement possessed, was even possessed by, its own character, also taking its place in the necessary sequence. Like that of all the best Schumann pianists, Kolesnikov’s voicing was exquisite, yet never for its own sake, telling rather of the wayward, flickering, brilliant subjectivity at work in the score. He built it to a veritable black pearl of a ‘Träumerei’, taken very slowly (presaging Feldman), maintaining line without so much as a stretch mark. It was a case of suspended animation: a canto sospeso even, and indeed he invited us to listen with all the concentration we must lavish on a work by Nono. (It would be wonderful, I suspect, to hear him in such music.) Kinship with Chopin was particularly evident; it was, though, kinship rather than identity, earlier common roots, for instance in Bach, apparent, though again without didactic underlining. This was a truly Romantic, even Jean Paul-like performance to savour.

But then, before the poet spoke, another intervened, perhaps a painter. Feldman’s Palais de Mari takes its leave from an image he saw at the Louvre of a ruined Babylonian palace. Kolesnikov drew us in to a work that is never quite static, though it certainly takes its time. Does one often not, when something strikes one in a museum or gallery? Here, it sounded as if Schumann’s neo-Bachian inner voices attempted with every chord to progress, to develop, yet each time could not: a different, yet mysteriously related form of suspension. A certain similarity, perhaps superficial but perhaps not, to the last of Schoenberg’s op.19 Piano Pieces emerged, albeit on a canvas that owed more to Rothko than to Schoenberg’s very different, highly personal form of expressionism. Minimalist? Yes, in a proper sense, though it does not seem to me to have anything in common with most of the music that has taken that name. I was transfixed, as most of the audience also seemed to be. After which, der Dichter sprach: again, in highly measured, almost prophetic terms. It could hardly have been better judged.

Highly effective use, unless my ears had deceived me, of the una corda pedal, especially in the Feldman, effected a bridge into the similarly pedalled opening of Schubert’s G major Sonata, D 894. When the full complement of strings was finally heard in the first movement, the suggestion was of an act of Creation: ‘and there was Light’. I also thought of Edgar Reitz’s use of colour in his Heimat series; for me, at least, there was a sense of that haunting by memory, a reminiscence perhaps of Die schöne Müllerin, a staging post even to Winterreise. As so often with Schubert, Dylan Thomas’s ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’ seemed to haunt pages and performances. It felt slow, though not Richter-like glacial. That might have been an obvious choice post-Feldman, but here there was a sense of self-collection in the wake of the first half, furthered in the final three movements. Kolesnikov’s dynamic range was considerable and always considered; his exquisite tone never hardened, though it certainly impressed, at times in almost Lisztian fashion. Often the performance dealt in opposites, but it mediated too, as does Schubert. This music had lilt too; it danced. Line, lyricism, and proportion were all impeccably judged, again appat emerging from the material itself. Above all, though there was sadness, this was never lachrymose; there was resolve, even strength, to be heard and personally felt.

‘L’Egyptienne’ from Rameau’s G major/minor suite in the Nouvelles Suites de Pièces de Clavecin made for a refreshing, bracing, indeed vigorous encore: as much a reaction as a complement, fashioned in a highly particular burst of enthusiasm one imagined might well have been very different in other circumstances.

Parsifal, Vienna State Opera, 8 April 2026

2026-04-12T15:11:00.002+01:00

Images: © Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn

Amfortas – Gerald Finley
Gurnemanz – Franz-Josef Selig
Parsifal – Klaus Florian Vogt
Klingsor – Werner van Mechelen
Kundry – Jennifer Holloway
Titurel – Matheus França
Younger Parsifal – Nikolay Sidorenko
Squires – Florentina Serles, Daria Sushkova, Andrew Turner, Adrian Autard
First Knight of the Grail – Carlo Osuna
Second Knight of the Grail – Alex Ilvakhin
Flowermaidens – Ileana Tonca, Mariia Zherebiateva, Anna Bondarenko, Ilia Staple, Jenni Hietala, Isabel Signoret

Director, designs, costumes – Kirill Serebrennikov
Lighting – Franck Evin
Assistant director – Evgeny Kulagin
Assistant designer – Olga Pavliuk
Assistant costume designer – Tatina Dolmatovskaya
Video and photography – Aleksey Fokin, Yurii Karih
Fight coordinator – Ran Arthur Braun
Dramaturgy – Sergio Morabito
Actors

Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Thomas Lang)
Vienna State Opera Orchestra
Axel Kober (conductor)

More by happy accident than design, my Easter Monday Rheingold in Salzburg was followed only two evenings later in Vienna by Parsifal from the same director, Kirill Serebrennikov. Whilst the former marked the first instalment, if the third performance, of a new Ring, the latter was the final performance in a revival of a production first seen in 2021 and reviewed here at its first revival last year. My thoughts on the production largely remain similar to 2025, though there will doubtless have been small changes, given a largely new cast, Klaus Florian Vogt the only singer to reprise a principal role. I shall doubtless also have seen different things and reacted differently to what I saw, so I shall recapitulate, without reading my former review, before proceeding to those performances. Conductor Axel Kober remained in the pit, as of course did the Vienna State Opera Orchestra, although how many players will have been the same I do not know.

Serebrennikov’s role as a film as well as stage director is, as in Das Rheingold, apparent throughout. In this vision of Monsalvat correctional facility (the ‘l’ given by a cross) we are made to think and feel, if not quite as Wagner would have had us do – how can we ever know? – then in a way certainly preferable to any moribund attempt to imitate, the threadbare letter mistaken for the spirit, just as the ‘l’ Cross has almost vanished when we (and the characters) return for the third act to a building and institution that remains even after its initial purpose has died. So far, so Wagnerian one, might say, penetrating in historical decay at least to the essence of this Grail community tale. In some ways, this is Kundry’s tale: she as photojournalist documents the regime and its hardships, writing a lengthy investigative (exploitative?) story for the glossy magazine ‘Schloss’ managed by Klingsor, which may or may not contribute to institutional demise.

The question of gaze is interesting: there is clearly something strongly homoerotic to the film visions not only of the young Parsifal (Nikolay Sidorenko) revisited or remembered by his later self (Vogt also on stage, a ghost who sings). ‘Er ist schön, der Knabe!’ as Klingsor cannot help but admit. Whether the prison activities, physical training, ‘play’ wrestling and all, themselves partake in such homoeroticism will partly be a matter for the beholder. There is, however, no question in the case of the swan, another young inmate who approaches the inexperienced Parsifal on film, only swiftly to be felled, his body taken away by guards whose relationship to the prisoners, not least old lag and tattoist Gurnemanz, is anthropologically fascinating if occasionally narratively tricky. Lingering shower shots as the pure fool cleanses himself tell one tale, which may or may not be concluded by filmic resurrection for the swan (a prison nickname perhaps?) at the close.

But we should not forget that, if Gurnemanz is Wagner’s narrator, Kundry is in many ways Serebrennikov’s. Not only do prisoners act up for her, young Parsifal learning to flex his biceps in imitation of others by the time of his release from what seems to have been a week-long sentence, days recorded on the film, at the close of the first act. But she is photographer and writer, clearly a more serious as well as successful figure than fashionista Flowermaidens who get nowhere with their lust, when young Parsifal comes to the office, ritually stripped and bashful, to be reclothed in tighty whitie Calvin Kleins and still tighter black leather trousers. Kundry has her way beyond Wagner’s kiss, if not the whole way, whilst the older Parsifal, powerless to intervene in a past that is past, attempts to save his younger self. So the gaze represented, arguably embodied too, extends beyond the homoerotic, even beyond the queer, to the female too. Whatever names we may wish to accord this or these, such orientations and identities stand(s) in opposition to singular, heteronormative patriarchy, here a quasi-monastic prison in itself. Notably, there is no Voice from Above at the end: it is Kundry herself, less released by death than released by life.

Kober’s conducting was largely brisk and no-nonsense. It was less overtly an ‘interpretation’ than many might conductors might give, though in so complex a score there is unquestionable art in giving the impression of letting it and the wonderful Vienna orchestra speak for themselves. If there were times when greater variation in tempo on both micro- and macro-levels might have been desirable or at least interesting, there were great dynamic range and considerable timbral variety – if not that of, say, a Barenboim – to the orchestra doing what it does best. The chorus was outstanding – surely outstandingly trained too – throughout; it would be tempting to take that for granted, but its marriage of precision and heft was not the least of the evening’s achievements.

Vogt and Sidorenko gave tireless, complementary performances as Parsifal, their interaction and non-interaction moving as well as suggestive. Hearing Vogt in this role almost inevitably summons memories – for those who have heard it anyway – of his Lohengrin, an historico-genealogical layering that is fruitful if not necessary. This Parsifal must play the game we play yet retain freshness on the way to experience, far from the only instance of work and production gaining in turn from their interaction. Some dislike Vogt’s voice – excessively, I cannot help but think – but that is surely neither here nor there. He reminds us that he is justly a major artist in this repertoire, has been for many years, and shows no sign of going anywhere yet. Jennifer Holloway will sing Adriano in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus’s first ever Rienzi this summer. Her Kundry was well acted, well sung, increasing in overt confidence in fine parallel with Serebrennikov’s concept. Franz-Josef Selig could not reasonably be faulted as Gurnemanz, marriage of words and music an object lesson. The greater ambiguity, even occasional malevolence, of the character in this production was subtly suggested without caricature. Gerald Finley’s Amfortas made a similarly intelligent impression, unquestionably founded in and at ease with Wagner’s words and their changing meaning. Werner van Mechelen made his mark not only as Klingsor but as this Klingsor, Smaller roles were all well taken, often illuminatingly so. Like Kundry, probably Parsifal too, Wagner’s Bühnenweihfestspiel again found itself released by the new life staging and performances can and did impart.

Salzburg Easter Festival (3): Das Rheingold, 6 April 2026

2026-04-09T11:50:00.007+01:00

Felsenreitschule

Images: Frol Podlesyni
Performers: Olade Roland Rodolpho Sagbo, Delavallet Bidiefono, Roméo Bron Bi

Director – Kirill Serebrennikov
Set designs – Kirill Serebrennikov, Olga Pavluk
Costumes – Kirill Srebrennikov, Slavna Martinovic, Shaiva Nikvashvili
Lighting – Sergey Kucher
Choreography – Ivan Estegneev, Delavallet Bidiefono
Dramaturgy – Daniil Orlov

Wotan – Christian Gerhaher
Donner – Gihoon Kim
Froh – Thomas Atkins
Loge – Brenton Ryan
Alberich – Leigh Melrose
Mime – Thomas Cilluffo
Fasolt – Le Bu
Fafner – Patrick Guetti
Fricka – Catriona Morison
Freia – Sarah Brady
Erda – Jasmin White
Woglinde – Louise Foor
Wellgunde – Yajie Zhange
Flosshilde – Jess Dandy

Performer Compagnie Baninga

Actors, Performers

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

Determined to bring Wagner and Berlin Philharmonic opera to his native Salzburg, Herbert von Karajan inaugurated the city’s Easter (for the greater part, Holy Week) Festival in 1967. It began with a Ring (Die Walküre first), partly co-produced with New York’s Metropolitan Opera and directed by Karajan himself, which formed the foundation for Karajan’s Deutsche Grammophon audio recording. The Ring returned to Salzburg under Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic from 2007-10, in Stéphane Braunschewig’s production, given also in Aix. Now in 2026, with the triumphant return of the orchestra to Salzburg, the Easter Festival’s third Ring begins, in a co-production with Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Opera, conducted by Kirill Petrenko and directed by Kirill Serebrennikov.

Fafner (Patrick Guetti)

I say triumphant, since there can be no doubting that the orchestra proved the brightest stars of all in this Rheingold’s firmament. I doubt the score can ever have been better played at the level of execution—and at this stage of my Wagnerian life, I have heard it a good few times. Depth of tone, balance, and pinpoint accuracy were second to none; and, as I have noted a few times with the BPO under Kirill Petrenko, they (or their conductor) show a greater willing to draw on the wisdom and experience of their long history, a dark, more Furtwänglerian sound, closer to that of the Staatskapelle Berlin, than tended to be heard from Rattle, Claudio Abbado, or indeed Karajan proving the baseline – sometimes even the bass line – in core Austro-German repertoire. Petrenko’s Wagner conducting has also progressed in leaps and bounds not only since he conducted the Ring at Bayreuth, but also from his Wagner in Munich. Not that the former was poor, far from it, but the theatre brings its own, notorious challenges for a director and, more to the point, the conception often lacked metaphysical and, in many ways, physical depth. There is no doubting Petrenko’s grasp of the work’s vast architecture, heard and communicated as if (almost) in a single breath – not quite Daniel Barenboim, though no one else has been this century, arguably since Furtwängler himself. With this orchestra as his collaborators, though, he can draw on a greater, multi-dimensional canvas, gaining harmonic depth, timbral variegation, and a more varied, yet always firmly directed narrative thrust. If the strings sounded as of old (or so one could fancy), the woodwind arguably sounded more variegated and characterful than ever, the brass both more tender and more malevolent as necessary (and much more). Underwhelming anvils, poorly integrated were a pity, but they often are; the technical difficulties here lie far beyond a merely ‘musical’ issue.

Froh (Thomas Atkins), Wotan (Christian Gerhaher), Loge (Brenton Ryan)

On, then, to Serebrennikov’s vision and its realisation. A post-apocalyptic setting in the/a potential future, presumably following a cataclysm such as we shall encounter at the close, may not be ‘groundbreaking’. We have been there before in the Ring, perhaps most celebratedly with Harry Kupfer, let alone in other works. It is difficult to imagine, at least until it happens, what could, at least on that broad, outline scale could be by now, although arguably Frank Castorf achieved something of that kind in his 2013-17 Ring (conducted initially by Petrenko). It is surely, by the same token, especially apposite right now, at a time when monsters such as Trump and Netanyahu are threatening to unleash still worse than they have already. The devil and, just perhaps, the angels will of course lie in the detail, and here Serebrennikov’s conception offers much promise—as well as certain caveats. It is always difficult, indeed impossible, to tell from a single instalment, although one can always tell if all has gone horribly wrong. In so bleak a landscape, visited both on stage and above on Serebrennikov’s own film, should one start entirely from scratch or recall the before times? It may not be either/or; indeed, there will be choices to be made from which or, better, whose before times. The question nonetheless retains some validity. The gods seem bound to a past that may lie beyond recovery; arguably they do by at least the final scene of Rheingold anyway, perhaps earlier still. In light, uncoloured, perhaps even ragged robes, they affect poses, probably attempt solutions as if an Attic (more than Teutonic?) past were present. All they seem positively, promisingly to possess is the technology of a greenhouse to cultivate Freia’s apples of immortality. We do not so much as glimpse Valhalla; perhaps it does not exist.

