BREAKING NEWS: Opera & Ballet

Argerich/Munich PO/Shani - Farrenc, Beethoven, and Brahms, 5 September 2026

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:31:34 +0000

Royal Albert Hall

Louise Farrenc: Overture no.2 in E-flat major, op.24
Beethoven: Piano Concerto no.2 in B-flat major, op.19
Brahms: Symphony no.4 in E-minor, op.98

Martha Argerich (piano)

Munich Philharmonic Orchestra

Lahav Shani (conductor)

Images: BBC/ Chris Christodoulou

With the best will in the world, much of the audience in such a concert will be there for the soloist. That intends no disrespect to Lahav Shani or the Munich Philharmonic, but Martha Argerich is, well, Martha Argerich—and one takes whatever opportunity one can to hear her. It took me several false starts in the face of cancellation before finally I did, but I have never regretted it and certainly did not now. Whether rehearsal time had been targeted accordingly, I do not know, but Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto proved the unquestionable highlight of the evening, alongside deeply disappointing Brahms and a well-played nonentity of a concert overture by Louise Farrenc.

An interesting historical figure both as pianist and composer, Farrenc has her advocates, but this E-flat Overture proved little more than a series of introductions to introductions, wearing a little too obviously influences on its sleeve, from Gluck and Beethoven to Cherubini and Rossini. It began impressively, implying a true curtain-raiser, even without an opera to come. Its over-reliance on tonic-dominant harmony – yes, Beethoven can do this too, but how! – might not have mattered too much, but the lack of anything in the way of intrinsic musical interest did. Still, it was a welcome opportunity to hear this music for oneself, and the orchestra was on good firm, powerfully directed by Shani.

The Albert Hall offers an ideal acoustic for very little, if anything, certainly not for an early Beethoven concerto performed with chamber-orchestral forces (ten first violins down to four double basses). One had to listen in here, but rewards were many for having done so, from the fresh opening tutti onwards. Argerich’s entry had it all: chiaroscuro, beautifully pointed, and unerring line, Beethovenian goal-orientation never in doubt. In that, it offered a prospectus for the whole, the first movement in particular notable for counterpoint as crystal-clear as it was harmonically founded and directed. It was often a more inward account – these things are relative – than one might once have expected from her, but it was not without vehemence either, the world of the later composer summoned and very much with us in the cadenza. If the opening of the second movement exposed Shani’s inability, as yet, to work out how, in this acoustic, to present Beethoven simply, balances awry and much a little too fussy, then things settled soon enough on the return of the soloist. Thereafter, Shani proved a sure and sensitive accompanist. Perhaps the close was a little too drawn out, a little too loved, but if so, that is a fault in the right direction. Cultivated, directed orchestral playing and flashes of the tigress of old characterised the finale, its Scotch snaps worth the price of admission alone. ‘Le Jardin féerique’ form Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye made for a slightly surprising encore. It took a while to find its feet—or better, its balance, but Argerich’s glissandi will linger long in the memory of all who heard them.

Brahms’s Fourth Symphony brought out the best in neither orchestra nor conductor. If the first movement opened wistfully, its lack of textural clarity presaged one of several recurrent problems. That may have been in part an acoustical matter, but general listlessness and dissipation of tension were surely less so, likewise surprising thinness of string tone. At times, we heard more committed playing, but it was unclear where it had come from or why. Such issues were carried forward into a second movement whose mixture of petulance and strange balance – often, downright lack of balance – meant it never really had a chance. It suggested Brahms, here at the height of his powers, had simply given up. The third movement began more promisingly. It bounced along, a little too jolly but with greater precision—until tone thinned again and it became merely hard-driven, disintegrating thereafter. The finale likewise seemed to have a stronger sense of structure at its opening, but that was not to be maintained. A strange emptiness at its heart was engendered by scrappy playing and Shani’s apparent lack of musical understanding. What presumably was intended to sound hushed sounded merely uncertain. It was all a bit of a mess, and though it gathered a reasonable head of steam later on, that was too little, too late. Contrast with the courageous witness of Ilan Volkov at least year’s Proms could not have been starker.

BPO/Petrenko - Elgar and Tchaikovsky, 2 September 2026

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:53:38 +0000

Royal Albert Hall

Elgar: Variations on an Original Theme, ‘Enigma’, op.36
Tchaikovsky: Symphony no.4 in F minor, op.36

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

Images: Berliner Philharmoniker/Lena Laine

Elgar and Tchaikovsky are not exactly strange bed-fellows, but nor are they frequently programmed together. Their harmonic and, in some cases, melodic worlds have more than some might suspect in common—and can be nudged further in that direction in performance, as I think probably happened here, from Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic. Indeed, in a decidedly un-English performance, the theme of the Enigma Variations already danced a little closer to St Petersburg than I have previously heard. It only struck me afterwards that both works on the programme, that and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, were their respective composer’s op.36. It would seem a strange reason to programme the two works together, but it would also seem a strange coincidence. Maybe Petrenko first thought of them on that account and pursued the idea further to the extent of recognising the combination might work.

First, I should state that I stand warmly in favour of celebrating Elgar as a great European rather than ‘English’ composer. We need not rehearse here his musical antecedents, Richard Strauss’s praise, and the rest: they are by now common currency, though perhaps more in criticism and musicology than in performance. I cannot recall hearing Elgar from this Petrenko before, though I have done so from his namesake Vasily and been greatly impressed. Perhaps more to the point, I have heard Daniel Barenboim and another great Berlin orchestra, the Staatskapelle, more than once in this music, and raved. There was much to admire in this performance, not least the ever-outstanding playing of the Berlin Philharmonic, not to mention the still-too-rare opportunity to hear it play Elgar. There is a ‘but’ coming, as you may have sensed, yet I should like first to attend to the positive, often highly so, side of the ledger. From the outset, this was warmly expressive, cultivated playing which yet never curdled into narcissism. Petrenko clearly had his own ideas about the score and knew very well how to pursue them with his players. Every variation had sharply etched character, had seemingly been approached anew, developed within, and often offered contrast with its predecessor and successor. I shall not list them all, but a good-natured ‘R.P.A.’, in which we reheard Mendelssohn through Brahms, exquisite solo viola-playing in ‘Ysobel’, and a truly rollercoaster ‘Troyte’, propelled by wondrous timpani, more Berlioz than Brahms, were three that lay at the heart. A flighty ‘Dorabella’ had one hear the music newly, as did a ‘Nimrod’ that unfolded with the most natural, warm Romanticism one could imagine. There were some variations, however, that to my ears and sensibility felt driven too hard: perhaps most of all a ‘B.G.N.’ that came dangerously close to a mere showpiece. There was some of that to the finale too, though I greatly appreciated the way Petrenko had its opening somehow sound and feel as if it were the final movement of not only a set of symphonic variations but a symphony. It was ultimately, though, in that sense rather than its far from unwelcome heterodoxy, that I felt the performance added up to less than the sum of its parts. There is more to the relationship between these variations than individual character and contrast. A guiding thread founded on harmonic motion, such as we should unquestionably have heard from Barenboim, proved elusive. Moreover, comparison with Petrenko's superlative way with another Barenboim speciality, Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra, op.31, might also suggest this to be something of a work-in-progress. I hope he will return to Elgar and develop his often interesting thoughts further.

For three of the four Tchaikovsky movements I felt that more keenly. (Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, this was also repertoire in which Barenboim excelled.) The opening of the first movement felt more idiomatic, more ‘inside’ the music, the trumpet fanfares already drawing back in dialectic relationship to a Fate that must be obeyed yet from which the subject in performance must surely also recoil: thereby grief-laden without so much of a hint of the mawkish. At some point Petrenko dropped his baton, later to be retrieved by concertmaster Noah Bendix-Balgley, but it mattered not a jot to the cohesion and persuasiveness of the performance. It chilled just as much, perhaps even more so, in its eerie, nether passages, again evoking the world of Berlioz (in whom I should be very keen to hear Petrenko). Struggle was felt, not merely observed, throughout, as was a sense that it might become too much, the falling nature of motifs itself becoming a motif. The second movement again ‘spoke’ as well as sang beautifully—and consequently. ‘Soul’ and form seemed as one in its unfolding. Pain, pride, all manner of sensitivities vied beneath the surface and in turn helped shape it. In its bitter, pizzicato introversion of a balletic world, the third movement edged us a little closer to Mahler, without forsaking the composer’s own palette or sentiment. There was always, moreover, ambiguity: a sense, sometimes achieved in the trio, that something more joyous might break through, albeit not without a welcome dose of Prokofiev-like sardonicism.

And so, when all that pent-up energy exploded at the outset of the finale, the performance seemed truly to have arrived. Alas, it was here that I felt its narrative fell apart somewhat. Yes, one can drive this music hard: it is marked ‘Allegro con fuoco’. But it is, or should be, with fire rather than like a machine. Technical accomplishment was beyond compare, but it seemed more hysterical, even Shostakovich-like, than deeply felt. It came and went, like a whirlwind, yet seemed not only out of proportion, but also a little out of meaning. At any rate, a London audience increasingly starved of high-profile orchestral visits during its normal concert season, responded with great enthusiasm.

Leonard Cohen in Yiddish

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 14:06:35 +0000

And now, as they say, for something completely different. Swedish band Louisa Lyne & di Yiddishe Kapelye are touring their show Leonard Cohen in Yiddish and it made its Toronto stop at Lula Lounge on Tuesday evening as part of the Ashkenaz Festival. It makes sense right? Cohen’s roots were in the Yiddish speaking community in Latvia and somehow Yiddish seems apt for his typical subject matter.

So what we got was a selection of Cohen songs translated into Yiddish and some original pieces inspired by Cohen. What made it for me; being neither hugely knowledgeable about Leonard Cohen or a Yiddish speaker, was the sheer verve and skill of the performance. Louisa Lyne is passionate, engages with the audience well and is a terrific mover and singer. She’s just great fun to watch.

The band; violin, cello, bass, guitar (electric and acoustic), accordion, keyboards and percussion were excellent. The arrangements were thoughtful (there was no drum kit – thank whichever God you fancy) and gave all the instrumentalists a chance to shine. I particularly noticed some very fine fiddling and accordion playing.

So I probably didn’t get as much out of it as the (as far as I could tell) mainly Yiddish speaking audience but I had fun. There was lots of positive energy and the sound was really good; which isn’t always the case at Lula Lounge! Definitely worth the trek out west!

Photo credit: Dan Rosenberg

Rusalka; gritty and glam

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 17:20:15 +0000

Dvořák’s Rusalka seems to be a favourite for directors to give the “high concept” treatment. That’s certainly the case with Philipp Stölzl and Philipp M. Krenn’s production for Dutch National Opera recorded in Amsterdam in 2023.

We open with the closing scene of a Hollywood extravaganza; The Prince and the Mermaid. Sailors, dancing girls aerialists doing their thing until the protagonists disappear into a giant clam shell… all in glorious Technicolor. It’s a massive contrast with the cinema exterior; a grimy street in Brooklyn. The water nymphs are prostitutes. Vodnik is their pimp. There are gangsters and plenty of violence. Rusalka is a rather dowdy employee of the cinema with a heroin habit; viscerally demonstrated during “The Song to the Moon”. Rusalka longs for the glamour of Hollywood and for the handsome man who plays the lead in the movie.

Ježíbaba, the proprietor of the next door hairdressing and nail salon facilitates the transformation of Rusalka into something suitably glamorous whereupon the scene moves to Hollywood where Rusalka takes up with her dream prince. The huntsman is the film director, the kitchen boy a make-up artist and the gamekeeper is (maybe) Prince’s agent. This plays out remarkably straightforwardly on a film set with paparazzi and so on.

Enter the Foreign Princess. They are shooting the sequel to the earlier movie. Both the Prince and the Princess are doing coke and there is an energetic sailor ballet. At this point we have a sort of split screen with the Brooklynites following Rusalka’s adventures in the newspaper. This all builds up to a knife fight between the Foreign Princess and Rusalka in which both get cut up.

And so we are back in Brooklyn where the stars of “The mermaid Returns” are attending the premiere with their Oscars. The Prince tries to make up with Rusalka but, of course, dies. We see more excepts of The Mermaid Returns while Rusalka shoots up again in the street. It shouldn’t work but actually it does pretty well. Hollywood is unrealistic enough to carry the fairy tale elements. Only the ending is a bit weak but that’s not exactly the opera’s strongest point anyway!

Musically it’s very strong. The orchestra here is the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, conducted by Joana Mallwitz, and they sound sumptuous. The singing is very good. Johanni van Oostrum is a sympathetic Rusalka and both she and Annette Dasch, singing the Foreign princess, manage to look and sound suitably glamorous. Pavel Černoch has film star looks and a really lovely and quite powerful tenor. He’s pretty much ideal as the Prince. Raehann Bryce-Davis’ rich, powerful mezzo and somewhat larger than life stage presence are ideal for this Ježíbaba; who is portrayed as at least as imposing as anyone else in the drama. Maxim Kuzmin-Karavaev is surprisingly lyrical and sympathetic as Vodnik. The chorus also does a great job as does a huge crowd of dancers, aerialists and other extras.

The sound (LPCM stereo and DTS-MA 5.1) and the picture are excellent on Blu-ray. Michael Beyer’s video direction is on point and shows off the cleverness of the set design and its seamless transitions. The voice orchestra balance is more natural than usual. The voices aren’t balanced implausibly far forward! The booklet is basic with a track listing and a generic synopsis. Subtitle options are English, German, Dutch, Korean and Japanese.

All in all this production works better than one might expect and certainly better than some of the competing recordings of Rusalka. Add to that the performances are strong across the board and there’s a lot to like. There several good Rusalka recordings and I did a round up of them here (last paragraph). The choice is largely a matter of taste as to production style.

Catalogue information: Naxos Blu-ray NBD0193V. Release date is 11th September 2026.

Rossini - Le siège de Corinthe at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 16:56:27 +0000

Auditorium Scavolini, Pesaro, Friday June 21 2026

Conductor: Carlo Rizzi. Production: Davide Livermore. Sets: Eleonora Peronetti, Paolo Gep Cucco, Davide Livermore. Video: D-Wok. Costumes: Gianluca Falaschi. Choreography: Erika Rombaldoni. Lighting: Nicolas Bovey. Mahomet II: Adrian Sâmpetrean. Cléomène: Matteo Roma. Pamyra: Vasilisa Berzhanskaya. Néoclès: Maxim Mironov. Hiéros: Simón Orfila. Adraste: Tianxuefei Sun. Omar: Giuseppe De Luca. Ismène: Anna-Doris Capitelli. Chorus of the Ventidio Basso theatre. Bologna Municipal Theatre Orchestra.

Photos: Amati Bacciardi

While I’ve no intention of teaching granny to suck eggs, I think any article about Le siège de Corinthe is bound to include at least something about the history - or vicissitudes, you might say - of the work. Those of you who already know all about Corinthian egg-sucking can just skip to the performance itself.

So (1)… Rossini’s Le siège de Corinthe premiered in Paris in October 1826 and to celebrate, the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro has just staged a new production, by Davide Livermore. For his first French opera, Rossini chose to draw on Maometto II, composed for Naples in 1820: it wasn’t known in Paris, and Rossini himself was particularly fond of what Philip Gossett goes so far as to call a ‘perfect’ neoclassical opera, so it made sense to recycle some of the material.

However, catering to Paris opera conventions meant not just translating the libretto into French, but rewriting the score: fleshing out the orchestra, simplifying the vocal style and adapting it to French declamation, adding choruses and ballets, changing voice types (the female alto Calbo becoming, for example, the tenor Néoclès) and reassigning arias or portions of arias in consequence…

In addition, in April 1826, i.e. just six months before the premiere of Le siège, the final siege of Missolonghi had ended in victory for the Turks and catastrophe for the Greeks. Inhabitants not massacred or choosing suicide by gunpowder over Ottoman defeat were carried off into slavery, and the city was burnt to ashes. European public opinion was already gripped by the unrest in Greece. Byron’s own The Siege of Corinth (inspired by the 1715 Ottoman massacre of the Venetian garrison in Corinth: no wonder we get confused) had been published in 1816. The news of his death in Missolonghi, in 1824, had caused a great stir, further stoking philhellenic sentiment.

The story of Turks v. Venetians in Maometto II thus became one of Turks v. Greeks in Le siège. Up to the last minute, the third and final act was remodelled as news from the war of independence continued to reach Paris. As a result, though the action is supposedly based on Mehmet II’s historic siege of Corinth in 1458, Le siège de Corinthe is deemed to be one of the most, perhaps the most topical of all operas.

There is no known autograph version of Le siège. The first orchestral score was printed by Eugène-Théodore Troupenas in Paris (he would also publish the first editions of Moïse, Le comte Ory and Guillaume Tell), and this still provided the basis for performances in Pesaro in 2000, to Philip Gossett's dismay. Demonstrating how quickly, in Rossini’s day, scores got hacked up and rearranged, Troupenas’s first edition is, according to Gossett, ‘a mess, with errors and inconsistencies, major confusions about the order and content of pieces, and dramaturgical absurdities.’ At the end, ‘the male Greek defenders of Corinth are all dead, yet they manage to sing from offstage “O patrie,” in a conclusion that merges incoherently several versions of the final measures.’ The 2000 staging didn’t help, but for more about that, read Gossett.

What he doesn’t mention, and probably didn’t know since Damien Colas’s critical edition of Le siège would only be heard in Pesaro in 2017, was that, as well as reconstructing the original architecture of the score, it would also restore nearly 500 bars that had already gone AWOL by the time Troupenas printed his first edition. Colas did all this by painstakingly piecing the score together line by line (‘from piccolo to double-bass, bar by bar’) from the individual orchestra and vocal parts.

As early as 1827, Italian translations of the opera began to circulate as L’assedio di Corinto, of a kind, typical of their times, that Colas calls ‘adaptations sauvages’ (haphazard adaptations) with numerous ‘bidouillages’ (tinkerings), ‘alterations of varying degrees - the removal of certain numbers and the insertion of others, not necessarily by the composer but by the often anonymous individuals in charge of each production: conductor, choirmaster, capo banda… not to mention the singers and their whims.’

Which brings us to the famous but oft-decried (by Gossett, for one, bitterly) diva-showpiece version of L’assedio featuring Beverly Sills under Thomas Schippers. This, says Colas, ‘bears little resemblance to the authentic siège de Corinthe’, with ‘here, excerpts from Maometto II, there passages from Le siège translated into Italian, and a breathtaking rondo aria, “Parmi vederlo, ahi misero” composed in 1828 for Giulia Grisi, slotted in between Pamira’s prayer and the tragic finale.’ The decision to switch Néoclès’ tenor part back to a breeches role for alto or mezzo, to allow Marilyn Horne and Shirley Verrett to dazzle audiences alongside Sills, resulted in numerous inconsistencies, even absurdities, in the patchwork score.

Colas nevertheless concludes, philosophically, that this Schippers/Mickelson mishmash remains important. Thanks to ‘the splendour of the performance,’ it brought the work to the attention of a wide audience, contributing to the revival of Rossini’s opera seria output. But also, ‘it bears witness to that quaint business of cobbling together 19th-century scores, which, thankfully, is now on the wane.’ For bel canto fans, he writes, ‘it is a cult recording, in which Beverly Sills, with her legendary trill, showcases the very best of her artistry.’

The full plot of Le siège de Corinthe can of course be found online. In brief, Cléomène, the governor of Corinth, wants his daughter, Pamyra, to marry a Greek officer, Néoclès. She, of course, is already in love with someone else, who to her surprise, not ours, turns out to be Mahomet II. When, after much soul searching, she eventually turns him down, the latter finally attacks. As the Greek menfolk march off to defeat and enslavement or worse, she joins the women in choosing death over dishonour, and Corinth goes up in flames.

*****

Director, designer, singer, dancer, actor, scriptwriter and teacher Davide Livermore is a star of the Italian stage, director of Genoa’s Teatro Nazionale, and a Pesaro regular, but this was the first time I had seen a production by him. If this article is late, it’s partly because, after Pesaro, I was completing my journey to Naxos, where I’m writing now, but very much because I was at a loss for words to describe what I saw.

Now I know I sometimes get told off for quoting from other people’s accounts, but while I muster my thoughts, I can’t resist pasting here a lively snippet from a review by Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Jewish Chronicle, who writes that Livermore’s staging is… ‘… a clumsy, oafish massacre of Rossini’s work carried out by a man with the sensitivity of a blind porcupine attempting to make love to a Fabergé egg, while congratulating himself on his tenderness.’

After much thought, I decided I’d start my own account by simply recycling what I wrote about Johannesburg Erath’s take on Ermione, also in Pesaro, in 2024. In a nutshell, ‘The production was exasperatingly cliché-ridden and over-busy.’ Livermore’s Le siège actually opens with a cliché: ‘Corinthe’ daubed in red at the end of a streak of blood across the black steel safety curtain. From that point on, it’s a perpetual guessing-game as to the director’s intentions; at no point does he seem interested in engaging with the tragedy of Corinth (or the implied one of Missolonghi) as such.

The curtain rises on giant crates of ancient artefacts wheeled about by scurrying dancers in Grecian tunics. So at first it looks like this might be a ‘museum’ production, or a ‘spoliation by invaders’ one, both familiar from various stagings of Giulio Cesare and other works over the years. Statues, including the Vénus de Milo, are unpacked, a tall chunk of ruin with twin Ionic columns slides in, and one big crate opens to reveal a glowing screen at its rear. This crate, a small stage-within-a-stage with its video backdrop, will be a permanent feature throughout the evening. The videos, by a multimedia design firm called D-Wok, look as if they’d asked AI to conjure up a Kitschy ideal vision of the ancient world - one reminiscent of postcards and trinkets peddled to tourists around the foot of the Athens Acropolis - by combining Lawrence Alma-Tadema with Thomas Kinkade. These images will glitch up in a slick of oily black to show temples, a throne room, sea views, etc, eventually the Parthenon atop a mountain of garbage, and Corinth in flames.

Le siège might be set in various relevant times and places: the time of Mehmet the Conqueror; the time the work premiered, and thus that of the Greek war of independence; in any modern or present-day context of conquest and occupation… Here, however, the Greeks are costumed (by Gianluca Falaschi) as cartoonish ancient Greeks with flowers in their hair, while the Ottomans seem, at first, to be inter-war gentleman archeologists, in beige linen three-piece suits, black ties and fedoras. Only their behaviour is anything but gentlemanly: these are swaggering, uncouth oafs, forever lighting up cigarettes (a directorial tic I’d already complained of after Ermione), laughing at the humiliation of the hapless Greeks and taking Instagram shots and selfies with their smartphones - yes, the inevitable smartphones, notwithstanding their ‘Howard Carter’ looks. Mahomet, in a white suit, relieves himself on arrival against a column, before lighting up and posing with his grinning gang for one of many selfies. He signals his virility by climbing up the scaffolding.

As the stage fills with variegated bags of rubbish, plastic waste bobs on the Aegean in the garish, gilt-framed videos behind, and Pamyra sings a lament seated on an upturned supermarket trolley, it emerges that the production is somehow a comment on the impact of uncouth modernity on ancient art and cultures, or, more simply, one on the disastrous effects of overtourism. It’s as if it has a life of its own, and the near-irrelevant opera is played out within it quite incidentally. As I wrote above, in no way does it address the classic tragic dilemma of affections and loyalties in times of war, invasion and occupation: with cardboard cut-out Greeks and an army of chain smoking louts in beige linen wielding toy swords and led by a spiv, how could it? It managed at once to trivialise ancient Greece, the Ottomans, the Muslim occupation and war of independence, Rossini’s heartfelt opera seria and by implication, in the special context of Le siège, the dreadful fate of Missolonghi.

And naturally, the reduction of the characters to silly caricatures undermines the efforts of the singers. It’s impossible to tell if their hammy, silent-film acting (the production also involves many ‘freeze-frame’ moments, tableaux vivants in which soloists and chorus strike corny heroic poses) is a result of their being left to their own devices by a director too busy orchestrating his technically-perfect conception, or of their being directed to do it.

Before I move on to the singing, though it isn’t the usual protocol, I’ll begin with the orchestra under Carlo Rizzi, as their contribution naturally had an impact on it. Rizzi is, I guess, a safe pair of hands, and conducted the score with vigour and impulse. But delicacy isn’t his thing. I’m particularly interested in the subtleties of Rossini’s orchestra, its skilfully-crafted, and in my view often neglected, inner workings. Rizzi’s relatively martial approach, never, it felt, dropping below forte, with a largish Bologna orchestra in the pit including the substantial lower brass added for Paris, produced what I’m sorry to admit I called a ‘galumphing’ effect when texting my first impressions to a friend. This made things harder for the singers.

Pamyra is, in the most considerate of circumstances, a punishing role, and in this production, she even has to mingle with the dancers and display conflicting emotions during the cute act-two ballets Rossini composed for the Opéra, here staged as a dream, or perhaps her inner turmoil. Vasilisa Berzhanskaya has an impressive voice, best, in its current state, in long, soft passages, where she can float ethereal pianissimi, in dramatic declamation, and soaring thrillingly over a full orchestra and chorus in rousing finales. She must surely be a great Médée, supposing she has the dramatic temperament for it (in this production, it is impossible to tell if her relative impassivity and corny gesturing are her own, or imposed deliberately by the director as part of his scheme). Her ‘nightingale’ days, supposing she had them, are, however, probably now, or will soon be, behind her - at any rate with Rizzi conducting the Bologna band. Her rapid runs, slightly soapy, disappeared under the decibels.

The two ‘Nourrit’ tenors (Louis Nourrit was the first Cléomène, while his son Adolphe sang Néoclès), Matteo Roma and Maxim Mironov, were nicely contrasted. Funnily, young Roma is practically at the start of his career, whereas Mironov is someone I first saw as Marzio in Mozart’s Mitridate 20 years ago (around the time all Facebook was gawping at his bare-chested Lindoro), yet here the younger singer, heavily made-up, grey-haired and whiskered, got to play the older part. Roma’s singing was as assertive as the staging allowed a paper cut-out to be, and interestingly complex in timbre. Perhaps end-of-series fatigue (I was there on the last night) was responsible for one or two strangled top notes; but as the orchestra was loud, they were barely noticeable. Perhaps the same fatigue explains the lack of éclat in Mironov’s top register too. Otherwise, his was probably the most classic Rossini singing of the evening, elegant if perhaps too light for a role composed for Adolphe Nourrit. Curiously and unfortunately, in his Grecian pleats and gold boots, he recalled Michael Palin in The Life of Brian (‘I have a vewy gweat fwiend in Wome called Biggus Dickus'). This limited his dramatic impact.

Bass Adrian Sâmpetrean (Mahomet) was announced sick but willing to soldier on. As is often the case, this didn’t show, at least to anyone not familiar with him, but it may have reduced his impact and the consistency of his singing at least to some extent. I’ve read he's a very interesting singer. Here he seemed a bit uneven and blustery, but in the circumstances it’s probably better not to try to judge. I’ll be glad to find his name in a future cast list and form a sounder opinion.

Experienced Simón Orfila was a strikingly resounding Hiéros, the rest of the supporting cast was adequate, or, in the case of Anna-Doris Capitelli, more than adequate, and the chorus was on form.

In a more respectful, less self-regarding production, rather than one that felt as if a limitless budget had been handed to a precocious student director too young to realise his astounding insights are tiresomely déja vu, and with subtler playing, this might have been a better evening of Rossini. But that sports-arena auditorium is spartan, the seats are painful, summer parking in Pesaro is a nightmare, and you can’t be sure your money will have been well spent. The Festival isn’t what it used to be - as one friend familiar with it joked, they should let people park in the empty seats - and I honestly wonder if I’ll bother to go back again.

(1) The key sources for this introduction were Philip Gossett’s Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera, plus an interview he gave about Maometto II, now on YouTube; musicologist Damien Colas’ De Maometto II (1820) au Siège de Corinthe (1826) : comment une pièce turque est devenue une tragédie grecque, in Orages magazine; six interviews with Colas (who made the critical edition of Le siège now used in Pesaro and elsewhere) published, to mark the work’s bicentenary, on the Première Loge website; and, inevitably, Wikipedia.

Images: BBC/ Chris Christodoulou

For the first of its two Proms in its first ever visit to the series, the MET Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin offered an all-Strauss programme, perhaps not coincidentally on considerably firmer ground in the operatic first half than the symphonic second. The mysterious Rosenkavalier Suite – still no one knows who wrote it, though Artur Rodziński remains a favoured candidate – began with a Prelude full of contrasts yet clear of narrative. That the Metropolitan Opera’s music director and its orchestra have chemistry and mutual understanding was clear from the outset, Nézet-Séguin ‘playing’ the ensemble as his own. There was, moreover, a fine, Straussian sound without undue (however tempting) clotting of the cream. It made me long to hear the rest of the opera. That could not quite be arranged, but there followed a welcome whistle-stop-tour. If the Presentation of the Rose was milked slightly, who can blame them? There are worse things than time standing a little on the still side, as the Marschallin would doubtless counsel us. For me, it worked as if a dream of the opera house itself, cruelly interrupted by Ochs’s ‘hallucinations’. What is ‘real’ here anyway? If that brief intervention sounded a bit odd in itself, out of context, it nicely divided the second act from the first hearing of the Baron’s own waltz. The waltzes in general had idiom, charm, and a keen sense of delight: excellent solo playing from all concerned. And if part of me wishes the suite would close in a different way from that chosen by its compile, whoever he may have been, the other part smiled at it for what it is and for how it was played.

Elza van den Heever joined the band for the final scene from Salome in a performance of visceral, all-encompassing commitment, perhaps the finest I have heard from her. The orchestra’s switch at the opening to full-on expressionism displayed a versatility and judgement that ran through the scene: no sugar-coating from anyone concerned. The soloist’s diction, moreover, was second to none, all the more important here as a way to bring the drama into being without scenery or context within the greater work. Sometimes I felt Nézet-Séguin might have moved things on more quickly, but I could understand why not. And when death came – ‘der Geheimnis des Todes’ – it was truly horrible, as if van den Heever’s voice had turned first to stone, then to blood of the deepest crimson. She gloried thereafter in what she had done, with the memory and legacy of that kiss, in a welcome dose of old-fashioned glamour.

