Carmen, Royal Academy Opera, 19 November 2025

Susie Sainsbury Theatre, Royal Academy of Music

Images: Craig Fuller

Carmen – Charlotte Clapperton
Don José – Woogyeom Kim
Micaëla – Madeleine Perring
Escamillo – Harrison Robb
Zuniga – Theodore McAlindon
Moralès – Alexander Hopkins
Frasquita – Abigail Sinclair
Mercédès – Amy Porter
Remendado – Joseph Hancock
Dancaire – Joel Robson
Lillas Pastia – Joshua Furtado-Mendes

Director – Harry Fehr
Designs – Yannis Thavoris
Lighting – Jake Wilshire
Video – Matt Powell
Movement – Victoria Newlyn

Royal Academy Opera Chorus

Royal Academy Sinfonia

Christopher White (conductor)

A few rays of Andalusian sun would not go amiss right now in the dark, dismal, last half of November. Short of that, Carmen at the Royal Academy offered an alternative: quite an undertaking even for an enterprising conservatoire opera scheme. Given the ways in which voices develop, ‘big’ nineteenth-century repertoire – the description begs questions, yet still holds – tends to be avoided in student performance. Just as young professional voices tend for the most part to steer away from Verdi and Wagner in favour of Mozart, early music, and some modernist repertoire, so do they from Carmen. One can debate whether that is a good thing. Many factors come into play, not least the desire to gain experience in roles for which they might be asked to audition. It made for a nice surprise, then, when the Royal Academy named Carmen as its end-of-term show, all the more so when given with such confidence by all concerned. 

A smaller theatre helped, of course; when does it not? But there was nothing intrinsically small-scale to the performances; rather, they felt suited to the venue. Intimate, perhaps, but only in the sense that the RAM’s Susie Sainsbury Theatre benefits from its size in enabling all to see and hear the performances at relatively close range. Carmen may be an opéra-comique – as we arguably inform ourselves a little too much – but it generally plays to large houses, is performed by large forces, and Bizet was going to write those orchestral recitatives himself anyway for Vienna, death meaning that they instead were composed by his friend Ernest Guiraud. Tragedy need not be large-scale, but this is no piece of froth. Christopher White and the Royal Academy Sinfonia may likewise have been small in scale (strings 4.4.3.3.2) but they did not come across as such, whether in dash, vigour, or a sheen that would have put many a larger (and older) orchestra to shame. White’s pacing of the four acts stressed dramatic immediacy without ever sounding rushed, offering space where needed. This is an opera of the moment, though, and sounded as such. 

Don José (Woogweom Kim) and Carmen (Charlotte Clapperton)

As is generally the case, a mixture of orchestral recitative and dialogue was used, wisely cut, given length and the difficulties of speaking as well as singing in French. Just as in a larger house, some found the language more of a challenge than others, but there was some genuine excellence in that respect and nothing too grievous. If French dialogue was not tenor Woogweom Kim’s greatest strength, it came and went, and vocally he truly came into his own in the second act, a Don José of ardour and vulnerability in tandem. Charlotte Clapperton’s Carmen surely revealed a star in the making: growing like her co-star, fully holding the stage as any Carmen must, through voice and dramatic presence. Madeleine Perring’s sweetly sung Micaëla and Harrison Robb’s already dark Escamillo made much of their roles, as indeed did the rest of the cast, including an enterprising, accomplished chorus depleted by seasonal ailments yet never sounding like it. 

Harry Fehr’s production updated the action and made the occasional nod to contemporary mores. Micaëla’s bag made it clear she was no fun of bull-fighting, which seemed very much in character. It told the story straightforwardly, highlighting in interesting fashion the crucial role of fate, alternative paths portrayed on video, without distracting from the principal action. Once again, then, an excellent evening of opera at the Royal Academy.