Rhinemaidens (Yajie Zhang, Jess Dandy, Louise Foor)

For this is clearly Alberich’s story more than theirs. Whether that will be the case throughout the Ring, we do not know, but it seems unarguable at least for this Rheingold. The film begins and continues with his quest across a barren, Icelandic landscape, both harking back to the Eddas and representing the problem, even the terror of the present. Where he is heading remains unclear, but when he appears onstage we recognise him and this doubling (like others between singers and actors, purely onstage) proves dramatically enabling and productive, without provoking confusion. This is a world in which religion, like all else, must or at least may be recreated, the gods and their heroes – viewed as ceramic memories at the close, hardly promising for the future – facing just the replacement Alberich threatens will come from him and his horde. And so, he builds a cult of his own, enthroned under a canopy, learning from those who have oppressed him, including an able trio of Rhinemaidens replete with actor-provided tentacles of the erotic urge (liebesgelüste) Wagner divined in Alberich. Film turns to fire and even disintegrates, though recovers, possibly presaging the future's future.

Whether ‘borrowing’ from African cultures onstage is the best way to go about some of this may be questioned. Questions of appropriation or downright (neo-)colonialism – primitive or primitivism? – are complicated by the engagement of African dancers under the responsive choreography (and dance) of Delavallet Bidiefono. These artists have clearly contributed, to my eyes highly productively. So too have Recycle Group (Andrey Blokhin and Georgy Kuznetsov) in provision of materials. Matters are not so clearcut here as they might initially seem, though the suspicion of ethnographic tourism lingers even when one learns of the creditable research that has gone into the production from reclaimed materials and office rubbish of a reenvisaged Egungun masquerade dress for Loge. His colourful world, what appears to be a reinvention of magic – what else is there in such an environment – makes quite an impression. What lies within the portable hut his double guards remains a mystery, as doubtless it must. The questions it provokes may prove key to the whole enterprise. What seems to mark a remythologising of the Ring bucks recent practice. The politics remain; how could they not? They do not, bar the overall post-catastrophic setting, laudable environmentalism in production values, and the coming of the Global South, seem to be paramount conceptually. Perhaps that will change, or perhaps it is the intention: something approaching a new direction in itself in the twenty-first century. But will this be Wieland Wagner with a world tour and integrated recycling, or rather more than that? All eyes, or at least mine, lie on Alberich and Loge—rather than on Wotan.

Alberich (Leigh Melrose)

That shift of emphasis was paralleled, less fortunately, in terms of singing. That Loge might steal the show in Das Rheingold is far from unprecedented; it is almost to be expected. Brenton Ryan’s quicksilver portrayal was nonetheless far more than a reflection of the work, vocal and stage presence combining (in collaboration with his redder ‘double’) to represent something both primal and advanced, whether instrumental reason or sham magic dramatically ambiguous. Leigh Melrose’s Alberich was again a true animating as well as animating presence, his use of words and music in Wagner’s radical alchemy not only tracing but helping form the narrative. Christian Gerhaher, by contrast, was, like many of the full gods, oddly static. This, again, was partly a matter of the production, but there were times when he seemed parted, resorting to barking reminiscent of aspects of Karajan’s Fischer-Dieskau but without his commanding presence. Gerhaher is a superlative artist as a singer, but not so much of an actor, and it is difficult to consider Wotan, even in this ‘preliminary evening’, his ideal role. Whether he will continue in Walküre and Siegfried – Fischer-Dieskau did not – we shall see. Le Bu’s Fasolt and Patrick Guetti’s Fafner were formidable giants, offering portrayals with considerable psychological depth as well as necessary force. Erdas rarely disappoint and Jasmin White was no exception; theirs was a moment that cast its shadow over all that was to come—and presumably that is still to come. Thomas Cilluffo’s characterful Mime promised well for the greater stint to come (assuming he continues in the role). Even here, then, much judgement must necessarily be provisional, but the best onstage and all in the pit augur well indeed.

Salzburg Easter Festival (2): BPO/Harding - Haydn, 5 April 2026

2026-04-07T10:27:00.002+01:00

Grosses Festspielhaus

The Creation, Hob.XXI:2

Hanna-Elisabeth Müller (soprano)

Andrew Staples (tenor)

Konstantin Krimmel (baritone)

Bavarian Radio Chorus (director: Peter Dijkstra)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Daniel Harding (conductor)

Images: Monika Rittershaus

One might, somewhat fancifully, think of Haydn’s two late oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons, as the counterparts of their time to Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. That thought briefly entered my mind prior to this Easter Sunday performance of The Creation, if only because the Salzburg Easter Festival had given Mahler’s work two days earlier. A more meaningful comparison would lie with Handel’s oratorios, especially as given a little while after the composer’s death in Handel ‘Commemorations’ at Westminster Abbey from 1784 onwards. Haydn attended the sixth of these, ‘by command and under the patronage of their Majesties’ in 1791, boasting more than a thousand performers (more, then, than the perennially misnamed ‘Symphony of a Thousand’. According to an early, albeit not especially reliable biographer, Giuseppe Carpani, Haydn ‘confessed … that when he heard the music of Hendl [sic] in London, he was struck as if he had been put back to the beginning of his studies … He meditated on every note and drew from these most learned scores the essence of true musical grandeur.’ It is at any rate likely that Haydn then resolved to write a successor work, which he did in collaboration with Gottfried van Swieten back in Vienna in 1797 and 1798. Both oratorios exist in German and English forms. (See here for further discussion.) This Salzburg performance, naturally, was given in German as Die Schöpfung and with musical forces on the smaller side from the premiere, although sizes of chorus and orchestra varied significantly during his lifetime, including performances in which one way or another he participated.

The opening ’Representation of Chaos’ sounded duly radical and rigorous in the hands Daniel Harding and the Berlin Philharmonic. It is not entirely without precedent, especially when considers the introductions to Haydn’s London Symphonies, but this is on quite a different scale, of duration and harmonic adventure, as befits the oratorio’s scale and subject—and so it sounded here, darkly mysterious, with teeming anticipations of potential life from the ever-outstanding Berlin woodwind emanating from and sinking back into the terror of the void. I have heard broader, more beautiful introductions, not least in classic recorded form from this orchestra under Herbert von Karajan, but it is an open question whether should Chaos sound beautiful. Raphael’s opening recitative lacked nothing in broadness, imparting a fine sense of suspense. The coming of Light did all that it should, fitting indeed on the day of Resurrection, followed by a ringing ‘Und Gott sah das Licht…’ from Andrew Staples as Uriel. Spring, it seemed, was here—as, at last, it had been outside earlier in the day. Fallen angels had their moment, orchestral as well as choral, in the number to come, strings’ slithering descent especially worthy of note, and Staples’s shading, like that of all soloists, was finely gauged without pedantry, momentary darkness evoked on the word ‘Schatten’. On the second day, Konstantin Krimmel and the orchestra had us feel as well as hear in their opening recitative storms, rain, snow and other consequences of the Almighty’s creative division of the waters. Hanna-Elisabeth Müller’s vibrato in Gabriel’s ensuing ‘Mit Staunen sieht das Wunderwerk‘, taken slower than usual and with an interesting old-Handelian sturdiness, was a little on the broad side, but my ears soon adjusted and that ceased to be an issue after this number.

Our three angels announced in their announcing, we could enjoy the delights to come, Krimmel in particular offering an outstandingly keen sense of narration, at times confidingly so, in fine partnership with the orchestra and Harding. Nothing we heard was ever less than vividly communicative and lyrical. Gear changes such as that towards the end of ‘Rollend in schäumenden Wellen’ might on paper have seemed a little odd, but the transformation in atmosphere effected worked very well in practice, with ample justification in the libretto. Likewise Harding’s tempo shift in the trio ‘In holder Anmut steh’n’ for Raphael’s darting of fish. Ornamentation was stylish from all concerned, orchestral soloists included. Indeed, there was at least much to savour from the Berlin Philharmonic – Wenzel Fuchs’s delectable clarinet in ‘Auf starkem Fittiche’, cellos to die for in ‘Mit Würd und Hoheit angetan’, those three flutes of Eden at the opening of the Third Part led by Emmanuel Pahud, and so on – as from anywhere else. The Bavarian Radio Chorus was irreproachable, irresistible throughout, echoing Handel in ‘Vollendet ist das große Werk’, whilst ravishing woodwind reminded us this was a post-Mozartian world.

A sense of wonder in literal awakening was unmistakeably evoked in the Third Part, further awakening to be heard, equally unmistakeable yet without any crude exaggeration, in the duet of Adam (Krimmel) and Eve (Müller). The world created had come truly into its prelapsarian, if precarious own. There were surprises throughout, even here, as for instance in Harding’s slow tempo for the opening of that duet, sustained throughout. There is, more often than not, no ‘right’ answer to such questions; different performances offer different pathways. Here, kinship with The Magic Flute was readily, meaningfully communicated. In the only secco recitative of any length in the entire work – we are in the realm of humans – the luxury of hearing a cellist of the stature of Bruno Delepelaire alongside the also excellent fortepianist Florian Birsak was almost worth the price of admission alone. Ultimately, it was of course Haydn’s invention, its optimism far from naïve but rather that of a good Catholic who had seen and heard it all and knew something still lay beyond the wars ravaging his Europe, that offered the greatest balm. Amidst the carnage of 2026, we must hope that Haydn, his co-creator Swieten, and all those voices, musical, literary, and theological, who helped shape this enduring masterpiece may yet have a point. That we could hope at all suggests that may just be so.

Salzburg Easter Festival (1): BPO/Petrenko - Mahler, 3 April 2026

2026-04-04T18:20:00.001+01:00

Grosses Festspielhaus

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Symphony no.8 in E-flat major

Jacquelyn Wagner, Sarah Wegener, Liv Redpath (sopranos)

Beth Taylor, Fleur Barron (mezzo-sopranos)

Benjamin Bruns (tenor)

Gihoon Kim (baritone)

Le Bu (bass)

Berlin Radio Chorus (director: Justus Barleben)

Salzburg Bach Choir (director: Michael Schneider)

Salzburg Festival and Theatre Children’s Choir (directors: Wolfgang Götz and Regina Sgier)

Tölz Boys’ Choir (director: Marco Barbon)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

If it initially felt more than a little strange, even heretical, to hear Mahler’s Eighth Symphony on Good Friday, this outstanding Salzburg Easter Festival performance from assembled soloists, choirs, the Berlin Philharmonic, and Kirill Petrenko swept all before it, doubts included—or perhaps better, incorporating such theological doubts into the experience of those listening 115 years on from the work’s premiere. A little under four years from the outbreak of the First World War, that age may seem, simultaneously, both strangely close to and increasingly distant from the insanity of the world’s current predicaments. Mahler was no aestheticist; this rightly offered no refuge. But nor did it hold up anything so predictable as a mere mirror. No audience member will have experienced it in quite the same way, but all will surely have been edified, exhilarated, and far more besides. The indifference, at best, in which so many contemporary Mahler performances proceed was never an option here. Petrenko’s way with the work was often surprising, yet never arbitrarily so. It was, as is typical of this artist, a deeply thought-out reading that challenged, confounded, and ultimately, dare I say, came close to that thing we may still, hope against hope, consider to be transcendence.

Beth Taylor (standing), Jacquelyn Wagner and Fleur Barron on either side

I shall admit to having had my doubts earlyish on in the First Part. The organ sound was far from ideal. More fundamentally, I wondered quite where the performance was heading, with highly contrasting blocks of material: a brisk and lithe choral section seeming almost underwhelming, followed by spacious, operatic solo singing that seemed perhaps closer to Berlioz or Verdi than Mahler. Unity of soloists and chorus intriguingly suggested something akin to the world of nineteenth-century oratorio – Dvořák’s Stabat Mater came to mind – but I began to ask myself: where is the symphonism in this? I should have known better, since Petrenko had taken a highly original view that yet proved compelling both in the moment and in retrospect. Chamber-music playing – yes, in this movement – suggested an affinity with the Berlin Philharmonic Wagner of Herbert von Karajan, reminding us of the roots of this festival, revisited this year in a new Ring, but more importantly offering a fascinating new perspective (for me, at least) on music I had thought I knew well.

Liv Redpath (Mater gloriosa)

It goes without saying, yet doubtless should not, that the Berlin Philharmonic’s chamber playing, just as much as any titanic, surround-sound barnstorming, proved superlative and indeed enlightening. When Petrenko whipped up a storm, he truly did so; when the choirs sang, seating arrangements only enhanced a musical understanding that reached back to the antiphonies of ancient polyphony. (I thought, perhaps idiosyncratically, of Wagner’s Palm Sunday Palestrina.) Where, though, was the Mahler, I might perhaps have asked earlier on. It was increasingly clear, again both in the moment and in retrospect. Ghosts from his earlier symphonies increasingly haunted the music: liminal passages from the Rückert symphonies, ecstasy from the Second and Third, and more than a little Wunderhorn later on. And when the moment of return arrived, any idea that this conception was not, among other things, symphonic through and through was dispelled once and for all. If there was something disturbing about hearing those cries of ‘Gloria!’ on this of all days, there was something utterly thrilling to it too: a tribute to Mahler’s syncretic vision, itself reimagined in further syncretism, rather than any banal blasphemy. All came together, as it must, yet in at least the last two performances I have heard of this symphony, it utterly failed to do so; moreover, it came together in a display of long-range thinking that made complete sense of the progression we had heard so far, also anticipating that to come.

The introduction to the Second Part is, of course, one of the most extraordinary musical landscapes in the entire canon. In that, it follows Goethe and, for some of us, even goes beyond him. Bar prolonged electronic interference from what I assume was a malfunctioning hearing aid, this wanted nothing. Here, Petrenko and the Berliners offered their very own – rather, Mahler’s – rite of spring, initially cold yet melting, suggestive of the snow one can still view here on the Alpine landscape visible from all quarters in the city, yet in its translucency also partaking in a further liminality already hinting at the very different heights to come. At that moment when they must, strings dug in, in a way one fancies they must have for Mahler in 1910 Munich, yet probably did not. It was, at any rate, both expertly and movingly shaped. When choir and echo entered, it was likewise as if we heard chamber choirs writ large, that translucency extended not only to song but to words and verse themselves.

As other persons had their say, we recognised them both as of old and quite anew, classical yet contemporary: the ideal for any performance, as Daniel Barenboim (who surely would have had the measure of this work he never conducted) might have told us—and Pierre Boulez, who certainly did on both counts, very much did tell us, both in words and music. The early stages of the rest of this part truly imparted a sense of ascent both physical and metaphysical, as if partaking in a musical-cosmological demonstration of the mediaeval Great Chain of Being. Gihoon Kim’s excellent Pater ecstaticus was, yes, ecstatic, but also clearly heartfelt, presaging the deep (in every sense) love extolled and embodied by the Pater profundus of Le Bu. The word ‘Kettenschmerz’, towards the close of his first solo, he almost spat out, without slightest sacrifice to beauty of tone or deeper meaning. This is clearly a rare talent: an artist new to me but whom I hope to hear much more from. Beth Taylor’s Mulier Samaritana revealed a fine, Erda-like contralto-like mezzo, equally at home with the alchemy that turns words into something approaching music drama. Jacquelyn Wagner offered a thrillingly, operatic turn for Magna peccatrix. First among an extraordinary team of equals in the First Part, Sarah Wagener sounded here, quite rightly, more oratorio-like in the part of Una poenitentium, without in any sense refusing the inheritance from her composer namesake. Speaking of whom, the Siegfried-like Doctor Marianus of Benjamin Bruns, rang out in uncommon harmony with the orchestra. All soloists, as well as all choirs, contributed to the greater whole in outstanding fashion, whether the Third Symphony’s Bimm-Bamm sublimation in our corps of younger angels, Fleur Barron’s imploring, inwardly strong Maria Aegyptiaca, or the pre- and post-Parsifalian voice from above, Mater gloriosa, of Liv Redpath, both necessary response and necessarily sweet.