Ein Heldenleben fared less well, marred by strange tempi choices that seemed counter-intuitive and failed, at least to my ears, to justify themselves. The opening intrigued, given with what seemed, after Salome but also on its own terms, a model of Classical restraint. There were oddities of balance, though, which haunted the rest of the piece, doubtless less familiar to the orchestra (though an old favourite of the conductor). Introversion ensued; it is a point of view, I suppose, but an odd one when applied either to the hero’s adversaries or his companion. A welcome flick of the switch came to something warmer, more blooming, but if detail was always present, greater structural awareness was less discernible. Much of the battlefield sounded magnificent, offstage and onstage trumpets included, but the works of peace felt too drawn out, often merely listless. Ultimately, the reading did not cohere for me, though much of the audience clearly felt otherwise. A rich-toned ‘Zueignung’ came as encore, van den Heever and Nézet-Séguin recovering with grace and humour from the former’s initial memory lapse.

Salzburg Festival (6) – Kopatchinskaja and friends: Bartók, Kurtág, and Mozart, 25 August 2026

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 09:57:43 +0000

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Bartók: Rhapsody no.2 for violin and piano, Sz 89
Kurtág: Selection from Játekók and Jelek, játekók és üzenetek; Kafka-Fragmente, op.24: ‘Ruhelos’
Bartók: 44 Duos for two violins, Sz 98: ‘Szól a duda’; Contrasts for violin, clarinet, and piano, Sz 111
Mozart: Clarinet Quintet, KV 581

Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Jonian Ilias Kadesha (violins)

Lawrence Power (viola)

Sol Gabetta (cello)

Reto Bieri (clarinet)

Olga Pashchenko (piano)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

The second of my ‘Hommage à Kurtág’ concerts proved in more than one sense a concert of two unequal halves, a scintillating selection from Bartók and Kurtág followed by a bizarre, if mercifully shorter, mauling of Mozart that would have been better left unimagined, let alone performed. In its violin and piano version, Bartók’s Second Rhapsody imparted a curious, welcome sense in its first movement of first being heard from a slight distance, quickly coming into focus, as if the players had drawn physically nearer to us. (They had not moved at all, at least in position.) Pianist Olga Pashchenko and violinist-cum-animating-presence Patricia Kopatchinskaja proved animated guides, the former’s shading of post-Romantic tone as absorbing as the ghostly echoes of the latter. Dancing, revelry, and other wildness characterised a whirlwind second movement of considerable ferocity.

The duo joined by violinist Jonian Ilias Kadesha, violist Lawrence Power, and cellist Sol Gabetta, we heard a selection of piano pieces from Kurtág’s Jatekók and string solo and trio pieces from another of the composer’s collections, Jelek, játekók és üzenetek (‘Signs, games, and messages’). ‘Hommage à Kurtag Marta’ functioned almost as if a Bach prelude from the 48, inviting and of course in this case remembering, followed by a haunting ‘ … féerie d’automne’ from Kadesha. ‘Ligatura Y’ for string trio suggested music not only for but by strings, sound and its organisation seemingly arising from the instruments themselves, however strong the illusion—and strong it was indeed. Power’s solo viola ‘In Nomine – all’ongherese’ was eloquent, rich, thoroughly absorbing, from which Pashchenko’s return in ‘… lehullot levelek’ stemmed with unforced inevitability, kinship within Kurtág’s œuvre as keenly perceived as that with his composer colleagues. ‘Népdalféle’ (Kadesha) and ‘Fanfárok’ (Paschchenko) led to an intense ‘Jelek VI’ for string trio (Kopatchnskaja, Power, Gabetta), its rests as musical and overwhelming as its notes, Webern’s ghost still an honoured guest at the feast. Kadesha’s ‘Hommage à J.S.B.’ suggested Bach writing in the style of Kurtág rather than vice versa, a second, piano piece of the same name over in a flash. Gabetta’s solo ‘Az hit …’ (actually a transcription from a soprano original) was as richly eloquent as Power’s viola solo, kinship again fruitfully acknowledged.

The Prelude and Waltz from the first book of Játekók and a dancing string tio ‘Hommage à Ránki György’, fresh from the tavern led us to a changing of the guard in Kopatchinskaja’s party piece ‘Ruhelos’ and a Bartók duo reimagined so as to involve all players, Bieri included, in a captivating piece of bagpiped music theatre. Contrasts, from Bieri, Kopatchinskaja, and Pashchenko, seemed to create a world before our ears and express its essence similarly before us. If there were inevitable echoes of other worlds from rural Hungary to nightclub blues, especially in the first movement, this could only ever have been Bartók. The initial, rapt stillness that yet moved of the central movement ran deep in a detailed performance whose impassioned outburst both surprised and yet confirmed. Organised delirium, to borrow from the Boulezian future, characterised an infectious third movement, chamber-music give-and-take ever new and rooted.

If only that had carried through into the Mozart Clarinet Quintet. To be fair, chemistry in the expanded ensemble was equally palpable. What a pity, then, that it was so misapplied, Kopatchinskaja and Bieri apparently leading the show. The first movement begin oddly sotto voce, as if founded on a need to make Mozart sound ‘like’ Kurtág on the surface, rather than explore what kinship might lie within. I suspect that was the ‘idea’, but in practice, the complete lack of line throughout the entire piece would have made equal nonsense of Kurtág—or Bartók. In fact, what we heard sounded more akin to a caricature of the already self-caricatured Nikolas Harnoncourt, with strange pieces of 1960s music theatre thrown in for no apparent reason. I found myself wanting to cry out: ‘could you just calm down and let Mozart speak, preferably sing?’ There were odd sources of light, still mannered, but at least vaguely coherent, such as the first movement’s development section, but alas few and far between. The third movement came off best, the minuet relatively mainstream in conception and all the better for it, although both trios were more odd than anything else, the first seemingly wanting to be Beethoven, the second Haydn, Mozart nowhere to be found. Much of the finale sounded as if it had been turned inside out with choppy phrasing, perverse emphases, and unfathomable tempi.

Salzburg Festival (5) - Ariadne auf Naxos, 24 August 2026

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 16:20:45 +0000

Haus für Mozart

Images: © SF/Thomas Aurin

Composer – Kate Lindsey
Primadonna, Ariadne – Christina Nilsson
Tenor, Bacchus – Eric Cutler
Zerbinetta – Ziyi Dai
Major-domo – Johannes Silberschneider
Music Master – Christoph Pohl
Dancing Master – Jonas Hacker
Harlequin – Leon Košavić
Scaramuccio – Michael Porter
Truffaldino – Lukas Enoch Lemcke
Brighella – Theodor Browne
Naiad – Jasmin Delfs
Driad – Ana Mittermüller
Echo – Marlene Metzger
Wigmaker – Blaž Stajnko
Lackey – Fabian-Jakob Balkhausen
Officer – Fabio Dorizzi
Dancers – Ashley Elexandra Wright, Yume Takojima, Anton Ruslanovych, Samuel Young-Wright
Actors – Leo Albertini, Maximilian Montag, Martin Preiner, Paridam Schneider, Christian Walker

Director, designs, costumes – Ersan Mondtag
Lighting – Franck Evin
Choreography – Ashley Alexandra Wright
Video – Alexander Pannier
Dramaturgy – Till Briegleb

Assistant designer – Lorenz Paul Stöger

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Manfred Honeck (conductor)

A musically outstanding Ariadne auf Naxos, as well played as any I have heard, was here alas let down by a frankly idiotic staging, directed by the recently fashionable ‘interdisciplinary artist’ Ersan Mondtag. Let me resume the good musical news, which was very good indeed. I am not sure I had heard Manfred Honeck conduct an opera before, although in addition to serving as Music Director in Stuttgart for several years, he will have played in many as a violinist in the Vienna Philharmonic, here led by his brother Rainer. Doubtless it did no harm to be ‘one of them’, for the musicians clearly trusted and responded to him as they would to few others, combining a sense of chamber music writ large with unassuming yet unquestionable musical flexibility and direction. Harmony and counterpoint combined in near-Mozartian balance in an orchestra of soloists. Rarely if ever have I heard so much of the score, inner string parts in particular: not simply for its own sake, but musically and thereby dramatically enriching the drama. Tristan in particular could be heard informing various passages of the Opera proper: not only in the obvious, intertextual ways, but in those string textures, their direction, and their potentiality. This may not have been a brazenly modernistic Strauss, but then this is a particular work with its own brand of neoclassicism avant la lettre: one rooted in, yet in no sense hidebound by, tradition, and with frames of historical reference in almost any direction one might care to take, not least what we call the French Baroque (though ‘Classicism’ arguably makes greater sense). I can pay Honeck’s direction no greater compliment than to say I should love to hear him in a Mozart or Wagner opera, or indeed more Strauss. And if he can encourage this orchestra to play like that, he should definitely conduct more opera in Salzburg and Vienna.

With this of all operas, we need to keep several operatic balls in the air at the same time, and show ourselves to be doing so. Whatever nonsense they were called to by the director, the singers shone vocally bright indeed. Christina Nilsson, served particularly ill by Mondtag’s designs, nevertheless offered a thoughtful, radiant performance as Ariadne. At one point, I found myself wondering wishing the late Jessye Norman had been cast, in order to put the production where it deserved, but otherwise I was more than happy with her successor. Ziyi Da was a delight from beginning to end as Zerbinetta, her coloratura responding perfectly to the needs of a drama both necessarily italicised and natural. If I have heard a better Music Master than Christoph Pohl, I have forgotten him, which seems unlikely. A warmly Wagnerian baritone, with just the right amount of ironic distance, sounded just what Hofmannsthal and Strauss had ordered. If it is difficult to wax too lyrical about a Bacchus, that reflects the thanklessness of the role; Eric Cutler did all that was asked for him and more. Jonas Hacker’S Dancing Master, Leon Košavić’s Harlequin, the euphonious trio of Jasmin Delfs, Ana Mittermüller, and Marlene Metzger: these and others all attested to casting from depth, repaid in intelligence, good humour, and tonal warmth. A host of dancers and actors did well what presumably had been asked of them too.

I have left to the end Kate Lindsey’s Composer, not because she proved an exception, but because her character, alas, leads us directly to Mondtag’s staging. If, to begin with, I found her singing a touch on the harsh side, it blossomed into one of the most moving accounts of Strauss’s paean to music I have heard. It is one of those unmistakeable moments when the master of musical masks lets his slip, or at least has us think it does, and had me in tears. (The Vienna Philharmonic was at least an equal partner here of course.) But the reason, I suspect, I had taken longer to warm to her performance was that she had been landed with having to play the Composer not as a successor to Cherubino, but rather as a strangely dressed, ‘uptight’ middle-aged woman with a twitch. In offering what she did, Lindsey probably did precisely what had been asked for, prior to casting caution to the winds. That was not the worst of it, by any means. In what came across, rightly or wrongly, as crass misogyny, this woman was enabled, during the Opera, to ‘loosen up’ with the aid of a spliff or two, Zerbinetta removing the Composer’s top so that she could wander haplessly around the stage in her bra, prior to tentatively joining in one of the most tedious all-in orgies you will ever have the misfortune to observe.

The attempt, as New Labour might have had it, to sex up Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s dodgy dossier was often embarrassing, but always dull and increasingly so. Where the Prologue’s setting, on a spaceship flown to Mars, with a variety of peculiarly dressed people, had merely irritated but had not especially got in the way, the Opera suggested a supreme lack of interest on the part of the production team in anything remotely connected with the work, let alone its musical and verbal text. Characters from the Prologue wandered around to no particular end, as if in search of a bus that alas was never coming. Curiously joyless sex, with a bias towards revelation of the male form, carried on throughout. For some reason or none, Zerbinetta and her troupe either – according to taste – took the controls of the spaceship or engaged in a television quiz show.

Finally, Bacchus arrived as a golden spaceman, to leave with Ariadne, only to have the Major-Domo press a button and explode their ship. If the argument were, as seemed suggested in the dramaturge’s programme note, that this was offering a contemporary critique of artistic patronage, it failed completely in its aim, let alone in presenting any idea, Strauss’s, Hofmannsthal’s, or anyone else’s, of transformation. But if that were being offered, perhaps some consideration might have been given to which version of the opera would be presented. Only a little better thought out than the production, this note gave the impression of not even having appreciated this was an issue, referring baldly to the ‘premiere’ in Vienna in 1916. Sebastian Bolz’s accompanying essay was, by contrast, excellent: a model introduction to the work.

As the celebrated Turkish proverb has it, when a clown moves into a palace, he does not become the sultan; the palace becomes a circus. I suspect the production team would claim their work was ‘about’ this relationship rather than simple evidence of it. There is, of course, nothing intrinsically wrong with a circus or the idea of one, though it is hardly to be equated to the commedia dell’arte. It is not, though, suited to everything—especially when it never leaves the shallows of a mere ‘look’. Achim Freyer’s (almost) one-size-all approach could become wearing, but there was no doubting his craft, his pursuit of an idea, his ability to conjure up a new world within the confines of his aesthetic, and the theatrical magic he could, at his best, create. His Magic Flute, which I saw for the first time here in Salzburg in 1999, was a case in point: perhaps still the most memorable and magical I have seen. If you have never seen so much as a still from a low-budget 70s sci-fi series and would happily see it irrelevantly created on stage, seasoned with a torrent of aimless dry-humping observed by an occasional refugee from the land of Teletubbies, Zirkus Mondtag will descend next summer on Bayreuth for Parsifal.

September upcoming

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 14:10:49 +0000

The season starts to ramp up a bit…

Concerts and Opera

September 1st at Lula Lounge, Louisa Lyne & di Yiddishe Kapelye, present Leonard Cohen in Yiddish as part of the Ashkenaz Festival.
September 18th is the opening of Verdi’s La Traviata at the Four Seasons Centre. There are ten performances split between two casts with the last on October 17th.
September 23rd sees the Ensemble Studio open the Free Concert Series in the RBA. Note these shows are still free but are now ticketed.
September 30th is National Truth and Reconciliation Day and the COC has a lunchtime lecture/recital in the RBA by mezzo Camryn Dewar on The Evolution of Female Indigenous Representation in Canadian Opera from 1879 to Present.

Theatre etc.

September 12th at the Theatre Centre Icarus Theatre presents the Canadian Premiere of Walden by Amy Berryman. Previews are on the 10th and 11th and it runs to the 26th.
September 17th is open ing night for Soulpepper’s production of Wedekind’s Spring Awakening. Previews start on September 10th and the run extends to the 30th.
September 24th is opening night for Wine in the Wilderness at CanStage Berkeley Street. Previews begin on the 19th and it runs until October 4th.
Also on the 24th Nightwood Theatre’s production of Erin Shields’ Invite to a Flame opens at the Jackman Performance Centre. Previews start on the 22nd and t runs until October 4th.
The 24th to the 27th sees multiple shows in Youngplace at Sweet Action Theatre and Small World Music Centre as part of the What The Festival. Multiple clown, puppet and drag acts.
September 29th is the opening for Sasha Ivanochko’s Heaven; a music-less dance work for three naked dancers. It’s at the theatre centre and runs until October 3rd.

Austere Maria Stuarda

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:55:24 +0000

Ulrich Rasche’s production of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, staged in the Großesfestspielhaus at the Salzburg Festival in 2025, is austere and interesting. As most people know, the libretto, based oin a play by Schiller, is not at all historically accurate and invents a relationship between Robert Dudleigh, Earl of Leicester, and Mary Stuart that never existed but turns the opera into a love triangle in which the two queens are vying for Leicester’s attention! Rasche’s production runs with this angle and what little sense of actual political events there is n the opera is pushed into the background.

The set is austere. There are three large disk shaped platforms which move, tilt and rotate. Two are more or less at stage level; one for Elizabeth and one for Mary. They never leave their disk but other characters move between the two. The third disk is used mostly as a projection screen but descends at the end to wipe out Mary and her attendants. There are also dancers from the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance. The disks have a spider web pattern on them and rotate constantly so, treadmill like, the singers and dancers have to keep moving to stay in the same place. The inference, I suppose, is that all the characters; certainly the queens, are trapped in a destiny they cannot escape. Costuming is essentially black or white and fairly abstract; Elizabeth in black, Mary in white and other characters switching as the action proceeds.

In Act 1 Elizabeth is wearing a severe but elegant black dress and is fierce. She’s sung by Kate Lindsey and it’s a performance that combines brilliantly stylish singing with terrific character acting. Mary, equally well portrayed by Lisette Oropesa, is in simple white. The confrontation scene is brilliantly done with Oropesa throwing out insults and brilliant coloratura in equal measure. Leicester, sung by tenor Bekhzod Davronov, is also excellent and flits (flirts?) between the two women. The dancers just sort of stalk Elizabeth.

At the beginning of Act 2 Elizabeth appears dishevelled and distraught as if Mary has really got to her. The dancers now seem like Furies swarming Elizabeth. Cecil, sung impressively by a very cool and controlled Thomas Lehman, persuades her to sign the death warrant despite Leicester’s pleas. From now on the action is all about Mary but Rasche keeps Elizabeth stalking around her disk in the background.

The dancers, dressed in white loin cloths now, carry Mary in like an effigy. She then descends to the stage to mourn her situation with Talbot; well sung by bass Aleksei Kulagin. Cecil (in black) appears to tell her that her execution is imminent. Lehman is really good here; dignified but implacable. There are some very striking stage pictures created here! So on we go with Mary’s confessions to God and Talbot etc with Leicester, dressed in a long white skirt and T shirt (as is Talbot at this point) being restrained by the dancers. Mary walks up stage and the third disk descends at an angle, compressing and then obscuring Mary’s disk. Curtain. It’s a pretty effective ending in keeping with the aesthetics of the production as a whole.

Paul Blackman’s choreography is consistently interesting and contributes a lot to the overall picture and his dancers are excellent. The chorus stays mostly in the background but sings really well. The orchestra is the Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Antonello Manacorda. They do quite well enough!

Video direction is by Michael Beyer. He chooses to film from some odd angles with quite a few close ups. It’s hard to figure out what the theatre audience saw and the projections get especially short shrift. That said, he creates some really striking images on screen and I doubt that anything essential is lost even if the experience is a bit disorientating. Best to think of it as a (rather good) film in it’s own right. On Blu-ray, picture and sound (LPCM stereo and DTS-HD MA 5.1) are excellent. The booklet has a track listing and synopsis plus, rather weirdly, a short note on “Bel canto and censorship” but no director’s notes. Subtitles are Italian, English, German, French, Spanish, Korean and Japanese.

Obviously this production is not for those who think anything Tudor should be played in doublet and hose but it is coherent and I think it gets to the essentials of the drama very effectively. The performances; especially Oropesa and Lindsey, are absolutely top notch. It’s some of the best bel canto singing I’ve heard in a long time.

Catalogue information: C Major Blu-ray 773104

Salzburg Festival (4) - Saint François d’Assise, 23 August 2026

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 11:14:38 +0000

Felsenreitschule

Images: © SF/Monika Rittershaus

The Angel – Lauranne Oliva
Saint François – Philippe Sly
The Leper – Sean Panikkar
Brother Léon – Russell Braun
Brother Massée – Léo Vermot-Desroches
Brother Élie – Aaron-Casey Gould
Brother Bernard – Willard White
Brother Sylvestre – Marius Aron
Brother Rufin – Ivan Lyvch

Saint Francis’s father – Ingo Arbeiter
Saint Francis’s mother – Ingeborg Haidinger
Leper (actor) – Georg Schwamberger

Angels – Eirck Godoy, Ilaria Quaglia, Nicholas Sambou, Davide Troiani, Lisa Vilret, Sebastian Zamaro
Brothers – Felix Chang, Antoine Effroy, Nikos Fragkou, Emanuele Ospelt, Davide Sportelli, Emile Wendt

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera (chorus director: Jozef Chabroň)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Maxime Pascal (conductor)

Salzburg’s new Saint François d’Assise, directed by Romeo Castellucci and conducted by Maxime Pascal, with Philippe Sly in the title role, single-handedly justifies the somewhat mixed operatic results of Markus Hinterhäuser’s now concluded intendancy. This was an event, an experience not only of the highest, most challenging artistic order, but extended beyond that, building to a transcendental encounter in the third act that I am sure will remain with those who underwent, no participated in, it for the rest of their lives. That is in large part a matter of the work, of course, Messiaen’s avowed summa; or rather, the work was an indispensable fons et origo for it. But the palpable ambition, commitment and – doubtless in various forms – belief shown from all concerned were equally crucial. Taking steps, as it does, not merely beyond the at-best wonderful, yet also too-often-infuriating aesthetic of opera, but beyond Wagner’s renewal of Attic tragedy and Schoenberg’s theological transformation of Wagnerian music drama, to an opera that arguably belongs less in our opera houses even than Parsifal or Moses und Aron, and yet in its rebuke and challenges alike to them helps justify their continued existence and promise them new life, Saint François may be a one-off, but it is an absolutely necessary one-off. More to the point, it felt and, quite simply, was so here, an inspired contribution to the eight-hundredth anniversary of St Francis’s death, as well as a crucial demonstration of what art, religion, and humanity can and must do if they are to survive—and to be worthy of survival.

The total commitment of Sly’s performance in its physical extremity as well as its astounding musical range was foremost among the wonders experienced. Call it inspiration, call it faith, call it what you will: here was an artist responding to and creating something extraordinary—in tandem with his fellow artists and the work itself. Lauranne Oliva’s Angel was a voice and presence of radiant clarity, as unanswerable and unknowable as the place from which (s)he had come. Russell Braun’s beautifully sung Brother Leo offered a more attainable or at least approachable example, imploring and certain in faith, ineffably human as, like the rest of the brothers, he sought the way. Willard White’s Brother Bernard imparted a striking, equally touching voice of older faith. All presented voices and faces of a community, a path, that connected us to the world of saints, angels, and divinity.

The opening of Castellucci’s staging offered a frame closer to more typical contemporary opera as anything we should proceed to see (or hear), but quite rightly one soon forgotten, even discarded. In a museum – yes, our museum of musical works – the young Francis was called to leave all behind: his fine clothes, art, family (his father reappearing briefly in the final scene, but no longer in any sense the focus) himself to begin the route to the beyond: first beyond society, even beyond established monasticism, and ultimately Beyond. Shedding his fine clothes, as did the historical Francis, he was born anew, as were his followers, in a water both of baptism and of, straightforwardly, elemental water, pouring from the ceiling and, in one of many striking images of Castelluccian installation-drama, apparently petrified, water emerging miraculously as if from a fountain. Brothers, singers and dancers alike, joined him, likewise losing all, one shaved onstage, in the promise of gaining all—through a life of obedience, prayer, belief, charity, and art that is heavenly rather than temporal. Such is no easy path, of course, and only Francis could truly take on the ultimate challenge, that of Christ’s Cross, but others would participate as they could: whether in baking bread during Lauds in onstage ovens, its unmistakeable aroma inviting us to the refectory for physical interval sustenance; in receiving the Angel and its questions about predestination; in accepting not only the Leper, but his leprosy as part of God’s creation, a blow against Cathar and other heresy; in wandering, even wallowing in a mud, a filth as far removed from Francis’s fine origins as could be imagined; and of course with the birds and other of God’s creatures (all featured at different points onstage: wolf (of Gubbio), bird, and sacrificial lambs, as well as representations).

There was much more, yet nothing was hurried, the production taking its necessary time as did the musical performance. If some of the visual displays might have worked better, ironically, in a museum – a giant picture, for instance, of a child regaining the ability to hear – then many others were deeply touching, not least a confession to which it was difficult not to assent, quasi-heretically, in artistic communion: ‘Je t’aime, Olivier, immense artiste’. The birds in Francis’s sermon took on new, tragic meaning when shown, both onstage as near death and on screen in funerary naming, in reference to the ecological devastation of our age. But for the most part, the preaching was not Castelucci’s, or ours, but that of Francis and perhaps something lying beyond even him. This was not a place for argument, for discussion, but for mystery and for truth. We could recognise that more readily, however strenuous the demand, in the acceptance of the leper (acted by an old man, apparently wasted away, yet sung and doubled already by an angelic Sean Panikkar in white), mirrored towards the close when the latter returned to wash Francis on his way to the beyond. The ravishing beauty of Panikkar’s singing added further levels of theological as well as dramatic understanding, as of course did the Vienna Philharmonic’s celestial invitation (and those of the ondes Martenot, played by Nathalie Forget, Augustin Viard, and Cécile Lartigau). The image of Panikkar as angelic leper emanation, to borrow slightly from Stockhausen, kneading together Francis and physical Leper under a cloth for them to emerge in quasi-communion, even quasi-transubstantiated, as living counterpart to the bread whose baking (and oven steam) similarly pervaded the Felsenreitschule, made perfect liturgical sense in the moment—a key condition, of course, for any form of liturgical acceptance, not necessarily to be expected out of context. Ritual lived, brought to life, and yet, as with Our Lord, ultimately pointed to death—and thereafter resurrection.

For later, in the stigmata scene, we were unmistakeably in the world of dark mysteries it was and could not be given to us to understand. As with Francis, we must simply submit. A chill orchestral wind summoned by Pascal and the orchestra both formed a foundation for and intensified the dark images onstage, all having changed as we approached the beginning of the end. In dance, image, and music, it might almost have been a black (or better, dark) mass, a reminder that true sacrilege may closer approach – an essential term here – the sacred than so much of our banal, daily lives, ‘religious’ or ‘secular’. Not everything, here as in art and religion more generally, was necessarily to be understood or experienced representationally. Was that apparently sacramental mound from which so much dirt and darkness came anything of the kind? Did it summon the grave later to be dug by skeletal figures, one of them Francis? Or were these the wrong questions to ask, evidence that we had not yet been called? Red may have signalled blood; it may simply, joyously, agonisingly, have been red (to synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes alike). Angel wings were surely, though, on at least one level what they seemed to be: providing, and of Providence, something towards which Francis, once further shorn of strength and submitted to those dark figures (of Hell?) could reach, ultimately to join a company of Heaven that may have been easier, or at least less impossible, for Francis’s mediaeval mind than ours to grasp.

And yet, this is a work of modernity, a singular version no doubt, but no less modern for that. Messiaen engaged with the newest as well as the oldest music; he instructed many of its composers, as well as writing it himself. Pascal left us in no doubt he head internalised this musical language, its capabilities, and its emotions, to bring it, like Francis – and us – to new life. Birds, for Messiaen God’s finest musicians, sang more clearly than all, uninhibited, acting from their essence, knowing no other. This we heard from all sections of the orchestra, gamelan-percussion in near-surround sound included. Counterpoint and harmony mesmerised as Creation itself returned to life. But there was more to it than that single miracle. There was existential dread, harmonic and timbral; there was radiant, human joy; there was a new sense of time; there was the Angel’s unearthly viol. Ultimately, there was the coming together of all, in orchestral and choral divine encounter, an experience so overwhelming one felt one had actually met God. That did not happen by itself, through mere grace, for this was still art: the work had been prepared, paced, and permitted to speak for itself in its succession of tableaux. Its inevitability, though, was undeniable. In the numinous, astonishing, overwhelming closing bars, instruments, creatures, alleluias, and other songs of praise resounding, we came together as the angels had promised Francis: poetry and music leading us, as with Bach, to God Himself. This is not the only thing opera or art can and should do; but it felt, for many hours after, that it might (yet) be the most important.

Salzburg Festival (3) - ‘Hommage à Kurtág’: Brahms, Kurtág, Schumann, and Ligeti, 22 August 2026

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 15:21:36 +0000

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Brahms: Trio for violin, horn, and piano, in E-flat major, op.40
Kurtág: Hommage à R.Sch. for clarinet, viola, and piano, op.15d
Schumann: Märchenerzählungen for clarinet, viola, and piano, op.132
Ligeti: Trio for violin, horn, and piano

Noah Bendix-Bagley (violin)

Tabea Zimmermann (viola)

Daniel Ottensamer (clarinet)

Stefan Dohr (horn)

Kirill Gerstein (piano)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

This is what I call programming. Kirill Gerstein essentially brought together two unusual chamber ensembles, him common to both, to perform works by two celebrated pairs of composers: contemporary master and disciple (though more complicated than that) themselves in some sense responding to their predecessors. Joined by Noah Bendix-Bagley and Stefan Dohr for the Brahms and Ligeti for violin, horn, and piano, and by Tabea Zimmermann and Daniel Ottensamer for works by Kurtág and Schumann, Gerstein wrought a moving centenary tribute to György Kurtág, whose life and work in many ways offer a conspectus of the Western classical tradition, such as one would only find at a festival such as Salzburg’s.

For the Brahms Horn Trio, opening balance sounded a little odd, or perhaps it was more a matter of my ears adjusting. At any rate, this was a fine performance of a work with nowhere to hide—and no reason to need such a place. The first movement’s metrical and harmonic ambiguities offer difficulties for players and listeners alike, but there was no problem at all on the former side. This is difficult music and should never be thought easy listening, but these were musicians who enabled form to emerge as emotional as well as structural progression. The scherzo came to life as an ebullient, even disturbing homage to Mozart and Beethoven, wild in its Brahmsian discipline and in the occasional hint, never realised, that such discipline might be overruled. Its trio offered darkly Romantic balance and, within, a new world of chiaroscuro, prior to a still more intense reprise of the scherzo. The slow movement was darkly introspective to begin with, developing into defiance rather than merely stating it, whether outwardly fragile or overtly impassioned. More than once, I could not help but notice affinities with Die Walküre, its material as well as its mood. (I must consult the score for myself.) The sense of musical ‘lighting’ – slightly different, I think from shading – offered by all three players was exquisitely expressive, founded in yet never to be reduced to harmonic motion. The release of the finale was no less felt, or more remarkable, for its complexity, striking a keen balance between hints of the cyclical and the developing variation that is the essence of so much Brahms. Here was the culmination of a mighty river’s flow.