Le nozze di Figaro, Opéra national de Paris, 15 November 2025

Palais Garnier

Images: Franck Ferville - OnP
Figaro (Gordon Bintner), Susanna (Sabine Devieilhe), Count Almaviva (Christian Gerhaher)

Figaro – Gordon Bintner
Susanna – Sabine Devieilhe
Count Almaviva – Christian Gerhaher
Countess Almaviva – Hanna-Elisabeth Müller
Cherubino – Lea Desandre
Marcellina – Monica Bacelli
Dr Bartolo – James Creswell
Don Basilio – Leonardo Cortelazzi
Don Curzio – Nicholas Jones
Barbarina – Ilanah Lobel-Torres
Antonio – Franck Leguérinel
Two Bridesmaids – Sima Ouahaman, Daria Akulova

Director, designs, video – Netia Jones
Lighting – Lucy Carter
Choreography – Sophie Laplane
Dramaturgy – Solène Souriau

  
Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris (chorus master: Alessandro Di Stefano)  

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris

Antonello Manacorda (conductor)

Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro took a while to come to the stage. Completed in more or less the form we know it by 1778, it was accepted, little more than a stone’s throw away from the Palais Garnier for performance by the Comédie-Française in 1781, but its reading before the French court had Louis XVI personally intervene to prevent it. Following revisions, including the action’s transposition from France to Spain, Louis was persuaded by the Queen and his brother the Comte d’Artois (the future, notoriously reactionary Charles X) to permit a private performance in 1783 at Gennevilliers including members of the French royal family. Overruling the censor, Louis thereafter permitted its Paris public premiere the following year at the Théâtre Français on the opposite side of the river. Royal prevarication could be seen as symbolic of Louis’s reign as a whole, encapsulating in its way one of many themes in the history that led only five years later to the outbreak of the Revolution. (So too, of course, did the play itself, Napoleon’s celebrated description – ‘C’est dejà la Révolution en action!’ – serving even today to frame many a review, whether of Beaumarchais or Da Ponte and Mozart. Box-office receipts were the highest France had yet seen; the controversy ultimately did it no harm, quite the contrary. Given the place it holds in French history – not only French literary and dramatic history – the play continues to hold the stage in Paris and France more generally, though Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera has largely, if not entirely, eclipsed it elsewhere. It somehow therefore seemed a little strange – alternatively, a glimpse into reception and transformation – to hear it in Italian rather than French, for what I realised must be my first Nozze di Figaro in France, its billing as Les Noces di Figaro (rather than Beaumarchais’s Mariage) both clue and complication. The Paris Opéra would give it in French between 1793, in Beaumarchais’s own re-adaptation, and 1973, when Giorgio Strehler’s new staging, conducted by Georg Solti, would be the first to employ Da Ponte’s original Italian. 

Dr Bartolo (James Creswell), Marcellina (Monica Bacelli)

Netia Jones’s production takes its leave from that history; from a decision in some, though not all, ways to eschew it; and from the MeToo movement, less distant in 2022 than it now seems during the Trump Restoration. (Come back Charles X, all is forgiven?) The setting is backstage at the Palais Garnier, playing with the idea that opera houses in general and this one in particular come close to an eighteenth-century estate. Not having been backstage there, I learned only from Jones’s programme note that set designs, including ‘the celebrated armchair’, were reproductions of their counterparts there, dressing rooms the focus of the action—as they will in houses prove the focus and locus of dressing (and undressing). Indeed, at the close, we see a glimpse, back of ‘backstage’, and thus theatrically in front of it, of the auditorium itself. I do not think it especially matters; the framing’s the play’s the thing, and this clearly has more general reference. Staircase and all, this house has after all particular resonance in the popular imagination as an archetype, the institution itself having a longer ‘representative’ history we can take back almost as far as we like, even beyond the age of Meyerbeer, Scribe, et al. (and Wagner). Not for nothing do descriptions of changing operatic tastes more often than not use the building’s survey of celebrated lyric composers (and others) as an illustrative case in point. 

House hierarchies can, like their landed ancien régime counterparts, prove ‘challenging’, as contemporary HR-speak would have it. Indeed, outside politics and big business – I recall a splendid Guildhall School production transposing the action to a US election campaign – there may be few better equivalents. This can be portrayed lovingly, as in Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos, although there is no reason why that should not be challenged a little more, love the work though many of us may. (We love Figaro too, after all.) But that has never been the point of either opera or play, the former here sometimes supplemented by projections of Beaumarchais, for whom the cliché tends to be that his play is more ‘political’ than Mozart-Da Ponte. (It is not always so simple as that, but such is the way with generalisations. That does not make them entirely without worth.) We can reasonably be sure, though, that reports we have of abusive behaviour are only the tip of the iceberg and casting, let alone treatment, of singers has long offered an unusually egregious instance. Artistic collaboration rests even more than many other forms on personal, often highly unequal relationships: not quite a society of orders, but with several points in common. There has clearly been a ‘scandal’ at the house we see, in which the characters prepare for a performance of the opera they are previously creating; at least, the costumes they occasionally don suggest that it may be. Cherubino’s costume being several sizes too big for him, the Count’s too small – it would doubtless once have fit – offer straws in the wind for the future as well as the present. Play and opera have always done that too. 