All the while, Petrenko proved, after Mahler, our (pen-)ultimate guide. There was no more a weak link in the symphonic logic of this vast structure than there was in the playing of the Berlin Philharmonic or the singing of our onstage cosmogony. All took its place with a Wagnerian inevitability that belied the elements of crowd control, however unseen and unheard, which must always inform a performance of this symphony. When, heralded by a clarion-like yet tender return for Doctor Marianus, the Chorus mysticus entered, it was with a magic that seemed to lie somewhere between Mozart and Nono. Disbelief in the celebrated and/or notorious last line of Goethe could be suspended, because one felt one actually believed; perhaps even in the old canard, credo quia absurdum. There was, though, nothing absurd to a coronation of queens and princes of heaven alike, even on Good Friday. Whether or no this were the beyond we glimpsed, none could doubt that we felt we had.

LSO CO/Martín - Mozart, 29 March 2026

2026-04-03T16:27:00.005+01:00

LSO St Luke’s

Bassoon Concerto in B-flat major, KV 191/186e
Horn Concerto no.3 in E-flat major, KV 447
Sinfonia concertante for violin, viola, and orchestra, KV 364

Benjamin Marquise Gilmore (violin)

Eivind Ringstad (viola)

Daniel Jemison (bassoon)

Timothy Jones (horn)

LSO Chamber Orchestra

Jaime Martín (conductor)

Images: Mark Allan

On the one hand, there can never be enough Mozart, whether that refer to works or performances; on the other, there can readily be more than enough, should the performances not at least come close to perfection. This LSO Chamber Orchestra concert oddly fell somewhere in the middle: a pleasant enough way to spend an hour and a quarter on a Sunday afternoon, lacking in the grotesqueries that disfigure most contemporary Mozart orchestral performances, yet also lacking in much to enable one to answer quite what the point of the concert had been, beyond giving LSO principals a chance to perform the works in question. All too often, what we heard sounded more like an accomplished run-through, skating on the Mozartian surface rather than plumbing its depths.

Performances of the Bassoon Concerto – the only one that has survived, though Mozart may have written four more – are thin enough on the ground that this offered its own justification. There was much more than that: sensible tempi, clean, well phrased and articulated playing from soloist Daniel Jemison, and a largely cultivated sound from the orchestra. Here, it is probably fair to say that there are fewer depths for a conductor to plumb, and Jaime Martín offered decent enough leadership, though I could not help but think a little more insight might have been shown at his end. In the minuet-rondo finale in particular, less slow than sluggish, the orchestra sounded a touch reticent, even non-committal. Jamison’s playing was nonetheless excellent. Moreover, the opening Allegro sounded properly poised on the Rococo-Classical cusp; the slow movement enabled Jamison to show beguiling command of the long Mozart line.

The Third Horn Concerto with Timothy Jones told a not dissimilar story, though its greater musical substance – not to diminish the Bassoon Concerto, but to elevate this – made relatively minor shortcomings more obvious, more keenly felt. Again, tempi were well chosen, and it was a relief to be spared fashionable ‘period’ mannerisms. Mozart needs more, though, and certainly here. He often received it, Martín and the orchestra pointing a syncopation here or a modulation there early on to good effect. A necessary sense of development was indeed strongest in the first movement. The slow movement unfolded without fuss, if occasionally with slight blandness, Jones’s lyrical playing not always matched by the orchestra. Still, one sensed Mozart’s tonal mastery, every inch the equal of Haydn and Beethoven’s. Jones’s navigation of the balance between hunting ebullience and subtle sorrow was sound in the finale, but alas Martín’s direction of the orchestra proved rather listless. Mozart, alas, is very difficult to get right; there is nowhere to hide, and sometimes it showed.

The Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola is, of course, the acknowledged masterpiece of the trio. Here, expectations were highest. Although there was nothing especially wrong with the performance, again aspects of the orchestral direction in particular once again fell short enough to provoke slight disappointment. Violinist Benjamin Marquise Gilmore and violist Eivind Ringstad were excellent throughout, as was much orchestral playing, although there were some frays at the edges and a few too many phrases and paragraphs that did not tug the heartstrings as they might. The first movement started promisingly, Martín’s direction having regained the direction it had lost in the finale of the previous concerto. The great crescendo spoke for itself. solo playing was warm, lyrical, and wonderfully responsive. If there were a few instances of pulling the music round, emphasising the end of a phrase a little too much, we have all heard worse, far worse. The slow movement flowed nicely, but amiably; here, above all, we need to hear a grave, tragic beauty that flickered only intermittently. A bright, well-shaped collegial finale arguably offered greater tenderness, though the sense of loss related too much to what had preceded it rather than to emotional depths. If few Mozart performances offer the perfection Sir Colin Davis brought to the composer not so very long ago, with this orchestra and others, ultimately they should.

Davies I and N/Bevan/Hobbs/Dunford - Dowland, 28 March 2026

2026-03-29T19:33:00.005+01:00

Wigmore Hall

From The Third and Last Booke of Songs or Aires: ‘Behold a wonder ‘; ‘I must complain’; ‘Lend your ears to my sorrow’; ‘What poor astronomers are they’; ‘When Phoebus first did Daphne love’ (?); ‘Me, me and none but me’; ‘The lowest trees have tops’; ‘By a fountain where I lay’; ‘Time stands still’; ‘Say, love, if ever thou didst find Interval’; ‘What if I never speed’; ‘It was a time when silly bees could speak’; ‘Fie on this feigning’; ‘Love stood amazed’; ‘O what hath overwrought’; ‘Farewell too fair’; ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’; ‘Come when I call’; ‘Farewell, unkind, farewell’
‘The Frog Galliard’
‘Lachrimae’

Iestyn Davies (countertenor)

Daisy Bevan (soprano)

Thomas Hobbs (tenor)

Neal Davies (bass-baritone)

Thomas Dunford (lute)

The Wigmore Hall has done John Dowland proud with a whole weekend, Friday to Sunday, commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of his death. The composer’s lute songs will surely always remain at the heart of his renown, but these concerts have also explored his instrumental and sacred writing. The concert I was able to attend offered almost all of The Third and Last Booke of Songs or Aires: nineteen of the twenty-one, I think, although, unless my ears deceived me, one listed on the programme, ‘When Phoebus first did Daphne love’ was not sung and thus – I assume – replaced with one of those remaining. (I may, though, have misunderstood; the programme above I have simply reproduced from that I was given.) In addition, we heard two exquisite lute solos, as well as skilful ‘preluding’ in between from Thomas Dunford. The 1597 Frog Galliard, which may ultimately refer to Elizabeth I’s pet name, ‘my little frog’, for her French suitor the Duke of Anjou, was nicely spun as a memory of court dance. The ‘Lachrimae’ pavan that would become the celebrated ‘Flow my tears’ from Dowland’s Second Book, was its second-half counterpart, on which a little more below.

Dunford’s contributions ran throughout, of course, a masterclass in the lutenist’s art, ever tailored to song, singer, and moment. His partnership with Davies in the opening song, ‘Behold a wonder here’ announced a wonder indeed: endlessly varied music-making, not despite the strophic form but on account of the variation it suggests and received. All four singers had their moments in the sun, including a four-song sequence at the beginning in which each introduced him- or herself. Thomas Hobbs’s ‘I must complain’ presented his pleasingly lyrical tenor; Daisy Bevan’s ‘Lend your ears to my sorrow’ offered similar verbal sensitivity and a nice sense of inwardness, her style broadly ‘early’ but not aggressively so; a sprightly, witty ‘What poor astronomers are they’ from Neal Davies rounded off the quartet.

Part songs such as ‘Me, me and none but me’ and ‘Love stood amazed’, subtly yet crucially directed by Iestyn Davies, offered textural variety, a keen, variegated sense of euphony, and a good deal of variety within. ‘By a fountain where I lay’, for instance, had solos, well taken, from soprano and tenor, whilst tenor and countertenor shared those honours in ‘Say, love, if ever thou didst find’. Collaborative singing was crucial in the brazen repetitions of ‘come’ in ‘What if I never speed?’ Likewise the duetting between Bevan and Iestyn Davies in ‘Come when I call’. Neal Davies’s expert use of the Earl of Essex’s verse in ‘It was a time when silly bees could speak’ suggested words of their own volition becoming song, art concealing art. His sign-off here was a particular moment to cherish. The closing ‘Farewell, unkind, farewell’ struck just the right note as a farewell in itself: slightly lingering, but not too much.

Other highlights were a plaintive ‘Farewell too fair’ from Hobbs, followed by a wonderfully somnolent ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’ from Bevan, words and performance a powerful incentive to succumb to the ‘reconciling … rest that peace begets’, whilst at the same time reminding one why this could not be an option, given the quality of music-making on offer. Both, as well as the preceding four-voice ‘O what hath overwrought’, fell in the shadow of that ‘Lachrimae’ from Dunford. Here, one felt not only Dowland’s tears, but their salt, flavouring much of what was still to come.

My only real doubt concerned whether some aspects of the performances fell a little too strongly on the polite side: not only for itself but because it precluded the greater variety that might have come from more clearly developing the lead set by Dunford and Davies (Iestyn) in that respect. If not quite Choral Evensong, it was not entirely not of that world either. It might seem silly to criticise a performance of English music for being too English, even Anglican, and this was an intermittent matter of degree. This is a hesitant cavil, though, nothing more, and doubtless in part a matter more of taste than of judgement. There could, in truth, be no gainsaying the intelligence and musicality of these performances.

Takács Quartet: Haydn, Assad, and Debussy, 24 March 2026

2026-03-27T13:50:00.005+00:00

Wigmore Hall

Haydn: String Quartet in G minor, op.74 no.3, ‘Rider’
Clarice Assad: Nexus (London premiere)
Debussy: String Quartet in G minor, op.10

Edward Dusinberre, Harumi Rhodes (violins)

Richard O’Neill (viola)

András Fejér (cello)

Contrary to some rumours I have seen spread, the Takács Quartet is not about to disband. Instead, at the end of this season, it will say goodbye to András Féjer, the last member of the founding group of players, after fifty-one years as its cellist. There was not the slightest sign of dimming powers at this Wigmore Hall concert; quite the contrary. At times, Féjer seemed almost to rise to first among equals, but then so, at other times, did his colleagues. Indeed, both programming and performance might have been designed to illustrate the many lives, within one greater life, of the string quartet as genre and the Takács Quartet in particular.

It always, of course, comes back to Haydn, here in the guise of his ‘Rider’ Quartet, op.74 no.3. The six opp. 71 and 74 quartets written in 1793 mark a watershed in the idea of quartet performance: the first the ‘father’ of, though not quite the first composer in, the genre composed with the idea of public performance at least partly in mind, as would be the case the following year on his second visit to London, in the Hanover Square Rooms (a very short walk away from the Wigmore Hall). There was no questioning the engagement of this concert audience—as, I suspect, there was not 232 years previously. The sense of musical character(s) increasingly formative and generative in Haydn’s parallel public-symphonic writing was vividly apparent in the Takács’s performance of the first and indeed subsequent movements here, a slightly tipsy, Jahreszeiten-presaging first violin part (Eduard Dusinberre the latest incarnation of the great Johann Peter Salomon) included. Féjer looked as well as sounded very much at home, though never too comfortable. Haydn’s latest play with sonata form proved every inch an intellectual challenge and joy. The slow movement sang and developed in gripping fashion, proto-Beethovenian – it is, of course, the other way around really – violin ‘ornamentation’ ornate, yes, but as fundamental to line as it would be in Bach, Beethoven, or Schoenberg. The concision marking the whole quartet was especially apparent in the minuet and trio, typically Classical play between tonic minor and major a microcosm of the Quartet as a whole. And the finale was all it should be, a thrilling ‘ride’ for the so-called ‘Rider’.

Debussy’s early String Quartet marks in some ways a further step in the idea of public performance, in that it is very clearly a concert work written by a composer with a deep appreciation for string instruments but not a string player himself (which would have verged on the incomprehensible to Haydn). Debussy was neither the first nor the last composer in that category, but his Quartet is a characteristic work in that development, all the more so if – I repeat ‘if’ – one takes on board Hans Keller’s typically provocative claim that ‘you can come to understand a symphony by listening to it, but you cannot completely understand a string quartet without playing it,’ the string quartet being ‘the esoteric symphony,’ with a ‘more absolute need for … immediate experience’. One might say a string player rather than, say, conductor or orchestral musician would say that, would he not, but let us leave that (and Mandy Rice-Davies) alone for now.

Concision was again a hallmark of the performance, albeit naturally of a different kind, just as its development was. (I do not find the word ‘cyclical’ very helpful here, though many do.) The rich, variegated tone we heard from the outset was never present for its own sake, but as a means of expressing the idea – even the Idea – of the work. Each movement’s form was unerringly communicated, not as a formula, but as the revelation of its musical content in time. For that, detail must be just as clear—and it was, as, for instance, in the thrilling pizzicato of the second movement. The slow movement seemed to speak of the ambiguities to come of Allemonde, on the threshold, as it were, of Pelléas et Mélisande. You think this is malevolence; and surely it is. But is it? At any rate, it moved into a rapturous fourth movement, with more than a little of Tristan to it at times—as well, of course, as a reinvention of that G minor/major tension heard in Haydn too. I honestly did not find the Quartet’s conclusion any more convincing than I have before, but perhaps I am being too German. For the rest, it was a wonderful performance I should readily have heard again immediately.

Sadly, I could not say the same for the intervening work, Clarice Assad’s Nexus. There was no concision on display here, though I suspect it lasted for roughly the same time as the Haydn and Debussy works. Treated as a conceptual view of what might be involved in chamber music performance, as the ‘search for connection’ signalled in Dusinberre’s significantly more interesting spoken introduction, it offered something, I suppose. I imagine it took its place in this programme on that basis, but I am speculating. The problem was that its three movements, ‘(Dis)connection’, ‘Connection’, and ‘Synchronization’, came across as merely descriptive rather than analytical or exploratory. I gleaned nothing from them I should not have done from a string quartet with more interesting musical material. At best diffuse, the content was mostly gestural: walking on and off stage, stamping of feet, actorly expressions, acts of imitation, and so on. (There lay some mild interest in trying to guess which expressions were ‘natural’ and which were part of the work.) Playing was beyond compare; players seemed to be having fun; much of the audience seemed to be doing so too. If only the music ‘itself’ had not been more akin to a television soundtrack, vaguely modal, and relying on extraneous meta-activities for anything that might approaching interest.