Kurtág’s Hommage à R.Sch. brought the ‘other’ ensemble onstage. The first miniature, ‘(merkwürdige Pirouetten des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler)‘ created a scurrying theatre stage of the mind, unmistakeably in the line of Webern, but equally unmistakeably Kurtág. Semi-whispered, hyper-Romantic confidences in the second effected a beautifully moving synthesis at the close, to be disrupted immediately by Florestan/Schoenberg’s third, equally beautiful in Pierrot-like violence, and further balanced or rather sublated in fourth and fifths movement in which semi-return to the mood of the second was, in nicely Schumannesque fashion, complicated by helter-skelter response. The sixth movement, longer than the first five combined, though still relatively brief, brought a properly Kurtágian haunting in response to Pierrot’s comings and goings, crystalline perfection in work and performance the means to emotional and intellectual integrity and depth. This was the air and indeed landscape of another planet, our revels ending with the unshowiest, yet most certain of drumstrokes from Ottensamer: a soldier’s tale, perhaps.

After the interval, Gerstein, Zimmermann, and Ottensamer returned for Schumann’s late Märchenerzählungen, the first in context offering a whimsy not unrelated to Kurtág’s. This was unmistakeably a fairy tale opening, the page turned: ‘once upon a time…’, the story told with palpable delight from all concerned, and in as ultimately harmonious a world we can imagine this side of Mozart. Its successor proved similarly touching: this may not be music ‘for children’, but there seemed little doubt they would like and ‘get’ it. The rapt euphony of the third piece was also touching in its simplicity. (Again, few composers after Mozart have had that gift, although Kurtág does.) It brought tears to my eyes. Similarly good-humoured, the fourth and final tale was more overtly fantastical, even Hoffmannesque—which returned us to Kurtág and his homage.

For the Ligeti Trio, the players seemed more immediately at ease than in the Brahms, their instruments ‘speaking’ and indeed singing eloquently from the off. If any other composer occasionally came to mind, it was first Berg (especially on violin), later Bartók (especially on piano); but in reality it could have been none other than Ligeti—and ‘late’ Ligeti at that. Every note and every relationship between them enchanted as strongly as Schumann’s or Kurtág’s. Such Mozartian ease with such unusual forces announced in the first movement continued throughout all four, the second offering a riveting walk on the post-Bartókian wildside. Bendix-Balgley’s harmonics, Dohr’s contrapuntal lines, Gerstein’s well, everything combined to mesmerise. Talk about having rhythm, Ligeti included—and harmonic rhythm just as much. The third movement sounded at first as if a response to an imagined Schumann march, before pursuing other, very different, though not less fantastical paths in a directness that again suggested the smiling ghost of Bartók. And if hearing this work in the same concert as Brahms’s Trio for the same forces rightly brought difference rather than kinship more strongly to the fore, there was an undeniable Brahms-like satisfaction in what we heard here, ever more so in the final movement: simply itself and unanswerable. Bells tolled for someone or something: maybe for us. If so, the composer of Le Grand Macabre might have reminded us that it would not have been the first time we had failed to notice.

Salzburg Festival (2) - Hadelich/VPO/Thielemann: Brahms, 22 August 2026

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 14:00:02 +0000

Grosses Festspielhaus

Violin Concerto in D major, op.77
Symphony no.1 in C minor, op.68

Augustin Hadelich (violin)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Images:© SF/Marco Borrelli

A frustrating concert, this: on account of neither Augustin Hadelich nor the Vienna Philharmonic, but rather of Christian Thielemann’s conducting, which certainly had its moments, its passages even, yet could readily have offered much more. Consistency can over over- and underrated: no one wants consistent mediocrity and the twin curiosity and courage not to rest on laurels and thus to try something different are often to be lauded. Proof of the pudding lies in the eating, though, and difference for its own sake will rarely be a good thing. Here, above all in the First Symphony, a strange eschewal of harmonic rhythm, tracing Brahms – of all composers – at worst as if this music were merely a succession of melodies and at best in a fashion born more of operatic than symphonic drama, culminating in a strange two-movement dash to the finish, as if Thielemann had simply had enough, fell some way short of the deep, intense satisfaction that is this composer’s wont. If it would be unjust to speculate that his mind might have been in Bayreuth, it was difficult to escape the conclusion that his heart was.

I shall return to the Symphony. The Violin Concerto offered better news, although that was mostly Hadelich and the orchestra’s doing, Thielemann showing himself an able, sensitive accompanist rather than equal partner. How much can one tell from an opening phrase and, more broadly, an opening tutti? Here, quite a bit: it was rhetorical, theatrical even, something of a curtain-raiser, without really leading to what the curtain might reveal on Hadelich’s entry. Throughout, all in Hadelich’s interpretation felt born in the notes, in their connection, and what that created, constituting the work’s form as both structure and emotional fabric. Hadelich’s golden tone, variegated yet centred, harked back to a mythical yet enduring idea of a Golden Age of violin playing, intriguingly set against a somewhat darker toned VPO (not something one especially associates with that orchestra). Thielemann proved ever attentive, visibly and audibly listening and responding, yet rarely assertive, as will often, ideally, be called for; and when it was, skirting slight mannerism. It was telling, no doubt, that the truest instrumental drama came in the cadenza: not one I recognised—I wonder whether it was Hadelich’s own. At any rate, it learned lessons from celebrated predecessors, whilst treading its own path with confidence and genuine rejuvenation. The way Hadelich built tension through counterpoint that became harmony, extending Brahms both as himself and as a true disciple of Bach, was invigorating, yet pointed to an apparent lack of harmonic interest on Thielemann’s part. It was not grievous; one hears far, far worse, especially from the ‘authentic’ brigade, but something was missing, if here more by way of contrast. It was Hadelich, doubtless rightly, but perhaps to an undue extent, who gave the impression of inviting the orchestra back in.

Wind playing – not only the oboist’s, though certainly his – of the highest distinction marked the second movement. There was a definite lateness without mawkishness to this ‘Adagio’: a heartfelt tribute and even a farewell to a Classicism that underlay all and yet was no longer quite within reach. That beautiful yet melancholy thought elicited string (solo and section) consolation before darkness emerged beneath the surface. This, then, was truly a movement of Romantic anguish, born from within rather than applied to it. Hadelich’s song – and how his violin sang – was an achievement rather than a given, however little it lay in doubt. Thielemann imparted a strong sense of what might have been—in more than one sense. A strong turnout from the Phlegm Liberation Front notwithstanding, Brahms ultimately won out in a finale launched with little rather than no break. It may have been a matter of where I was seated, but early on the VPO’s tone sounded oddly harsh here. Transitions and other shifts were generally well handled, but ultimately this was a movement (for me) more observed than shared—again, largely on Thielemann’s account. For an encore, Hadelich gave what I believe to be his own arrangement of Schumann’s ‘Träumerei’: unfussy, resourceful, and closing on magical harmonics.

Thielemann initially seemed more obviously at home in the Symphony, conducting from memory and shaping the opening of the first movement into a compelling, if not truly harmonically founded, drama. (The greatest Brahms conductors from Furtwängler and Klemperer to Barenboim would immediately show what was missing.) A palpable sense of tragic narrative was present, though, whatever slight reservations one might have felt. A strange noise from within the audience – electronic interference? – disrupted a little, but orchestra, composer, and, here at least, conductor emerged victorious from that tussle. Had the performance continued in similar terms, one might well have located it broadly as lying within the tradition of Karajan—and there are far worse things than that. Hints of motivic Beethoven towards the close already suggested, though, a little of what else might have been underplayed earlier. There was, though, undeniable eloquence to the second movement, not least through the way the orchestra ‘spoke’—again, perhaps a little operatic, but there is more than enough room for different approaches here. The emotional ambivalence of its opening well established the contest to come, even if overall tone was a little on the bright side for Brahms (at least to my taste).

Following a further barrage of coughing, the third movement began at a tempo that felt faster than any I could recall. If it was difficult objectively to square with ‘Un poco Allegretto e grazioso’, it had its own logic in lifting of mood and proved surprisingly convincing—until textures became more congested than flowing. Its later course, though, was straightforwardly odd: slowing massively and ending in perplexing disappointment. The finale likewise began well enough, laying out its material clearly and bringing an undeniable sense of suspense. That horn call was all one could wish for, and the principal theme sounded beautifully, if in oddly soft focus. ‘Più Allegro’, though? It was certainly più, but to my ears considerably troppo. What ensued was driven in a way one might have thought – hoped – had gone out of fashion with Toscanini, albeit without his preparation and aesthetic. Harmonic understanding and communication seemed to have gone out of the window in order to catch the next train home.

Salzburg Festival (1) - Der Prinz von Homburg, 20 August 2026

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 15:45:16 +0000

Felsenreitschule

(concert performance)

Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg - Maximilian Schmitt
The Electress – Tanja Ariane Baumgartner
Princess Natalie of Orange – Kathrin Zukowski
Field Marshal Dörfling – Lauri Vasar
Frederick Arthur, Prince of Homburg – Georg Nigl
Colonel Kottwitz – Anthony Robin Schneider
Count Hohenzollern – Magnus Dietrich
First Officer – Konstantin Igl
Second Officer – Gabriel Rollinson
Third Officer – Philipp Schöllhorn
First Lady of the Court – Hanna Park
Second Lady of the Court – Freya Apffelstaedt
Third Lady of the Court – Brigitta Listra
Sergeant, Second Orderly – Marcel Durka
First Orderly – Johannes Bamberger

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

Mention, let alone celebration, of Hans Werner Henze’s centenary has proved surprisingly muted, if not entirely unmarked—at least in continental Europe. Simon Rattle, a longstanding advocate, has given performances of Henze’s oratorio The Raft of the Medusa with his new orchestra in Munich, following on from an outstanding performance here in Salzburg last summer. Munich, long an important centre for Henze performance, saw a new staging of The English Cat by the Bavarian State Opera over the winter of 2025-6, so strictly not a new production this year, although close to being so. El Cimarrón, a scenic music theatre piece rather than an opera, has been given in Rome, Aix-en-Provence, and the composer’s birthplace, the small Westphalian city of Gütersloh. By and large, though, opera and symphonic performances have proved little less frequent than usual over the past decade, which is to say strikingly less frequent than during his lifetime.

Whilst it was difficult not to feel a certain disappointment at the Salzburg Festival’s decision to give Der Prinz von Homburg in a single concert performance – sold out, be it noted – rather than a full staging, we should still be grateful for this celebration of the twin centenaries of Hans Werner Henze and Ingeborg Bachmann, born but six days apart in 1926. Theirs was a fruitful partnership extending over roughly a decade, beginning in 1955 with the composer’s provision of incidental music for Bachmann’s radio play Die Zikaden, its German narrator having fled to an Italian island. (Both Henze and Bachmann had taken that road south too.) A crucial context for this opera, the first of two, was the 1957 song-cycle Nachtstücke und Arien, with which Henze, with typical theatricality, staged his separation from an avant-garde of which he had never really been part in the first place. (One should be wary of his accounts of what happened, but that in part makes them all the more valuable aesthetically. Yet, as so often with Henze, the more he voiced his dissociation from German art, the more he also found himself drawn to it. Kleist’s play Prinz Friedrich von Homburg had achieved and, in a sense, suffered great popularity during both the Second Reich and the Third, and thus stood potentially as tainted for Henze and Bachmann as German Romantic music, especially when dealing with a German stage and audience. That held, almost irrespective of the aesthetic admiration its recreators both felt. The effort, then, in this opera not to be German is palpable, doomed, and fascinating—which is not to say that it is only German. (What is, or would wish to be? Pfitzner, perhaps, and probably not.)

The conflicts at work in the score, not only mirroring but extending and intensifying those in the libretto came through strongly in this account from the ORF Symphony Orchestra, Ingo Metzmacher, and a distinguished cast. If I felt occasional passages of softer focus earlier on, I think that was in part a matter of listening my way in and also in part also a reflection of Henze’s writing. After all, in In his own words, ‘Der Prinz von Homburg … sets itself against the blind unimaginative application of laws, in favour of an exaltation of human kindness, an understanding of which reaches into deeper and more complex realms than would be “normal” and which seeks to find a place for a man in this world even though he is a Schwärmer and a dreamer, or perhaps because of that.’ There is a distinctive basic sound-world to the opera, blueish in hue, which takes on and sublimates, even to an extent pacifies the militarism one might expect. There is also certainly a strange dream-world that extends from that, heading the cantata Being Beauteous of a few years later, yet nonetheless shaped in trauma by what has gone before: politically, aesthetically, and perhaps ethically too.

To present march rhythms on the harp, for instance, rather than trumpets and drums, seemed a statement, an act of hostility towards authorities that had brought the world to war in drama as on earth, and might do so again—heightened by the sense of aesthetic persecution the composer himself undoubtedly, if exaggeratedly, felt for himself: cursed, as it were, to be a German composer, however much he may have wished it otherwise. If the orchestra often seemed driven, perhaps by Metzmacher, to tilt the scales, as did Henze and Bachmann, away from unwanted inheritance, in this case towards Stravinsky, victory ebbed away as soon as it was achieved—just as on the battlefield. If the strangely muted world of interiority took longer to become dramatically compelling, there is arguably point to that, both in work and in performance, Whether there is stylistic resolution or even quite coherence becomes a more pressing issue without staging; eclecticism can be too readily condemned, but also too readily celebrated. When, at its best, stylistic conflict is put to dramatic use, one heard it all the more readily. Registering with ever greater immediacy was Henze’s inner conflict between Schoenberg and Stravinsky – the Symphony in Three Movements and ‘whiter’ ballets sometimes too close for comfort – alleged determinism and freedom, calculation and dreams, depth and beauty, and so on registered with increasing power.

So too did, if less in the guise of a mediating power then humanistic intervention, understanding of the Prince of Homburg as a strange, postwar (even in war) Wozzeck-, even Christ-figure in a heterodox passion of sorts. If a concert performance could less readily convey than full staging quite who the characters on stage all were, more musical patterns could suggest something of that narrative—arguably more strongly than the work itself warrants, mind and ear compensating in unusual ways. Georg Nigl’s Prince took on the contradictions and struggles – the Prince’s and Henze’s – as his own in a performance of dramatic commitment that outweighed ‘mere’ aesthetic considerations. If occasionally he sounded a little stretched, more often Nigel emerged invigorated by the challenge. Magnus Dietrich’s honeyed Hohenzollern and Anthony Robin Schneider’s dark-chocolate Kollwitz particularly caught my ear on the male side, as on the other side of the gender divide did Kathrin Zukowski’s imploring, inwardly strong Princess Natalie and Tanja Ariane Baumgartner’s rich-toned, quasi-contralto Electress. Maximilian Schmitt ensure that, whilst the Elector’s justice might be cold, it had its own tonal allure. If Henze sometimes tilts the scales a little too obviously – Bachmann less so, I think – the cast did much, even in concert, to present a conflict worth agonising over. If the Prince’s celebrated battle-cry, ‘In Staub mit allen Feinden Brandenburgs,’ bidding Brandenburg’s foes return to dust, can no longer offer Kleist’s jubilation, it was all the more notable that ambivalence that also undercut mere tragic inversion emerged at the close.

Whether so understandably anti-militaristic, anti-Prussian a recreation ultimately quite adds up, given inevitable, nagging comparison with Kleist, remains an open question. A few years later than the opera, Pierre Boulez spoke scathingly of Henze as a ‘lacquered hairdresser, who pays homage to an utterly superficial modernism’, here specifically in ‘an unfortunate rehashing of Verdi’s Don Carlos’. (Henze, it is only fair to add, had made for his part considerably more outrageous claims against Boulez, Stockhausen, and others.) If imaginative staging might have been able to do more to address such claims head on, this concert performance pointed further to the need to find out for ourselves. It also connected us with another centenary, falling as it did 100 years to the day after the Felsenreitschule’s first use as a performance venue by the Festival: for Max Reinhardt’s staging of Goldoni’s Il servitore di due padroni. The riding school has of course been used since for a host of memorable stage and concert performances, most renowned of all a filmed Don Giovanni conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. Should the current encounter point the way to a staging somewhere soon for Der Prinz von Homburg, it will prove still more welcome, but this will remain an important evening in its own right.

Operatraveller’s Hot Operatic Tips for 2026 – 27

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Once again, we find ourselves at the dawn of a new operatic season – at least for those theatres that organize their seasons from September to August. As is customary by now, I’ve taken a look at the operatic offerings available and pulled out some shows that look potentially interesting. Over the most recent seasons, I have tended to organize my operagoing around places that I’d like to spend time in, as much as the repertoire and casting – although the latter of course has a significant influence. With that in mind, I’ve pulled together some productions that look potentially very interesting. And so here are some very personal Hot Operatic Tips for the year ahead.

Der Rosenkavalier, Oper Köln, September – December 2026.

For a long time, it felt that this day would never come. After being exiled to the other side of the Rhine for a over a decade, the Oper Köln is finally returning to Offenbachplatz and opening with this new production of Der Rosenkavalier, by Marie-Ève Signeyrole. The run has been double cast with the opening night cast featuring Magdalena Hinterdobleras the Marschallin, Bianca Andrew as Octavian and Giulia Montanari as Sophie. The terrific young bass, Patrick Zielke, sings Ochs, while the musical direction is in the hands of music director, Andrés Orozco-Estrada.

Peter Grimes, Finnish National Opera, November 2026.

Over the past few years, since attending their Ring cycle, I have had the pleasure of hearing the house chorus in Helsinki. This is an exceptional chorus, one that is surely the one of the finest in the world, and what better opportunity to hear them than in this most choral of operas, Peter Grimes. With Daniel Brenna in the title role and the experienced interpreter of Ellen Orford, Maria Bengtsson, alongside him, this offers a genuine showcase for all that the house has to offer. The recently-appointed house music director Dima Slobodeniouk conducts David Radok’s staging.

Elektra, Opernhaus Zürich, November – December 2026.

It was in Zurich that I saw the great Evelyn Herlitzius sing her final Elektra in July 2019. Time doesn’t stand still and this fall, the house will premiere its new production of Strauss’ opera in a staging by Lydia Steier, a director who always brings ideas to a work. In the title role is Miina-Liisa Värelä an experienced interpreter of the German repertoire, whose recent Walküre Brünnhilde in Munich showed just how much she has grown as an artist. Joined by Tanja Ariane Baumgartner and Sara Jakubiak as mother and sister, with the experienced John Daszak and Gábor Bretz rounding out the lineup of principals, the performance will be conducted by Lorenzo Viotti.

Otello, Teatro alla Scala, December 2026.

The Teatro alla Scala is opening its 2026 – 7 season, the first under the music directorship of Chung Myungwhun, with this new production of Otello. Damiano Michieletto is one of the most thoughtful and emotionally engaging stage directors active today and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what he does with Verdi’s masterpiece. In the first cast, Brian Jagde returns to the title role after his notable debut in Madrid last year, while Luca Salsi sings Jago. As Desdemona, the Scala has engaged Eleonora Buratto, the finest Italian soprano before the public today. The alternative cast features Arsen Soghomonyan, Roberto Frontali, and Roberta Mantegna. I must admit it has always been a dream of mine to attend the prima at the Scala, although realistically I’m more likely to attend a later performance in the run. Still, this will be one of the most anticipated events of the season.

Kát’a Kabanová, Teatr Wielki – Opera Narodowa, January 2027.

The Warsaw Teatr Wielki – Opera Narodowa has planned a very interesting 2026 – 27 season and this new production of Kát’a Kabanová promises to be one of the highlights. It has been very excitingly cast with two of the greatest singing actors of our time in the leading roles, Aušrinė Stundytė as Kát’a and Evelyn Herlitzius as the Kabanicha. They are joined by Jamez McCorkle as Boris and Brindley Sherratt as Dikoj. Kornél Mundruczó is, by now, an experienced director of Janáček’s operas and the performance will be conducted by the new house music director, Yoel Gamzou.

The Oper Köln. Photo: © Raimond Spekking

Theodora, Grand Théâtre de Genève, January – February 2027.

While its historic home is being renovated, the Grand Théâtre de Genève will perform its new production of Händel’s oratorio in the Bâtiment des Forces Motrices. With a staging by the always insightful Krzysztof Warlikowski and led by supreme baroque stylist, Raphaël Pichon, conducting his Pygmalion chorus and orchestra, along with the resident house chorus, this promises to be an evening of vision and contemplation. The cast looks interesting, with Fang Ying in the title role, joined by Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian as Didymus, Laurence Kilsby and Niamh O’Sullivan as Septimius and Irene, and John Brancy as Valens.

Salome, Opéra de Lyon, March – April 2027.

I’m always somewhat reticent to plan to see things at theatres in the French Republic given the potential for labour disputes and cancellations, but Lyon is one of the last few significant European theatres I have had the pleasure of visiting and this new production of Salome certainly gives a reason. With stage direction by the great Calixto Bieito, and Constantin Trinks conducting, it will be fascinating to see what Bieito does with this most gruesome of operas. The cast is interesting, with British Columbian soprano Ambur Braid in the title role and Josef Wagner as Jochanaan.

Maria Stuarda, Opéra de Marseille, March 2027.

This pair of concert performances of this chapter of Donizetti’s Tudor trilogy has been very interestingly cast. With consummate bel canto stylist Jessica Pratt in the title role lining up against Teresa Iervolino as Elisabetta, we are promised an evening of authentic stylishness. In the male roles we also have the superb John Osborn as Roberto, while the highly talented, young Valencian bass Manuel Fuentes takes on Talbot. The musical direction is in the hands of house chief, Michele Spotti. In this most Italian of French cities, this is certainly one to watch.

Mazeppa, Bayerische Staatsoper, March 2027.

Dmitri Tcherniakov is one of those directors who always brings a personal stamp to the works he interprets. While some of his readings can be wayward, they’re always insightful and make the viewer feel, which is precisely what one looks for in an opera production. This new Mazeppa has been cast from strength, with Vladislav Sulimsky, Alexander Tsymbalyuk, Ekaterina Gubanova, and Olga Kulchynska among the principals. Daniele Rustioni conducts. This is not likely to be a conventional Mazeppa, but it will undoubtedly be a stimulating one.

La clemenza di Tito, Teatro Municipale di Piacenza, March 2027.

The Teatro Municipale di Piacenza is one of those theatres that every opera traveller should know. Located within easy travelling distance of Milan, the house presents an interesting program with some really judicious casting. This Clemenza looks particularly interesting with Ilker Arcayürek in the title role, Mariangela Sicilia as Vitellia, and Arianna Vendittelli as Sesto. The music director of the Accademia Bizantina, Ottavio Dantone, conducts Chiara Muti’s staging. This fall, they’re also presenting a Bohème led by consummate Puccini stylist, Vincenzo Milletarì, and a Fliegende Holländer led by the energizing young conductor, Martijn Dendievel.

Finnish National Opera. Photo: © Operatraveller.com

Lucia di Lammermoor, Teatro Massimo Palermo, March 2027.

This Lucia at the Teatro Massimo is one of those shows that has been double-cast, yet both casts look equally exciting. In the title role, we have Nina Minasyan and Ruth Iniesta, while Lawrence Brownlee and Iván Ayón Rivas sing Edgardo. Enrico is shared by Artur Ruciński and Markus Werba. With the magnificent acoustic of the house, and its experienced orchestra and chorus, both casts should provide evenings of bel canto thrills. Stefano Ranzani conducts Lorenzo Mariani’s staging, imported from Genova.

Salome, Teatro Regio Torino, April 2027.

April appears to be the month for Salome and this new production at the Teatro Regio Torino is offering a luxury cast. Italian orchestras excel in German opera, and the Turin orchestra is a particularly fine one, here under the direction of Axel Kober. Johanni Van Oostrum takes on the demanding title role, alongside Gábor Bretz as Jochanaan. Jennifer Larmore and John Daszak incarnate the Herods. The stage direction is confided to Kornél Mundruczó whose vision of the work, imported from Geneva, certainly promises to be intriguing.

Tristan und Isolde, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, May 2027.

The Maggio orchestra is one of the finest in the Italian Republic and this opportunity to hear them in Wagner’s intoxicating score is an unmissable one. The house has cast the run with experienced Wagnerians, led by Simon O’Neill and Anja Kampe in the title roles. They will be joined by Okka von der Damerau, Iain Paterson and Brindley Sherratt. Similarly, with the musical direction confided to Alexander Soddy, the evening will certainly be in safe and experienced hands. The staging is by Keith Warner, one of those names one often sees, although I find it hard to recall what I might have seen by him.

Tannhäuser, Teatro Real, May 2027.

This new production of Tannhäuser at the Teatro Real promises to be set in a science-fiction, post-apocalyptic universe, which is certainly an absorbing prospect. This is a common theme in David Hermann’s work, and I’m keen to see how he makes it work with an opera that focuses on religious piety and sexual liberation. As always, the casting at the Teatro Real is extremely luxurious. We have Andreas Schager and Clay Hilley in the title role, Ludovic Tézier and Andrè Schuen as Wolfram, Malin Byström and Elisabeth Teige as Elisabeth, and Aušrinė Stundytė and Irene Roberts as Venus. Gustavo Gimeno conducts.

Götterdämmerung, Bayerische Staatsoper, June – July 2027.

Tobias Kratzer’s Ring cycle in Munich has so far been one of the most compelling cycles of the past few decades. He’s imagined the work as a

Side-by-Side by Confluence

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 14:00:13 +0000

Every year around this time Confluence Concerts work with a group of young artists to curate and present a concert at Heliconian Hall. This year’s took place on Thursday evening. There were twenty two pieces of music on the programme; some written or arranged by members of the group with composers ranging from Henry Purcell and Barbara Strozzi to Libby Larsen and Sting. There was classical vocal and instrumental from the baroque to yesterday, jazz, fado and genre defying pieces. I’m just going to single out a few (to me at least) highlights.

Sarah Storms’ (soprano) Sewing Seeds, Tapestries and Persistence set her own poetry sung, spoken and whispered by herself and a chorus surrounding the audience. It’s an intriguing text and the surround sound was effective. More conventional was a really well executed performance of Barber’s “Sure on this shining night” sung with considerable art by the multi-talented Vivien Illion ((here wearing her soprano hat) accompanied by pianist Michael Spiroff.

When you have three violins and a viola you have to find something for them to play. This time it was a movement from Jacob Dont’s Gradus ad Parnassum played by Larry Beckwith, Clara Moniz and Audrey Sung on violins and Sofia Moniz on viola. It was kind of simple but pleasant. Tracy Wong’s “Jam” and a Clara Moniz arrangement of Joni Mitchell’s “Morning Morgantown involved most of the gang as a chorus stomping and finger-clicking with piano and strummed violin plus Aaron Blewitt on percussion.

After the interval an some Telemann we got one of the more ambitious pieces on the programme Audrey Sung’s Quicksand. Dark, intense, somewhat atonal with some chaotic chattering it explores the idea of how hard it is to “succeed” in one’s own mind! Scored for chorus, violin, piano and really interesting percussion, this one really resonated with me.

Errol Garner’s “Misty” allowed Clara Moniz to show she is at home with cool jazz as well as classical vocals but where she really shone was in her own arrangement of Anibal Nazaré and Fernando de Carvalho’s “Tudo isto e fado” where she sang most idiomatically. There was some excellent art song from female composers to with Sarah Storms singing a dramatic version of Libby Larsen’s “Pregnant with piano while Anna O’Drowsky gave us Rebecca Clarke’s “Lullaby” accompanied by viola and piano.

I think I’ve managed to check almost everyone who performed but there were a trio of Confluence regulars I haven’t mentioned involved as well; Suba Sankara, Patricia O’Callaghan, Máiri Demings and Anika Venkatash. So many of the numbers involved a large chorus that a lot of people doubled up as choristers! It’s really pretty amazing that such a varied and complex programme was put together and rehearsed in just ten days.

Photo credit: Máiri Demings

Date of Performance

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 10:56:04 +0000

My last show of this year’s SummerWorks was perhaps the most unusual. Date of Performance; written and directed by Maryam Khalili and presented in The Theatre Centre’s Franco Boni Theatre. It’s a lecture-performance documenting theatre and performance practices created inside Iranian prisons from 1954 to 2024. There is no-one on-stage; just recordings of telephone conversations and some voice overs; all in Farsi with English subtitles.

Photo by Maryam Khalili – the number had increased to 1117 by Sunday

The time period is interesting because it really covers two eras; the reign of the Shah when the prisoners were mostly members of leftist political parties followed by intensifying repression of a broader spectrum of opinion after the establishment of the Islamic Republic. It’s interesting how things change and how they don’t. The interviews with contemporary artists, prison letters, archival materials, and post-release writings all explore how imprisoned artists conceived, rehearsed, and staged performances under conditions of isolation, repression and deep uncertainty. Some of this was very creative including the use of volleyball games as rehearsal opportunities. Most of this work was undertaken in secrecy but, perhaps surprisingly, some was facilitated and encouraged by the state; provided it conformed to the prevailing ideology.

We are used to theatre where we see as well as hear the participants but in Date of Performance the actors are absent; paralleling their absence from Iranian stages. How do we react to that? Is it in fact real theatre? I have to say that for me it worked as theatre. I found it compelling and very moving. This show was seen in Tehran and Berlin before coming to Toronto so t may pop up again. I’d definitely recommend it.

Photo of Maryam Khalili by Nazanin Khalili

COC Summer Intensive Showcase

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:40:20 +0000

For the last five years the COC has eld a week long intensive workshop/coaching session for a select group of early career singers and collaborative pianists. The week concludes with a “Showcase” concert in the Jackman Studio which happened this year early on Saturday evening. There were ten singers and two pianists with each singer giving us one aria.

First up was mezzo Daria Kharchenko (pictured) with “Ich lade gern mir Gäste ein” from Die Fledermaus. She made a very appealing Orlovsky. Vocally, she played around just enough while keeping things musical and not too OTT. Her physical acting was in the same mould. She was genuinely funny and I could definitely see her in this role on stage.

Baritone Braylon Belanger sang a very stylish “Vision fugitive” from Massenet’s Hérodiade though it could have used a bit more physical and/or vocal expressiveness. It was rather the opposite with soprano Sloan Smith and “Take me back” from Rorem’s “Our Town”. It was powerfully sung and it is, to be fair, a very emotional aria but I think in a small space like the Jackman Studio a more restrained approach might have worked better. Tenor Kiho Sohn gave us a pretty standard version of “Il mio tesoro intanto”.

Next up was my favourite opera Massenet’s Werther (just kidding). No complaints though about mezzo Stella-Rose Martin’s accurate, powerful and nicely characterised account of “Va! laisse couler mes larmes”. The same could be said for soprano Sherrie Spelchuk’s “Un bel di vedremo”. This was notable for drama, very clean top notes and great control. Good stuff!