Cherubino (Lea Desandre), Count Almaviva

But to return to the implied preceding scandal, it is clear that, as in the Count’s reassurance to all that he has foregone his feudal right, sexual harassment and worse will not be tolerated; or rather, it is clear that that is the line, shown in red to us all as Figaro cannily papers – aided by Jones’s rapid video multiplication – the walls during the Act I chorus with posters unambiguously saying ‘NO’ to such behaviour. That, however, is the easy part. Actual behaviour generally lags behind, and certainly does here, from the Overture onwards, the Count patting a ballerina on the bottom before closing the dressing room door. During the opening scene, we can also see him, next door (of course) to Figaro and Susanna, being interviewed, doubtless dispensing the public, enlightened house line, just as our Enlightenment honnête homme would have done as governor of Andalusia.

Countess Almaviva (Hanna-Elisabeth Müller), Susanna,
Figaro, Antonio (Franck Leguérinel), Count Almaviva

Presented as a more rounded character than is often the case, Don Basilio is here very much in on the act: a self-regarding and entitled music-master whose conducting of the chorus is full of exaggerated gesture and absent of musical substance, in sharp contrast to Figaro when he leads them in. The latter’s presence clearly irks his alleged musical (and social) superior who, in a nice touch, carries with him a score of Così fan tutte, ready for ‘that’ line. He later emerges from the bathroom in nothing more than a towel to harass an auditioning singer. So much for things having changed, as the Count will show at greater length. 

That Figaro’s role is as a hairdresser offers a welcome reminder of the barber of Seville’s origins, though his skills are clearly multifarious. Susanna (like Barbarina) steps forward from the corps de ballet to remind us not only of the sexism and objectification dancers face, but of their particular role in French lyric theatre. The particular treatment of female dancers by historical patrons (the Jockey Club, for instance) comes to mind, but what of the present? And not only there: who, in Britain, could forget the Johnson government’s notorious invention of ‘Fatima’, a ballerina whose ‘next job could be in cyber (she just doesn’t know it yet). Rethink. Reskill. Reboot’? An opera house requires diversity in every sense, or it simply cannot function. 

Don Basilio (Leonardo Cortelazzi), Susanna 

The treatment of Marcellina is also interesting, not least given the particular brand of misogyny levelled at ‘older’ women. (No one refers to the Count as an ‘older’ man.) Beaumarchais’s Marceline, inveighing against male exploitation of women, is partly restored via projection, and in a wonderful closing touch she dispenses with the Count’s services (that is the Count playing the Count, as it were). Rather than a woman, he has, in that unlovely phrase, been traded in for a younger model. Will the house see a new regime, under Marcellina? It is a nice thought, though we probably no more believe it any more than we believe the Count will never stray or abuse his social standing again. It was a pity, then, that we lost her aria—as so often we do. Might not restitution have begun there? 

On the other hand, if Revolution, or at least revolution, is just around the corner, who knows? In an alternative history of the Opéra, the 1960s proposals of Jean Vilar and Pierre Boulez might have been accepted, a ‘new’ Opéra would have opened in a series including the latter conducting the French premiere of Moses und Aron, a new work by Berio, and the Monteverdi Vespers—and the Solti/Strehler Figaro: who knows? We cannot change the past, but we can strain to change the future. Characterisation, including a reassessment of characters that draws upon their authorial past as well as their reception, can have consequences. Even Don Curzio, whom often one hardly notices, was given a helping hand by an additional, second-act appearance, collecting signatures for the trial to come. This was repaid that with a freshly sung performance one did note, not least in the recognition sextet, from Nicholas Jones. 