Rinaldo, Royal Academy Opera, 19 March 2026

2026-03-21T15:10:00.002+00:00

Susie Sainsbury Theatre, Royal Academy of Music

Almirena (Abigail Sinclair) and Rinaldo (Ella Orehek-Coddington)
Images: Craig Fuller

Goffredo – Owen Lucas
Rinaldo – Ella Orehek-Coddington
Almirena – Abigail Sinclair
Argante – Tom Butler
Armida – Grace Hope-Gill
Eustazio (Cupid) – Theodore McAlindon

Director – Julia Burbach
Designs – Bettina John
Lighting – Robert Price
Choreography – Cameron McMillan

Royal Academy Sinfonia

David Bates (conductor)

Rinaldo, Handel’s first opera for London, received a bright, enjoyable, and – more surprisingly – succinct new production at the Royal Academy of Music, directed by Julia Burbach and conducted by David Bates. As ever, with conservatoire opera, the ultimate point is to afford young singers experience, but that can never, should never be the only point: unless there is positive musical and dramatic reason for an audience to attend, the singers will gain no meaningful experience. The virtues of a small theatre, in which all are close to the action, are many; but again, they will be as nothing without excellence in performance. As so often, that was forthcoming, a fine young case requiring no apology and proffering many grounds for praise.

Goffredo (Owen Lucas)

Handel’s operas are no stranger to cuts. A standard version in the modern sense is arguably an anachronism in such opera seria, as is a modern conception of the ‘musical work’—in some ways, more so than it might be for Monteverdi (in others, less so). The music we heard was expected, though not all of it was heard. For to compress almost three hours of music into a two-hour span including a twenty-minute interval required radical surgery—much, though far from all, lying in elimination, as opposed to pruning, of recitative. That is not to say there was none at all, but there were a good few cases when aria simply led to aria. There are losses to such a path, of course; one can tell that even when one does not know the work so well. To an extent, the production helped fill in the gaps, but there were narrative elements that came to seem underdeveloped, even arbitrary. Most smaller parts, sung or merely acted, were dispensed with.

So far as I could tell – I shall happily be corrected by those more deeply acquainted with the opera – the music heard was essentially from the ‘original’ version, including some of that later cut. However, Goffredo was sung by a tenor, as in the major 1731 revision – damned by Anthony Hicks as ‘in effect … a pasticcio’ – a decision I could not help but think marking an improvement. In any case, the 1711 ‘original’ includes so much earlier music from Handel’s Italian period, it is unclear to me how meaningful such a distinction might be, in theory or in practice. There is much I believe we still do not know about what was sung for revivals in between 1711 and 1731; there is ever reason to choose pragmatically, according to singers available and other performing conditions, just as Handel would have been.

That out of the way, the abridged version had much to offer musically—and more dramatically than one might have expected. Ella Orehek-Coddington gave an impressive account of the title role, truly growing into the part as it progressed, which seemed to be a dramatic strategy rather than simply warming up. Her tone was both bright and warm, her coloratura secure; to an age in which countertenors are more often preferred in this repertoire – the RAM’s double-casting offered both – she reminded us of the distinct virtues her vocal type can offer here (which was, after all, a signature role for Marilyn Horne). Grace Hope-Gill presented a fiery sorceress Armida, one with whom one could not but help sympathise, ably complemented by Tom Butler’s Argante, both singers employing technical command as a spur to greater emotional commitment—on their part and on ours.

Argante (Tom Butler), Almirena

Owen Lucas offered model Handel singing, clarion-like as Goffredo, leader of the First Crusade, looking the part in Bettina John’s costume too and employing it to suggest compromising vanity. Abigail Sinclair’s Almirena was sweetly sung, blending well almost as if a member of the orchestral wind in that aria, ‘Lascia ch’io panga’, whose ornamentation was relatively lavish from all concerned, yet in no sense excessive. Eustazio, a role which, unless I am mistaken, was written for contralto, was here sung by bass Theodore McAlindon, doubling up (slightly confusingly) as Cupid. Not that doubling of roles is necessarily confusing, but presenting this newly invented role as one and the same was a little. I suspect the reasoning was its relatively thankless nature as it stood; indeed, it was omitted in revivals later than that of 1713. The dual role gave McAlindon more to do, his acting accomplished as well as his vocal artistry.

Eustazio (Theodore McAlindon)

Bates led the Royal Academy Sinfonia and singers alike in a warm and spirited performance that, whilst often swift, only occasionally seemed rushed. This was excellent playing indeed from the orchestra, whose variety in timbre, colour, and much else suggested a larger and more varied ensemble than was actually the case, the composer’s resourcefulness showcased in the pit as well as onstage. Concerning the latter, Burbach trod in the best sense a fine line between straightforward telling and framing of the action – all the more necessary given how much it must fill in or even invent – and creation of a world in which strange fantasies might germinate, take root, and surprise. Cameron McMillan's choreography added considerably to the sum of the parts. If, at times, I might have preferred a production that took more of a ‘view’, not least with respect to the Crusader setting, I can equally see why one might not wish to do so. The work is not ‘about’ that, of course, and we return to the ultimate point of conservatoire opera. In that and in much else, this Rinaldo succeeded very well indeed.

Hannigan/LSO/Avni - Bowler, Ligeti, and Strauss, 5 March 2026

2026-03-06T12:16:00.002+00:00

Barbican Hall

Laura Bowler: The White Book
Ligeti: Lontano
Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra, op.30

Barbara Hannigan (conductor and soprano)

Matthew Fairclough (live electronics)

Bar Avni (conductor)

London Symphony Orchestra

Barbara Hannigan’s LSO concerts – her concerts more generally too – always offer interesting, insightful programming as well as her extraordinary gifts as a performer. This was no exception, presenting the LSO’s new co-commission, The White Book, by Laura Bowler, with Ligeti’s Lontano and Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra. Clear that The White Book was not ‘a sing/conduct piece’, Hannigan elected to sing, whilst her protégée Bar Avni, Chief Conductor of the Bayer Philharmonic from 2021 to 2024 conducted. She then took to the podium alone for Ligeti and Strauss in the second half.

Bowler’s response to Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-shortlisted novel bears the hallmark of loss: in the latter case, of the writer’s elder sister, who died just hours after her premature birth; in the former, the recovery of the composer’s mother from leukaemia, only to die in an accident before it was possible to say goodbye. I do not know the novel, so can only proceed from what I heard, but the encounter made a strong impression and was warmly acclaimed by a large Barbican audience. There was theatre to Hannigan’s ascent onstage, appearing as part of the performance, clad in a ‘one-of-a-kind confection of white silk and wool linen designed by … Yuma Nakazato,’ from his Glacier Collection, for which Hannigan apparently ‘needed a video tutorial to be shown how it worked’. The piece unfolded – perhaps better. ‘dropped’ – like the sleeves that ignited the orchestral introduction to the first of the five movements, ‘Wave’. Its icy precision and character, much of it founded on long, oscillating instrumental lines, was partly matched by and partly contrasted in a vocal part that required and received a cornucopia of vocal techniques that were yet combined in single, long lines of their own. Repetition, maintenance, and oscillation of pitch sounded as the musical key to all, until its sudden stop.

‘Breath-cloud’ sounded and even looked as its name suggested. Related yet distinct orchestral technique and atmosphere led to a rocking incantation of the biting words ‘On cold mornings’ in lengthy melismata as clear as the LSO’s razor-sharp playing. Eventually, it tailed off, unaccompanied, into ‘the empty air’. There was something cyber- or Olympia-like – one might also think of her vocal Ligeti – to the abrupt transformations in Hannigan’s voice in the following ‘Sand’: partly so. It was as if vocal and verbal half-lives were fated to almost-eternal recurrence: perhaps in recognition of and response to trauma. There was some quasi-traditional word-painting on the word ‘slipping’, both in vocal line and orchestral penumbra, though never predictably so, the beginning of upward slipping a case in point. The suspended animation of a close when music, perhaps even life, slipped ‘stubbornly through fingers’ made its point with a chill.

The fourth movement, ‘Silence’, was not silent but eerily still with, yes, some crucial silences. The vocal line took up a pattern of descent from its predecessor, albeit in distinct, scalar fashion rather than ambiguously slipping. The orchestra often took a similar route, sometimes coinciding precisely, both reinforcing one another. Ironically, a long crescendo of orchestra and electronic echoes led to (as yet) the work’s greatest climax; the rest played out in its shadow. ‘All whiteness’ offered, naturally, a climax to the work as a whole. Occasional sounds, even harmonies, brought Messiaen to my mind, but I think that was more a matter of me than the writing as such. At any rate, this ‘whiteness’ was properly comprised of the colours of the spectrum, like the sense of the sacred invoked in the glacier of the text, ‘unsullied by life’. Vain verbal and musical repetition on the words ‘shafts of’ attempted to surmount something – tragedy? – that could not be surmounted. Again, the rest played out in disquieting shadowlands of the movement’s climax.

Lontano’s opening brought oscillating correspondences with that of The White Book, soon turning in different directions. There was a keen sense in such fluctuation of the outset of something akin to a journey, the excellence of the LSO’s performance commensurate to the extraordinary achievement of the work. It imparted the sense, illusory or otherwise, of changing the way one listened, so that nothing would ever sound quite the same again. Moreover, Ligeti’s writing sounded more strongly as a successor to the particular Klangfarbenmelodie of Schoenberg’s ‘Farben’ in a way I had not previously appreciated, captivating in its eternal transformation (as opposed to earlier eternal recurrence). It felt almost as if melody itself, perhaps harmony too, were being created or recreated before our ears, out of something both older and newer.

Also sprach Zarathustra similarly opened – no news here – with a single pitch, again heading in very different directions, although its organ music in particular (Richard Gowers) intriguingly suggested points of contact with the manipulations and oscillations of the earlier pieces. There was a fine sense of irony to Strauss’s response to Nietzsche: too often missed in performance, but not here. The LSO’s performance was once again outstanding, boasting uncommonly rich string playing (not least for the Barbican acoustic). There was throughout a welcome sense of space to the work’s unfolding, without that in any sense implying slow tempi. Processes were as clear as in Ligeti, especially earlier on. Did the performance lose its way somewhat later on? Perhaps, though it is a notoriously difficult work to grasp as a whole, whether as performer or listener. There was, at any rate, something fittingly phantasmagorical to the whole.

Tamestit/MCO - Bach, Hindemith, Schnittke, and Shostakovich, 2 March 2026

2026-03-04T15:02:00.001+00:00

Kammermusiksaal

Bach: Chorale, ‘Von deinen Thron tret’ ich hiermit’, BWV 327
Hindemith: Trauermusik for viola and string orchestra
Bach: The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080: Contrapunctus I and III
Schnittke: Monologue for viola and string orchestra
Bach: The Art of Fugue: Contrapunctus II and IV
Shostakovich, arr. Rudolf Barshai: Chamber Symphony, op.111a
Bach: Chorale Prelude, ‘Von deinen Thron tret’ ich hiermit’, BWV 668

Antoine Tamestit (viola)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra

(My photograph)

The Berlin Philharmonic’s International Chamber Orchestra series, its home in the Philharmonie’s younger sibling, the next-door Kammermusiksaal, always offers a rich and rewarding selection of programmes. This Mahler Chamber Orchestra concert, given with artistic partner, violist Antoine Tamestit, was very much a case in point, music by Bach interspersed with works of lament and mourning by Hindemith, Schnittke, and Shostakovich. Bach of course offers life, death, and the beyond. Here we began and closed with him approaching God’s throne, beseeching the Almighty for hope, forgiveness, and the promise of everlasting life, including a transcription of his deathbed chorale prelude, with the first four Contrapuncti from the Art of Fugue offering a taste, even a banquet, of the music of the spheres. ‘Bach, c’est Bach, comme Dieu c’est Dieu,’ in the words of Berlioz.

The opening chorale, BWV 327, bears no words in the surviving text and sets a melody associated with the hymn ‘Herr Gott, dich loben alle wir,’ the alternative words given to it by the editors of the Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe. If you were expecting a rousing ‘Old Hundredth’ opening, nothing could have been further from the reality. Instead, front desks only from the string orchestra offered a slow, veiled, vibratoless, Passion-like introduction, soft humming suggesting a congregation, perhaps even of the netherworld. In a sense, it brought together old and new Bach, the speed more Klemperer-like than anything one might hear today, the total lack of vibrato looking back (or so we imagine) to early consorts as well as forward to the present, the difference being that this proved to have been an artistic rather than a dogmatic choice.

The chorale is quoted in Hindemith’s Trauermusik for George V. The British monarch may not seem the most promising object of a musical tribute, but there have been far worse—before, in Bach’s age, Hindemith’s, and our own. Trauermusik was written on 21 January 1936, following news of the king’s death the night before (as we now know, killed by his physician in order to make the following day’s newspapers). The concert in which Hindemith had been due to play his own viola concerto was cancelled, but this new work, conjured up at Mozartian speed in a BBC office for the occasion, was given in a broadcast instead, with the same performers: Hindemith, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and Adrian Boult. I have not especially warmed to the piece before – indeed, last time I heard it, I found it rather dull – so was delighted to find myself far more involved this time around, no doubt on account of the excellent performance from Tamestit and the MCO. The effect of the ‘new’ orchestral sound was of coming into ‘modern’ focus that yet intangibly built upon Bach. The four brief movements were dignified, at times passionate, yet never lachrymose, always guided by melody, harmonic rhythm, and their combination. This was recognisably the world of Mathis der Maler, with Bach’s chorale (which Hindemith was unaware had not set the words printed in the BGA) sounding as a reminiscence of the world in which it had been set as well, obviously, as of Bach. Played initially with low – not no – vibrato and gradually intensifying, it imparted a sense not only of coming ‘up to date’ but also of a life gathering force until its close, at which the music duly receded.

Contrapunctus I followed, each of the Art of Fugue pieces given by four solo strings, Tamestit one of them. Each begins in a different voice, this therefore initiated by the ‘second’ violin (actually, front desk first violinist, but not leader) Alexandra Preucil, to which Matthew Truscott soon responded as ‘first’. It was interesting, even before the entry of viola and cello, to note how different the two violinists’ playing was: not in any sense predictably so, but in response and complement. In a sense, it offered a microcosm of a concert in which nothing was taken for granted. This was warm, intelligent, unaffected playing, in which the illusion of the music ‘speaking for itself’ could readily be believed in, though it offered subtle insight aplenty as soon as one listened, just as in, say, music from the ‘Golden Age’ of vocal polyphony. The following fugue sounded as if a long-range ‘answer’, which in a way it is. Procedural relationships were clad in both flesh and the emotions that attend it. It was deeply involving and affecting.

Like Contrapunctus III, Schnittke’s 1989 Monologue begins with a viola line, albeit against a backdrop of orchestral second violins and violas. Written for Yuri Bashmet, it is as well that it has been taken up by other violists, since we are unlikely to hear Bashmet in the ‘West’ for the foreseeable future. Tamestit, in any case, had nothing to fear from comparisons, leading a performance it was not difficult to think ‘definitive’ (however vain the idea), every note being made to count without a hint of pedantry. The piece’s darkness was apparent; so too was the happenstance of kinship with Hindemith, at least in initial retrospection, though its ghostliness extended, as one might expect, far further. Indeed, it offered a kind of bridge between Hindemith and Shostakovich. If sometimes I had doubts about the quality of the material ‘itself’, performance rendered such doubts, as it were, more or less immaterial.