Tenor Nicholas Kluftinger gave us Fenton’s aria “Dal labbro il canto estasiato vola” from Verdi’s Falstaff. This was properly Italianate tenoring infused with a real sense that we were listening to a young man in love. Sometimes you don’t need to raise the roof! Next up was another young man’s aria; Smeaton’s “Ah! parea che per l’incanto” from Donizetti’s Anna Bolena. This one is for mezzo or contralto of course and it really suited Briana Sutherland’s rather dark voice. She also had plenty of power and proper bel canto style.

Wagner’s “O du, mein holder Abendstern” is something of a baritone showpiece. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard it in competitions! Neil Hong (pictured) sang with passion and considerable beauty of tone. He has quite a rich voice which suited this music well. Finally, soprano Alina Tigelman with more Massenet. This time it was “Je marche sur tous les chemins” from Manon. This was powerfully and very stylishly sung. She has all the notes and a very clean upper register. A nice way to finish!

Accompaniment throughout was provided by the highly competent pair of Cecilia Nguyen Tran and Natalia Sawyer. There aren’t too many song recitals in Toronto in August and so this is one to watch out for.

Photo credit: Karen E. Reeves

GPO Box No.211

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 14:06:34 +0000

GPO Box No.211; written and directed by Carmen Lee (also responsible for lighting) and performed by Chun Shing Au (also responsible for the model/mask/paper design), is a theatre/dance piece inspired by an exchange of letters with the creators’ friend Siu Ming (a pseudonym), who was incarcerated as a political prisoner for three years following the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. It’s presented by Theatre du Poulet at A Space Gallery as part of SummerWorks.

The set up is basically a blank white space with the tech desk at one end with a table on which sit components that will later be assembled into a model. At the other end is a large roll of white paper. The floor is covered with crumpled up bits of paper. The audience finds standing or sitting space as best they can around the perimeter. It begins with the performer handing each audience member first one crumpled letter, and then another. These are letters to Siu Ming which talk about running and seeing the moon and the inconveniences of being in prison including bizarre limits on the size of packets of M&Ms.

Chun Shing Au assem,bles the model which, I’m guessing, is the prison. He then sweeps up the crumpled paper and unrolls an enormous sheet of white paper which refuses to lie flat. He wrestles with it, he disappears under it. He wraps himself in it and dons the prison model as a mask/headpiece. It has lights inside. Eventually the model finds itself at the opposite end of the space while the performer runs on the crumpled paper gathering it under his feet and then there’s a very cute surprise at the end. All this takes about an hour.

So I could see the references back to the letters. There was running and a sense of moonlight, or its absence, and there was a prison. There were also M&Ms but you will have to go to find out how they were worked in. It feels well thought through and quite polished; it’s been seen in multiple European venues. And, as a writer, I can empathise with someone struggling with a blank sheet of paper! It is though very abstract and probably more for experimental theatre nerds than the general public.

We were warned beforehand that there were issues with the sound and lighting so there may be dimensions to the show that I didn’t experience. There are further performances today (Saturday) and Sunday.

Photo credit: Thomas Lenden

Tchaikovsky: Child of Glass, Not Entirely Serious, 13 August 2026

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:22:28 +0000

Opera Holland Park

Tama Matheson (director, actor)
Jayson Gillham (music director, piano)
Stephen Wicks (assistant director, choreography)
Suzy Kohane, Oliver Holland (actors)
Téo Debreuil (ballet soloist)

On the hottest day of the year, Opera Holland Park turned from its own season to the period in which it generously permits use of its theatre to other, smaller companies and events. The first, following on from last year’s Beethoven: I Shall Hear You in Heaven, was Not Entirely Serious’s Tchaikovsky: Child of Glass. Reuniting co-producers Tama Matheson and Jayson Gillham and actors Suzy Kohane and Oliver Holland, Matheson and Gillham tripling and doubling as writer/director and pianist/music director respectively, the new play welcomed Royal Ballet soloist Téo Dubreuil to the team, with impressive, often moving results.

Tchaikovsky’s life presents, of course, a very different story from Beethoven’s, but both, like many others, have clear narrative arcs, the latter with undeniable tragic elements, the former an undeniable tragedy. (I found this writing another composer biography, that of Schoenberg: how well a life structures its works, at least in certain cases.) Here the emphasis naturally lies on the composer’s homosexuality and broader queerness, Tchaikovsky initially appearing onstage in a dress, only to lose and never regain it. There are other stories to tell, no doubt, but in a general ‘bio-play’, it would be perverse to ignore this as guiding principle. Russian culture ministers, should they still exist, may beg to differ. Across today’s world, an increasingly ominous space for LGBTQ+ people, and not least in a United Kingdom in which Rowling & Co. seem to call most of the legal shots, we hardly need reminding of how fragile acceptance can be, of how distant liberation remains.

Matheson brings to onstage portrayal of the composer the same energy and commitment shown not only in his writing but also his general animating presence. Put simply, this would not be happening without him—though it is no one-man show. In narration and dialogue, there is a readiness to recapture, even in necessary translation, the different style and voice of Tchaikovsky’s age. A good deal of basic – and sometimes less basic – biographical information is conveyed: perhaps some time a little too much, although the balance is difficult to strike. The outlines, however, as well as telling detail are very much present, as indeed they are in the contributions of his fellow actors, called upon to summon up a chorus of portrayals (literally in the ‘court of honour’ some have claimed drove Tchaikovsky to his death). I mean no disrespect to writer or actors, though, when I say that it is elements of music and dance that linger longer and hit deeper. Such, after all is their nature—arguably in general, but certainly in the life in question, its agonies as clearly as any sublimated into art. Gillham’s pianism, crystalline, scintillating, seductive and more, guides us through a distinguished tasting-menu of Tchaikovsky and others (Rachmaninov, Mozart, Bizet, Wagner, Saint-Saëns), original piano music (solo or concerto) and arrangements delivered with equal ease and magic. The ‘Bacchanale’ from Samson et Dalila puts in an apt, orientalist appearance for a scene in Paris, in which the composer succumbs once again to the sins and liberation of metropolitan flesh. Here, Debreuil’s personification of Tchaikovsky’s urges, his dreams, and ultimately, even in death, his hopes truly commands the stage. His is a part lying somewhat in the line of Tadzio (Britten’s more than Visconti’s—or Mann’s): more knowing, perhaps, yet also crucially beyond good and evil.

James Harley’s Wild Fruits

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:50:01 +0000

James Harley’s Wild Fruits was inspired by two texts; Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard and Wild Fruits by Henry David Thoreau. The five movements all involve combining extracts from the texts read by Jim Bartruff, Theresa Carson and Anne-Marie Donovan with sounds recorded in nature and, in some cases, worked over in the studio. It was originally conceived as an eight channel surround sound experience but the commercial release has been remixed for stereo and Dolby ATMOS. Obviously some of the spatialization is lost and I’d be curious to hear the ATMOS mix. As it is I’m going to write about the 48kHz/24bit stereo version which I listened to on headphones because I find that’s closer to the immersive experience than speakers.

Each movement has quite a different feel. The “Prologue” uses animal and bird noises and something akin to white noise behind the texts to create a fairly generic nature sense. “Like a Ragged Flock, Like Pulverized Jade” uses lots of watery sounds. The third movement “Chestnuts” is a bit weird. Thoreau was clearly obsessed with the things and there’s a lot of text about the state of chestnuts at every season; these are read over sounds of rustling leaves and broken twigs and what sounds like something banging on a tin can. Possibly a squirrel whose nuts Thoreau has just appropriated?

“Winter” has heavy rain and wind noises and lots of double tracking for the spoken texts. “Epilogue” focuses on the passage of the seasons and the need to live in each; for example “in August live on berries”. There are insect and bird sounds and the patter of rain on a tin roof. plus something that sounds like grunting. Altogether the piece lasts about 63 minutes and it’s quite engrossing. There’s a distinct mood and sound world for each movement (and how I would have liked to experience a different spatialization for each). And, even in stereo, it’s really quite immersive.

It’s a digital only release and besides the hi-res mix and ATMOS there’s a CD quality version and MP3.

Catalogue information: Centrediscs CMCCD34726

Our Other Organ

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:51:31 +0000

Our Other Ogan is a one man show (almost) written and performed by Boaz Barkan. It was originally designed specifically for the old anatomy theatre at the medical school in Copenhagen. For the performance at SummerWorks we have to imagine the black box of the Incubator as an amphitheatre with busts of Galen and Hippocrates looking down at the anatomist and his subject.

Barkan is there to introduce us to a new organ; the one where our racism resides. To this end, on the table he has the very tall and very scantily clad Dane, Joel Degerfeldt. Barkan intertwines his demonstration of the form and function of the other organ with the story of his Jewish family over the generations from Tsarist Russia through the Holocaust to present day Israel showing how the tentacles of the other organ absorb anti-Semitism and ultimately regurgitate it as the lack of empathy that makes contemporary genocide and ethnic cleansing possible.

He does this with a very light touch and the most surprising thing about the show is how funny it is. There are many laugh out loud moments which seem to sit quite comfortably with some very uncomfortable ideas. Nobody actually gets dissected of course but there is a lot of fake blood as the implications of all we have heard become more apparent. It’s a riveting 55 minutes and I highly recommend it.

Our Other Organ is presented by NoLands in the BMO Incubator at The Theatre Centre as part of SummerWorks. It runs until August 13th.

Photo credit: Jacob Tekiela

NYO/Adès - Liszt, Adès, and Berlioz, 8 August 2026

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 11:13:12 +0000

Royal Albert Hall

Liszt: Mephisto Waltz no.1, S.110/2
Adès: Dante: Part 2, ‘Purgatorio’
Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique, op.14

National Youth Orchestra

Thomas Adès (conductor)

Images: BBC / Chris Christodoulou

To hear the National Youth Orchestra is always a treat. The enthusiasm of young musicians, not a cynical bone in their bodies, can hardly be gainsaid; but enthusiasm will only get one so far. These musicians have technical and musical capabilities beyond their years; many will have professional careers ahead of them. Just look at the NYO’s alumni. They will have many more rehearsals than a professional orchestra could every hope for. (Eat your heart out, Celibidache!) There is also the sheer joy of hearing an orchestra of this size too, again unaffordable on the professional scene for almost anything but Gurrelieder—and often not even then. Berlioz knew a true orchestral pianissimo required a far greater body of musicians than one was ever likely to hear, rendering his works either utopian or unperformable or, on some measure, inadequately performed in reality. What we hear today from ‘period’ and ‘modern’ orchestras alike, whatever the ideological claims of the latter, will almost always fall short of what he required. Such is life, at least under capitalism. We stretch our resources to breaking-point and beyond, and ultimately make do with less than perfection; otherwise, we should hear nothing at all. It was nonetheless a treat to hear the Symphonie fantastique played with musicians within the range of his expectation, if still towards the lower end (albeit with more powerful, modern instruments).

Before that, the first half of this concert conducted by Thomas Adès offered music by Liszt and Adès himself. The greatest musical avant-gardist of the nineteenth century, Liszt was stranger neither to ideas nor to practice in the realm of musical ‘progress’: neither on the piano nor the orchestra, inventing for the latter the new genre of the symphonic poem. So important were they to Wagner that he actually played down some of his own prior innovation, here strictly preceding that of Liszt, so as to incorporate Liszt’s poems into his musico-historical schema. The first Mephisto Waltz has a not dissimilar conception, reminding us that there were orchestral works before Liszt, as there have been many after, that may not strictly be classified in that way, but which at least come close. (Ask Berlioz, for one.) No one writes – plays, listens – in a vacuum. Coming to this music for the first time or the hundredth – the latter unlikely, for we hear it far less often than we might – no one would have failed to register the NYO’s musical, indeed human energy from the conductor’s first downbeat, indeed before that too. Unanimity of sound, but also of purpose, reached through collaboration rather than dictatorship, was apparent here and throughout the entire concert, whether in the opening phrase or the whirlwind that ensued, string crescendi a remarkable case in point (more difficult than they might sound). It was quite a ride for all of us. Handling the sudden change of tempo for the love music is a difficult task: how to ensure necessary contrast but also ‘symphonic’ continuity. If Adès proved stronger in the former than the latter, there was nonetheless much to admire and be thrilled by—especially in the return to full throttle. Moreover, all orchestral solos were taken exquisitely (again, very much the case throughout the concert).

Adès’s ballet Dante was written for the Royal Opera House and Opéra de Paris for the septcentenary of Dante’s birth. Here we heard the second of its three parts, ‘Purgatorio’. Its performance seemed once again to be outstanding, NYO musicians clearly relishing the opportunity to work with a composer on his music, in a performance it is difficult to imagine being surpassed. I felt decidedly ambivalent to it as music, though, a promising opening leading to outright bathos. The first six of its seven sections contains recorded material: baqashot chants, as revealed in Edward Venn’s useful note, connecting both with the composer’s family history and themes in Dante. They were fascinating to hear, as was, at the music’s best, their incitement to and/or emergence from orchestral material, be it for solo instruments, groups, or something approaching a full ensemble. I am not sure the writing always escapes orientalism, arguably all the more pronounced in frequent combination – almost as if we had not progressed from Saint-Saëns – of tonality and ‘fantastic’, ‘Oriental’ colouring. The microtones of the ‘real thing’ had considerably more intrinsic character. Despite the tendency towards film music, one could imagine it danced—and that was of course part of the point.

There were certainly thrills to be heard when we reached the final ‘Ascent’ in ten horns or five trombones standing together to play. When joined by bells, though, the score ended up sounding uncomfortably close to a television ‘Christmas special’. It made a noise, as did the orchestra, but beyond that? Wagner advised Liszt not to write a ‘Paradiso’ movement for his Dante Symphony, declaring depiction of paradise beyond the powers of music: advice Liszt wisely heeded, substituting a ‘Magnificat’. Given the nature of this musical approach, I think I shall similarly refrain as listener. Whatever my misgivings, a poorly-behaved audience – slurping ice cream, dropping things on the floor, taking phone calls, air conducting, and more – loved it.

And so, to Berlioz, gifts of conductor and orchestra united in a performance that threatened to raise the roof even of the Albert Hall, yet lacked nothing in subtle detail. The first movement received as fine a performance as I can recall for a long time, its introduction barely registering as such, but rather as one stage, full of potential yet equally absorbing on its own terms, in an ever-developing, shortish symphonic poem of its own. NYO energy could be experienced as coming direct not only from the players but their instruments: testimony to Adès’s wise stewardship in pursuit of Berlioz’s goals. I was especially intrigued by the darker corners, timbre, harmony, tempo, and more united in production of colour and motion. All manner of shades between them and the composer’s signature manic Romanticism made for another captivating journey, as did a graceful, yet at-times-menacing second-movement ball, here given with cornet solo. (Truth be told, I prefer it without, but in this context, it would have been idiocy not to give the soloist his moment to shine, as he certainly did.)

Once the ballroom had been brought to eyes and ears, the ‘Scène aux champs’ unfolded with every bit as keen a sense of musical narration. Excellent use was made of the Albert Hall; in veritable coups de théâtre, both oboe echo of cor anglais solo (excellent in both cases) and thunder-drums above in stereo with their siblings below made fine use of the gallery. Berlioz would have loved the spatial drama, as, I am sure, he would the Beethoven rarely more than a little below the surface, underpinning the movement’s structure. The darker timbres of the ‘March to the Scaffold’ echoed and extended the aforementioned corners in the first movement, lugubrious and extravert twin sides to the same fateful coin. If ever you had wanted to experience the sound of eight bassoons standing from within an orchestra, here was your opportunity. That was not in itself the point, but rather what was done with them—which proved to be of equal excellence.

A duly rollicking finale combined narrative and musical coherence to the extent that it would have been inconceivable to divide them. As black sabbath bells pealed from the gallery, witches and skeletons came to life and partied below. Coordination was no mean task in itself; bar one slightly precarious moment, quickly salvaged, there was no problem at all. The chase to the close, full of incident, imparted a properly Gothic thrill in this monstrous hall. If it were no surprise to be treated to an encore, the choice of music perhaps was: a darkly sensual John Barry ‘Space March’ from the score to You Only Live Twice. Now that is how you do film music.

Oberon, Proms, 6 August 2026

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 11:22:47 +0000

Royal Albert Hall

Oberon – Nicky Spence
Reiza – Jennifer Davis
Sir Huon – John Findon
Sherasmin – Yannick Debus
Fatima – Rachael Wilson
Puck – J’Nai Bridges
Mermaids – Charlotte Bowden, Jessica Cale

Narrator – Tamsin Greig
Emma Doherty (stage director)

Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique
Monteverdi Choir (chorus-master: Richard Wilberforce)
Mark Elder (conductor)

What to do with Oberon? Staging it ‘as is’ – or ‘was’ – is barely an option, though it would be far from without interest for those of us who care deeply about its music. Even if we resolved, as well we might, never to see it again like that, we should have gained a greater sense of its conception. The problem lies squarely with James Robinson Planché’s English libretto for Covent Garden, a product of taste (or lack thereof) and time rather than straightforward incompetence, and in its way an object of fascination, yet hardly enough for someone to take the plunge. It lies of course more broadly with the state of English opera at the time. Even if we were to avoid value judgements, taste and expectation are so utterly removed from ours – far more so than, say, eighteenth-century opera seria at the height of its alienation from a Romantically inclined public – that it will not happen.

Value judgement, moreover, is pretty much impossible to avoid in this case. However much I may attempt to resist temptation – in truth, not so very much – I shall eventually end up quoting Donald Tovey, so may as well do so here. For this strange spin-off from Wieland and Shakespeare, perhaps lost in translation yet also at least a window on a Romantic window on traditions and conceptions that are not ours, Weber ‘poured his last and finest music into this pig-trough’. Or as Clive Brown, only a little more diplomatically, wrote in the New Grove: ‘It is a remarkable testimony to Weber’s operatic genius that, notwithstanding the unmitigated awfulness of its libretto, Oberon has maintained a toe-hold in the repertory. To a very considerable extent he was able to compensate for triviality and inconsequence in the libretto by skilful musical treatment.’ It is not simply the quality of the libretto, though, but the nature of the ‘work’ to which the composer was obliged to contribute. In the words of him who, advancing consumption notwithstanding, had hurriedly and with marked success learned his English lessons in order to provide for his family: ‘The intermixing of so many principal actors who do not sing, the omission of the music in the most important moments – all these things deprive our Oberon the title of an opera, and will make him unfit for all other Theatres in Europe; which is a very bad thing for me, but – passons la dessus.’

So, what to do? Or rather, what was done here in this semi-staging – perhaps closer to ‘concert staging’, though the boundaries are as porous as for opera, semi-opera, Singspiel, etc. – from the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestras (here in Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique guise)? In a resourceful conception of its own, brought to the Proms rather than conceived by it, the orchestra formed the centre-piece around which Emma Doherty’s direction of the singers took place. Oberon’s horn, seen and heard first from the organ loft, later from its own solo spot onstage, rightly took its place as fons et origo of the action. There was a good deal of activity, running- on and offstage and even, in one case for Sir Huon and Sherasmin, lost en route to rescue Reiza, on the arena. The fate of near-eternal gardening prior to reunion of our pairs of lovers, was illustrated with watering cans and so on. It did not take itself too seriously, but nor did it merely send things up or wallow in self-regard.

Would that I might say the same for Timothy Knapman’s new English narration, replacing Planché’s dialogue. It was not his fault that many characters simply disappeared from the stage; imagine, say, an Entführung without Bassa Selim. Nor was it necessarily a bad idea to condense those aspects of the action into verse narration. The all-too-obvious quotations from Shakespeare, forced rhymes – readily amused members of the audience laughing some time before their delivery on account of surtitle pre-emption – and general air of facetiousness quickly grew wearing. True, something had to substitute for what would – should – have been theatrical spectacle. It would have been lovely to have had some of that, in some sense reimagined, but that was never on the cards. But there is a line between not taking oneself too seriously and not taking anything seriously at all. One might have been tempted to ask: why bother at all?

Fortunately, Weber and his performers prevented one asking that, and ensured audience gratitude for what is, after all, a rare opportunity. (Covent Garden was due to stage the work a few years ago, but unceremoniously withdrew. My sole previous live encounter was an enterprising performance from New Sussex Opera in 2014.) Bar a couple of highly noticeable occasions when string tuning went horribly awry, the ORR played beautifully. Under Mark Elder’s guidance, the orchestra had none of the inflexibility and astringency forced upon it – and us – by its founding conductor, departed to fight (literally) other battles elsewhere. Accustomed to modern instruments, my ears took a little time to adjust, but Elder and the orchestra brought a lovely intimacy to musical proceedings, feather-light, gossamer intimations of Mendelssohn, equally germane recollections of The Magic Flute and Die Entführung, and more than occasional foreshadowings of Wagner all part of a rich historical mix nonetheless centred upon Weber’s particularity. It was arguably a little too introspective at times, a little too loved by Elder; but if so, that was a fault in the right direction. For herein lay genuine love for the opera less in evidence from narrative condescension.

This was, moreover, a performance in the best sense considerate to a fine cast of singers that was yet not, for the most part, Wagnerian as we understand the term. As Oberon, at least in this version, Nicky Spence has relatively little to do, but did it well—and with undeniable sense of theatre. His fellow tenor John Findon had considerably more on his plate as Sir Huon of Bordeaux, and rose to Weber’s challenges with winning ease. So too did Jennifer Davis, of course very much a Wagnerian, in the parallel role of Reiza. Both gave spirited and subtle performances that made the most of the dramatic opportunities this particular brand of staging could provide. Much the same might be said of the ‘lesser’ couple – think Papageno and Papagena, albeit with greater balance in their minutes of music – of Yannick Debus as Sherasmin and Rachael Wilson as Fatima: both animated, and stylish throughout, Wilson offering a touching, lovelorn ‘A lonely Arab maid’. With a lovely mermaid duet (Charlotte Bowden and Jessica Cale), all the more bewildering without much in the way of context, a spirited J’Nai Bridges as Puck, and a fine collection of soloists in their own right from the Monteverdi Chori, the score and some at least of its context were brought vividly to life. Tamsin Greig, moreover, delivered her narration with collaborative ease and the keenest ear for verse. As in any ‘version’ of the work, content was not the responsibility of the performers.

Had Weber lived to return to Germany, he would almost certainly have revised the opera for its stages, introducing recitative and doing away with some of its more problematic aspects. (Hearing it in German translation, however inauthentic on a literalist level, is in aesthetic terms a great improvement.) Maybe some day, someone will offer us Planché’s 1860 revision in Italian (by then, more to the taste of opera-going London). Mahler’s version, which I have never heard in the theatre, probably offers the best way forward in German, treating us not only to the revision of one of the opera house’s greatest animating forces, but also to Mahler’s own extension of Weber’s material for transitional music. But there are worse things than a work that confounds possibilities for performance. (So too, in different ways, do many others—Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron included.) This was a valiant attempt, offering a proper degree of bewitchment. Now where is Euryanthe?

Bayreuth Festival (4) - Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung, 28 and 30 July, 1 August 2026

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 19:21:03 +0000

Festspielhaus

Siegmund, Siegfried – Klaus Florian Vogt
Sieglinde – Elza van den Heever
Hunding, Hagen – Mika Kares
Wotan – Michael Volle
Fricka, First Norn – Anna Kissjudit
Brünnhilde – Camilla Nylund
Siegrune, Second Norn, Gutrune – Alexandra Ionis
Rossweiße, Wellgunde – Natalia Skrycka
Grimgerde, Floßhilde – Marie Henriette Reinhold
Helmwige, Third Norn – Magdalena Hinterdobler
Gerhilde – Martina Weischenbach
Ortlinde – Brit-Tone Müllertz
Waltraute – Karis Tucker (Walküre), Anna Kissjudit (Götterdämmerung)
Schwertleite – Freya Apffelstaedt
Mime – Gerhard Siegel
Alberich – Jochen Schmeckenbecher
Fafner – Peter Rose
Woodbird – Victoria Randem
Erda – Christa Mayer
Gunther – Michael Kupfer-Radecky
Woglinde – Katherina Konradi

Curator – Marcus Lobbes
Artistic and technical conception – Marcus Lobbes, Nils Corte
Dramaturgy – Andri Hardmeier
Digital- and AI-storytelling – Roman Senkl
Creative code, visual art – Nils Corte, Phil Hagen Jungschlaeger
Set design – Wolf Gutjahr
Costumes – Pia Maria Mackert

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus director: Thomas Eitler-de Lint)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Images: Bayreuther Festspiele / Enrico Nawrath

‘Auf geb’ich mein Werk: nur Eines will ich noch: das Ende – das Ende!‘ When, in bitter disillusionment, in his great monologue from the second act of Die Walküre, Wotan offers Alberich – absent from the stage, yet present in words, orchestra, and our thoughts – the world he had once striven so hard to retain, now desiring one thing alone, the end, he spoke for all of us. Michael Volle delivered the line with characteristic intelligence and artistry. The Bayreuth Festival Orchestra ‘spoke’ with equivalent excellence as Wagner’s Attic chorus. Goodness knows what happened or did not onstage. I cannot recall and I doubt anyone else can; the likelihood of anyone having cared is still lower. Maybe it happened at one of the times I experimented by closing my eyes or wearing a newly acquired sleeping mask from a Bayreuth branch of Rossmann. (Tentative conclusion: may help relieve symptoms for a short period, but consult a musicodramatic physician should symptoms persist, as alas they did.) The truth, alas, is that most of us had willed that end far sooner, from about a minute or two into the first Rheingold screen-saver foisted on us by ‘curator’ Marcus Lobbes. His recorded utterances suggest barely the slightest acquaintance with the Ring, let alone what it might mean, but such knowledge is doubtless to be disdained in a braver new world than Aldous Huxley might ever have imagined.

In a sense, there is little else to write, yet somehow, like the pilgrims who returned night after night, more in expectation than in hope, I should make the attempt. What did we learn? That the ‘machine’, the ‘intelligence’, the ‘prompter’ – whatever we wish to call it/him/whatever – was never happier than when covering singers with red, which contrasted with brown, to merge in a sickly terracotta, only to be eclipsed by yellow? That the bizarre ‘historical’ pictures could indeed get worse? The Prologue and first Act of Götterdämmerung took us not very far, from Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan to Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton, the latter understandably covering his face. That whoever/whatever was signally incapable of aligning past production images, all still in terrible resolution, with what was going on, so that Frank Castorf’s legendary alternative Mount Rushmore appeared only when it should not in Siegfried, and that, staggeringly, Patrice Chéreau’s still more legendary Immolation Scene, Dame Gwyneth and all, appeared first in the wrong scene with Brünnhilde? What on earth the advent of the euro was doing there, I refuse even to speculate. We cannot or, better, should not be expected to do the work for these machines. We are not Alberich’s enslaved Nibelungs; or rather, we are, but must free ourselves. Not that we saw them anyway—and the chorus, when it appeared, was denied costumes and indeed visibility. An unfortunate moment of mislighting, were that a word, nonetheless revealed the arrival of its female contingent. The ‘cage’ of screens, front and back, could not function on its own terms, let alone ours.

Occasionally what we saw just about aspired to the level of a mid-price greeting card image; near-aspiration consistently failed to elevate itself into achievement. The obscenity of randomly posting a picture of what appeared to be starving Africans, presumably as a result of a colonial atrocity, as something to gaze at for a few seconds, then having it ‘transform’ into some meaningless shapes, whilst Siegmund and Sieglinde voice their increasing love – and lust – for one another should in itself have been enough to take this idiocy off the stage. That Walküre ‘moment’ fell, if I remember correctly, somewhere between sightings of Thomas Mann (at the right time for Wälsungenblut, though apparently not intended as such) and a pair of keyholes; Lenin and Hitler remained some way off. Who knows? Who cares? Actually, many might care about suddenly being presented with an unmotivated, uncalled-for giant image of Hitler impressed upon them in the Festspielhaus. Where is the obligation to them? A concert performance would have been infinitely preferable; so too would even the worst of stagings.

Someone should have pulled the plug, literally, before this debacle had begun, leaving us with what would doubtless have been a fine concert performance. It might well have been a disappointment, but it would not have been a catastrophe. It would have spared some of the ‘AI’ environmental footprint too, as our own World-Ashes not only wither but blaze across the world. Home to Wagner’s endearing encounter with Jessie Laussot, Bordeaux has endured more temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius this unfinished year alone than it has over the preceding century-and-a-bit during which records were kept. Soon not only revolutionary composers will be expelled; not only the vines whose fruits Jessie’s husband traded on will wither; the city itself may fall. The end approaches and it does not look pretty; nor does it seem likely to cleanse us and the world Musk, Trump, Lobbes, and others have despoiled. Mention of sustainable theatre, sustainable anything else, or indeed any sort of theatre, let alone drama, now raises little more than a shrug. We are all apparently just to destroy our eyes, ears, minds, and souls sitting in front of screens waiting like the gods in Waltraute’s heartrending plea to Waltraute—or what would have been, had it not similarly been obliterated by further image-bombardment. Say what you like about the US occupation forces when they turned the Festspielhaus into a venue for musicals and other entertainments; they never conceived of such an indignity on Wagner’s house, work, performers, and audience, let alone put it into practice.

Again, I shall need to be brief about the performances, since I found it well-nigh impossible to concentrate upon them. Bar a very few inevitable slips, the orchestra continued to play brilliantly for Thielemann, despite its relegation to soundtrack for whatever it was we were compelled to view. Silken strings that darkened on demand; sensuous yet spirited woodwind; brass that rang with the hallowed tones, yet none of the complacency, of altdeutsch tradition: from this palette our necromancer-in-chief painted a series of epics to my ears closer to Strauss (and even at times Debussy) than the Bayreuth Wagner of old, yet certainly with tales to tell. These were aesthetic decisions rather than omissions; this was made clear at points of the highest dramatic tension in Act I of Die Walküre, when suddenly Thielemann shifted to an almost Klemperer- or Barenboim-like focus on growling, foundational harmony, the parallel gear-shift in tempo audible yet convincing. There was often a chamber-music line less in the line of Karajan than beyond him; at least, I discerned it from time to time when the images would permit me to listen.

The singers were, of course, still more poorly served—some might say unforgivably so. This may seem an absurdly first-level question for a production, but did our ‘curators’ for one minute consider the implications for the outstanding, hard-working vocal artists placed at their disposal? Either they did and utterly failed in another basic task, or they did not and were thereby negligent. Volle’s class shone through nevertheless, if only sporadically, as did that of everyone else. Perhaps I might have been more critical in other circumstances, but Klaus Florian Vogt’s follow-ups to his excellent Mime, taking in both Siegmund and Siegfried – surely a record? – offered insight throughout and only occasional tiring. He acted too, bringing far more to the stage than a thousand screen-savers might ever: not only in his own dramatic presence, but in engagement with others. If Mika Kares did not quite manage such a feat, our Daland and Fasolt excelled also as Hunding and Hagen. Here is a first-rate artist, readily adaptable, without threat to lyricism, verbal meaning, or their musicodramatic union. Anna Kissjudit stood out to me similarly as Fricka and the First Norn. Her sister Norns, their sister Rhinemaindens, and indeed their sister Valkyries were all excellent as individual voice and ensemble. Camilla Nylund emerged as first among equals, in fiercely committed performances as Brünnhilde in all three of these operas. Far too often, though, these were fleeting rather than sustained impressions, and all on account of the ‘curation’.

This ‘production’, ‘curation’, or whatever one wants to call it is not about ‘AI’; it is not ‘about’ the Culture Industry or capitalism. It denotes and indeed forms part of their logical, lowest-common-denominator, catastrophic conclusion. Of course the Ring, like anything else, cannot preserve itself from the structures of our current existence; nor should it, even if that were possible. By the same token, it should not – must not – merely surrender to them. The Bayreuth Festival was, for sound reasons, founded as a joint stock company. That was not an endorsement of later-nineteenth-century capitalism; it was a decision necessitated by economic furchtbare Not. To complain about that is to plummet to the inanity level of ‘you have an iPhone, so how can you criticise capitalism?’ There was neither call nor need for this aesthetic disaster, surely the worst in the history of the Festival. If any of us hears again of Lobbes in the opera house, it will be too soon, but this is not the fault of a single person, however culpable he and his ‘team’ may be. We are not all guilty, as the cliché has it; guilty indeed, though, are obsession with technology – as ‘bros’ call it, ‘tech’ – and an economic system so ruinous Alberich might have led the revolution against it.

The optimistic view would be that, once this is all done, there will be a chance to start again, echoing Harry Kupfer’s vision of a Ring post-nuclear-apocalypse. That now seems merely utopian, however welcome it was to find occasional relief in Siegfried from poor-quality reproductions of Kupfer’s lasers. Wagner situates hope, at the close of Götterdämmerung, in the survivors, the men and women ‘moved to the very depths of their being’ by what they have witnessed. If we have witnessed nothing and merely been numbed to the ever-narrowing shallows of what remains of our being, will not the fires continue to rage until we are all incinerated? Make a Ring about that and just maybe we can still talk, create, and crucially listen. Otherwise, as a composer-conductor in Wagner’s line, soon to work on the twentieth century’s defining production of the Ring here at Bayreuth, once put it: ‘The most expensive solution would be to blow the opera houses into the air. But do you not think that that might also be the most elegant solution?’

Or, as Wagner, already at work on the Ring project, noted in his diary from revolutionary Dresden almost 120 years earlier: ‘8 May (Monday) Morning once again by roundabout route via barricades to Town Hall. At S. Anne Barricade guard shouts “Well, Mr Conductor, joy’s beautiful divine spark’s made a blaze.” (3rd perf. 9th Symphony at previous Palm Sunday concert; Opera House now burnt down. Strange feeling of comfort.)’ If we do not stop ‘AI’ and the forces behind it, such will soon be all our lot, minus Wagner’s strange feeling and certainly minus redemption, ‘through love’ or anything else. Booing with a fury and unanimity I have never previously encountered ensued: which already returns us, once again, to Wagner and the Dresden uprising. Let us consider this, then, a warning on multiple levels, in the unlikely event it is not too late already.

Bayreuth Festival (3) - Der fliegende Holländer, 29 July 2026

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 10:51:43 +0000

Festspielhaus

Daland – Mika Kares
Senta – Elisabeth Teige
Erik – Benjamin Bruns
Mary – Nadine Weissmann
Steersman – Kieran Carrel
The Dutchman – Nicholas Brownlee

Director, set designs – Dmitri Tcherniakov

Costumes – Elena Zaytseva
Lighting – Gleb Filshtinsky
Dramaturgy – Tatiana Werestchagina

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus director: Thomas Eitler-de Lint),
Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Oksana Lyniv (conductor)

Images: (c) Bayreuther Festspiele / Enrico Nawrather

Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Dutchman and Dutchman return, still ship-less, to their small town of still smaller horizons for what may or may not be the last time. They have had a good run by recent Bayreuth standards, rightly so, and are not scheduled for next season. (Minus Tristan, all dramas from Rienzi onwards are scheduled either for this season or next.) Whilst there was naturally immense relief all round at an actual theatrical experience amidst the torture-debris of the ‘AI’-Ring debacle, things were looking a little tired, at least until a third act that continues to pack quite a punch. I doubt this was really the fault of anyone concerned, although Tcherniakov presumably did not return to direct this revival, since there was no production team present for curtain calls. Indeed, what we saw had very much the air of a repertory house revival, somewhat at odds with what is held to be the ethos of ‘Werkstatt Bayreuth’, if infinitesimally so when compared to the horrors that had unfolded the previous two nights. (I shall deal with Die Walküre in a single ‘rest of the Ring’ review following its much-awaited Götterdämmerung.)

Providing, as ever, his own set designs, Tcherniakov presents in the Prelude a pantomime in which the young ‘H.’ (Holländer, we presume) sees his mother hanging lifeless from a house window, shamed by a hypocritical, Peter Grimes-like community that had her yield – perhaps as sex worker – to Daland’s advances, only to be cast aside when no longer of use. His adult return is no seven-year ritual in search of an impossible love, but rather pursuit of revenge against the man and more broadly the community that did this. His whole life, one senses, has explicitly led up to this, as he is welcomed by the venal Daland – maybe he continues to run up such expenses? – and later his wife Mary, acted with palpable compassion by Nadine Weismann, as well as by Senta. Invited to dinner, his plan falls into place when, following interesting initial reluctance that has her decline even to come inside, Senta falls for him. The third act shows the community at large, in mirthless corporate celebration for which the Dutchman’s crew (or whatever they be) notably fail to participate. Shots are fired, Daland falling before his daughter, who nonetheless continues to hold faith in H., to be cruelly tossed aside—as surplus to his requirements as his mother had to Senta’s father’s. Daland’s house and wealth ablaze, the entire claustrophobic Nordic townscape at risk, Mary returns to kill the Dutchman. Senta’s highly disconcerting, hysterical turn between grief and celebration is ultimately transformed into compassion for the woman who has long cared for her. Perhaps, then, as we hear the 1860 post-Tristan ‘redemptive’ ending, there is a form of feminist redemption after all. Men have created and perpetuated this world and its revenge saga; if women survive, they can hardly do worse and might, just might, do better.

Oksana Liniv’s conducting remained the weakest link in the evening’s proceedings (from when I last heard it in 2024). It is a pity she could not have been replaced with someone more able and willing to respond to such a dramatic conception, or indeed any other, of the work. If the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra played well enough, it rarely sounded inspired, and one could hardly blame it. Lyniv’s alternation between pressing too hard and listlessly meandering, the latter especially apparent in a second act that seemed much longer than it was, offered a reversion to number opera seemingly not from aesthetic conviction, but because a more music-drama-focused performance could not be sustained. A sudden change of gear to breakneck speed at the close of the spinning chorus had pit and stage fall apart for several bars, the chorus compelled to find its own way back into sync, quite unaided by the conductor.

A further sadness lay in the sound offered by a now reduced chorus, especially at the beginning of the third act. The Festival’s decision to take an axe to what should be one of its crown jewels has regrettably had consequences, notwithstanding the musicianship of those remaining and their new director. In the title role, Nicholas Brownlee had an awkward beginning, intonation surprisingly, repeatedly awry in the first act. He grew into his own, though, to offer a compelling performance later on. Having sung two other challenging roles (Fasolt and Hunding) on two immediately preceding evenings, Mika Kares was undaunted by prospect or reality of Daland, outsinging the Dutchman in the first act and continuing to impress thereafter. Benjamin Bruns and Elisabeth Teige offered an aural, if not necessarily dramatic, glimpse of what a future Siegfried and Brünnhilde might sound like, Bruns impassioned and vocally fearless as Erik, Teige taking all in her musicodramatic stride in a role notorious for its demands. It was heartening too to welcome a fresh-voiced Kieran Carrel from Berlin’s Deutsche Oper to the Green Hill as the Steersman; let us hope this intelligent portrayal will prove neither his last visit nor role here. If I had certain reservations, then, this revival nonetheless proved quite a tonic after the anti-human production horrors of the two preceding evenings.

Bayreuth Festival (2) – Das Rheingold, 27 July 2026

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 11:01:15 +0000

Festspielhaus

Wotan – Michael Volle
Donner – Alexander Grassauer
Froh – Siyabonga Maqungo
Loge – Klaus Florian Vogt
Fricka – Anna Kissjudit
Freia – Evelyn Novak
Erda – Christa Mayer
Alberich – Jochen Schmeckenbecher
Mime – Gerhard Siegel
Fasolt – Mika Kares
Fafner – Peter Rose
Woglinde – Katharina Konradi
Wellgunde – Natalia Skrycka
Flosshilde – Marie Henriette Reinhold

Curator – Marcus Lobbes
Artistic and technical conception – Marcus Lobbes, Nils Corte
Dramaturgy – Andri Hardmeier
Digital- and AI-storytelling – Roman Senkl
Creative code, visual art – Nils Corte, Phil Hagen Jungschlaeger
Set design – Wolf Gutjahr

Costumes – Pia Maria Mackert

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Images (c): Bayreuther Festspiele / Enrico Nawrath

The Bayreuth Festival has had a chequered history over its (almost) 150 years to date. It nonetheless remains, or has until now remained, in many ways an object lesson to the rest of the operatic world in how to take art seriously, how to create conditions in which it might be produced and experienced, and much else—not least with respect to the Festspielhaus amphitheatre and covered pit. That the rest of the world has failed almost entirely to heed its example may sadden us, but reflects on that world and us, not on Bayreuth, nor indeed on Wagner. As Pierre Boulez observed, whilst at work here half a century ago on the now legendary ‘Centenary Ring’ with Patrice Chéreau, perhaps with a little exaggeration, if understandably so, Wagner’s ‘diatribes’, written in turn:

… more than a century ago, are still completely relevant, for nothing has changed—the laziness of the repertory theatre, its failings, its precarious functioning, the blind choice of works, the fortuitous casting of singers and players, the lack of rehearsal, the sauve-qui-peut routine. Architecturally speaking, the Bayreuth model has remained a dead letter and we still have Italian-style theatres. … Both visually and acoustically, we continue to witness this permanent defeat of what is truly theatrical, Bayreuth having effected not the slightest improvement.

To strike a slightly less pessimistic note than Boulez, I think Bayreuth has played a notable role in effecting certain theatrical improvements, if more related to staging than stages. That 1976-80 production and numerous others – Ring stagings from Harry Kupfer and Frank Castorf, Tristan from Heiner Müller, Parsifal from Stefan Herheim, Hans Neuenfels’s Lohengrin, Tobias Kratzer’s Tannhäuser, and so on – set standards for and posed challenges to the rest of the world, just as Wagner did, and occasionally, sometimes more than that, they have been taken up, run with, even surpassed. Bayreuth as ‘workshop’ (Werkstatt), the greatest legacy of Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner, created the conditions for such innovation, building on the vision and achievements of Richard himself, as well as (whisper it) the best of the Winifred era, brought such artists of vision, Boulez included, to the Green Hill, showing not only the necessary courage to fail but the equally necessary courage to rethink, to revise, to rejuvenate: Wagner’s own celebrated ‘Kinder, macht Neues!’ following that very first festival in 1876.

If, gentle reader, you sensed a less-than-gentle ‘but’ approaching, I fear you would be anything other than mistaken. Perhaps nothing, especially in the theatre of Tannhäuser and Parsifal, is truly irredeemable; perhaps something can be salvaged from this. Imagining how lies quite beyond my little mind, though perhaps some machine will tell us. For what the Festival, incomprehensibly, has come up with to celebrate the 150^th anniversary of the first Ring must be the greatest travesty ever to have been visited on it anywhere at any time, an experience so unbearable five (out of five) people I spoke to afterwards described it independently as the worst thing they had ever seen, one adding the unforgettable and entirely accurate phrase ‘visual waterboarding’, and a rebuke not only to Wagner, not only to Bayreuth, but to any conception of art that tiny, human mind of mine will ever be able to entertain. Enter the ‘AI’-Ring, mysteriously and with insufferable pretention subtitled ‘‘Ring 10010110 – vom Mythos zum Code’, seemingly undirected, and yet ‘curated’ by one Marcus Lobbes.

What we saw can be dealt with briefly. (If only one might say the same of experiencing it.) Following a mercifully image-free Prelude, beautifully and imaginatively led by Christian Thielemann, near-peerlessly performed by the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, any sense of drama, opera, or basic humanity deserts us for a parade of banal screensaver images shown upon a curtain in front of the singers, thus largely obscured and left to fend for themselves, wearing identical, indistinguishable, weirdly yet unrevealingly hideous costumes. (Final applause, for those who could bring themselves to engage, proved something of a game in trying to identify who was presenting him-/herself at any point At least it offered the first and only prospect of entertainment in the entire sorry evening.) Sometimes there was a clear reference to the Ring at Bayreuth, the first image being the celebrated representation of the Rhinemaidens in 1876, amidst genuine theatrical wizardry that enabled them to appear as if swimming in the Rhine. (Yes, as Anna Russell told us, in the Rhine: now on the curtain.) I almost wept upon a brief appearance, in bizarrely low resolution such as would be refused by the least assiduous reviews editor, of Castorf’s Golden Motel, not out of the nostalgia I feel for that production, but because it was vaguely discernible. We did, to be fair, see a few large rings, on apparently female fingers, when the ring should first have been seen on stage with Alberich. Otherwise, endlessly, pointlessly transforming shapes came and went, sometimes returning, few with any relation to what we heard, culminating in an anonymous man and woman who turned into street (or perhaps theatre?) lights, quickly to turn back again. Some more recognisable, if irrelevant images were suggestive of Ludwig II put in a very brief guest appearance during the descent to Nibelheim, as did very occasional glimpses of other Rheingold productions, but that was it.

The ultimately unforgivable thing was the way this abject, wasteful nonsense distracted from whatever might have remained of the drama. With that going on before our eyes, our ears (at least my ears) struggled for more than a minute or so to keep track of what was probably a very good musical performance. Not only was this entirely at odds with any idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk – in many ways, a problematical idea that will benefit from deconstruction – but with art and even humanity themselves. I managed to hear flashes of an intriguingly mobile, flowing orchestral conception shaped by Thielemann—rather along the analytical lines suggested by Wagner in an 1871 report to German Wagner societies, tracing an entire corpus of interrelated themes from the individualisation of ‘a few malleable Nature motifs’. If I sensed that most vividly in the Prelude, its low E-flat foundational in every sense and exquisitely decorated by some of the fruitiest, bubbliest woodwind I can recall hearing here, that is a comment related in no sense to the performance itself.

Vocal contributions seemed to be of a very high standard too. Not having had chance to remind myself of the cast beforehand, I had a very pleasant surprise in hearing Klaus Florian Vogt, no less, as Loge, the ringing clarity and sincerity of his tone both in consonance with the demi-god’s revelation of uncomfortable truths and in productive contrast with his wheedling strategizing. Michael Volle’s performance, lighter than one often hears from him and in keeping with the specific demands of the Rheingold Wotan, would doubtless have graced any stage, had I been able to follow it adequately; likewise Jochen Schmeckenbecher’s darker hued Alberich, Mika Kares’s evidently lovelorn Fasolt, Christa Mayer’s chalumeau-like Erda, and much else besides, Evelyn Novak's golden Freia and a fine trio of Rhinemaidens included. To claim that I properly heard any of these performance, though, would be entirely misleading, so I shall leave it there.

According to Tina Lorenz, writing in the programme, ‘Ring 10010110 tells a radically contemporary story about how we are currently witnessing the beginnings of a transformation in the global order’. It may be a ‘contemporary’ story, but its only ‘radicalism’ lies in turning Das Rheingold and presumably the rest into an immersive Fidelio in which we as prisoners finally experience light and fresh air upon its close. The stampede for the doors was unlike any I have seen—or participated in. Some brave souls managed to agitate for opening of the theatre doors during its course and escaped, to the intense envy and admiration of the rest of us. A period of lengthy reflection, absention, and apology would be in order from all involved. Wagner deserves better, as do the musicians and audience. So too does a world, like that of the Ring, on fire thanks to wasteful, ‘technological’ domination.

Bayreuth Festival (1) - Rienzi, 26 July 2026

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 22:37:08 +0000

Festspielhaus

Images: Enrico Nawrath

Rienzi – Andreas Schager
Irene – Gabriela Scherer
Colonna – Andreas Baer-Kanabas
Adriano – Jennifer Holloway
Orsini – Michael Nagy
Cardinal Raimondo – Vitalij Kowaljow
Baroncelli – Matthias Stier
Cecco del Vecchio – Michael Kupfer-Radecky
Messenger of Peace – Victoria Randem

Directors, set and costume designs – Alexandra Szemerédy, Magdolna Parditka
Lighting – Bernd Gallasch
Video – Leonard Koch

Dramaturgy – Markus Kiesel

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus director: Thomas Eitler-de Lint)
Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Nathalie Stutzmann (conductor)

On 22 May 1872, Wagner laid the foundation stone to his new festival theatre, followed by a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, probably the single most important artistic work other than his own for Wagner’s own life and work. It has reappeared for key anniversaries ever since, not least the reopening (and ‘rebranding’) of the Festival as ‘New Bayreuth’ in 1951, including this year’s sesquicentennial edition. Unable to attend that official first night, I nonetheless hastened to the still more auspicious, unquestionably more historic event of the second, the first ever Festspielhaus staging of Wagner’s third opera, Rienzi, Last of the Tribunes. Excluded by Cosima – not without warrant from The Master himself – from the Bayreuth canon, Rienzi has actually appeared once before in Bayreuth, alongside the still earlier Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot, during the 2013 bicentenary of Wagner’s birth. That initiative, likewise from Festival Director Katharina Wagner, nonetheless operated in the penumbra of the Festival proper: in the Oberfrankenhalle sports complex, albeit played by the Festival Orchestra and (unlike its two predecessors) staged within the limitations of the arena. Now, however, for the first time since 1901, a new Wagner opera was admitted to the formal Festspielhaus canon.

How many people in the audience, on this first night or thereafter, will have known Rienzi at all, and if so to what extent, is an open question. Probably more than in many (all?) other theatres, I should guess, but still with a considerable number who will never previously have had the opportunity to see it, and doubtless some who will never have heard it. That holds implications for how to present it and for how it will be received. So too does the vexed question of a text for the work. The latter opens up a fascinating, rich, and complex world in itself, which I cannot even begin to summarise here. Suffice to say that the very idea of a complete text sits at odds with the expectations of the grand opéra genre in which Wagner was mostly, if not entirely, composing this ‘große tragische Oper’. That is, even if there were a single version, it would not necessarily – almost certainly not – have been expected that all the material would have been used for any given production and/or performance. There is not, since Wagner made revisions even before performance, and would unquestionably have done so again for future performances in which he wished to offer even a provisional, let alone definitive, version to the world. Late in life, he famously declared he still owed the world a Tannhäuser; whether he felt similarly about Rienzi is more dubious, though we might do so. If I understand correctly, the 2026 ‘Bayreuther Fassung’ of the verbal text has its foundation in that Wagner authorised in 1871 (presumably for the Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen published that year), with some textual variants nonetheless adopted, and an important, almost equal role played by the piano score in Egon Voss’s complete edition. Wagner’s stage directions are, for better or worse, ‘only seldom adopted’—which, as Brahms might have told us, any ass can see.

Lack of surviving sources that would enable definitive presentation, as opposed to reconstruction, of particular musical versions presents another, currently insuperable problem. The autograph, given by Winifred to Hitler, disappeared one way or another with him in 1945, as did performance parts in Dresden the same year, courtesy of ‘Bomber’ Harris et al. Much more could be said – and has been – about those difficulties, but like any such difficulties, they can also present creative and intellectual opportunities, perhaps especially when coming into dialogue, conflict, whatever we wish to call it, with a festival founded on strong notions – born in Wagner himself, at least the Wagner of late life – of a textual canon. At any rate, although the idea of a ‘complete’ Rienzi is straightforwardly impossible and probably undesirable, this gave a far better sense of the shifting boundaries and potentialities of the ‘work’ than my previous theatrical encounter, at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, with a version so mutilated as to verge upon the useless.

The question then, remains: how did this new Rienzi fare—with relation to these parameters and, let us to be fair, to its own too? There are very few cases – in my personal experience, only Stefan Herheim’s Parsifal comes to mind – in which a first-year production at ‘Werkstatt Bayreuth’ has proved its strongest, and/or has not undergone considerable modification in light of stage experience. If, as we have been led to believe, this is to be a one-year-only production, that may prove unfortunate, but for the moment it is in any case all we have. My assessment would be mixed, albeit with overriding gratitude for the occasion so much as to present itself. To my mind, orchestral playing and vocal performance considerably eclipsed conducting and stage direction, although everything afforded material to consider and reflect on, both in itself and in relation to broader ideas of the Festival, its history, and its future, which is just as it should be.

Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka’s staging had its moments, but mirroring Nathalie Stutzmann’s conducting, failed to my eyes (and ears) to form a coherent assemblage, let alone whole, whilst ultimately proving more successful than either director (Philipp Stölzl) or conductor (Evan Rogister) in Berlin. The staging opened chez Rienzi, with Irene and a child in attendance. Given the advanced state of their brother-sister relationship, I assumed the child was theirs; only in the programme, did I discover him to have been their brother. (So far as I was aware – and I may well have missed something – nothing defined who he was, the first of several signal directorial omissions.) The brother’s death whilst Rienzi and Irene pursued their relations formed the foundation of a psychosexual crisis that offered the ultimate explanation for Rienzi’s deeds thereafter. Reductionist, nous? But then we repaired to a world of rolling (and fake) news, of social media speculation about ‘keeping it in the family’ and worse, whilst opinion polls forecast apparently increased vote share for Rienzi vis-à-vis his electoral opponents, Colonna and Orsini. Whatever the scandal, it seemingly did our would-be-tribune, ‘Rienzi for Prez’, no harm, though the fickleness of the crowd ultimately would. In essentials, then, here was criticism of that which liberals have christened ‘populism’, with little fundamental recognition that the people may be right as well as wrong, and that in their systemic as well as charismatic manipulation lies the greater problem. I might add here that, in the absence of German, let alone English, titles – to my mind, a mistake for a work unfamiliar to many – some things could be filled in via placards and screens: no bad thing, which merits commendation.

In Wagner’s second act, which formed the second half of the first of Bayreuth’s three acts, the ballet was, rather to my surprise, retained, although most of its sense was lost. Wagner’s brilliant idea, in defiance of grand opéra convention, of offering dramatically meaningful dance, in this case via an allegory of the rape of Lucretia, was ditched in favour of a Bayreuth metatheatrical show that took in many of the dramas to come, from Das Rheingold to Parsifal, all directed from the other side of the political-dramatic stage by a gilded mini-Wagner familiar from around the town (here played by a child—and very well too). If much was lost, a considerable amount was also gained, and the humour of showing us as audience rushing to the Bratwurst stall and lavatories was well observed. A turn to sacrifice and martyrdom – seemingly of the entire Rienzo family – was abrupt and, stigmata aside, a little too dependent on a screen relay of Olivet Discourse prophecies from St Matthew’s Gospel, first in English, then in Latin. Again, something more broadly rather than personally political would have been welcome, but it made its point well enough. Visual inheritance from Meyerbeer (and presentiment of Götterdämmerung) in stage positioning of Rienzi, Irene, and Adriano was striking in its complement to the score.

The third/second act was perhaps the most successful, its colour and overall look splendidly dark. Rienzi suddenly becoming a crazed murderer, firing mortal shots, was a duly shocking moment—although I am not sure so ‘critical’ a stance to the opera and its hero was necessary or even advisable at this stage in its chequered reception. The final act(s) had politics more or less entirely collapse in favour of Rienzi as a sort of hapless Macbeth, incomprehensibly stabbed by Irene rather than meeting his death at the hands of the populace. For some reason, during the fifth act proper, they both went backstage, the world as theatre returning, the point presumably being that all of these worlds – social media, Bayreuth, politics, and more – are stages of some point. A lack of clarity in direction, though, made much of this seem weirdly arbitrary, as did Rienzi carrying on crying, gesturing, and singing for a long time after his death had apparently come. I gleaned little concerning who the ‘smaller’ characters were. One might say – unfairly to my mind – that Wagner might have offered more here; but even if one did, that surely presents a challenge or, better, an opportunity to the directors, not a fait accompli.

Rienzi explicitly looks forward to a united Italy, which in Vormärz Saxony had obvious implications for a German revolution from below. Nor for nothing did Friedrich Engels sketch a drama on the same subject at pretty much the same time. By all means try something different, but do it with more evident knowledge and understanding of that from which you are differing. Szemerédy would seemingly benefit from, among other things, a lesson in basic historical chronology if she seriously thinks, as she is quoted saying in the programme: ‘How much Hitler is actually in Rienzi? The case had to be reopened.’ None, literally none; there is no ‘case’ to answer. Hitler was born in 1889; Wagner died in 1883; Rienzi was written forty years before that. That is not what she meant, of course, but the starting point remains unfortunate and straightforwardly wrong, whether in theory or in practice.

At least as consistent a failing, though, was the directors’ failure to consider the crucial role of the Church and Papacy. If not eliminated from the words, it was entirely absent from the stage, without even a derisory substitute put in its place. One set design may well have been informed, as again the programme informed us, by a floorplan of St John Lateran, but it is difficult to imagine how anyone could have known this, nor appreciated why it might have mattered. If couching the drama in terms of opinion polls, electoral politics, and ‘private lives’ was a signal error – in drama, as in life, we need far more than #ImWithHer – so was avoiding any attempt to reinvent such broader social, political, and ideological structures of the drama. Final approach towards a video man of the future and failure to meet him are all very well, yet unprepared it went for little.

Stutzmann often drew a fine sound from the orchestra, the beginning of the Overture revealing a wondrously golden, blended sound that was not simply the achievement of the covered pit. Alas, the somewhat listless way in which it proceeded was similarly prophetic of much of what was to come. I assume part of the reason for her selection and for her interpretative choices was her attempt in Tannhäuser to emphasise its French origins, but inability to present tempi as part of a greater whole even within numbers, let alone between them, did little service to Wagner’s far from inconsiderable musical dramaturgy. I should usually be the last person to complain about a lack of applause, if perceived as merited, within acts. ‘Traditional’, ‘historically informed’, or not, I cannot stand the practice; it has been outmoded since long before Wagner (with the possible knowing exception of Strauss’s Zerbinetta). And yet here, awkward silences, born of the audience’s ‘proper’ Bayreuth respect for the unity of the act, cried out for something to fill them. It need not have been that way, but it was the conductor’s responsibility to impart a sense of unity that precluded thoughts of audience participation, even in its absence. Wolfgang Sawallisch’s live 1983 (another Wagner anniversary) Munich recording remains an object lesson, if not in forestalling applause, then more importantly in creating a convincing, compelling tonal-dramatic plan. It is not the only way to perform Rienzi; there is never one way. But it has an idea and achiev

Ariadne auf Naxos, Glyndebourne, 19 June 2026

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:33:05 +0000

Images: © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Tristram Kenton

Music Master – Michael Kraus
Major Domo – William Relton
Lackey – Oliver Williams
Officer – Owen Lucas
Composer – Samantha Hankey
Tenor, Bacchus – David Butt Philip
Wigmaker – Hector Bloggs
Zerbinetta – Alina Wunderlin
Prima Donna, Ariadne – Rachel Willis-Sørensen
Dancing Master – Ru Charlesworth
Naiad – Anna Denisova
Dryad – Ekaterina Chayka-Rubinstein
Echo – Eirin Rognerud
Harlequin – Mikhail Timoshenko
Scaramuccio – Caspar Singh
Truffaldino – Lian James Karai
Brighella – Liam Bonthrone

Director – Laurent Pelly
Set designs – Massimo Troncanetti
Lighting – Marco Giusti

London Philharmonic Orchestra
Robin Ticciati (conductor)

Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos should in many ways be the ideal Glyndebourne opera. It is indeed pretty much the ideal opera for any opera house, given its metatheatrical treatment not only of the genre itself, but of almost any aesthetic standpoint anyone in the audience might care to adopt (including none at all). All are fondly mocked and cherished; all can see and hear themselves. The question of art as ‘entertainment’ in a ‘country-house opera’ setting in which the picnic can take almost as long as the performance, itself increasingly prey to what the late Michael Tanner christened the ‘Glyndebourne guffaw’, is especially keen here. So too, for many of us, is the necessity for it to be more than merely entertainment, for the authors’ twin, arguably conflicting ideas and strategies of transformation (Verwandlung) to come into play. It is an opera, then, to be treated with good humour and seriousness, affection and critical distance, these and the opera’s other binaries all informing one another and reminding us why we might have fallen in love with the genre in the first place—even to the extent of catching trains, buses, and more in the madness of decamping to rural Sussex with hampers and the like for an afternoon in the uncharacteristically burning sun. Thinking and writing about opera are part of that joy and madness too, not least since one is almost inevitably setting oneself up to be lampooned in this context (that is, in the unlikely event anyone should really care what one has to say). Without hedging or situating further, I am somewhat saddened to say that it was only in the realm of vocal artistry and individual dramatic performances that this new production shone, staging and conducting leaving much to be desired, even to the extent of coming across in unduly provisional form.