Bach returned for Contrapunctus II and IV. No such doubts here, of course, the extraordinary, unanswerable invention and integrity of harmony and counterpoint reminding us once again of Berlioz’s dictum. What struck me on coming to the fourth was how the player first intoning the subject had apparently taken the lead for the way in which the fugue would be played as a whole: not, of course, that this had not been playing of mutual responsiveness, but that it had rightly made its mark (just as voicing would necessarily do so on the piano). Chromaticism naturally offered its own seasoning.

Rudolf Barshai’s Chamber Symphony arrangement of Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet has long been admired, not least by Shostakovich himself. It sounded here in no way as if it were ‘merely’ an arrangement, but rather as if it were what had always been intended. Moreover, it would be difficult to imagine a better or more committed performance than that we heard from the MCO, Tamestit in its ranks on the first viola desk. The opening ‘Largo’ seemed, perhaps inevitably, to speak to our current predicament, little more than two days after the shocking attack on Iran. It was sad, bleak even, but human. Detail and the longer line were unerringly drawn, contributing to one another. The second movement as hysterical outburst knocked Schnittke into distant second place, its astonishing string playing further vindication of Barshai’s work. Capturing letter and spirit to perfection, the third movement performance moved from initial innocence to something lunging and sardonic; for once, comparison with Mahler did not seem beside the point. The weird after-life of this ‘Allegretto’ seemed more like hell on earth. For the two remaining ‘Largo’ movements, the first lament was icy yet warm, briefly brought into a winter sun that was swiftly banished; the second, kindred in spirit, also performed its function of quasi-cyclical return. Even for someone such as I who is not in general Shostakovich’s greatest fan, this was haunting music and haunting music-making.

And so, to Bach’s final work, the last of the ‘Leipzig chorales’, moving effortlessly in true Bachian fashion from organ to strings, binding together the programme in various ways, not least since it was also the chorale with which Bach closed but not completed The Art of Fugue (albeit under the name ‘Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein’), allegedly on his deathbed. Hindemith was, of course, unaware that Bach had always used a different melody for the chorale that he included in his work. This true ‘Von deinen Thron’ therefore effected a kind of historical as well as aesthetic reconciliation, albeit of a properly complex variety. I have simplified the above, perhaps to the extent of distortion, for which please accept apologies if necessary. There was no distortion and certainly no need for apology, though, in the profoundly moving music-making that concluded this outstanding concert. The whole string orchestra, Tamestit included, gave an intimate, unveiled performance of ultimate integrity, reminding us that Bach offers as close to ein’ feste Burg as we shall come in this life: not in stoicism, which may or may not be all we have, but in faith.

The Cunning Little Vixen, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 28 February 2026

2026-03-03T20:00:00.000+00:00

Vixen – Vera-Lotte Böecker
Forester – Svatopluk Sem
Fox – Magdalena Kožená
Forester’s Wife, Owl – Natalia Skrycka
Schoolmaster, Mosquito – Florian Hoffmann
Priest, Badger – David Oštrek
Harašta – Carles Pachon
Dachsund, Woodpecker – Sandra Laagus
Rooster – Anna Samuil
Innkeeper’s Wife, Hen – Adriane Queiroz
Jay – Sonja Herranen
Innkeeper – Junho Hwang

Frog – Milla Aulibauer
Cricket – Paula Bredt
Grasshopper – Alexander Meieer
Young Vixen – Naz Yilmaz
Frantík – Otto Glass
Pepík – Alia Engel
First fox cub – Paloma Couloumy

Director – Ted Huffman
Assistant director – Sonoko Kamimura
Set designs – Nadja Sofie Eller
Costumes – Astrid Klein
Lighting – Bertrand Couderc
Choreography – Pim Veulings
Dramaturgy – Detlef Giese, Elisabeth Kühne

Children’s Choir of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden (director: Vinzenz Weissenburger)
Staatsopernchor Berlin (director: Dani Juris)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Sir Simon Rattle (conductor)

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Believe it or not, this was the first ever performance at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden of The Cunning Little Vixen, more than a century after its world premiere in Brno. It is not that it has never been performed in Berlin before, of course not. Walter Felsenstein’s 1956 (German-language) Komische Oper production was a landmark in the reception of the work and, more broadly, of Janáček outside the Czech lands. In 1965, Felsenstein’s production was made into a magical film for East German television, conducted by no less than Václav Neumann. Yet the house a few hundred metres away left the opera alone and indeed showed little interest in most of Janáček’s operas, even as they were revived elsewhere, in Europe or beyond. Simon Rattle’s passion for the composer, combined with his now long-term collaboration with the Staatsoper and Daniel Barenboim’s trust in Rattle, has now resulted in a number of Janáček house premieres, of which this must surely be the most surprising. Rattle conducted the opera for the first time almost fifty years ago, at Glyndebourne, in 1977. He has also conducted it with the Royal Opera and the LSO, as well as with the Berlin Philharmonic. So here we had an inviting blend of novelty and experience, mirrored onstage by the combination of adult professionals and child performers (acrobats as well as singers).

How did that work in practice? Rattle certainly conducted it with the knowledge, sympathy, and understanding that would entail. Pacing was such that one did not notice it; it proceeded naturally and, in general, at the rate of a sung play, as Janáček tends to require. The composer’s language had been fully internalised and put to good musicodramatic use, even if the Staatskapelle Berlin – understandably – did not always sound quite so much at home in this music as other opera orchestras (or indeed the LSO, which has taken to it like ducks to water). It was a golden, Straussian Janáček we heard: nothing wrong with that and indeed one might sometimes say the same about the most ‘authentic’ Janáček of all, from Czech orchestras. There is in their Janáček, though, something I did not quite hear in this case: not only ‘tradition’, that slippery, movable, even questionable feast; but also an instinctive feel of how the orchestral music speaks, sings, propels, and even bites, in its own extraordinary language. Playing was on its own terms, though, excellent throughout; I should not exaggerate a relatively minor reservation.

As has been the case for his Janáček performances in both London and Berlin, Rattle had assembled and/or attracted a fine cast too. Vera-Lotte Böecker’s Vixen was characterful, animated, and sympathetic without being remotely cutesy. This world of Nature should never be sentimentalised. Magdalena Kožená offered a proper, more masculine complement with her Fox; the two matched one another at times as if in a Mozart instrumental serenade. Svatopluk Sem was a distinguished, humane Forester, his final hymn to Nature and its life cycles properly moving. (By now, the Staatskapelle too seemed more fully inside Janáček’s idiom.) Natalia Skrycka, Anna Samuil, David Oštrek, and Carles Pachon particularly stood out to me in their respective roles. Samuil’s Rooster proved a delightful, scene-stealing Rooster. But this was casting in depth too. No one disappointed, right down to the smaller animal roles very well taken by members of the Staatsoper’s International Opera Studio and also of its Children’s Choir. Choral singing in general was of a high standard throughout.

Unfortunately, Ted Huffman’s production proved a disappointment. It had its moments, a highpoint being the imaginative presentation of the vixen’s running amok in the chicken coup, feathers flying across the stage as hens’ costumes were punctured. At that point, following a slow and disjointed start in stage terms, all seemed to be coming together nicely. It was, alas, difficult to discern much of a line in what followed, ideas briefly floated only to vanish without trace or recur arbitrarily, as in characters’ typing of letters towards Terynka during interludes, which added little other than confusion. All took place ultimately in a white box, Nadja Sofie Eller’s designs offering neither natural wonder nor obvious deracinated contrast. For some reason, great play was made of dressing the chorus in highly individualised human outfits: well designed as such by Astrid Klein, but it was unclear to what end. Lighting seemed to be little more than simple on and off; perhaps a point was being made, but again I am not sure what. There was scope for the children to display their skills, undoubtedly welcome; yet integration into the plot, be it of opera or production, proved elusive.

Insofar as there was an overall idea, it seemed to be to blur the boundaries between animals and humans: fair enough, but the blurring seemed, well, blurred in focus and ultimately arbitrary. This was a different attempt at realism from Felsenstein’s, from that of Peter Sellars too (for Rattle and the BPO in 2017). If preferable to the latter, which was often frankly bizarre, it could surely have learned something from the former, even at this distance, not least in terms of overall coherence and indeed of a sense of what the work, or the production for that matter, might be about. Elsewhere, the accomplishment of that one scene with the chickens threw into relief what came across as a lack of basic, general direction elsewhere. Some scenes more resembled an early stage of rehearsal than a finished staging.

This is necessarily impressionistic, but I could not help noticing that younger and more international elements, visiting or resident, appeared distinctly less enthusiastic than the older, local core of the audience. If I were to hazard a potential explanation, I might note that it could hardly have been a matter of theatrical style and values. The production had nothing obviously in common with critical German theatre—unless that were why some approved, which I should not discount entirely. But I do not think it was only that; there seemed to be a genuine excitement at encountering the work, notwithstanding those Rattle performances at the Philharmonie in 2017. Those of us who have seen it in multiple stagings may be, according to taste, more critical or more jaded. Yet it is no bad thing to be reminded of the joy of encountering a Janáček opera for the first time; of that there appeared to be much in evidence.

Bendix-Balgley/Delepelaire/BPO/Sokhiev - Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Berlioz, 27 February 2026

2026-02-28T12:13:00.002+00:00

Philharmonie

Mendelssohn: Overture: The Hebrides, op.26
Brahms: Concerto for violin, cello, and orchestra in A minor, op.102
Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique, op.14

Noah Bendix-Balgley (violin)

Bruno Delepelaire (cello)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Tugan Sokhiev (conductor)

Images: Stephan Rabold

How I miss hearing the Berlin Philharmonic more weeks than not. Perhaps absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I have little doubt I should have found this an outstanding concert on matter what. It showed, moreover, how the orchestra, especially under the right conductor, can draw on the best of its great tradition without in any sense being hidebound on it. Mendelssohn’s overture The Hebrides was a case in point. I was surprised to see it had not been performed by the BPO for nearly fifteen years, the last time being in October 2011 under Pablo Heras-Casado. Mendelssohn may be oddly unfashionable, but his music came up as fresh as new in an absorbing performance under Tugan Sokhiev. The opening sounded ‘right’ in every respect: balance; warmth and variegation of orchestral tone; the changing nature of the seas, relatively calm yet with elemental menace in their depth; and tempo, which, whilst slower than usual, worked just as well. Later prominence of bass heightened the drama without overwhelming, though one could say much the same of strings after that. Though were considerable shifts in tempo, they lay within a coherent whole; indeed, they helped form it. First among solo equals was clarinettist Wenzel Fuchs, whose duetting proved just as delectable. It was as fine a Mendelssohn performance as I had heard for some time.

Noah Bendix-Balgley and Bruno Delepelaire joined their orchestral colleagues for an excellent performance of Brahms’s Double Concerto, showing that surpassing suavity in solo performance need not in any sense preclude depth of response, quite the contrary. Again, an orchestral sound announced itself that, whilst not to be identified directly with that of Karajan (or, in this repertoire, Jochum) suggested tangible relation. Delepelaire’s opening solo statement likewise ‘might’ have been that of a great soloist of the past, save that it was very much of the present, Bendix-Balgley’s response that of an equal. The soloists watched and listened to each other as chamber musicians, making music with each other and their peers, speaking of things, as Mendelssohn put it, that were too definite rather than too vague for words. Drawing-room intimacy both contrasted with and yet grew out of more public statements. Tempi again sounded just right, without being noticeable in themselves. Throughout this first movement, there was plenty of space for the music to unfold, though no loss of urgency, broadening to the moment of recapitulatory return a fine example, unleashing a veritable second development.

A darkly post-Beethovenian reading of the second movement followed: ‘late’, but not too late Brahms. It sang and developed in tandem, very much as chamber music writ large, albeit within a Sophoclean framing of evident kinship with the Fourth Symphony, Nietzsche’s idiotic claim that Brahms’s music spoke with the ‘melancholy of incapacity’ effaced by the melancholy of supreme compositional mastery. The finale ensued with unerring rightness: lighter in one sense, yet anything but carefree. It was more ambiguous and yet also more ‘public’: how is that for ambiguity? The major mode, when it came, moved precisely because it incorporated prior struggles rather than attempting to overcome or even reconcile them. This was not an easy ride, nor should it have been. Too often nowadays, concerto performances are followed by irrelevant encores, serving only to prolong departure from the hall. Bendix-Balgley and Delepelaire judged theirs just right: their own arrangement of a Brahms Hungarian Dance. Alas, I noted down the number incorrectly and am now not sure which one. At any rate, it was spirited, idiomatic, and balanced wienerisch origin with a paprika seasoning of fun.

It is not only Mendelssohn who seems to be out of fashion; so does Berlioz, doubtless because a number of distinguished champions are no longer with us. Sokhiev and the BPO left us in no doubt what we are missing, with a superlative performance of the Symphonie fantastique, its burning radicalism suggesting even Helmut Lachenmann might yet learn a few tricks from this earlier orchestral master. An augmented orchestra, a larger string section more than matched by considerably more varied as well as larger wind and percussion sections, immediately sounded different, giving the lie to claims that ‘tradition’ somehow makes everything sound the same. It might, but only in the guise of poor playing, which can be old or new. Silkier strings suggested somewhere between opera and ballet, perhaps born of the very different traditions of French theatre music, whilst still honouring the composer’s idiosyncratic yet unmistakeable symphonic ambition. Tension was screwed up in the first movement introduction, exposition release just the thing. Here was form rather than formula, seemingly emerging from the instruments of the orchestra themselves. We never forgot, nor did our guides, that this was Berlioz the Romantic with a capital ‘R’, heir to Byron and Beethoven alike, from double bass growls here to later piccolo shrieking.

Sokhiev captured to a tee not only the dance of the second movement, but also its subjectivity, islands of unease such as the appearance of the idée fixe included. It and its successors benefited from a beautifully captured sense of scene as a whole and detail within it. Dominik Wollenweber’s cor anglais solo and Albrecht Meyer’s oboe response announced an involving ‘Scène aux champs’, full of musical and dramatic tension, far from always the case in a movement that can readily drag, yet here sounded very much a cousin to the great slow movements of Beethoven. Ghosts of the operatic past – Gluck, Mozart, and Beethoven too – imparted great eloquence to the orchestral ‘speech’. Not that programmatic elements were diminished, far from it. This is not a zero-sum game; different aspects should heighten one another and here did.

That was certainly also the case in the fourth and fifth movements. Timpani, nicely prefigured in the third, rightly took a different turn on this stage of Berlioz’s trip. I was put in mind of the ‘organised delirium’ of which we heard so much with respect to Pierre Boulez last year. Relish of woodwind grotesquerie characterised both movements, but the whole gang was here: bells from above, Dies irae brass, and the most rumbunctious of fugal writing from all concerned, Sokhiev pointing up aspects of character where necessary, yet also knowing when to leave the orchestra alone. It made for a magnificent ending to a magnificent evening.