Let us start with the good news then. Our artists – and artistes – acquitted themselves with excellence ‘as themselves’ in the Prologue and, where relevant and appropriate, as something more in the Opera. Rachel Willis-Sørensen resisted any temptation there may have been to present the Prima Donna as a mere caricature; this was a singer who knew her worth, certainly, but without seeming silly or monstrous. Her seriousness – that word again – in preparing for Ariadne was genuine, as was her achievement in a splendid ‘Es gibt ein Reich…’ and beyond. One might say much the same of David Butt Philip’s Tenor/Bacchus, whose keen attention to words as well as music ensured uncommon depth, not least in furthering our appreciation of where (and whom) he was coming from, in Circe’s guise. Given the enormous technical and other demands placed on Zerbinetta, it is striking how few fail. It is really one of those roles one does not consider attempting unless one can. Alina Wunderlin proved no exception, whether as immensely likeable artist or purveyor of pinpoint coloratura thrills that yet did not mask a necessary sadness behind them. Samantha Hankey’s Composer was a sincere, similarly likeable portrayal, offering an unmistakeably human trouser role in various of its complexities and possibilities. There was much to admire elsewhere, too, the cast assembled in depth with vivid cameos from a world-weary Michael Kraus as Music Master, and Ru Charlesworth as his overtly camp, yet similarly professional opposite number in the world of dance. A haughty Major Domo (William Relton), a fine trio of Rhinemaidens or Naiad, Dryad, and Echo, and a spirited desert island troupe offered other highlights.

Insofar as Laurent Pelly’s production offered a framework, or at least setting, for those performances it functioned well enough. Too often, though, the lack of an evident directoral hand was felt: conceptually, but even in imparting much beyond the sense of bringing the cast together. Was this in some sense the Composer’s dream, suggested by his/her return to view proceedings? If so, that seems a workable, even promising idea, but little was done with it, beyond presenting a Prologue set that combined Rococo and modern, and an Opera wilderness around which characters walked, more or less directed. If Pelly did not get in the way of the work’s dramatic themes, nor did he seem interested in bringing them out either. There is much one could do here to suggest more than the sum of its parts, yet any attempt to do so passed me by. Likewise when it came to Robin Ticciati’s painting-by-numbers conducting, notwithstanding the strengths of the London Philharmonic in itself. We lumbered from section to section, with little to suggest connection between them. A strangely motoric opening intrigued, as if Stravinsky – who openly despised this opera, or claimed to – had been set the task of reinterpreting it, perhaps in the light of Pulcinella. That was soon binned, though, another, arbitrary idea come to replace it for a minute or two, and so on. Again, it gave an impression of what the work might be, but little more than that. A sense of magic beyond the vocal remained stubbornly elusive.

Vivacious Transportation: Il barbiere di Siviglia at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 14:21:15 +0000

Rossini – Il barbiere di Siviglia

Il Conte d’Almaviva – Marco Ciaponi
Don Bartolo – Roberto De Candia
Rosina – Alexandra Meteleva
Figaro – Kim Min
Don Basilio – Giorgio Caoduro
Fiorello/Un ufficiale – Gonzalo Godoy Sepúlveda
Berta – Aloisia de Nardis

Coro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino / Riccardo Bisatti.
Stage director – Damiano Michieletto.

Cavea del Teatro del Maggio, Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Florence, Italy. Saturday, July 18th, 2026.

For the month of July, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino moves its activities to a space called the Cavea, situated on the roof of the modern theatre. Getting there requires one to walk a staircase along the side of the building up to the top, quite a challenge on a humid Florentine night, but once up there, visitors were rewarded with a coupon for a refreshing, free ice cream, which was a lovely touch. The space itself is wonderful. It’s a natural amphitheatre, suitable for unamplified music, and being able to watch opera under the ‘cielo divino’ of the cradle of the renaissance is simply magical. Even more so because those willing to walk a few more steps to the top of the auditorium are rewarded with glorious views of Brunelleschi’s dome and other Florentine landmarks. I must admit, I was absolutely enchanted by the setting.

Photo: © Michele Monasta

It also helped that the performance was similarly delightful. For its summer program, the Maggio has chosen to present Damiano Micheletto’s staging of Il barbiere di Siviglia, tonight revived by Stefania Grazioli, and conducted by Riccardo Bisatti. This staging is testament to how Michieletto is one of the finest opera directors around. Given the limitations of working in the outdoor space, he makes so much of little, the set consisting of two dozen red chairs on the black stage that are moved around to create varying stage pictures, and occasionally accessorized with other accoutrements, such as some cushions for Rosina’s boudoir, or a sheet upon which graffiti artists paint a storefront for Figaro’s salon. With a relatively small stage, the chorus sings dressed in black on the side. Michieletto starts the evening with a train announcement, announcing an express train from Florence to Seville. The overture is then staged with the principals acting out passengers on a train, along with some actors who are constant presences on the stage to move the chairs around. I loved that idea of the opera taking us from our quotidian reality of train delays and commuting to a fantasy world, full of outlandish costumes, by Carla Teti.

Photo: © Michele Monasta

Throughout the evening, Michieletto throws so many visual gags into the action. Whether, soldiers showing up in Donald Duck masks in the Act 1 finale, or Rosina acting as a boxing match hostess while the Conte squares off against Bartolo. The entire evening is deliciously zany and, in that respect, felt so completely Rossinian. The hours passed by as if they were seconds, the stage action was intricate, while also feeling completely spontaneous – and had clearly been revived most efficiently by Grazioli. The principals all threw themselves into the action fully and seemed to be having the most wonderful time, the energy emerging from the stage was completely winning. This, combined with the magical setting, meant that one sat watching the evening with a constant grin from beginning to end.

Photo: © Michele Monasta

Musically, the evening was in the very competent hands of Bisatti. He was aware of the limitations of operating in an outdoor venue such as this. He kept the tempi nicely swift – the ‘buona sera mio signore’ was taken very quickly, as was Berta’s subsequent aria. Despite the very humid evening, the string and wind intonation was true throughout, the modest string section (8 first violins and 3 double-basses) played with exceptional precision of attack, in an acoustic where there was nowhere for them to hide. The recitatives were accompanied by an amplified electronic keyboard set to resemble a harpsichord. Of course, one might have preferred a fortepiano, but given the limitations of operating in a venue such as this, this was an effective solution. I had not previously been aware of Bisatti, but tonight he proved himself to be a terrific Rossinian and a young conductor I would be keen to hear more from.

Photo: © Michele Monasta

Marco Ciaponi sang the Conte in a bright, forwardly-placed tenor. He sang his opening cavatina, ‘Ecco ridente in cielo’, with a princely line, the legato wonderfully smooth, and the voice opening up with sunny ease on top. He also has delicious comic timing, entering into his various guises most gamely. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to hear his ‘Cessa di più resistere’, which is a real shame as I’m sure he would have sung it spectacularly. Ciaponi has the ability to dispatch the rapid-fire coloratura with brilliant ease. Naturally, his diction was superb, but this was the case throughout the entire cast, which meant the evening took wing even more.

Photo: © Michele Monasta

Alexandra Meteleva sang Rosina in a similarly sunny mezzo. Her ‘una voce poco fa’ was dispatched with immaculate coloratura and genuine wit in her stage presence, the words always nicely forward. Hers was a strong Rosina, one who was never going to submit to Don Bartolo. From the very first moments, Metelva made that clear through her constant playful mocking of Bartolo and the way that she used her vivacious tone colours to illustrate the words. It was a luxury to have Roberto De Candia as Bartolo. He’s a true Rossini master, dispatching the rapid-fire patter with precision, while never compromising the clarity of his diction. He was also tremendously game, compromising his intonation, while singing his arietta of admiration, to Rosina to terrific comic effect.

Photo: © Michele Monasta

Kim Min sang Figaro in wonderfully idiomatic Italian. He’s clearly learned the style well, dispatching the recitatives with genuine personality and character. He immediately made an impression in his entrance aria, giving it a scintillating bravura edge, yet never succumbing to the urge to compromise the tone. Throughout the evening, Kim was a deliciously congenial presence on stage. Giorgio Caoduro sang Basilio in a big, rich bass. His ‘la calunnia’ was wonderfully conspiratorial, even in this outdoor setting, he used the dynamics to grow the aria gradually so that the ‘colpo di cannone’ felt genuinely exciting. In his roles, Gonzalo Godoy Sepúlveda sang his music in a handsome, burnished baritone, sung nicely off the text. Indeed, I very much hope to hear his Figaro soon. Aloisia de Nardis capped the ensemble in the Act 1 finale in a diamantine soprano, while she sang Berta’s aria with genuine wit and easy reach. Despite their placement at the side of the stage, Lorenzo Fratini’s chorus sang with good blend and genuine presence.

Sepia Starlets: Aida at the Circo Massimo

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:23:09 +0000

Verdi – Aida

Aida – Yolanda Auyanet
Il Re – Adriano Gramigni
Amneris – Valentina Pernozzoli
Radamès – Ivan Magrì
Amonasro – Ernesto Petti
Ramfis – Alex Esposito
Un Messaggero – Andrea Schifaudo
Sacerdotessa – Veronica Marini

Coro del Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Orchestra del Teatro dell’Opera di Roma / Daniele Callegari.
Stage director – Davide Livermore.

Opera di Roma, Circo Massimo, Rome, Italy. Wednesday, July 15th, 2026.

For this year’s edition of its summer festival, the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma has set up a temporary theatre in the Circo Massimo in the heart of ancient Rome. It certainly made for an atmospheric setting for a performance of Aida. The start of Act 3 was particularly striking, with the dreamy strings of remembrance accompanied by the songs of cicadas and the chatting of the Italian Nonne in the audience. The mature ladies next to me were keen not to let an operatic performance prevent their conversation, with one of them giving us the added bonus of her vigorously air conducting ‘celeste Aida’ while miming singing along and putting her feet up on the seat in front. It was definitely an experience.

Photo: © Fabrizio Sansoni – Opera di Roma

The staging, directed by Davide Livermore, was the same that I saw in Monte-Carlo last November. It was interesting to see it again, since I must admit my experience of it was very different in this outdoor setting than it was in the theatre in Monaco. Tonight, the Opera provided two screens at each side of the stage, which showed the events on stage in close-up. This was particularly effective as Livermore’s design for his staging is based on a reimagining of a 1920s silent movie, with costumes and maquillage reflecting that era. As the close-ups on video were shown in a sepia tint, this very much brought Livermore’s stage pictures to life much more effectively than when I saw it in the theatre, where the visuals lacked the impact that the close-ups brought. I still find the choreography, also by Livermore, unintentionally risible. The bare-chested pharaohs brandishing spears were hilariously camp, although I think they were meant to be threatening, and the danseuses who simultaneously acted out the haka while having an epileptic fit definitely gave plenty of laughs.

Photo: © Fabrizio Sansoni – Opera di Roma

Furthermore, compared to Monaco, the video, by D-WOK, which provides constant visual accompaniment to the action on stage seemed to be part of a bigger whole. It was present, but one’s attention was much more focused on the principals than on anywhere else. That focus meant that it became clear that personenregie was very much based on standing and delivering to the front, with exaggerated hand movements. It certainly was in line with the silent movie aesthetic that Livermore was aiming for, but during the evening I longed for him to illustrate the desperate themes in the work – the drama of love, war, jealousy and exile. These all felt underexplored. That said, what I really appreciated was how clear the text was throughout the cast. This made the drama crackle much more than the stage movements alone.

Photo: © Fabrizio Sansoni – Opera di Roma

The musical direction was confided to Daniele Callegari. As is customary at the summer festival, the performance was amplified. A big difference to the previous two occasions I have attended shows here is that the amplification appears to have been upgraded, now reflecting the position of the singers on stage. It did seem that the chorus was a bit recessed in the sound design, the opening of the triumphal scene lacked the impact it might have had since they sounded a bit distant; but the end of that scene sounded much louder, as if someone had flicked a switch and turned up the volume. The string sound was somewhat brittle at lower volumes, simply as a result of the acoustic, and the amplification did highlight some momentary lapses of coordination – surely not helped by the very hot and sultry evening. The brass was on excellent form, not a split note all night, and the winds were deliciously fragrant and full of personality. Callegari seemed to be fully aware that working in an outdoor acoustic such as this, he needed to keep the tempi nicely fluid, which certainly compensated for the sonic dryness of the location. He also managed to generally keep his forces together most admirably, again an achievement given the challenges of working in a space such as this.

Photo: © Fabrizio Sansoni – Opera di Roma

The run has been double-cast. The cast I saw this evening was composed entirely of Italian or Hispanophone singers, which greatly aided textual understanding and meant that the words really did come to life. Tonight was my first time hearing Yolanda Auyanet. The Canarian soprano is an honest, genuine singer who brought much emotion to her music, all sung off the text. The middle of the voice has a rich beauty and her soprano is grounded in a genuine chestiness. The top, however, is rather problematic. While the middle does give much pleasure, the top becomes strident, lacking in spin, with the tone curdling. Auyanet also doesn’t quite have the support lined up, meaning that she had to break the ascent to the high C in ‘oh patria mia’, and the support issues meant that she wasn’t able to float on high in the way that one might hope for. That said, as I mentioned, she is an incredibly sincere and honest singer, who genuinely brought out emotion through the text – and that’s an aspect worth appreciating.

Photo: © Fabrizio Sansoni – Opera di Roma

Luciano Ganci brought his robust, sunny tenor to the role of Radamès. As with Auyanet, the middle is most attractive, with a genuine warmth to the tone. The voice did have a tendency to spread on high, the vibrations becoming looser. He made a valiant attempt to phrase ‘celeste Aida’ in long lines, but the closing high B-flat was trumpeted out, with no attempt to incorporate the pianissimo indicated in the score. Again, this was genuine, heart-felt singing with real textual eloquence and in that respect, Ganci gave pleasure. Alex Esposito is making his role debut as Ramfis in this run. His bass is far from the massive bruisers we often hear in the role. Instead, Esposito gave us something much more lyrical and thoughtful. I very much appreciated this approach. He sang his ‘Nume, custode e vindice’ with an even legato and handsome tone, making his imprecations much more prayerful than we often hear. A notable new role for this always excellent artist. Amonasro is also a good role for Ernesto Petti, who sang with focused tone and musicality. He raged effectively in his curse of Aida, but still maintained the integrity of the tone. We also had agreeable interventions from Adriano Gramigni who sang il Re in a lugubrious bass and Veronica Marini who was an extrovert and confident Sacerdotessa. In the role of Un Messaggero, Andrea Schifaudo brought a bright, forward tenor, making every word of his brief scene count. The chorus, prepared by Ciro Visco, sang with enthusiasm and free vibrations in the sopranos, while the tenors and basses sang their priestly harmonies with accurate tuning.

Photo: © Brescia & Amisano / Teatro alla Scala

Spitalfields Festival: Choir of the Chapels Royal, HM Tower of London/Carey - Palestrina, Soriano, et al., 8 July 2026

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 14:26:24 +0000

Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, Tower of London

Palestrina, arr. Francesco Soriano: Missa Papae Marcelli (for eight voices in double choir)
Interspersed with:
Palestrina: Ave Regina coelorum a 8
Plainchant: Ave Maris Stella
Flor Peeters: Toccata, Fugue et Hymne sur Ave Maris Stella, op.28
Plainchant: Gaudeamus omnes in Domino
Charles Tournemire: ‘Introit’ from L’Orgue mystique, op.57 no.35, ‘In assumptio BMV’
Plainchant: Assumpta est Maria
Tournemire: ‘Offertoire’ from L’Orgue mystique, ‘In assumptio BMV’
Palestrina: Assumpta est Maria a 6

Daniel Greenaway (organ)
Choir of the Chapels Royal, HM Tower of London
Colm Carey (director)

Images: Matt Abel-Smith (from another performance by this choir)

This final concert from the 2026 Spitalfields Festival provided not only an excellent musical experience. It also offered the opportunity to visit one of the Tower of London’s two chapels, St Peter ad Vincula, its current building dating from the 1520s, although others have stood on the same site, perhaps even prior to the Norman Conquest. Many are buried there, including two of Henry VIII’s wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, both executed at the Tower, and his successor-but-one, albeit for nine days, Queen Jane. Thomas Macaulay wrote of the chapel, in his mid-nineteenth-century History of England:

In truth there is no sadder spot on the earth than that little cemetery. Death is there associated, not, as in Westminster Abbey and Saint Paul's, with genius and virtue, with public veneration and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and churchyards, with everything that is most endearing in social and domestic charities; but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame. Thither have been carried, through successive ages, by the rude hands of gaolers, without one mourner following, the bleeding relics of men who had been the captains of armies, the leaders of parties, the oracles of senates, and the ornaments of courts.

It depends what one means by sadness; if one understands it as something qualitatively different from, say, tragic, as opposed to the latter being an extreme version of the former, then this might, according to taste, have truth in it. At any rate, this royal peculiar is an interesting, unusual, and enduringly strange corner of what is itself now a rather strange complex, more exclusively associated in the popular imagination with imprisonment, execution, and death than its history warrants, so much so that one can readily forget the Tower was for centuries a palace in which English monarchs lived in courtly splendour, eating, drinking, carousing, ruling, praying, and more.

There was nothing especially deathly about this concert, notwithstanding the tombs around us (hardly unusual in church buildings). It was, however, an unusual programme, offering an arraignment for eight voices in double choir of Palestrina’s celebrated Missa Papae Marcelli by one of his pupils, Francesco Soriano. Colm Carey, director of the Choir of the Chapels Royal, HM Tower of London, thought it may have been the first concert performance in this country; at any rate it was a rare opportunity. The twofold legend that the Council of Trent sought to banish polyphony from services and that Palestrina’s mass ‘saved’ it may be little more than that. It has proved a hardy legend though, all the way to Hans Pfitzner’s opera and beyond. The intelligibility of the liturgical text, saviour of polyphony or not, is the crucial thing here—and it certainly endures in Sapiano’s version, all the more so when performed with such excellence as we were treated to here. Palestrina’s mass is written for six voices, with a seventh added for the second movement of the ‘Agnus Dei’, although he employs different combinations of voices throughout. From what I have read – I do not recall having heard any other music by him – Soriano worked basically within the tradition of Palestrina, with whom he studied at St John Lateran, whilst adopting the newer polychoral style, which fits very well with what we heard here.

A rich toned, admirably clear performance kept counterpoint and harmony in admirable balance. The ‘Kyrie’ flowing nicely, with its ‘Christe’ offering contrast and continuation, nicely shaded without fussiness or undue anachronism. Palestrina’s eight-voice Ave Regina coelorum sounded, perhaps, a little ‘purer’—though this may well have been my fancy, owing to what I ‘knew’. At any rate, it offered another complement and contrast, as well as pleasure and edification in its counterpoint. No one could doubt the ‘Tridentine’ intelligibility of the ‘Gloria’, as the liturgy became wordier. It was here that the arrangement revealed certain foretellings of later music, if not quite Monteverdi’s seconda prattica, then a little beyond the primo. Tenor intonation of the plainchant Ave maris stella (which many of course will recognise from Monteverdi) prefaced Daniel Greenaway’s performance of a Toccata, Fugue, et Hymne on that theme by Flor Peeters Greenaway communicated i.ts structure with admirable clarity, not merely for itself, but enabling the music that forms it to come to life. It is a strangely reactionary piece – like much twentieth-century organ music – but its echoes of Hindemith were not without interest.

Hearing the Palestrina-Soriano mass in such a chapel gave rise to some thoughts of correspondence with English music, above all that of Byrd, and perhaps most clearly in the ‘Credo’. To perform it in a chapel such as this would once have been unthinkable, perhaps giving rise to a greater English exceptionalism than was ever warranted. In more purely musical terms, to hear it performed as if in one, variegated breath, form secure and revealing, was a splendid gift. Two pieces from Charles Tournemire’s liturgical L’Orgue mystique, each again preceded by appropriate plainchant, showed a markedly different aspect to the organ in general, the chapel instrument in particular, and its playing. Here, moreover, the composer’s elaboration of plainsong seemed considerably more rooted in the immanent qualities of the material. If, at one point, I could have sworn I heard a recollection of the then new music of Turandot, I suspect it was coincidental or mere fancy: more a reflection of having heard the opera twice in recent succession than anything else. Or perhaps not; I must relisten.

Returning to Palestrina and Soriano, the ‘Sanctus’ did just what it should, singing its praises unhurried, yet flowing. The ‘Benedictus’ likewise boasted a keen sense of inevitable ‘rightness’, culminating in cries of ‘Osanna’ that truly lifted the soul. They in turn led to the spirited ascension of Palestrina’s six-voice motet Assumpta est Maria, which sounded, however sentimental the notion may be, properly Marian—connecting us to the chapel’s earliest, pre-Reformation history as well as to revivals thereafter. Carolling harmonic surprises on the words ‘Maria Virgo’ proved a highlight of programme and performance alike, angels singing from heaven to earth and back again, then building to fine, rounded climaxes. With an ‘Agnus Dei’ of hymnal sincerity, fitting to its place in liturgical and concert frameworks alike, the programme reached a conclusion of estimable beauty.

Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 5 July 2026

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:47:28 +0000

Images: Stephan Rabold

Bassa Selim – Bülent Ceylan
Konstanze – Adela Zaharia
Blonde – Serafina Starke
Belmonte – Siyabonga Maqungo
Pedrillo – Michael Laurenz
Osmin – David Steffens

New version and presentation – Bülent Ceylan, Andrea Moses, Michael Höppner
Director – Andrea Moses
Set designs – Raimund Bauer
Costumes – Anja Rabes
Lighting – Irene Selka
Video – Andrea Gabriel
Dramaturgy – Michael Höppner, Detlef Giese

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Gerhard Polifka)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Thomas Guggeis (conductor)

No one is perfect, although Mozart’s music often is. One of many differences between the Staatsoper Unter den Linden’s previous and current musical directors is the latter’s apparent lack of interest in the operas of Mozart. Christian Thielemann’s ongoing rejuvenation of the house’s record in Strauss’s dramatic works has already offered some compensation. Both he and Daniel Barenboim have of course long since proved themselves distinguished, if strikingly different, Wagnerians. It was, in his context, a heartening development to see the house offer a new production of Die Entführung aus dem Serail—not, I think, a work Barenboim ever conducted in full, although he was known to offer its overture in Busoni’s conclusion. (Barenboim’s advocacy of his fellow adoptive Berliner Busoni’s music is another aspect of the old regime yet to be reprised, but there is time.) That, however, was before reckoning with the new ‘version’ served up by director Andrea Moses, dramaturge Michael Höppner, and comedian Bülent Ceylan. In what proved to be an increasingly depressing evening, there were important redeeming features: the singers and, still more, the players of the Staatskapelle Berlin. The abiding memory, alas, will be of one of the most important musical works in German theatrical history having been treated with undisguised contempt by a director and dramaturge who seemed not even to have bothered to engage with it in the first place.

Billing this as an encounter between comedy and opera immediately posed the question (or rather, sadly did not) of what the relationship between the two might hitherto have been. Have there not been a few such ‘encounters’, or rather more than that, before? It is always worth, though, trying to approach something on its own terms: not that those terms cannot be criticised, but one will better criticise if one has discovered what they might have been. In that, I am afraid I can at best prove only partially successful. Ceylan essentially set the parameters for the evening by introducing it as a comedy show, ‘Entführung Live’. The idea of him as host drifting in and out of the character of the Bassa Selim is not an uninteresting one. Something improvised might, moreover, have sat in fruitful conflict with the work and the more general aesthetic of Vienna’s Nationalsingspiel. If anything, though, the tyranny of a new script proved more of a problem, Ceylan initially speaking as if this were the premiere, only later referring to that in the past tense. Whilst, to an extent, the lack of projection may have been part of the joke, incomprehensibility (to some) of Turkish German and Mannheim dialect the point, I am not sure it can be let off quite so easily. Moreover, for an event that prided itself on speaking to an international audience, the lack of titles, if not for the comedy then at least for the ‘new’ dialogue, was odd. If non-German-speakers, or indeed those of us with some German who nonetheless may have struggled at times, would have known anything, it would surely be the musical texts—the only part of the ‘action’ with titles in English or German. Ceylan was at least respectful to the musical artists, at least until the third act, in which his activity involved a good deal of speaking over them. Melodrama, I suppose, one might call it, but the game show element of highlighting apparen members of the audience – presumably in reference, in one case, to that recent Coldplay concert – had nothing to do with Die Entführung, even in its newly ‘presented’ state.

That said, he did what he was engaged for, and largely did it well. Ire should be reserved for Moses and her dramaturge. For what the production itself was ultimately concerned with remained to me elusive: very little, so far as I could tell, beyond this ‘encounter’. ‘Love’, perhaps, yet without any real questioning of what that might be—or have been. Characterisation went out of the window; there was some very odd direction of Konstanze in ‘Martern aller Arten’, in which she suddenly seemed turned on by the whole farrago, only immediately to forget that. Also absent was much sense of place, beyond a slightly baffling setting of much of it on a ship. Worst of all, the set design at one point revealed an offensive caricature of a woman’s eyes peering out from behind a burqa, hardly ever seen in Turkey, then or now: Orientalism and, let us be honest, Islamophobia far worse than anything in the work, by twenty-first- let alone eighteenth-century standards. (In her incoherent Staatsoper Meistersinger, she arbitrarily incorporated ‘sinister’ Arab figures towards the close, so there seems to be something of a pattern, both undiscriminating and, well, something worse.) The final moral, according to T-shirts thrust upon actors and chorus, appeared to be that everyone loved Bassa Selim. Hmmm, maybe. And even if true: is that it?

There were occasional suggestions that the perennial question ‘was its deutsch? / ‘what is German?’ – we have all been there – might be a theme, but it was so poorly sustained and, worse, haplessly addressed, that it would have been better left alone. If you start from the smug liberal standpoint that your values, more or less anti-historical, stand at such a level of perfection that they are all anyone has needed, currently needs, or will need, you are unlikely to advance politically and certain not to advance dramatically. To quote the unlamented Kamala Harris, ‘I’m speaking.’ Harris’s notorious refusal to acknowledge the right of protestors to be heard, let alone the justice of their cause, indeed points to the ‘elephant in the room’ chez Moses et al. in a city and country that proudly flies Israeli flags (antisemitically described by the present Federal Chancellor as ‘Judenfahne’) from public buildings. If you want a contemporary Orientalist theme, it is staring you in the face, but that would require a little courage. What we heard instead were less calls to Lessing’s gospel of tolerance, let alone modern diversity, than of self-congratulation that Berlin first and Germany second had advanced to their current stage of enlightenment. In reality, Moses offered no real concept beyond self-congratulation and enabling sections of the audience to congratulate themselves too, and strikingly little interest in, or even awareness of, the work. The craft of actual stage direction seemed more notable for absence than presence (unless, clutching at straws, the impression of non-direction were itself a misguided aesthetic choice).

Enough—though enough did not come soon enough. There were, as I said, aspects of the evening’s ‘entertainment’ truly to praise. One would not hear superior Mozart orchestral playing anywhere in the world; one would almost certainly hear significantly worse. Woodwind solo playing, duetting, and more was exquisite beyond words. (Much here, for better or worse, was beyond words.) The Staatskapelle strings, though, were every bit as fine, eschewing any hint of what passes today, quite erroneously, for ‘period style’, whilst as alive and alert in the present as one could hope for: unquestionably far more so than anything in the production and its ‘presentation’. What cavils I had lay with sometimes fussy direction by Thomas Guggeis. Whilst there was much to admire in his contribution – if not his unwillingness or perhaps inability to put his foot down in cases of the most egregious directorial intervention – then he could sometimes hold the orchestra down a little too ‘prettily’. Moreover, his participation in the contemporary fad of fortepiano ‘commentary’ was, alas, all too predictable in nature. When it was anything more than tracing an orchestral line on the keyboard in front of him, it came to still less, one particularly embarrassing moment excerpts from Mozart elsewhere, albeit with ‘jazzy’ (certainly not jazz-like) syncopation. Still, when he conducted, he mostly conducted very well and, crucially, let the orchestra mostly speak for itself.

The orchestra’s twin partner in virtue, the opera chorus, acquitted itself well too, whatever the trials presented to it onstage. So too did the cast, headed by a sweet-toned, tender Belmont in Siyabonga Maqungo and the almost instrumentally conceived Konstanze of Adela Zaharia (once past a few balance problems early on). Both made their coloratura dramatically expressive, insofar as Moses permitted, as well as musically glittering. So too did the outstanding Blonde of Serafina Starke, a member of the Staatsoper’s International Opera Studio, and her well-matched Pedrillo, Michael Laurenz, as alert to the many demands placed on him onstage as by the score. David Steffens’s Osmin was also first-class: surprisingly subtle, again insofar as permitted.

There's the rub, alas. I suppose one might try to mount a defence rooted in the genre banished by Joseph II’s theatrical reforms, founded in the ideas of Mozart’s friend Joseph von Sonnenfels. Might we see this as a return to the world of Hanswurst and, especially, his improvisational theatre? Sonnenfels’s – by extension, Joseph’s – objections had related to impurity of language, that is it was not (literary) German enough; dramatic triviality; and extensive extemporisation, that is in terms we might now employ, that it did not present a dramatic ‘work’. Its improvisatory nature, shows often only attaining literary form in their musical items, also rendered it extremely difficult to censor. But no, my heart is not in it. Ultimately, in any particular instance, there are no rules. Do whatever you want; a canonical, if slightly precarious, work will survive. But make sure you know what it is you are dealing with and do it well; otherwise, still more than mocking the work, it will mock you. If only this Entführung were anything like as ‘live’ as it thought it was.