Owen Wingrave, Guildhall, 23 February 2026

2026-02-24T19:07:00.005+00:00

Silk Street Theatre

Owen Wingrave – Sonny Fielding
General Sir Philip Wingrave – Harry Jacques
Miss Wingrave – Lowri Probert
Mrs Coyle – Hannah McKay
Mr Coyle – Oliver Williams
Mrs Julian – Manon Ogwen Parry
Kate Julian – Gabriella Giulietta Noble
Lechmere, Narrator – Tobias Campos Santiñaque

Director – Martin Lloyd-Evans
Set designs – Laura Jane Stanfield
Costumes – Katie Higgins
Lighting – Zoé Ritchie
Video – Kamila Przybylsk

Guildhall School Orchestra

Dominic Wheeler (conductor)

Images: David Monteith-Hodge
Mr Coyle (Oliver Williams) and Owen Wingrave (Sonny Fielding)

The Guildhall’s performances have long played an important role in London’s opera ecology, as well as offering invaluable opportunities to its students. Generalisations and comparisons are of limited value; every year is different and repertoire will grow out of the students available rather than being imposed upon them. Nonetheless, the works chosen for the Guildhall’s termly shows has tended to range more widely both than might be expected and than that of the other conservatoires (which, of course, very much have their own strengths). Henze, Hindemith, and Respighi have all featured alongside Mozart, Purcell, and others over the past few years. Britten is far from unfamiliar territory in this country, but Owen Wingrave is rarely seen anywhere. Hats off, then, to the Guildhall for staging it in a chamber orchestral reduction by David Matthews.

After a slightly shaky opening, the orchestra of young musicians gave a committed, even authoritative account of the score under Dominic Wheeler. Pacing convinced throughout. The music’s undeniable creepiness – a Britten trademark – shone through, as did its mechanistic progress. A flute solo here, a harp flourish there, Death in Venice-like percussion pervasive: these and more left one in no doubt as to the identity of the composer, though rarely at ever does he sound at his more inspired. Recorded children’s choir music, courtesy of the Cardinal Vaughan School’s Schola Cantorum, breathed life and death into evocation of the Wingrave family residence, Paramore. Martin Lloyd-Evans’s resourceful production moved from military academy to Paramore, taking in other locations with a refreshing absence of fuss. Things were played pretty straight, but none the worse for that. Occasional video additions enabled reference both to the outside world and to the family portraits of the house. Stage and musical direction were evidently conceived in collaborative sympathy.

Lechmere (Tobias Campos Santiñaque)

Each of the young stage artists impressed in what is neither easy nor grateful music. In the title role, Sonny Fielding combined close attention to the text with a moral insistence that clearly impressed the Coyles, brought to life (insofar as the work permits) with skill and humanity by Oliver Williams and Hannah McKay. Lowri Probert’s rich mezzo was just the thing for the stubborn spinster Miss Wingrave, increasingly contrasted with the breakdown of Manon Ogwen Parry’s Mrs Julian and her more ideologically driven daughter Kate, here given a fine vocal and stage performance by Gabriella Giuletta Noble. Harry Jacques’s offered a creditable elderly general: not the easiest of tasks for a young singer. In many ways, the show was stolen by the lively Lachmere (and Narrator) of Tobias Campos Santiñaque, a properly animating presence in an opera that certainly needs one.

For the problem, I am afraid, lay squarely with the work itself. I have not read the Henry James short story on which the libretto is based, but on this evidence The Turn of the Screw must be a far superior adaptation, whether by Myfanwy Piper or Britten. For me, it is Britten’s finest opera, so there is no doubt that composer and librettist could work together well. Indeed, it is difficult to believe Owen Wingrave comes from the same team, let alone ultimately from James. Where, in the earlier work, musical process is certainly to the fore, it is meaningful and generative. Here, too often, one simply hears gears grinding and changing to no evident end. Much of the orchestral writing is desiccated and there is strangely little in the way of idiomatic, let alone inviting, vocal writing. Word-setting and even straightforward are often awkward (as opposed to merely mannered). Dramatically, the work is still more flawed: most ‘characters’ are barely such at all, only really coming into being at the close. Instead, people who mostly never change their mind simply exchange pre-formulated statements on war, which either we shall mostly agree with (in Owen’s case) or find absurd (most of the rest, with rare glimpses of something more equivocal and interesting from the Coyles and Lechmere).

Mrs Coyle (Hannah McKay)

What might be done with the opera? Would making it more overtly topical help? Perhaps, although could one, really? One could doubtless set it in any number of current or recent ‘conflicts’, though I am not sure the concerns would translate. Most Londoners likely to be attending an opera are unlikely to be rabid militarists; they hardly need telling what they know already. Any number of Ukrainians or Russians, say, might with very good reason decide to flee conscription, but I am not sure so many would be making pacifist declarations at a military academy (or near enough) and angering their ‘old’ families. Perhaps it could be turned more evidently against Russian (or other) nationalism, I suppose, though its dramatic flaws would not be helpful. The other possibility, it seems to me, would be to take ‘pacifism’ as part proxy for homosexuality and other sexual repression, surely a subtext at least for what is going on here. That might actually unleash greater potential for production characterisation, though again the works’ flaws would remain.

Perhaps, then, Owen Wingrave simply works better as a television opera. I can imagine things ‘said’ might work more as reflections. Shots of the house, its portraits, its grounds and so on might likewise work better on screen. Or perhaps not. None of this is intended as criticism of a valiant attempt at revival. Anyone curious would be well advised to make an effort this week; it is difficult to imagine another opportunity coming our way soon. At the very least, you will encounter committed musical performances in an operatic rarity.

Stefanovich - ‘Labyrinth’: Bach, Kurtág, Debussy, and Liszt, 19 February 2026

2026-02-23T14:23:00.005+00:00

Milton Court

Bach: Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother, BWV 992
Kurtág: Eight Piano Pieces, op.3; Játékok: ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin – enragée’
Debussy: ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Birthday Elegy for Judit – for the second finger of her left hand’. ‘Apple Blossom’
Liszt: Nuages gris, S 199; Unstern! S 208
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Adoration, Adoration, Accursed Desolation’, ‘Dolna’
Debussy: ‘Des pas sur la neige’, Études: ‘pour les huit doigts’, ‘pour les arpèges composés’
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Objet trouvé’, Twelve microludes, ‘Antiphony in F-sharp’, ‘Les adieux (in Janáčeks Manier)’
Bach: The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080: Contrapunctus I
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Ligatura y’
Bach: The Art of Fugue: Contrapunctus XIV
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Pantomime’

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)

Images: Ed Maitland Smith

György Kurtág is the last man standing of the 'postwar avant garde': not merely standing, but writing too. Elliott Carter’s late period was unprecedented, a regular source of wonder, but even he did not write two operas in his nineties, the second, Die Stechardin, to be premiered in Budapest on the first full day of his second century. For the centenary itself, cities across the world offered thanks and celebration. London’s response was offered in typically imaginative form by Tamara Stefanovich.

Bach’s music has proved a lodestar for Kurtág’s creative life, whether in his piano transcriptions or deeper intellectual and emotional influence upon his own ‘original’ compositions. It was fitting, therefore, that he should feature so prominently in this finely constructed programme. The first piece, the early Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother, might have seemed a strange choice, but its uncharacteristic aspects reminded us quite how adventurous, even avant-gardist Bach was, how broad his terms of reference were, and how he could confound as much as any other composer. Stefanovich played up its character, especially at the outset, not least in the instrumental – in more than one sense – role of ornaments. It might almost have been a work by a French. Navigating a fine line between harpsichord terraced dynamics and piano shading, she showed not only how one need not choose, but how the interaction both on a local and a more sectional level could contribute to form and, in this unusual case, programmatic narrative. As it progressed, its chromaticism truly told: melting yet directed, in almost Mozartian fashion. Bachian joy in extravert, major mode was just as apparent and felt. Bells pealed, horns called, the labyrinth that gave its name to the recital as a whole deepened: here was a mini-recital in itself as well as a curtain-raiser of blazing originality.

Taken attacca, Kurtág’s bagatelle-like Eight Piano Pieces, op.3, now sixty years old, emerged in similarly declamatory, expressive, and original fashion. They formed a coherent whole, whilst exuding individual character of their own, contrast, complement, and dialectical mediation between what had passed before a guiding thread through this section of the labyrinth. Given the authority of the piano playing, one could readily take its virtuosity for granted, but of course one should not; not only was it laudable in itself, it is a key aspect to Kurtág’s exploration of his instrument, just as would be the case in Bach, Debussy or Liszt. Though Kurtág could not have known them at this time, Boulez’s Notations sounded as if a reference point, albeit distilled into still more starkly concentrated form. Webern was doubtless a crucial mediator here.

Pairing of Debussy and Kurtág’s ‘Fille aux cheveux de lin’ pieces likewise ensued with the inevitability – and initial serendipity – of a fine pairing of food and wine. A barrage of coughing from all quarters was unfortunate, to put it mildly, but the emergence of Debussy’s understated radicalism, through Stefanovich’s endlessly variegated piano line, from within the world of Kurtág suggested a performance very much for this programme; had the programming been otherwise so would the programming, which is just as it should be. Kurtág in turn seemed to prepare the way in musical transformation for the more overtly world of late Liszt. The Venetian haze of Nuages gris was now tinged with further shadows cast and faintly dappled light shed by Kurtág and Debussy. So much twentieth- and even twentieth-first-century music is rooted in this strange, twilit world, yet that should not lead us to overlook its more formal, generative legacy. There was little chance of doing so here, no more than in a post-Mephistophelian performance of Unstern! Collective rhetoric harnessed to musical ends, the notes seemed to extend in all directions, Liszt the seer momentarily elevated.

Returning to the world of Játékok, or perhaps better that world renewed, Kurtág very much created his own world in a few notes from those ashes, Webern again the principal, though far from the only, ghost at the feast. The combination of insistence and fantasy in, say, ‘Dolna’ suggesting distillation of Bach’s Capriccio into a fleeting yet unmistakeably tangible essence. Falling back into Debussy in an archlike form reminiscent of Kurtág’s beloved Bartók, the recital brought us steps in the snow without hammers followed by a pair of Études to remind us that ‘technique’, both as composition and performance, can and should be just as ‘poetic’ and thrilling as anything else. A succession of further Kurtág miniatures seemed, like the music of his forebears, to extend the piano keyboard and its capabilities before our eyes and ears. Every twist of the kaleidoscope brought a statement both consequent and new, the spectre of Ligeti listening, nodding, and, I think, smiling.

Then to Bach’s Art of Fugue, perhaps as far removed in character as well as chronology from the opening Capriccio. The relationship between freedom and organisation is always complex, whether in Bach, Kurtág, Debussy, Liszt, or others—or indeed in performance. Yet the absolute ‘rightness’ of what we heard here, even if it could readily be heard otherwise, seemed perfectly suited to Bach’s testament, its first Contrapunctus both prepared by all that had preceded it and a cleansing, nourishing sorbet. Dignified and directed, its harmony and counterpoint were in excellent balance. Kurtág’s ‘Ligatura y’ seemed in its way to mirror Bach by way of Webern and Messiaen, in turn preparing the way for the crowning glory of the unfinished Contrapunctus XIV, symmetry and development indivisible—until the labyrinthine thread broke off: silence! Kurtág’s ‘Pantomime’ proved the perfect, Beckettian response in near-silence of its own. As Simon Rattle remarked of the composer’s Stele, it is ‘a gravestone on which the entire history of European music is written’. Yet Kurtág, this recital reminded us, is alive—and writing.

Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, ENO, 16 February 2026

2026-02-18T14:15:00.006+00:00

Coliseum

Images: Tristram Kenton

Announcer – The Company
Leokadja Begbick – Rosie Aldridge
Fatty the Bookkeeper – Mark Le Brocq
Trinity Moses – Kenneth Kellogg
Jenny Smith – Danielle de Niese
Jimmy MacIntyre – Simon O‘Neill
Jack O’Brien – Elgan Llŷr Thomas
Bank-Account Billy – Alex Otterburn
Alaska Wolf Joe – David Shipley
Jenny’s Girls – Joanna Appleby, Deborah Davison, Sophie Goldrick, Ella Kirkpatrick, Claire Mitcher, Susanna Tudor-Thomas
Jenny’s Boy, A Cloud – Damon Gould
Jenny’s Boy, A Typhoon – Adam Taylor
Toby Higgins – Zwakele Tshabalala

Director – Jamie Manton
Designs – Milla Clarke
Lighting – D.M. Wood
Choreography – Lizzi Gee, Spencer Darlaston-Jones
Sound design – Jake Moore
Intimacy and fight coordinator – Haruka Kuroda

Chorus and Additional Chorus of the English National Opera (director: Matthew Quinn)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

André de Ridder (conductor)

In Berlin’s Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof, one of my favourite cemeteries, Hegel lies buried—as, very close, do Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, as do many others. Brecht’s Chausseestrasse house and the room in which he worked overlooked that cemetery; the Marxist Brecht expressly chose it out of increasing fascination with Marx’s single most important intellectual forerunner, GWF Hegel. One summer, I lived ten minutes’ walk away and visited regularly. Karl Marx, of course, lies in another celebrated cemetery, in another great world city: Highgate in London, further from anywhere in London I have lived, yet not so far in the greater scheme of things. This tale of ‘my’ two cities, of two cemeteries, of three dead men and more – ‘Nothing you can do will help a dead man’ – shaped my experience of this new ENO production of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, not least since I had seen Mahagonny only two months previously, in Berlin, in Barrie Kosky’s Komische Oper staging.

In capitalist society as in its artistic production, then as now, the grit lies in contradiction. What Hegel the divined as ontology, Marx situated in particular social and economic conditions. We are not obliged to choose; both indeed may be true or at least contain truth. In any case, following in both Hegel and Marx’s wake, Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny offers an illuminating instantiation of some of these contradictions: not only in subject matter but in aesthetics and its implications for performance and reception. Some art fails because it simply is not very good, or at least is not well presented. The contradictions here, though, are of a different nature, not to be smoothed over, concealed, or reconciled, but to be such stuff as dreams are smashed on—as indeed is patently the case wherever we look in our present social and political predicaments. No wonder, then, that this new ENO production, the last, I believe, before the company’s move to Manchester, is replete with more general resonance than those personal, albeit connected elements with which I began.

The contradiction between advertisement and reality is key to the Mahagonny and the Mahagonny we visit with Jamie Manton and his team, yet so is the form of production we can all see – and hear – if only we open our eyes and ears. In the ‘real’ world, ideology mystifies, obscures, yet never quite conceals; here, contradiction is perhaps more glaring, but that is the (Brechtian) point. It all goes back to a lorry, a box of theatrical tricks. (In what I think is pure coincidence, it put me a little in mind of the van in Frank Castorf’s Bayreuth Ring, though vehicular function may hold something in common.) Great claims are made for the city the unholy trio – less a trinity than in Kosky’s staging with c.1930 religious symbols – have built. Perceived desire and demand play their part, whether for whiskey or women—and, in a welcome update, men too. Sex workers rather than prostitutes, Jenny’s girls and boys are available to all, though the outcome does not change. Any declaration of love is not necessarily entirely hollow, but its truth is fleeting and contradicted by the destructive self-interest of all (save, perhaps, the founding mother and fathers). Even the whiskey is diluted by grim recycling that suggests what comes out one end will go back in the other.

But it is not all grime and grimness: there would be no contradiction then. There is Weill, of course, on whom more soon, but there is also a lively sense of fun, of entertainment: not necessarily unmediated, but what is? There are plenty of witty moments to occasion a wry smile or more, whilst the framing – the Coliseum’s staging and technical equipment a container for, in turn, the container – reminds us this is theatre. Announcements are made by alternating members of the company, part Brechtian remnant with loudspeaker, part Handmaid’s Tale entertainment imitation. (Before the interval, that is; after, they are more clearly themselves, unmasked.) And whilst the production in general shies away from specific contemporary reference – we can hardly fail to make it – the trial as gameshow surely gives the Trumpian game away. Resourceful designs impart a sense both of using what was to hand and also of what one might see, or have seen, at the Berliner Ensemble. In the contradiction between expectation and reality, a weathervane (we have plenty of them in our world) tapdancing hurricane points the way to just destruction of the city, only suddenly to change direction in a triumph of the knowingly underwhelming that prefigures God’s forlorn, defeated attempt to visit justice on this world at the end, drawn out Weill’s Bachian chorales bleakly yet thrillingly subverting Christian passion. Likewise, a cloud dances in counterpoint to Weill’s delicious parody of overwrought, out-of-tune Romantic salon music, edging out Jimmy’s act in more ways than one.

For the tension and indeed contradiction between Brecht and Weill will, should always lie at the heart of this work and its performance. Can, should music do what Brecht seems to imply it should? Where does that leave the songs, the tunes, the band? André de Ridder, music director designate, drew out biting and seductive playing from the ENO Orchestra. One could sympathise with Jimmy on his last night, traduced and betrayed, as for once strings soared, but not too much—and then it was over. Structurally, closed forms – how they do (and do not) add up to more – were clear and did far more than reproduce those of the libretto. It can be all too easy hearing Weill in the twenty-first century to succumb to nostalgia for a ‘Weimar’ that never was. Here, edge was maintained without entirely denying us pleasure; banjo and Hawaiian guitar could be heard amidst ominous, bass-led hemming in. If only Jeremy Sams’s translation could have decided what it wanted to be and stuck with it, much would have bitten still more savagely. Much was good, but there were too many instances that simply jarred, and the crucial Biblical element to Brecht’s writing was too often lost.

One less productive contradiction, at least for me, lay between operatic voices and miking. The Coliseum has never offered an ideal acoustic for opera, but here balances were too often awry. The chorus suffered more than most, words sometimes more or less inaudible. Rosie Aldridge and Danielle de Niese offered nicely contrasting and complementing female leads, equally at home in more operatic moments and something closer to the street, both fine singing actors. Simon O’Neill proved a tireless Jimmy, ably supported by his friends, Alex Otterburn, Elgan Llŷr Thomas, and David Shipley. Alongside Kenneth Kellogg and Mark Le Brocq, all offered individual performances founded on the text and on a recognition that the text has contradictions of its own, not least between words and music. Ultimately, I found there was in all respects no need to choose: Berlin and London offered different experiences, in contrast, complement, and yes, contradiction. In some ways, the latter, perhaps ironically, seemed the more Brechtian in its reluctance – refusal would be too strong – to concede to opera, even in Weill’s idiosyncratic conception. It was, in any way, a properly barbed, defiant way for ENO to bid us au revoir.

JACK Quartet: Lachenmann, 7 February 2026

2026-02-09T16:43:00.001+00:00

Wigmore Hall

String Quartet no.3, ‘Grido’
Mes Adieux, for string trio
String Quartet no.1, ‘Gran Torso’
String Quartet no.2, ‘Reigen seliger Geister‘

Christopher Otto, Austin Wulliman (violins)

John Pickford Richards (viola)

Jay Campbell (cello)

Now in his ninety-first year, Helmut Lachenmann continues to challenge, to confound, to nourish, and to delight. This concert brought home just how much his musique concrète instrumentale has become part of the compositional mainstream, as well as how, dare I suggest, a little of his mellowing and, more broadly, his increasing rapprochement with the tradition that has always preoccupied him. Lachenmann’s complete chamber music for strings was a generous offering indeed, though one at which we as listeners, let alone the players had certainly to work. Rewards were both instant and slow-burning; I find myself, two days later, still remarking on and developing musical thoughts and experiences.

In that accomplishment, the dizzying excellence of the JACK Quartet played, if anything, a still greater part than would usually be the case in performance. These players, of course, never do things by halves. Here we not only had Lachenmann’s entire œuvre for string quartet in a single concert; we not only had it supplemented by the anything-but-slight, more recent (2021-2) Mes Adieux for string trio; this was also a single concert in a day of three, in which audiences – not I – had heard works by Catherine Lamb, Hans Abrahamsen, and Wolfgang Rihm. That would surely have made a difference to how one heard the final instalment: a climax, no doubt, if a daunting one. I wonder whether, though, it would have helped one listen one’s way in. Here, I did to an extent, through the canny placing of the third quartet, ‘Grido’, first. It is anything but easy listening, yet it afforded a more ‘approachable’ opening than chronological ordering would have given.

From the outset, the JACK Quartet gave it with all the security, all the idiomatic command, one might expect from, say, the Takács Quartet in Haydn. Shards of or from German Romanticism were to be discerned even now, though not referentially. What struck me with some power was the total lack of distinction, whether in work or performance, between what once might have been thought ‘extended’ techniques and others: this was, as it were, the resolved palette of the string quartet. Full of melody, breath, emotion, it sounded from the dawn of the twenty-first century as if Schumann had continued to compose, heavily influenced but still more greatly liberated by post-Nono stillness and tranquillity. Relationships between instruments were part of the game, almost as if in Bartók. As music, entirely acoustic, ricocheted around the stage, sure in the knowledge that electronics were not required, it was full of surprises, old and new, not least in its continued ability to sing. In microtonal unison-ish and other interval-ish passages, music swarmed in finely judged redramatisation of an age-old dialectic between freedom and, if not, quite determinism, then unfreedom. Pitches emerged in an almost spectralist – though spectralist it certainly was not – clarity. In this fantastical world, the ever-becoming quality of Romanticism sounded reborn.

Violin, viola, and cello returned to the stage for Mes Adieux. Ironically, its texture sounded thicker at the start and indeed much for what was to come, Lachenmann often keener to employ all voices here at once. Was it more ‘thematic’, to employ a term one might have thought by now had lost all sense, yet did not seem to have? Or was my listening, following so powerful an introduction? I am not entirely clear, but one way or another, that seemed a meaningful way in and around this particular matrix. It was no less magical, absorbing, intense, or inventive. Again like Nono and Webern – or, for that matter, Bruckner – there was so music in the silences, let alone the near-silences, one could have listened to them all night.

In retrospect, the First String Quartet marked a watershed in string quartet writing and performance. Its construction from sounds hitherto unknown in the genre is remarkable in itself, but so is its legacy for what might be expected, relished, and developed by instruments and ensembles. ‘What I want,’ Lachenmann wrote in 1971, the year in which he began its composition, ‘is always the same.’ And hearing these works together, whatever their difficulties, made that clear: ‘art as a foretaste of freedom in an age without freedom’. In the cracks and crevasses between, say, pitch and non-pitch, sound and silence, and in their conversion into the age-old quartet-quality of conversation lay a sometimes difficult, but intensely rewarding ride. Deconstruction and reconstruction of instruments and their sound came more to the fore, but there was a moving aesthetic of care, as well as carefulness, that belied reputation of mere radicalism.

Orpheus reconfigured himself, so as to sing and dance, if not quite how we knew it, in the Second Quartet’s ‘dance of the blessed spirits’. Here, it sounded and moved as a response, a revisiting, a further journeying beyond Lachenmann’s explorations in the Second. Both possessed passages of a rare, febrile beauty, so long as one listened, yet also a sense of quite how much was at stake in such play(ing). Spirit shadows cast by flautato strings and the penetrating, uncompromising musical intelligence behind them; transformations both gentle and violent; an infinite number, or so it seemed, of shadings in multiple musical parameters: Lachenmann continued in these and in an undeniable, if flickering sense of something numinous, even noumenal, to challenge, to confound, to nourish, and to delight.

Idrīsî Ensemble/Fournil: Troubadour songs, etc., 6 February 2026

2026-02-08T17:56:00.003+00:00

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Grigor Natekatsi: Հավիկ մի պայծառ (Havik mi paydzar)
Mkhitar Ayrivanetsi: Սիրտ իմ սասանի (Sirt im sasani)
Comtessa de Dia/Bernart de Ventadorn, arr. Marti de Riquer: Ab joi et ab joven
Azalaïs de Porcairagues/Guiraut Riquier, arr. Thomas Fournil: Ar em al freg temps vengut
Troubadour motet: S’on me regarde
Trad. Epirus: Αλησμονώ και χαίρομαι (Alismonό kai chaíromai)
Anon./Guiraut de Borneth, arr. Fournil: En un vergier
Trad. Corsican: Stabat mater
Syriac chant: ܪ ܰܡܰܐܺܢܺ ̣ ܘ̣ ܰ ܬܰ (Taw nīmar)
Old Roman chant: Alleluia ‘Deute galliasometha’
Comtessa de Dia/Raimon de Miravai: Estat ai en greu cossirier
Anon.: Trois serors sor rive mer
Thomas Fournil/trad. Corsican: Dieus sal la terra
Sanʿa of Algiers: راسرم يرَ يَّوط (Tuwayyarī al-Masrār)
Comtessa de Dia: A chantar
Ponç d’Ortafà: Si ay perdut
Trad. Corsican: Kyrie

Idrīsî Ensemble

Thomas Fournil (director)

On yet another dismal, dark, and rainy night, scholar-performer Thomas Fournil and his Idrīsî Ensemble transformed the Queen Elizabeth Hall acoustically, scenically, and musically into a venue for a wide-ranging programme of mediaeval music. Focused on, yet far from limited to, some of the few surviving melodies that can confidently be attributed to trobairitz, that is female troubadours, it radiated outwards in various directions: to other troubadour songs; to related practices; to sacred music from twelfth- and thirteenth-century Occitania; to the music of other groups, marginalised in various ways; and across the Mediterranean world to take in Old Roman and Syriac chant, traditional music from Epirus; and, to begin with, a tenth-century Armenian poem by Gregor Narekatsim, set to a mediaeval melody transcribed by Robert At’ayan.

Whether solo song or ensemble singing, accompanied or, very rarely, unaccompanied, a new – old, but also necessarily new – world was created before our eyes and ears. Musical building blocks, poetic themes, methods of music making all old and new, likewise often simultaneously, gave each of us, all coming from slightly or radically different musical and broader cultural backgrounds, points of reference, departure, and arrival. Women’s voices came to the foreground, even in repertoire traditionally and probably historically reserved for men. Something akin to a varied continuo group, however anachronistic the notion, helped lead, ground, and fantasised, but so did words, notions, and fantasies. Frankly erotic texts, musical as well as poetic, took in sacred and secular, but so did themes of nature, of belonging, of land, of identity in multiple, as we might now say intersectional, fashion. A previously unrecorded Old Roman (pre-Gregorian) Allleluia, a walk in a garden of delights, a heart’s trembling at Judas’s deeds, three sisters on a seashore, and more came to life through monody, microtones, something akin to close harmony, movement, and an instrumental ensemble including portative organ, vielles, kaval, ney, kanun, and kanjira.

Much of this music and its performance is intrinsically political. How could it not be, with origins in struggles of gender, religion, ethnicity, and of course land? Minoritisation, persecution, and war from the time of writing have both much in common and much that is different from today. Having endured live-streamed genocide for more than two years now – never forgetting those who have lost lives, families, all hope in that genocide – the world is traumatised in a way that seems unusual even by historical standards. In many ways, it is, but we are also reminded of resources, witness, on which we can draw from those who learned (and failed to learn) lessons many centuries before us: the struggles of peoples to remain on their land and, indeed, to resist outright extermination. It was a clear, clear-sighted statement of solidarity in context. As one of the ensemble members said to overwhelming applause, introducing the old Occitan ‘Dieus sal la terra’, imagined by Fournil as mediaevalist, performer, and composers: ‘We stand with Palestine.’

That naturally made a great impression, yet so did much else. The third song of the Comtessa de Dia (Countess of Die), A chanter, in which a lover spurned and betrayed continues to believe in and praise herself, is the only trobairitz song to survive with music fully intact. ‘My rank and lineage,’ in Fournil’s translation, ‘should be of help to me, and my beauty and, still more, my true heart: this song, let it be my messenger.’ It was no mere tragedy or defiance, though; it was a statement and exploration of womanhood. A Corsican Stabat mater told a familiar story yet in both older and newer setting: for one thing, this was new, not old, verse ‘then’. Collaboration to reveal a single performing voice and yet many pointed to something essential about the evening. The harmonic, textural richness of a traditional Corsican Kyrie not only confounded but warmed and thrilled: paghjella of then and now, mediated by oral tradition. It was a varied, eventful journey that turned us into musical wayfarers and troubadours, trobairitz. If it could not, should not rid us of our particular standpoints, it suggested a little of what might lie beyond our cultural, even aural gazes: as Fournil pointed out in an excellent programme note, northern as well as gendered.

Cavils? It was, I think, a pity that, although we were given texts and translations, the auditorium was too dark to read them, there being no alternative in the form of titles. For the second half, I spent part of the interval reading the texts to come so as to prepare a little; that certainly helped. But I was literally in the dark for the first, which matters in a form for which words, meaning, and multiple unfamiliar languages matter. At the first half’s close, the Stabat mater offered a welcome exception, but also reflection on what I had missed earlier. Whilst I can understand the reluctance to distract, even by spoken introduction, they certainly helped when we had them. In such ignorance, one can as listener fall all the more prey to facile exoticism. These are trade-offs, though, and it is always interesting to glean sense and sensuality by other mean. Otherwise, though, this was a wonderful introduction to a world that continues, as it vanishes, to beckon.

The English Cat, Bavarian State Opera, 25 January 2026

2026-01-30T11:50:00.001+00:00

Cuvilliés-Theater

Lord Puff – Michael Butler
Arnold – Daniel Vening
Mr Jones, Judge, Mr Fawn – Zhe Liu
Tom – Armand Rabot
Peter – Samuel Stopford
Mr Keen, Defence Counsel, Parish Priest – Dafydd Jones
Minette – Seonwoo Lee
Babette – Meg Brilleslyper
Louise – Iana Aivazian
Miss Crisp – Elene Gvritishvili
Mrs Gomfit – Nontobeko Bhengu
Lady Toodle – Jess Dandy
Mr Punkett, Prosecution Counsel – Bruno Khouri
Betty – Lucy Altus

Director – Christiane Lutz
Set designs – Christian Andre Tabakoff
Costumes – Dorothee Joisten
Lighting – Benedikt Zehm
Dramaturgy – Olaf Roth

Bayerische Staatsorchester
Katharina Wincor (conductor)

Images: Geoffroy Schied

For an opera derived from a French novel (Honoré de Balzac) by an English playwright (Edward Bond) and a German composer (Hans Werner Henze), The English Cat has had an appropriately international and multilingual performance history. Its 1983 Schwetzingen Festival premiere was given in German translation, followed by French translation at Paris’s Opéra Comique the following year, only the year after that finally being given in Bond’s English at Santa Fe. Brexit-Insel (as it then, blessedly, was not yet) had to wait until 1987 before it was given at the Edinburgh Festival, finally coming to London only in its revised version in 1991, that revision having first been given at Henze’s own Montepulciano festival the year before. And that is before one comes to the undeniable Brechtian influence on Bond’s writing; Henze’s multifarious musical influences, often though far from always German; or indeed his flight – political, aesthetic, and sexual – from an oppressive, even repressive Federal Republic of Germany south across the Alps to Italy, settling outside Rome with his beloved partner Fausto Moroni; or his apartment in Knightsbridge…

‘So what?’ one might ask. Apart from intrinsic interest, it perhaps helps provide justification for the Bayerische Staatsoper’s decision, surprising nowadays, to present the opera in its German version by Ken Bartlett as Die englische Katze. Henze’s English-language works have a performance history of their own of being given in German versions: The Bassarids, for instance, also given in German in Munich in 2008, and the first of Henze’s collaborations with Bond, We Come to the River, having a tradition of being given in translation in Germany. For a native English speaker, it was a matter of regret. Bond’s brilliant use of language cannot help be but missed. But I suspect much of the Cuvilliés-Theater audience also gained something in translation. Hearing an English text in Germany, moreover, arguably imparted a little sense of a German composer, however good his English, responding to an English libretto.