Pelléas et Mélisande, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 3 July 2026

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 12:00:03 +0000

Images: Tatjana Dachsel (from an earlier revival, with a different cast)

Golaud – Simon Keenlyside
Mélisande – Magdalena Kožená
Pelléas – Thomas Blondelle
Geneviève – Anne Sofie von Otter
Arkel – Stephen Milling
Yniold – Henrik Brandstetter
Doctor, Shepherd – David Oštrek

Director – Ruth Berghaus
Revival director – Katharina Lang
Designs – Hartmut Meyer

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Dani Juris)

Staatskapelle Berlin

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

When, all too briefly, I lived in Berlin Mitte, I would regularly take a short walk, often mid-afternoon, to the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof. Taking their place in the firmament of great Berliners buried there, from Fichte and Hegel onwards, are Ruth Berghaus and Paul Dessau, director and composer in a properly Brechtian line. (From the house next to the cemetery, Brecht looked down at the graves of his predecessors, later joining them, and being joined by Helene Weigel.) It is little exaggeration to say that Berghaus saved the Berliner Ensemble from the mortmain of Brecht’s heirs, only to be replaced with their connivance and that of the ruling Socialist Unity Party. Berghaus’s most celebrated or at least most concentrated work in opera followed that period, when she worked with Michael Gielen in the 1980s at the Frankfurt Opera. Sadly, almost nothing of her opera work survives on film, but three or four productions remain in the repertoire: this Berlin Pelléas et Mélisande, her delightful Barber of Seville (also Berlin), Tristan und Isolde (Hamburg), and possibly Elektra (Mannheim).

The Pelléas was seen first in 1991, conducted by none other than Gielen; subsequent conductors have included Daniel Barenboim, Simon Rattle, and now François-Xavier Roth. This was its forty-third appearance performance at the Staatsoper: perhaps less than one might expect for so enduring a staging – compare that with over 350 for the Barber – but then the subtlety, depth, and absolute refusal to play to the gallery of Debussy’s opera have never appealed to sections of the operatic masses. (I once heard someone dismiss it as ‘boring’.) So much the worse for them. If they would not have been converted by this, then I suspect it would ever elude them; after all, we all have blind (deaf?) spots. The only sense in which Berghaus’s staging seems a little dated is perhaps in aspects of Hartmut Meyer’s designs: on reflection, not so much ‘dated’ as not quite of our time. Had I looked at them innocently, I might have guessed early twenty-first century rather than 1991. But they still function with great power as part of a musicodramatic whole, as if Roth and his cast had been involved from the outset: an astonishing achievement, when you think about it.

Like her fellow directors Harry Kupfer (now also in the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof), Götz Friedrich (across the city in Zehlendorf), and Joachim Herz (in Leipzig, as one might expect), Berghaus was a student of that great adoptive Berliner Walter Felsenstein (miles away at Kloser, on the Baltic island of Hiddensee). They may have departed from Felsenstein in post-Brechtian interpretation, but they all built upon his equal concern for musical and dramatic elements (insofar as they may be separated at all). It is perhaps no coincidence that their stagings, where they survive, have often proved especially enduring. Or perhaps it is, for the sell-by-date of a staging stands in a complex relationship to its initial qualities. Nothing, ultimately, is forever—and some wonderful things can prove ultimately ephemeral.

Not this, in any case—and there must surely be something in the production, as well as in the intelligence and craft of those reviving it, that enables such integrated results even now. One certainly notices the stark colours, quasi-abstract yet never cold, from the outset, and one soon becomes emotionally and intellectually involved in the Allemonde they create. The lighting, for whom I can find no one directly credited, is at least as important and, if anything, still more powerful. The shadows it creates are terrifying, and all will attest to the dramatic role, literal and metaphorical, of shadow worlds in this opera. The near-stratospherically vertiginuous staircase, representing Mélisande’s tower far more directly than any more realistic attempt I have seen, provides sceno-dramatic focus for so much and offers terror of its own. Much is invested in every walk up and down, every place and occasion to take a seat, and the rest. Likewise Yniold’s ball: a childish toy, an object of motion, and something to follow Mélisande’s ring into the menacing well. Her deliberate, not careless, tossing of that ring early on into those depths offers a rare, momentary instance of lightness, even humour, albeit set within the ever-ominous, increasingly terrifying workings of Fate.

Costumes and their apparent meaning, or at least amenability to be read, play intriguing balancing acts: a hint, perhaps of the Brechtian commedia dell’arte we know from Berliner Ensemble and Barber alike, but turned both early-French and symbolist. At times, Pelléas and Golaud appear almost interchangeable; at others, characters and situations win through and make their similar costumes irrelevant. The role of letters, their reading, and their consequences, becomes more concrete when they appear in large form, passed from character to character, and at times pinned on the wall (again, perhaps a Brechtian inheritance, but one transformed by another great artist at work). There is a strong feminist element too: Golaud’s rape of Mélisande horrifying, her pregnancy almost intolerably vivid (without male-gaze exploitation); and at least as disturbing as anything else, Arkel’s pursuit and lying with her, founded in the text but extended with well-nigh perfect directorial judgement.

The Staatskapelle Berlin has long experience of Debussy under Barenboim in particular. Roth’s reading brought similar structural virtues and alertness to colour, the later inevitably of a somewhat different nature, founded in his work with period instruments on this work. Wisely, there was no attempt merely to replicate that; we can all do without ever hearing ‘period style on modern instruments’ ever again. But that does not mean music-making, like theatre, cannot, or should not, be in a more intelligent sense ‘historically informed’. Timbre here played as important a structural role as anything else, pointing the way forward to Boulez, as malevolent harmonies, their progression, dramatic implication, and structural role led back to multiple Wagner dramas. Throughout the playing of the Staatskapelle was at least as outstanding as one could hope to hear anywhere.

Simon Keenlyside made the transition from Pelléas to Golaud a while ago, and continues to excel in this music and its drama (or should it be the other way around?) His triangle with Thomas Blondelle and Magdalena Kožená was as credible, revealing, and terrifying as any I can recall. Blondelle may have been indisposed, yet his Pelléas was fresh, alert, vivid and, listening between the lines, doomed. Kožená’s typically intelligent artistry, founded in profound communicative gifts, not least in French, proved almost horrifyingly moving. Anne Sofie von Otter’s Geneviève presided with similar intelligence—and perhaps the occasional hint of her youth and its travails. Stephen Milling’s Arkel was subtly yet powerfully sketched: a fascinating, compelling move from Hunding. No wonder Henrik Brandstetter’s Yniold received such warm and vigorous applause; so excellent was this performance from a soloist of the Tölzer Knabenchor, I confess I thought he must have been an adult singer successfully aping a treble. Even the small roles of Doctor and Shepherd were memorably assumed by David Oštrek.

This, then, was a highly moving and thought-provoking night in the theatre: in itself and for the questions it posed about stagings and their aesthetics, lineage, and longevity. I must try to see that Hamburg Tristan before it is too late.

Charles Craig – English tenor

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 21:13:30 +0000

Charles Craig was born in London on December 3, 1919, and died on January 23, 1997. He came from a large, unmusical family – he was the youngest of fifteen children. As a child, he was fond of the recordings of Enrico Caruso, though he didn’t consider a career as a singer. Craig worked in ordinary jobs, including tailoring, warehouse work, and helping in the family shop.

The Second World War had a profound effect on his life. Craig joined the army and, after being posted to India in 1943, found himself in an Entertainments Unit, where singing arias and ballads gave him hope of a musical career. After demobilization in 1946, he auditioned for the Royal Opera House. He was accepted, but only into the chorus, and for several years he sang tiny parts while learning repertoire from backstage.

His decisive break came through Sir Thomas Beecham. In 1951, Beecham heard him at auditions connected with Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl and offered to sponsor him, paying for singing, acting, and language lessons and even providing a living allowance. Craig studied with the Italian tenor Dino Borgioli. Beecham launched him in concert at the Royal Festival Hall on December 17, 1952, but Craig was ill – apparently with pneumonia – and his performance did not make much of an impression.

He joined the Carl Rosa Opera Company in 1953, making his debut as Rodolfo in La bohème. Touring with Carl Rosa gave him exactly what a late-developing tenor needed: stage experience, stamina, and a broad repertory. He sang Faust, Don Ottavio, the Duke in Rigoletto, Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini, and Des Grieux in Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. By 1957, after admired performances in London, he joined Sadler’s Wells Opera, where he added such parts as Samson, Manrico, and the Prince in the first British professional performance of Dvořák’s Rusalka.

In 1959, Craig made a successful Covent Garden debut as Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly, followed by an even stronger success as Cavaradossi in Tosca. That same year he sang Andrea Chénier, Luigi in Il tabarro, and Sou-Chong in Lehár’s The Land of Smiles. His voice had warmth and a ringing top, which is why Italian audiences sometimes assumed he was one of their own.

During the 1960s, Craig became a major dramatic and spinto tenor. He sang Radames in Aida at Covent Garden in 1961, and the role soon took him abroad – to Rome, Vancouver, Barcelona, Zurich, Naples, and Bologna. His Italian repertory also included Manrico, Canio, Calaf, Turiddu, Cavaradossi, Pinkerton, Andrea Chénier, and several Verdi roles. He also sang Arturo in I Puritani with Joan Sutherland and Pollione in Norma opposite Maria Callas.

His greatest success was as Verdi’s Otello. Craig first sang it with the Scottish Opera in 1963. He made his American debut in the part at Chicago in 1966, and then sang it in Vienna, Berlin, Naples, Munich, Venice, Salzburg, Turin, Lisbon, Düsseldorf, and elsewhere. Curiously, despite this international reputation, he did not sing Otello at Covent Garden until November 1983, when he replaced Plácido Domingo for two performances – twenty years after first taking on the role.

Craig also assumed the heavier German and Russian roles. He sang Florestan, Siegmund, and Siegfried for Scottish Opera; Lohengrin in Berlin; Siegmund again in Hamburg; and Aegisthus in Elektra. In Russian opera, he sang Golitsyn in Khovanshchina and Sergei in the British premiere of Shostakovich’s Katerina Ismailova.

He was not universally admired as an actor; critics sometimes found him stolid. But when the staging suited him, he could be theatrically powerful. The British musicologist and critic Elizabeth Forbes singled out his Turiddu in Zeffirelli’s Cavalleria rusticana as vividly convincing, and his best roles – Otello, Cavaradossi, Radames, Canio – show his vocal acting and emotional directness to be at a very high level.

Craig’s last stage appearance was in 1985 with English National Opera as Cavaradossi in Tosca. Even at sixty-six, his voice was reported to have retained its Italianate color and clarion top. His recorded legacy is not as large as his reputation deserves, but it includes recital discs of Puccini, Italian songs, and operatic arias, as well as a valuable English-language (though it could be in Swahili, I could barely understand a word) Otello recorded in performance at the English National Opera under Mark Elder, recorded in January 1983 with Rosalind Plowright as Desdemona, and Neil Howlett as Iago.

Craig’s importance lies in the unusual combination he embodied: an unmistakably English singer who sounded, in phrasing and vocal color, remarkably close to the Italian tradition. He was not a glamorous international celebrity on the scale of the tenors who dominated the record industry, but he was a fine spinto, verging on dramatic, tenor. At his best – especially in Verdi and Puccini – he had a masculine, ringing sound that made him one of the most distinguished British tenors of the twentieth century.

Thus, the obvious question is why he didn’t make more of an impact, given that he had a world-class instrument? One answer is that horrible curse, bad luck. Another is that he was English, and many opera-goers do not expect a great Italianate sound to come from an Anglican throat. Regardless, he was a great tenor who was underappreciated.

Below are nine recordings that show his rich voice and his fine use of it. First Di quella pira from a live performance in Geneva. Note the powerful high C.

Next two selections from his signature role – Verdi’s Otello. They are both from a staged performance of the opera in Naples in 1969. In ‘Si pel ciel’, the duet that closes Act 2, Craig is joined by Anselmo Colzani. This is followed by ‘Dio mi potevi’. Craig gives a brilliant, emotionally charged reading of the great soliloquy.

In ‘Meco all’altar di Venere’ from Bellini’s Norma, Craig takes the optional high C near the aria’s beginning. Flavio is the young Dennis O’Neill whom I’ll come back to at a future date.

Craig and Peter Glossop (the renowned English baritone) sing the famous duet “Au fond du temple saint”. It’s in English, and some of it is understandable.

‘Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemon’ is from Act 1 of Die Walküre. He brings a lyricism to the piece that often eludes German singers.

Next, some studio recordings that show to great advantage how good Craig’s voice and vocal production were. The Improvviso from Act 1 of Andrea Chenier is brilliantly performed. Craig sounds like a full dramatic tenor.

Every tenor sings ‘Nessun dorma’, but not at this level.

Finally, the Italian song by Tosti – ‘L’alba separa dalla luce l’ombra’.

Munich Opera Festival (4) - Die Walküre, 1 July 2026

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:56:50 +0000

Nationaltheater

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Siegmund – Joachim Bäckström
Hunding – Ain Anger
Wotan – Nicholas Brownlee
Sieglinde – Irene Roberts
Brünnhilde – Miina-Lisa Värelä
Fricka – Ekaterina Gubanova
Helmwige – Dorothea Herbert
Gerhilde – Julie Adams
Ortlinde – Elaine Gvritshvili
Waltraute – Claudia Mahnke
Siegrune – Niina Keitel
Rossweiße – Christina Rock
Grimgerde – Natalie Lewis
Schwertleite – Noa Beinart
Loge – Charith Pidikiti

Director – Tobias Kratzer
Assistant director – Matthias Piro
Designs – Rainer Sellmaier
Lighting – Michael Bauer
Video – Manuel Braun, Jonas Dahl, Janic Bebi
Dramaturgy – Bettina Bartz, Olaf Roth

Bayerische Staatsorchester
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

As a student in Berlin, Ludwig Feuerbach attended lectures from, among others, GWF Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher: far from an unusual combination, but prophetic for his subsequent development as the pre-eminent Young Hegelian philosopher of love-communism. Although he lectured at Erlangen, Feuerbach failed to obtain a university position, an ambition rendered impossible following revelation of his authorship of the atheistic Thoughts on Death and Immortality published anonymously in 1830, a year in which revolutions once again began to sweep Europe. His writings, including those Thoughts, The Essence of Christianity, and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, inspired many radicals in the next wave of revolutions (1848-51), although Feuerbach remaining personally aloof from revolutionary activity. One of those, of course, was Richard Wagner, who, shortly after publication of Feuerbach’s Thoughts, had gained his first experience, direct and reported, of revolution, inspired by events in Paris, Leipzig, and even the previously quiescent Dresden. The seventeen-year old Saxon would recall in his autobiography Mein Leben ‘the world of history’ having come to life: ‘Saxony was not spared: in Dresden it even came to street-fighting’. He began to attend Leipzig University lectures on philosophy and aesthetics, and henceforth considered himself a ‘fervent partisan of the revolution’. Wagner would go on read at least all three of the Feuerbach books named above and, in contrast to one of his great intellectual mentors, stood anything but aloof from revolutionary political activity—be it in practice, during the 1849 Dresden uprising, or in the fruits of his post-revolutionary exile in Zurich. Among those were The Artwork of the Future, dedicated to Feuerbach, its very title a homage, and of course Die Walküre, perhaps his single most Feuerbachian drama—in that the positive, as well as negative, side of a religion purer than yet related to Christianity, founded on love, features most strongly in the love of Siegmund and Sieglinde, and Brünnhilde’s conversion to their creed, crucially at the ‘price’, in reality an elevation, of losing her own immortality.

With this Walküre, newly premiered, Tobias Kratzer’s Munich Ring reaches its second instalment. I was unable to see Das Rheingold; but on the evidence of this, as well as much of his other work – his near-universally loved Bayreuth Tannhäuser, various Deutsche Oper productions, and more – I hope to put that right before long. Even considered on its own, Kratzer’s Walküre has numerous distinctions, but perhaps its most distinctive feature, at least until the third act, is a more overt Feuerbachian element than any other I can recall. I suspect it would seem so all the more in light of the Rheingold, but that must remain a matter of speculation by now. What it certainly does is put the gods, even here, centre-stage, not only as ‘the gods’, characters in this drama, but emphatically as gods—and emphatically not, as Ernst Bloch put it, ‘called gods without being gods’.

The curtain rises on a rural, possibly suburban chalet; by deduction, it may be somewhere outside Munich, though it need not be. This, of course, is Hunding’s house, at the end of the driveway a quasi-Marian shrine, albeit to Fricka. That is, Kratzer follows Wagner absolutely in presenting a dramatic critique of religion, mostly yet not only Christianity, albeit shrouded, as it were, in the guise of Germanic paganism. (Wagner is doing other things with reference to the Eddas and sagas too, but he is certainly doing that, in unambiguously post-Feuerbach fashion.) It is here, under Fricka as well as Hunding, also under a larger, indoor ecclesiastical shrine, not unlike a tabernacle or reliquary, perhaps denoting the rule of Valhalla/religion/Christianity more generally, that Siegmund takes refuge. Sieglinde is clearly a member of this religion too, since she genuflects before the shrine even when Hunding has gone—and, initially shamefully, later with abandon, celebrates her wholesale abandon(ment) only after covering it. When, in the second act, Wotan comes to earth, like the gods of old (though also, if we believe the New Testament, ours too), he is distressed not only by Fricka’s demolition of the new religion he has ultimately inspired, but by the destruction of the shrine within: his old religion, one might say. Just as Wagner’s god is torn, so is he, visibly as well as audibly so.

That Hunding, whose cause Fricka takes, should be a devotee of her understanding of this religion – sect, perhaps – will surprise no one, but it is clear, not assumed. She even recognises herself in it; I am tempted to add, in Biblical style, ‘and it was good’, save that obviously it was not for humanity. We even see a ram, albeit a dead one; hers is a chariot, if only metaphorically, of death—as in Wagner. When death occurs, moreover, it is unquestionably violent; we are no more spared than its more direct victims. When Wotan, in anger, bids Hunding kneel before Fricka, Wagner’s goddess of ‘custom’ (as he explained in a letter to August Röckel), the bourgeois property- and motor-owner does just that: not something I have seen before. She and other gods – I assume, Froh, Donner, and Freia – whom we have already seen, in a drawing projected at some point during Wotan’s monologue, observe events on the battlefield. Dressed in designer Rainer Sellmaier’s mediaeval, even Burgundian-Nibelungenlied garb, they offer strong connection to the mediaevalism of work, Wagner’s selection and adoption of sources, and to the hostile, Young Hegelian critique of church and state such as had been mystically united in states such as the Prussia of Frederick William IV.

Another such example, if less fanatically so, was the Saxony in which Kapellmeister Wagner threatened to burn it all down—and took delight in seeing just that in his opera house: ‘8 May (Monday) Morning once again by roundabout route via barricades to Town Hall. At S. Anne Barricade guard shouts “Well, Mr Conductor, joy’s beautiful divine spark’s made a blaze.” (3rd perf. 9th Symphony at previous Palm Sunday concert; Opera House now burnt down. Strange feeling of comfort.)’ Another important point, I suspect, from Wotan’s monologue: in his proto-Parsifalian wandering, he passes a church. Out of it ran two hooded figures, disaffected youth, it would seem. Something within me wondered whether one might be Alberich, in the one Ring drama in which he ‘should’ not appear onstage. I think it was, for during the Ride of the Valkyries, a hooded figure with child, surely Hagen, watches. We shall see. To be reminded, at any rate, of Wagner’s contemporary and fellow Feuerbach enthusiast (for a while), Marx, and his more or less contemporaneous observation, in explicit Young Hegelian critique of Hegel, that ‘the relationship of industry [Alberich] and, in particular, the world of wealth to the political world [the gods] is one of the principal problems of modern times,’ was salutary—and I should be surprised to learn that it had merely been my interpretative fancy.

So far, so excellent—all accomplished in fine Personenregie and response thereto. This is no mere concept; it is an absorbing drama. That of the third act is hardly less so in the latter respect, although it seems strangely distant from what has gone before. Perhaps more will be revealed in Siegfried or Götterdämmerung, but once past a video ‘Ride’ that took in much of Munich, Brünnhilde at the helm of Apocalypse Now helicopter, an original ‘Bavarian host’ of the Siegestor, thus returning to source as it were. Naturally, the local audience loved it, and why not, numerous aspects of the city eliciting gasps of recognition and, less laudably, actual applause. Surely one can appreciate a coup de théâtre or de cinéma without Pavlovian response. That nonetheless we should end up in the Nationaltheater may have particular warrant, given it was here that, against Wagner’s wishes, Ludwig II had it all begin. Perhaps Kratzer anticipated the applause or such reaction, and turned it against the audience avant la lettre. We can read it that way anyway. And perhaps subsequent events will play out more fully in that respect—and not too closely to Stefan Herheim’s metatheatrical Deutsche Oper Ring. But it seemed a slight pity. There is still much to admire in the emergency repair work – and religious rebirth? – offered by Valkyrie body-snatchers to heroes, as well as in the passionate direction and portrayal of Wotan and Brünnhilde thereafter. That the demi-god Loge appears as bidden, with flame, at the close, ties all neatly together. Yet I could not help but think – this is really my sole cavil – a more apt setting might have been found, unless the point be that the opera house is now our dubious temple. If so, I shall happily recant; again, we shall see.

In one sense, though, even that helped point, in the unlikely event anyone should have needed pointing, to the truest heroes of all: the orchestra that first performed this work. Wherever you may have heard it, in Berlin, Bayreuth, Dresden, Vienna, or elsewhere, it is unlikely to have been played better than this. Strings were dark yet incisive, ‘old German’ in a way Furtwängler might have recognised, ‘dramatic’ in a way Boulez might have done. The rest of the playing was equally outstanding, the Ride far more than showpiece, but rather quite rightly a symphonic movement taking its place in Wagner’s dramatic whole. Vladimir Jurowski’s conducting had its moments in better and worse senses. To begin with, too often one could hear as well as see him conduct. Wagner became a miniaturist in a sense too close to Nietzsche’s jibe. It was all too effortful, though to Jurowski’s credit, he never tried to get this great orchestra to sound like anything other than itself. The third act was more at ease with itself, with far fewer odd impositions upon it; it flowed in a way closer to the Rhine (or Isar) and thus the orchestra’s mysterious, Delphic oracle sounded more unbidden—save, in the eternal riddle, for who might have created its own gods.

Speaking of heroes, Joachim Bäckström made for a fine Siegmund, his chemistry with Irene Roberts’s increasingly ecstatic Sieglinde – what a foretelling of Siegfried she offered! – thrilling and, at times, disturbing to watch. For Kratzer did not follow Wagner in his understanding of incest. These twins, even the religious Sieglinde, were positively excited by the prospect of incest, as opposed to loving each other and its revelation not mattering. Again, film revealed some of the backstory, adding to rather than merely mirroring what we learned from narration—at least after the first, slightly disappointing instalment. Nicholas Brownlee’s Wotan we had thus seen and known already, his fireside sadness, seen by the siblings’ mothers, projected into a wise, multivalent portrayal of the ‘sum of present-day intelligence’ (Wagner on the character, immediately prior to starting work on the score of this opera).

Ekaterina Gubanova’s imperious, haughty, godlike Fricka was all one might hope for, in general and in context. Ain Anger’s self-assured Hunding was no mere thug, though he was certainly given to violence; here was a man who knew his beliefs and his patriarchal rights, and was willing to fight for them. Miina-Lisa Värelä’s Brünnhilde’s journey to the brink of losing immortality absorbed us through excellent, Wagnerian command of words, music, and gesture. Other Valkyries offered singing and acting of the highest order. For not the least of the work’s and performance’s virtues was a celebration of Wagner’s Feuerbachian conception of the ‘purely human’ and its socialist expansion into a vision, political, s

Puccini - Tosca, at La Monnaie in Brussels

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 08:36:01 +0000

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday June 28 2026

Conductor: Jordan de Souza. Production & costumes: Rafael R. Villalobos. Sets: Emanuele Sinisi. Lighting: Felipe Ramos. Paintings: Santiago Ydáñez. Floria Tosca: Leah Hawkins. Mario Cavaradossi: Stefano La Colla. Il barone Scarpia: Lucio Gallo. Cesare Angelotti: Li Huanhong. Il sagrestano: Paolo Orecchia. Spoletta: Trystan Llŷr Griffiths. Sciarrone: Kamil Ben Hsaïn Lachiri. Un pastore: Pieter De Praetere. Un carceriere: René Laryea. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie.

Photos: Pieter Claes, Karl Forster

My last opera of the 25-26 season - assuming Rossini’s Le siège de Corinthe in Pesaro this coming August doesn’t count - was Rafael R. Villalobos’s production of Tosca, in Brussels. This isn’t new at La Monnaie, but when it first appeared there in 2021 it was - like this season’s Norma as well - severely hit by Covid restrictions, and so attended by only a few. I’d previously only seen the director’s Hänsel und Gretel, or in this case Jancsi és Juliska, performed in Hungarian in Budapest. That was nearly ten years ago. But as he is, unusually, a director I’ve actually met (you can count on the fingers of one hand the opera professionals I know personally), I’ve followed his career with interest since. So while, after seeing it, I remarked that his cheerful updating of the Humperdinck was only sparsely contested at the Erkel Theatre, I’m aware that in Barcelona, for example (this is a coproduction with Montpellier, Barcelona and Seville) his Tosca gave rise what one critic called a ‘monumental boo,’ of a kind ‘not heard there in twenty years.’

Why?

Well of course it could just have been that the audience had expected a more traditional Tosca, though by now, in Barcelona, that seems unlikely. Perhaps it was because Villalobos's take on the work is just too complicated, with a certain piling-on of ideas suggested to him by the story. To me, as staged, it doesn’t actually live up to the ambitions laid out on La Monnaie’s website and in the copious programme notes. (La Monnaie’s programmes are not just a flimsy leaflet full of adverts for jewellery and scent, but two sturdy volumes, one containing cast details, the plot, bilingual essays and photos, and another the complete libretto, in the original language plus French and Flemish.)

More specifically, though, as far as I know, what was most loudly booed at the Liceu was a scene acted out in silence, right after the interval, in a box beside the stage: a tiff of sorts between an actor looking like Pier Paolo Pasolini and a curly-haired youth - perhaps Pino Pelosi, his alleged assassin. Because yes, a Pasolini lookalike is present on stage, and the production refers, explicitly if (thank goodness) surprisingly tamely, to the director’s Salò o le centoventi giornate di Sodoma.

Villalobos ingeniously links Pasolini to all three of the opera’s main characters. ‘This great artist,’ he writes in one of the programme essays, ‘regarded as an enemy of the government, was persecuted by the very same institutions of power as those depicted in Victorien Sardou’s play.’ According to one of several quotations from Pasolini projected during the production, ‘The moment he opens his mouth, an artist is engaged, because opening his mouth is always scandalous.’ So in the painter Mario, we see one facet of the cineast.

The title of his essay, Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma, refers as much to Mario (though in a different sense) as to Scarpia. ‘In my view,’ the director tells us, ‘there is a close parallel between the sadomasochistic yet incredibly poetic world of Salò and the second act of Tosca.’ In Scarpia, we see a second facet of Pasolini.

Then in Tosca herself, we see a third. The production, Villalobos tells us, deals with fear, faith and loss of faith - Tosca’s like Pasolini’s. ‘I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief,’ is another quotation projected during the production. The three acts are intended, the director tells us, to reflect Tosca’s progress from naive, unthinking belief in the first, through shock and incipient doubt in the second, to ‘the post-traumatic alienation’ of the third. For good measure, Romans 8 (Whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified’) and Victor Hugo’s The Pope (‘Le sceptre est vain, le trône est noir, la pourpre est vile’) are also convoked.

There's one basic set. A modular central space on stage is formed, under a ring of neon, by two concentric, rotating half-rotundas, the outer one a series of solid white arches inspired by Italian fascist architecture, the inner one, repeating the arches, a white steel framework, a sort of pergola. As each is open to one side, as the one rotates around the other, they provide the necessary scene changes and entries and exits. Each act involves monumental paintings, specially commissioned from Andalucian artist Santiago Ydáñez: a giant Madonna, giant nudes filling the arches, replaced, as the set shifts, by snarling dogs, a Judith and Holofernes inspired by Caravaggio…

The first act’s staggering, long-haired Angelotti is on his last legs. To paint, Mario wears a white shirt and grey suit trousers, like no artist I’ve ever seen at work. Tosca enters in a trouser-suit and an absurdly broad-brimmed, floppy hat, all black, carrying multiple Chanel-style shopping bags. She is coquettish, but solemnly lays a bouquet of lilies at the feet of a chalk-white statue of the Virgin. The louche, occasionally vicious sacristan entertains an ambiguous relationship with his three choirboys, near-naked under semi-transparent shifts. During their horseplay, just as Scarpia appears buttoned up in narrow, undertaker black, one of them is stripped to his underpants.

In an interview online, Villalobos assures us the plot is played out straightforwardly, and largely it is. But at the end of the act there’s no procession, indeed no chorus on stage at all: they’re kept in the wings. And there’s no cardinal, either, but Tosca sails in at the rear (like, I thought incongruously, the Marschallin showing up at the inn) in a stiff white gown that obviously but mysteriously recalls a Pope - Scarpia, after all, is holding a mitre. While Pasolini hovers in the background, when she turns to leave, she reveals a skull painted on the back.

In the central act, equally unexpectedly, she enters in shoulder-caped, cardinal red robes, before shucking them off to remain in a simple, black dress. Scarpia washes her feet. This is the Salò act, so the choirboys, now naked and carrying lilies like the ones Tosca laid at the Virgin’s feet, are subject to the (simulated) sado-masochistic attentions of Scarpia’s handsome but loutish sbirri. And this is the act where, as Mario is tortured, the Pasolini-inspired standing nudes are replaced by those snarling hounds.

The act three set is at its barest. The rotundas effectively recall the circular castle, and bear the words ROMA O MORTE in white neon. The ‘post-traumatic alienation’ is expressed in Tosca’s exaggerated laughter and screams. At the end, as in some other contemporary productions, rather than leaping off the mausoleum, she walks off slowly into clouds of brightly-lit stage smoke.

I won't claim that all this directorial ‘apparatus’, so to speak, is mistaken or misguided, but unfortunately Villalobos doesn't make it work convincingly. In print, he presents his ideas with conviction, but the result on stage seems somehow half-hearted. In the end it had me wondering whether Tosca isn’t just obvious enough as it stands (Sardou was seen, so I’ve read, as a particularly efficient playwright), and as such, a dubious candidate for conceptualisation.