Is there, as Henze feared, a mismatch between English and German comedy? Perhaps, but if so, I think that fruitful as much as fateful, whilst noting he felt he had never quite found the right form or version for the work. As for the talented performers onstage from the Staatsoper’s Opera Studio young artists’ scheme, I am sure they could have sung it any language or none. Theirs was a splendid company effort, as clearly was their direction: led musically by Katharina Wincor and scenically by Christiane Lutz and her resourceful production team. And to see it in the magnificently rococo Cuvilliés-Theater – scene to, among other things, the premiere of Idomeneo in 1781 – suggested a little the premiere of this different, yet not entirely un-Mozartian opera buffa at the still-smaller-in-capacity Schlosstheater in Schwetzingen.

Henze recalled in his memoir Bohemian Fifths that, on receiving the libretto from Bond and reading it to his ‘assembled household’ at Marino, he had found it ‘quite different’ from his first encounter with something closer to the original, a dramatisation by Geneviève Serrault for a company of Argentinian actors. It was ‘far more witty, far more relevant in terms of social criticism. It could have been subtitled L’argent fait tout …. It was no longer a fairy-tale play but a Victorian comedy of manners.’ Alas about half of what Bond had written had to be cut, but so far as Henze was concerned, those essential qualities remained. They also did here, I think, in what we saw and heard. The vegetarian-cat Royal Society for the Preservation of Rats was certainly laid bare in all its respectable bourgeois hypocrisy, an additional (I think) murder presented at the opening, both to parallel the later killing of Tom and to present the background to Lord Puff seeking election as president. There was a vacancy because he and his fellow cats had created one. I can understand why they were not presented visually as cats, although the orphaned mouse Louise had more of her animal nature to her. It might all have seemed a bit too close to, well, Cats. Something was lost, I think, not least in post-Brechtian alienation, although the libretto reminded us who they ‘really’ should be, as did a select few acts, such as Minette’s mode of walking on the roof. It also seemed a pity to lose a stronger sense of the other animals: when it came to Tom’s trial, the counsel for defence as dog, members of the jury as birds, and so on. Perhaps, though, there was wisdom in not wanting to turn this into a Cunning Little Vixen sequel. Moreover, both the mercenary nature of the sanctimonious society’s reality and the contrast with true love and humanity (or whatever the correct term would be) from the naive Minette and the smitten Tom were clear and meaningful.

That was, of course, due in no small part to the excellence of their portrayals onstage. Seonwoo Lee and Armand Rabot made for an excellent pair of lovers, complemented in a not-quite-triangle as product of social coercion and expectation by Michael Butler’s Lord Puff. Lee’s coloratura was spot on: sparkling, precise, and expressive in a fashion reminding us of Henze’s love for Mozart. Rabot struck a fine balance between evident sincerity and lingering doubt that the tomcat’s motivation might have been otherwise; much the same might be said of Meg Brilleslyper as Minette’s astute sister, Babette. There was a sense of something better to Butler’s Lord Puff, but also an acceptance that it would never win out. His scheming nephew Arnold was well captured by Daniel Vening. Iana Aivazian’s Louise made the stage her own at the end, showering herself in money, albeit with fine musical, if not political, values. She had learned, after all, from her protectors. Throughout the dizzyingly varied succession of solos, ensembles (the trio between Minette, Tom, and Babette especially moving) and interludes, a focused drama emerged: cut, yes, but with sensitivity and intelligence. There was no weak link in a cast that was greater than the sum of its parts.

Henze’s expressive compositional method – something, I think, to be heard, not merely analysed – also shone through in the vibrant, committed playing of the Bayerische Staatsorchester under Wincor’s incisive yet affectionate direction: not least the relationship between counterpoint and harmony which clearly owes something to Mozart and still more to his love for Mozart. One can hear or at least in some way sense the workings of the note rows, as one might in Berg or Schoenberg, and it is both not entirely the point but also not entirely not the point. Berg perhaps also comes to mind in the closed forms, although they are more overtly ‘closed’: ‘lots of little songs,’ as Henze put it. He would recall Bond having advised him when writing the music ‘to think less of Gilbert and Sullivan [!] and more of Mozart,’ a key stimulus to formulating its harmonic world. Echoes of other music and, more importantly, their collaboration and confrontation also bubbled to the fore.

Only Henze, surely, could come up with the idea of a ‘Courante’ between the sixth and seventh scenes of the second act, that refers both to ‘a visual idea of the tubes and pipes through which London’s sewage is discharged with enormous force into the Thames,’ and to ‘William Byrd’s Coranto, which I allow to come to the surface out of this flood of water – the same flood of water that will soon carry poor dead Minette out into the North Sea.’ I missed some of that detail, some of that city specificity onstage – maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner – but any production has choices to make, and I return to the point that London and England would not necessarily have been foremost in the minds of many in the audience. Weill complemented the residue of Brecht; disconcertingly Brittenesque string halos of love; elements of earlier Henzes from Boulevard Solitude to Pollicino; the Prinz von Homburg’s unresolved conflict between Schoenberg and Stravinsky; anxiety of influence in the direction of Richard Strauss: these and more combined, but in a duly personal as well as eclectic fashion whose ultimate message was piercingly yet humanly imparted. More Henze in Munich and elsewhere please—and not only in this, the composer’s centenary year.

Salzburg Mozartwoche (6) - Dueñas/VPO/Canellakis: Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Beethoven, 24 January 2026

2026-01-29T14:50:00.002+00:00

Grosses Festspielhaus

Mendelssohn: Overture: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, op.21
Mozart: Masonic Funeral Music, KV 471
Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E minor, op.64
Mozart: Idomeneo, re di Creta, KV 366: Overture
Beethoven: Symphony no.2 in D major, op.36

María Dueñas (violin)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Karina Canellakis (conductor)

Images: Wolfgang Lienbacher

My final Mozartwoche concert this year presented a frustrating conclusion. The starriest events are far from always the best: as Brahms might have said, any ass can tell you that. This was certainly not to be attributed to any failing on the Vienna Philharmonic’s part: it played and sounded wonderful throughout, alert, warm, and stylish. My problems lay rather with much, though not all, of what we heard from soloist and conductor, though it is only fair to add that the Festspielhaus audience reacted more positively.

The Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture worked well, as did the other shorter pieces on the programme. It is quite simply a delight to hear elfin strings and forest woodwind play like this. Here at least Karina Canellakis was reluctant to impose herself on the music: the last thing Mendelssohn wants. Moments of exhaustion at the end of the development and at the close of the piece, typical of Mendelssohn’s practice in general but with clear, programmatic meaning in this case, was handled beautifully and seeped into the following magical chords in a way I cannot recall hearing before. Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music exhibited not dissimilar virtues, though was naturally less driven. It flowed as if a wordless piece of sacred music, which it essentially is, and the VPO wind once again shone. The cantus firmus could be heard meaningfully as the focus of all that was woven around it: music, as Mendelssohn put it more generally of the art, that is not too vague but too precise for words.

Alas, I found it difficult to get on with María Dueñas in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, nervy vibrato that sometimes veered into wayward intonation married to a darker sound than either seemed intrinsically appropriate or was offered by the orchestra. Perhaps it was telling that, in a vigorous first movement, the cadenza came off best. Once the orchestra had returned, the soloist sounded increasingly overwrought: again, at odds with general tone and style. That turned to a general unevenness of tone in the long lines of the slow movement, however excellent the orchestral playing. The high spirits of the finale came off best, though Canellakis at times drove too hard. It was in any case all a bit late.

In the second half, the Idomeneo Overture got off to a good start, the VPO sounding wonderfully as of old. It might almost have been the same orchestra as we hear on John Pritchard’s 1983 recording. Direct and involving, it was very much the dramatic curtain-raiser; that is, until Canellakis began to pull it around to its detriment. It was a pity, but unfortunately prophetic of the Beethoven Second Symphony to come. Again, the playing was almost beyond praise, but the first movement introduction was oddly wayward. Rather than straining towards something, it verged on wandering off piste. The exposition and what came after was a mix of the hard-driven and the arbitrary. Above all, this was a Beethoven, like so much of what we hear now, that seemed divested of meaning at a time when we need his message more than ever. The other movements told a similar tale. After slow movement that wandered around until it stopped, with little to show for it, and in which the VPO seemed to have lost interest by the end, the minuet and finale offered more the same. Beautiful woodwind solos notwithstanding, how we had got there and why remained a mystery.

Salzburg Mozartwoche (5) – ‘Mozart & Moderne’, Orquesta Iberacademy Medellín et al.: Mozart and Zech, 24 January 2026

2026-01-29T11:28:00.008+00:00

Rittersaal des Residenz, Domquartier

Mozart: Symphony in C major after the Overture to Il re pastore, KV 208, reconstructed by Ulrich Leisinger; Divertimento no.11 in D major for oboe, two horns, two violins, viola, and bass, KV 251, ‘Nannerl Septet’; Il re pastore: ‘Vanne a regnar, ben mio,’ arr. Leisinger
Karim Zech: Concerto for piano four hands and ensemble (world premiere)

Members of the Orquesta Iberacademy Medellín

Krzysztof Wiśniewsiki (violin/director)

Alvaro Rodrigo Juica Paitan (conductor)

Karim Zech and Johann Zhao (piano)

Images: Wolfgang Lienbacher

In March 1767, in the Rittersaal (Knights’ Hall) of the Salzburg Residenz, the eleven-year-old Mozart led the premiere of the first part of his sacred Singspiel Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebots. (The second and third parts, for which the music, composed by others, is now lost, were given in two performances later that month.) Eight years later, in April 1775, Mozart returned to conduct the first and, similarly for a long time, only performance of Il re pastore, commissioned to celebrate the visit Archduke Maximilian Francis’s visit to Salzburg. It is a room, then, and not only a palace steeped in history—all the more so for those of us working in one way or another on Mozart.

Given that particular history, it was fitting to hear music from Il re pastore in a concert given by a group of young soloists from the Orquesta Iberacademy Medellín, led by violinist Krzysztof Wiśniewsiki. First was Ulrich Leisinger’s reconstruction and arrangement of the symphony Mozart fashioned from the opera, probably the same year, mindful that it was unlikely to be heard again any time soon in its entirety. The overture became the first movement, the aria ‘Intendo, amico rio’ with a little alteration the slow movement. A new Presto assai movement, traditionally assigned the Köchel number KV 102, was composed as a finale. The music naturally sounds different when heard by an ensemble of soloists rather than a chamber or full orchestra, but it is not a large space and one’s ears readily adjust, not least in a spirited performance such as this. Playing was cultivated and stylish; sensible tempi were chosen, and there was a proper sense of forward propulsion. The transition into pastoral Andantino was well handled, the first but not the last opportunity for oboist Juan David Capote Velásquez to shine. In a characterful reading of the finale, melodic and harmonic surprises registered keenly. In Leisinger’s arrangement of the duet ‘Vanne a regnar, ben mio,’ Elisa and Aminta’s voices assigned to flute (Juan Manel Montoya Flórez) and oboe, there was a lovely sense of dialogue between instruments, the style and occasion of Mozart’s serenata nicely recaptured.

In between, we heard the so-called Nannerl Septet with ‘Marcia francese’ following but not preceding. Its opening Molto allegro offered well-pointed playing, vigorous yet graceful, with telling yet unexaggerated articulation. The ensuing minuet and trio imparted due sense of the open-air serenade, followed by a lyrical, poised ‘Andantino’ with another gorgeous oboe solo at its heart. The second minuet (with variations) benefited from a strong rhythmic profile, full of incident that did not impede but rather proved the vehicle for the music’s unfolding. If it was a pity that the ‘Rondeau’ lost its way, that sometimes happens and the music restarted without undue fuss. The playing was more than infectious enough to compensate. The closing march was given with a winning lilt.

Mozart is not the only Salzburg composer, Leisinger reminded us, introducing the final work on the programme, a first performance for today rather than the eighteenth century: that of Karim Zech’s concerto for piano four hands and ensemble. Mozart’s writing for piano four hands and two pianos may in some sense have served (or not) as inspiration, but the twenty-one-year-old Zech proved very much his own person, both as composer and pianist, here joined by regular duet partner Johann Zhao and the excellent young conductor Alvaro Rodrigo Juica Paitan. Zech has spoken, Leisinger told us, of attraction to the impulsive quality in Mozart, as well as his thematic prodigality; he also admired, as did I, the spontaneity of the Medellín players. In four movements, each separated by a cadenza, it offered a splendid calling card, just as Il re pastore had for Mozart, seeking to impress the visiting Archduke as a potential patron. That was not to be, although Max Franz would later, as Archbishop-Elector of Cologne, prove a crucial figure in the early career of Beethoven.

Back to 2026: Zech’s first movement plunged us immediately into a world of distinctive, even arresting musical material. One might, trying broadly to characterise it, say that it was post-Second Viennese School, but any such background, if it existed at all, seemed fully assimilated. Zech’s writing for all instruments, not only piano, was here captivating and coherent, any echoes of other music(s) integrated in a musical labyrinth of its own. Jazz inflections prefigured a more strongly big band element of the fourth movement. Zech’s solo cadenza was the first, perhaps more overtly in the line of Schoenberg, which elicited no complaints from me. The often riotous second movement, a young person’s music and all the better for it, gave the impression of continuing the argument of the first, but in new ways. The musicians evidently relished Zech’s challenges and rose to them. The second cadenza, Zhao’s, was more of a slow, yet far from relaxed interlude, Zech assisting where required inside the piano, as both did for the third movement, piano sounds often engaging in duos and trios with other percussion instruments. The third cadenza, for piano duet, offered both complement and contrast, leading straight into an eclectic yet integrated and directed finale. In the first of two encores, the piano duo offered a paraphrase on Figaro’s aria ‘Non più andrai’, before the ensemble bade a captivating farewell with what I imagine may have been music from Colombia.

Mark Berry