But then… we were just emerging from the hottest June heatwave Europe has ever experienced, and it was still, on Sunday, a warm afternoon. Who knows what it felt like, for the cast, to be costumed up under theatre lights on stage? Also, as I’ve often said about these Brussels matinees, not all singers are at their best just after lunch. This is why I hesitate to say how I felt about the singing. Here are my honest thoughts.

Paolo Orecchia was a firmer-sounding, less decrepit sagrestano than we often get.

Stefano La Colla (Mario) is, as someone better-qualified than I am said to me later, no doubt a serviceable singer. He hits all the notes, mostly loudly - i.e. he’s the ‘can belto’ kind, not really cut out for loving tenderness. His lower and middle range has, to my ear, a slightly hollow sound, and his top thins out to a metallic cord. His way of sliding down from it, something he does more than once, with that steely sound and no vibrato, is ugly. He uses the irritating, showy trick of ending his hit numbers with a crescendo on the final note, and the young Canadian conductor, Jordan de Souza, made the mistake of giving him ‘concert’ endings, i.e. bringing the orchestra to a halt after them. Unfortunately, at the end of ‘Recondita armonia’, the audience remained silent.

Lucio Gallo (Scarpia) is a solid, dark baritone (bass, I might even have supposed), whose experience shows. He seems most comfortable at the top of his range; when agitated his intonation in the medium sounds unruly. He was, I thought, the best in this cast.

Leah Hawkins (Tosca) has a darkish, chesty lower range and a smoky, almost husky medium. Her voice isn’t wholly consistent - it alters as it rises, and her top notes are more those of a strong lyric soprano than a dramatic one. It felt as though she saved her best for ‘Vissi d’arte’, which I guess is understandable. She isn’t the first and won’t be the last. I’m not sure, though, she has quite the vocal heft, from bottom to top, for the role.

De Souza’s approach to the score was more brash and ‘in-your-face’ than varied and subtle, which is one way of approaching Tosca, though at times, that being said, he could at times still have injected more vigour and drive into it.

I’m afraid all this comes across as too bleakly negative. The cast were all reasonably strong and visibly committed, yet… this wasn’t really an international-class Tosca. Leaving the house, my neighbour and I concluded that, taken as a whole, whatever the singers’ merits, none of it had actually given us any pleasure. A disappointing conclusion to a Tosca, and in this case, to the season.

Note: some of the production photos, by Pieter Claes and Karl Forster, show a different cast.

Maestro Wenarto opts for a more traditional staging:

(An edited version of this post may be published on Parterre.com.)

Munich Opera Festival (3) - Turandot, 30 June 2026

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 08:38:11 +0000

Nationaltheater

Images: Geoffroy Schied

Turandot – Sondra Radvanovsky
Altoum – Kevin Conners
Timur – Christian Van Horn
Calaf – Yonghoon Lee
Liù – Golda Schultz
Ping – Vitor Bispo
Pang – Tansel Akzeybek
Pong, Prince of Persia – Samuel Stopford
Mandarin – Bálint Szabó

Director – Carlus Pedrussa/La Fura dels Baus
Designs – Roland Olbeter
Costumes – Chu Oruz
Video – Franc Aleu
Lighting – Urs Schönebaum
Dramaturgy – Andrea Schönhofer, Rainer Karlitschek
Revival director – Lejila Selfried

Chorus, Children’s Chorus, and Extra Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (chorus director: Christoph Hell)
Extras, Children Extras, and Opera-Ballet of the Bavarian State Opera
Bavarian State Orchestra
Conductor – Andrea Battistoni

How curious. I learned what this Turandot had been about only upon consulting the programme post-performance. To be honest, I wish I had not done so. A quotation from La Fura dels Baus’s website will do: ‘In 2046 Europe is completely under Chinese rule. More than 30 years, China had rescued Europe from a financial crisis by buying up the debt, the ownership and natural resources. China is now the new world power. Turandot, the princess of ice control, as “Big Brother” every European, in order to pay back every last penny and pay off the debt of their parents’ generation.’ There is, I suppose, nothing like a bit – a lot – of paranoid Western Sinophobia to knock the work’s tamer racism into perspective. How this was depicted onstage I am at a loss to describe, but there you have it.

For, if that sounds like the sort of thing a US Republican might utter or like to hear, what we saw often suggested something devised to hold the attention of an octogenarian man-baby president. There was certainly something going on all the time: less an evocation of the circus, or on engagement with the idea of one, commedia dell’arte or otherwise, than a circus in itself. If not so vacuous as, say, the Cirque du soleil, Carlus Pedrussa’s production was not so far off as it appeared to think itself. Breakdancers, acrobats, rollerskaters: someone was and often many people were doing something or many things all of the time. Quite why remained obscure, at least to me. I wondered whether some comment was being made about visual overload, and perhaps it was. But its relation to Turandot I could only hazard to tell you, until the final scene when things calmed down and the characters were directed rather well. Titles instructed us when to put on our 90s-style 3-D glasses, red and blue, which promised far more than they delivered. Apart from turning much of what we saw, well, red and blue, they enabled us to see a few objects flying around between us and the stage. Spectacle has always been a dramatic – or, indeed a postdramatic – tool in opera. Here, I am afraid, things tended towards Wagner’s celebrated denunciation of Meyerbeer as effect without cause.

Pedrussa’s decision – again, I quote La Fura dels Baus’s website – to present a Turandot ‘strictly pure and original’ mighty suggest conflict, productive or otherwise, with visual hyperactivity. Did it ‘respect the composer’s music’? Arguably so, in that it presented it as one might expect, save for one exception of ultra-‘respect’, ending ‘when the choir says “Liú poesía”.’ I had not heard it done this way before, so was curious to discover how it might turn out. Not very well, alas. It can plausibly be argued that there is no entirely satisfactory solution to this particular problem, not even Berio’s—and certainly not Franco Alfano’s. But this not only sounded quite at odds with what we had seen; it also presented an oddly muted winding down to an opera for which subtlety may hardly be a priority, but tonal dramaturgic strategy certainly is. Wozzeck stops rather than closes; no one would wish it otherwise. For Turandot more or less to peter out proved an unnecessary disappointment.

Andrea Battistoni’s conducting of the Munich orchestra offered a proverbial curate’s egg. Tremendous Stravinskian precision early on, hammering home Puccini’s inheritance from Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, met with frustrating listlessness later on. If the reading never lost sight of the gorgeousness of the orchestral tapestry, relative lack of structural command doubtless contributed to the disappointment of the close. Much was loud, very loud, although considerably more varied in tone than Yonghoon Lee’s ear-splitting Calaf. Again, this may not be the world’s most subtle opera; nor is Calaf’s the most of operatic characterisation. There is nonetheless more to it, or should be, than unrelieved shouting. Sondra Radvanovsky was cold and imperious as Turandot, and considerably subtler in, say, ‘In questa reggia’. It was difficult not to feel the loss of additional music in her case. Golda Schultz’s Liù was heart-rending: lovelorn and sincere, a star-turn without trying to be a ‘star’. Christian Can Horn’s verbally and musically attentive Timur impressed similarly for adding much that was absent elsewhere. Indeed, all the singing, bar that of Lee, was of excellent quality or better, massed choral forces included. I could only wish the singers – and we – had benefited from a production that had extended beyond School of Franco Zeffirelli, albeit more by default than design.

July 4th and the Hazy Past

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 23:51:15 +0000

As the nation marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, I found myself musing on its 200th anniversary. My life has been long enough that I was a mature man when the bicentennial occurred. My wife and I were driving through the south of Germany on our way to Geneva with no schedule and no reservations, save that we had to catch a plane from the Swiss city to Athens about 10 days after the 4th.

Happenstance took us to a cemetery somewhere in the Black Forest. On America’s birthday, we found ourselves looking at neatly kept rows of tombstones, all of which marked the passing of young men who had died in the early 1940s. Many of the tombstones had small pictures of the dead young men. Obviously, they were casualties from Hitler’s quest for domination.

I felt a very uneasy suspension of feelings at this odd accident of travel. Scores of the graves of very young men who, if they had lived, would not be a lot older than I was. On the opposite pole was the reality that they had died for a cause as evil as any that had ever existed. Then I felt a need to explain my presence in such an unlikely place on a momentous day for the country that had sent or helped to send these young men to these graves.

We left the cemetery and, by accident, found the best hotel in the Black Forest, which had an open room. I soon forgot about the encounter with the dead Hitler Jugend as we continued our improvised journey. Only today did the unlikely event escape the vault of lost memories.

The accident of longevity allowed me to see if I could retrieve other recollections that might in some gauzy way be relative to this day. I came up with a few that might be appropriate for the day, though their connection is fragile.

My parents were both the first children in their respective families to be born in the United States; everyone older was an immigrant. Thus, I grew up among family gatherings that were filled with people who had strange names, at least to me, and who spoke English with heavy Middle-European accents. Their devotion to their adopted country was palpable and unquestioned. They sent their sons off to fight World War II; one was as young as 17.

My maternal grandmother (who lived in the same house as my parents, my brothers, and me) came to this country in 1906 as a passenger on the Hamburg-America Line’s SS Deutschland. She kept the passenger manifest with her until her death more than 60 years later. I spent a lot of time with her. She spoke many languages and helped me with my German homework. She also would give me my allowance back whenever my mother confiscated it for bad behavior – a frequent occurrence.

The incident relevant to today happened when she and I were watching the 1968 Democratic Party national convention in Chicago. I had long since left home to live on my own, but was back for a visit. The violent clashes between police and anti-war demonstrators finally became too much for her.

“What’s the matter with those people?” she asked with deep incredulity. “Don’t they know this is the greatest country in the world?” She had ample basis for comparisons.

Some things never change. May the Fourth be with you.

Munich Opera Festival (2) - Of One Blood, 28 June 2026

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 10:20:55 +0000

Nationaltheater

Production images: Monika Rittershaus

Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England – Johanni von Oostrum
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots – Vera-Lotte Boecker
Female Consorts I-IV – Seonwoo Lee, Mirjam Mesak, Lotte Betts-Dean, Meg Brilleslyper
Female Consort V, Jane Kennedy – Freya Apfellstaedt
Male Consort I, Lord Darnley – Michael Butler
Male Consort II – Joel Williams
Male Consort III, Rizzio – Andrew Hamilton
Male Consort IV, Scottish Lord I – Armand Rabot
Male Consort V, Scottish Lord II, Executioner – Pawel Horodyski
Solo harpsichord – Mahan Esfahani

Director – Claus Guth
Set designs – Etienne Pluss
Costumes – Ursula Kudrna
Sound design – Bob Scott, Sven Eckhoff
Lighting – Michael Bauer
Choreography – Sommer Ulrickson

Dramaturgy – Yvonne Gebauer, Lukas Leipfinger
Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (chorus director: Christoph Hell)
Bavarian State Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

I remember, as a schoolboy, reading in a newspaper about ‘The Hecklers’, a pair of composers with highly reactionary aesthetics, who objected so strongly to Harrison Birtwistle’s Gawain that they protested against its revival at Covent Garden. I would hear Gawain at a subsequent revival, as a student, and be swept off my feet. But at the time, I recall being puzzled by the idea that one would protest against something being performed simply because one did not like it, or even because one thought it not very good. I did not know much about the repertoire of opera houses at the time, but the idea that they were overloaded with new, or even modernist, work was patently absurd. I was equally puzzled, at the end of this performance of Brett Dean’s new opera Of One Blood, to hear loud booing from certain quarters of Munich’s Nationaltheater, when the composer, librettist Heather Betts, and (I think) director Claus Guth came onstage. It was not a premiere, so their appearance was slightly unexpected, if welcome. Could people who had contentedly, so it seemed, sat through two acts of a new opera have felt so strongly about its music – it could, I suppose, have been its libretto, or even its staging – that they felt they must bellow farmyard noises in an attempt to drown out applause? If they had not liked the opera, or had considerable criticisms of it, fair enough, but what was it that had led them to such a display? It was neither a mindlessly reactionary nor a vigorously avant-garde work; it was well crafted, well performed, and well directed. Would not refraining from applause – as, I am sure, many of us have done on occasion – have been enough? I am afraid reflection has left me none the wiser, but the experience was unsettling and has continued to be, not least from concern for those at the sharp end of that strange, bullying response.

The phrase ‘of one blood’ refers to a phrase Mary (Stuart), Queen of Scots used in a letter to her cousin and antagonist – historical and, here, dramatic – Elizabeth I, here ‘Elizabeth Tudor’: ‘We be both of one blood, of one country, and in one Island’. In their communications and other sixteenth-century sources lie the seeds of Betts’s libretto, assembled and constructed after the manner of many a dramatic confrontation between the two. Betts is a visual artist: an interesting case for a librettist in terms of scene-setting, for instance the opening and close of the work in contemporary or perhaps, in Guth’s staging, a future Westminster Abbey, in whose Henry VII/Lady Chapel the two queens lie at opposite ends, at the command of their mutual successor, James VI and I, who also commissioned their tombs. That struck her when visiting, as it might anyone, but its visual element seems to have been especially important to the librettist dramaturgically, focusing the action and the way it plays out, thereby also influencing the staging, as well as providing elements of a solution for the perennial problem of what to do in a drama concerning the entwined lives of two central figures who never met. Contriving an occasion on which they did is a common solution; it is good to welcome an alternative to the fold, in an intriguingly clinical white setting, albeit beneath a hint of English Perpendicular Gothic (which tilted at one point, perhaps as a reflection of changing fortunes and/or danger).

And so, we see the two queens act separately in the beginning, later appearing partly at the same time in their own halves of the stage, with ‘consort’ retinues – I was puzzled before realising the word was intended musically rather than maritally – so as to react one another’s words and deeds, coming tantalisingly close, yet never quite meeting. Tellingly, their union in duet, as opposed to ‘written’ dialogue, takes place when both are offstage. There are oddities to the libretto, or at least features I did not understand: the archaic ‘-eth’ third-person singular is employed, yet we hear ‘will’ rather than ‘wilt’ with thou. It all serves its purpose well enough, though—and perhaps such inconsistencies, if inconsistencies they be, are simply reflections of a language that has always been in change. Titles were used not simply to convey but, at certain points, to add to the libretto, including indication of place, such as Richmond Palace, Holyrood, or of course Fotheringhay Castle.

Collaboration between husband and wife librettist (their daughter one of Mary’s excellent consort) seems to have been fruitfully close. What comes ‘first’, whether chronologically or aesthetically, is ever a fraught question in any such relationship, but there were no obvious signs of tension and many of complement. Likewise between them and Guth, the extraction of both tombs for cleaning and their return at the end an interesting element of the aforementioned framing rather than contrast or contradiction. A low opening pedal – electronic rather than acoustic, I think – sounds, Rheingold-like yet -unlike, the musical beginning, subsequent scraping noises, like a dental implement writ large, partaking of the drama and ushering in the Bayerische Staatsorchester, here on excellent form under Vladimir Jurowski’s wise, invigorating direction. Two worlds, then, collided and coincided in more ways than one: multidimensional yet bilateral dramatic conflict, one might say. This was further layered in the Elizabethan scenes with harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani onstage. Few if any harpsichordists have done more for new music than Esfahani; here his role once again bridged divides between old and new, his instrument inciting orchestral and electronic material, and on at least one occasion – if my ears did not deceive me – prefigured in the ‘purely’ electronic material of the very opening. The dramatic possibilities of such time travel were manifold—perhaps all the better for being left to us not necessarily to resolve but to ponder, and thus to engage as active dramatic participants.

Similarities with Berg – first a chord close to Wozzeck, then broader harmonic fields – suggested themselves to my ears at the opening of the second act, but I am not sure this was so much influence as my ears making sense of a new harmonic world with music I knew. More fundamentally, the expertise and artistry with which both acts, of roughly equal length, were planned and realised was striking, still more so in the second (perhaps a matter of my having become more at home with the work). In that, the role of the equally excellent chorus was apparent: first liturgical, in Westminster Abbey, but changing its role, like the Greek chorus so as both to comment and participate, in acclamation, rebellion, and more.

In what was perhaps an inevitable nod to or at least coincidence with Donizetti, coloratura featured in both queens’ lines, but there was far more to them than that, especially as brought so vividly and sympathetically to life by Johanni von Oostrum and Vera-Lotte Boecker. Amongst the rest of a very fine cast, I might put in a word for Michael Butler’s feckless Darnley and Pawel Horodyski’s Executioner, but this was emphatically an ensemble performance as well as one of warring queens. Designs and choreography were stylish and suggestive throughout. Maybe our hecklers disliked the black coals of ruin that occupied much of the second-act stage, before being swept away by restoration workers in the present/future. I am grasping at straws, though. Who knows? Ultimately, who cares?

Applause from the premiere: Geoffroy Schied

Al Jolson

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:45:23 +0000

Al Jolson (1886-1950) was not merely the man who appeared in The Jazz Singer. He was one of the central figures in the creation of modern American popular entertainment. He was born Asa Yoelson in Lithuania, usually given as May 26, 1886, though the exact date is uncertain. His father, Moses Yoelson, was a rabbi and cantor. He had come to the US in 1891 and was already working as a cantor in Washington, DC when Jolson and the rest of his family arrived in the United States on April 9, 1894.

Jolson’s early life furnished the rough material of his later career: immigrant poverty, a religious household, rebellion against paternal authority, street singing, and a hunger for applause. His mother’s early death seems to have affected him deeply, and the theme of maternal longing, which later became almost a Jolson trademark, had a personal root as well as a commercial one. The boy who sang for coins became the man who could make sentimental songs seem like public confessions.

Jolson’s education was vaudeville. That world was unforgiving. An act either held the audience or died visibly in front of it. Jolson learned timing, attack, improvisation, and the brutal economy of popular performance. He worked with his brother Harry and with Joe Palmer in a comedy act, then gradually emerged as a solo performer. By the time the Shuberts brought him to New York, he had developed many of the devices that would define him: the forward-leaning stance, the explosive entrance, the mock-intimate address to the audience, the sudden shifts from comedy to pathos, and the ability to make even routine material sound urgent.

His Broadway breakthrough came with La Belle Paree at the Winter Garden Theatre in 1911. Jolson quickly established himself as the biggest star on Broadway. Jolson was among the first American performers whose personality was bigger than the show containing him. Audiences went to see Jolson, not the book, the plot, or even necessarily the score. Like later stars from Ethel Merman to Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley, he turned performance into personal possession. At the height of his fame and powers, he was likely the biggest star of the 20th century.

The Winter Garden became, in effect, Jolson’s kingdom. He appeared in a succession of Shubert shows, including Vera Violetta, The Honeymoon Express, Robinson Crusoe, Jr, Sinbad, Bombo, and Big Boy. The titles are now mostly theatrical archaeology, but Jolson’s numbers survived because he made songs into events. “Swanee,” “April Showers,” “Toot, Toot, Tootsie!,” “California, Here I Come,” “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” “Sonny Boy,” and “My Mammy” became associated with him because he stamped them with a fiercely personal style.

Blackface must be mentioned, but it should not swallow his entire career. Jolson worked within the theatrical conventions of his time, especially vaudeville and minstrel shows, where blackface was common among white performers and even, in complicated ways, used by some Black performers as well. By today’s standards, the convention is seen as racially offensive and bound to degrading stereotypes. But to understand Jolson historically, one has to see that he did not invent the form, nor was his appeal reducible to it. His blackface act was part of a broader stage idiom of ethnic impersonation, immigrant self-fashioning, racial caricature, and popular song. It gave him a mask through which he projected warmth, grief, comedy, and rhythmic excitement.

Of course, as often happens, some have overreacted to the use of blackface failing to make the distinction between it and makeup. Thus, the Metropolitan Opera refuses to let a white singer portraying Verdi’s Otello darken his face to appear black, as the libretto requires. That the Met and its ilk can’t see the difference tells one how enmeshed in wokism a major cultural institution has become. ChatGPT is even worse. It wouldn’t let me manipulate a photo of the theater that premiered The Jazz Singer because it showed Jolson in blackface. Here’s the reason it gave me: We’re so sorry, but the image we created may violate our guardrails around harassment, discrimination, bullying, or similar prohibited content. So much for one of the most important events in human culture.

The Jazz Singer opened in 1927. Historically, its importance is immense. The film was not a fully talking picture in the later sense, but its synchronized singing and spoken passages made it the symbolic beginning of the sound era. Jolson’s famous “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet” became one of the great accidental prophecies of film history. The film’s impact was a turning point that helped end the silent era and forced Hollywood into sound. Interestingly, it was even Jolson’s first sound film. The year before, he had made a 10-minute film – A Plantation Act that was intended to introduce a full-length silent movie. It’s below.

Yet for Jolson himself, The Jazz Singer was less a beginning than a transfer of his stage identity to a new medium. The plot, about a cantor’s son torn between religious inheritance and show business, was almost too perfectly suited to him. His film career after The Jazz Singer was substantial but uneven. The Singing Fool in 1928 was a huge success and gave him “Sonny Boy,” one of his most famous recordings. He followed it with Say It with Songs in 1929, Mammy and Big Boy in 1930, and later Hallelujah, I’m a Bum and Wonder Bar. These films preserved elements of his stage personality, but they also revealed a problem. Jolson was born for a live audience. Film fixed him in place. What had seemed electric in a theater could look broad or old-fashioned on screen, especially as acting styles changed and microphones encouraged quieter vocalism. He remained a major name, but the movies were not his natural milieu in the way the Winter Garden had been.

By the 1940s he was a relatively minor figure compared to what he had been 20 years earlier. Then came one of the most striking comebacks in American entertainment. The Jolson Story appeared in 1946, with Larry Parks playing Jolson and Jolson himself dubbing the songs, though he was uncredited. The film was a major success, and its sequel, Jolson Sings Again, followed in 1949. These films revived Jolson for a generation that had not seen him dominate Broadway. They also converted him into legend while he was still alive. The old songs returned to circulation; his recordings sold again; radio welcomed him back; and Jolson, never shy about applause, took the revival as vindication.

His devotion to entertaining servicemen was not a footnote. It was one of the most admirable parts of his career. He had supported troops in earlier wars, sold Liberty Bonds during World War I, and then threw himself into entertaining American forces during World War II. He entertained troops at home and abroad during World War II and later during the Korean War. In 1950, despite age and ill health, he went to Korea and performed an exhausting schedule, often described as 42 shows in 16 days. Soon after returning to the United States, he died of a heart attack in San Francisco on October 23, 1950.

During his tour of the Pacific Theater during World War II, he contracted malaria and then developed pneumonia that advanced to empyema. He had part or all of his left lung removed. The sources about this illness are uncertain as to whether part or all of his lung was removed. Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall gave Jolson the Medal for Merit for his service to the troops. The Medal for Merit was then the highest civilian decoration the United States could award. It had been created during World War II for civilians who performed exceptionally meritorious service in the war effort. It was awarded posthumously, a few months after Jolson’s death in October 1950. The medal was presented to Jolson’s son, with Jolson’s widow present. The citation reportedly said that Jolson’s contribution to the U.N. action in Korea was made “at the expense of his life.”

Jolson’s career is difficult to compress because he belonged to several eras at once. He was a vaudeville performer who became a Broadway monarch; a Broadway monarch who became the emblem of talking pictures; an old-fashioned belter who survived into radio; a sentimentalist who could be genuinely funny; a self-promoter who gave unstintingly to soldiers; a performer tied to blackface who also helped bring Black-influenced music into the American mainstream.

His limitations are obvious. His taste could be gaudy. His pathos could turn syrupy. His ego was mountainous. His racial materials now sit uneasily, or worse, with modern audiences. But his virtues were just as large: energy, presence, timing, courage, generosity, and an almost frightening instinct for audience response. Jolson was not a museum piece in his own time. He was an event. To understand why he mattered, one must imagine not merely the surviving recordings or film clips, but a packed theater, the lights hot, the audience restless, and Jolson stepping forward with the absolute confidence that he could stop the show whenever he wished. More often than not, he could.

A Plantation Act

They Walk Among Us: Die Walküre at the Bayerische Staatsoper

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:41:24 +0000

Wagner – Die Walküre

Siegmund – Joachim Bäckström
Hunding – Ain Anger
Wotan – Nicholas Brownlee
Sieglinde – Irene Roberts
Fricka – Ekaterina Gubanova
Brünnhilde – Miina-Liisa Värelä
Helmwige – Dorothea Herbert
Gerhilde – Julie Adams
Ortlinde – Elene Gvritishvili
Waltraute – Claudia Mahnke
Siegrune – Niina Keitel
Rossweisse – Christina Bock
Grimgerde – Natalie Lewis
Schwertleite – Noa Beinart

Bayerisches Staatsorchester / Vladimir Jurowski.
Stage director – Tobias Kratzer.

Bayerische Staatsoper, Nationaltheater, Munich, Germany. Sunday, June 28th, 2026.

This new production of Die Walküre directed by Tobias Kratzer and conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, follows the superb Rheingold that was given here back in 2024. While there has been a two-year gap between the two instalments, the next will follow on quite quickly, with Siegfried opening at the end of October this year and Götterdämmerung at the end of June 2027, with two complete cycles planned for the Opernfestspiele next summer. The notable aspects of Das Rheingold were the fact that the cast had been hand-picked to represent the next generation of Wagnerian talent, alongside Kratzer’s vivid theatrical imagination and his ability to bring the fantasy to life. Furthermore, this is a piece that belongs in this house, with its extensive Wagner tradition, not to mention the fact that the work was premiered in this very theatre.

This Walküre is very much a continuation of the visual world of Das Rheingold and it’s clear that Kratzer is conceiving the cycle as one large continuous canvas. He takes us into a world where the gods live among us, contrasting the traditional costumes of the gods, with the quotidian world inhabited by Siegmund, Sieglinde and Hunding. Hunding’s home, a forest chalet, contains an altar that reflects the one where the gods were seated at the end of Rheingold, and Kratzer contrasts Hunding’s piety towards the gods with Siegmund and Sieglinde’s rejection of them, as they destroy the altar when they copulate. Kratzer gives us a real sense of power shifting throughout the evening, whether in Wotan submitting to Fricka’s will and sacrificing the siblings, or the fact that the gods are barricaded behind barbed wire at the start of Act 3. His staging of the ‘Walkürenritt’ is spectacular. He shows it as a movie, with video by Manuel Braun, Jonas Dahl and Janic Bebi, with images of the Valkyries flying over downtown Munich in a helicopter, or riding horseback through the city, to the surprise of tourist groups visiting the celebrated monuments. They drag the wounded back to the Nationaltheater building, which is surrounded by the aforementioned barbed wire, while the set for the final act, by Rainer Sellmaier who also conceived the costumes, reflects the lobby of the house, a place where here the Valkyries appear to be creating an army of warriors.

Kratzer’s visual imagination is staggering but also, in common with the earlier instalment, he has the technical ability to inspire his team to bring it to life. There’s so much more to Kratzer’s staging than the visual thrills, there’s a clear message here about power, about rebellion, and the relationship between those who dominated society for so long, coming to terms with the fact that that society has moved on. In the closing scene, Kratzer has an extra, who bears a physical resemblance to Sean Panikkar who sang Loge in Rheingold, appear to create the ring of flames around Brünnhilde and stands with Fricka to watch Wotan give her up. The personenregie is utterly natural throughout; Kratzer has obviously worked very hard with his cast to create vivid, believable characters. There was one aspect, however, that I felt didn’t quite work. During Act 1, there was occasional video to show Siegmund and Sieglinde’s idyllic childhood, featuring child actors with Nicholas Brownlee’s Wotan looking over them in domestic bliss. At the climactic moment of Sieglinde’s big declaration of Siegmund’s name, Kratzer shows video of the two children branding each other with a burning log, to create some kind of sibling marking. The effect was to distract from Irene Roberts’ big moment just when she needed to impose herself. Otherwise, this was a superb staging and one cannot wait to see what Kratzer will do with the rest of the cycle.

Today was a very hot day in Munich and we were given an announcement from the stage just before Act 3, that Brownlee was feeling unwell due to the heat and begged our indulgence. Perhaps it was also due to the heat that I found Jurowski’s conducting to be a bit stop-start. He certainly kicked off the evening in a visceral, exciting way, with a storm scene that was taken at a very brisk tempo. And yet, in the middle of the act, when Siegmund recounted his journey, or in Act 2, in the long duet between Wotan and Brünnhilde, the tension dipped significantly. Indeed, I missed a sense in Act 1 of it being conceived as a long, unbroken arc, in the way that Oksana Lyniv gave us in Bologna for instance. Instead, I did find Jurowski’s approach to be more episodic, alive to the changes of mood, certainly, but I did wish for him to push forward a bit in the more loquacious parts. At the same time, he and his musicians gave us some genuinely exciting moments. The ‘Walkürenritt’ was tremendously exhilarating, while Jurowski gave Wotan’s farewell a lovingly flowing tempo, and the winds in the closing flames felt almost redolent of the bells in the coronation scene of Boris Godunov. This is, of course, a Bavarian orchestra, one that, quite literally, owns this score. I did wish, however, that the strings had brought more emotion to the loving melody in the farewell – once you’ve heard an Italian orchestra play this, it’s really hard to hear it another way. I did appreciate how Jurowski led the ‘Todesverkündigung’, shaping the dynamics masterfully, allowing it to evolve organically and deliberately. The orchestral playing throughout, was of the highest quality. Even in this heat, the brass were utterly thrilling, and the solo timpanist made a tremendous noise.

One of the biggest pleasures I have is seeing artists grow in stature, authority, and technique. In previous encounters with Brownlee, I have had a sense of the support not being completely lined up. Tonight, that wasn’t a concern at all. He was absolutely sensational. Despite the extremely difficult circumstances, he gave so generously of himself. The voice is massive, rich and dark, with a striking verbal acuity that made the text live. He rode the surging textures from the pit with absolute ease, with Jurowski not having to hold back on the volume, and the top is so free and easy, which meant that the voice rang out in his final phrase where so many before him have run out of gas. This will not have been an easy evening for Brownlee, but his commitment, his generosity of vocalism, and the healthiness of his instrument all gave an enormous amount of pleasure.

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They Walk Among Us: Die Walküre at the Bayerische Staatsoper

Curing the Past: Of One Blood at the Bayerische Staatsoper

Hellenic Decadence: Elektra at the Teatro Verdi Trieste

Hans Krása - Brundibár, at the Opéra Comique in Paris