Count Almaviva

The production, then, was fortunate to have a fine cast of singing actors to bring this to life. Susannas, notoriously, have much to do—and are not necessarily the highest credited for doing so: a point with gendered as well as other social implications. Sabine Devieilhe certainly did a fine job both in her own right and as source of so many dramatic connections, her portrayal as finely sung as it was acted. Gordon Bintner’s performance as Figaro at times suggested a few first-night nerves: nothing grievous, but a sense that all would come together very soon. There was no doubting the broader brush of his portrayal, though, nor its contribution to the greater whole. Christian Gerhaher presented a moving descent into something approaching age and infirmity, his plea for forgiveness showing a man quite broken. He had been figuratively wounded earlier, at least as early as his audibly hurt ‘ma far burla simile / è poi crudeltà’ in the second act: not a hint of exaggeration, but a seasoned use of language. Hanna-Elisabeth Müller’s Countess offered a dignified yet spirited, beautifully sung Countess, equally at home in the serenity of her arias as in busy ensembles. Lea Desandre’s livewire Cherubino and Monica Bacelli’s impressive, take-no-prisoners Marcellina, and Ilanah Lobel-Torres’s unusually ‘present’ Barbarina, proved proper foils, at least on this folle journée, for the likes of Leonardo Cortelazzi’s similarly present Basilio and James Creswell’s sharply drawn, predatory Dr Bartolo. 

If Antonello Manacorda’s conducting did not plumb the depths, nor did it maintain an initially hard driven approach that might have tended unduly down either Rossinian or ‘period’ paths. To my ears, it would have done better to pay greater attention to harmony, but then who amongst our conductors really understands or at least conveys its role in Mozart, and Beethoven, now that Daniel Barenboim is semi-retired? There were no ‘period’ mannerisms, for which one must nowadays be grateful, but it ventured beyond the pleasant less often than one would have liked—and Mozart demands. Taken purely as orchestral playing, the Orchestre de l’Opéra national de Paris shone as so often it does in this repertoire. Few, if any, opera performances are perfect; how can they be when they stem from a society so imperfect? If the opera shows ‘la Révolution en action’, it is a revolution whose coming we, like so many before us, still await.

Philharmonia/Hrůša - Mahler, 13 November 2025

Royal Festival Hall

Symphony no.7

Philharmonia Orchestra

Jakub Hrúša  (conductor)

A little light relief here for Jakub Hrúša, in between Covent Garden performances of The Makropulos Case. That Mahler and Janáček should sound very different will hardly surprise, though the distance between Kalischt and Hukvaldy is not necessarily so great, even in compositional terms. There has long been something – have been some things, for let us not essentialise – special about the ears many Czech musicians bring to Mahler; one has only to think of Rafael Kubelík, let alone the Czech Philharmonic. Hrúša’s way with Mahler is different, indeed different from any I can recall hearing, yet full of interest and created with a collaborative determination that knows not only what it wants but how to get it. The Philharmonia must also, of course, be credited with that accomplishment. Most successful readings of the Seventh Symphony, at least in my experience, tend to rest on bringing coherence to what, rightly or wrongly, many find a tendency that pulls in the opposite direction. Highly contrasting examples would be Daniel Barenboim’s surprising – and surprisingly successful – treatment of the work in dark, post-Brahms fashion and Pierre Boulez’s more brazenly modernist, yet no less steely command of line, timbre on equal terms with rhythm and harmony. A reading that was merely incoherent would be little more than that. One that revelled in rather than attempted to solve its enigmas, perhaps with more than one might expect of Boulez’s musical hindsight, yet imbued with other varieties of its own, was what we heard here: crazier than Barenboim, arguably more so than Boulez too, and more theological to my mind’s ear than, say, the quite different house-of-horrors readings of Leonard Bernstein. 

The opening of the first movement already signalled something intriguingly different. Slow in tempo yet febrile, it drew one in, brass vibrato somewhat Slavic, and more generally dark in orchestral tone (definitely more Barenboim than Boulez—or Bernstein, for that matter). Here, it seemed was an extended fin-de-siècle orchestra experiencing twentieth-century hallucinations that, over the course of the symphony as a whole, would increasingly wrest control from a fast-vanishing past. Basic tempo firmly established, deviation, be it early flexibility or later abrupt change, registered in relation to that; much the same could be said for the whole symphony. The performance’s spirit compelled too: marionettes from the earlier ‘Rückert’ symphonies danced, yet abstracted, even automated, harbingers of a future that might not be desired, but could not be averted. The ‘world’ of a Mahler symphony – think of his celebrated exchange with Sibelius – has many mansions, historical, geographical, and otherwise. Unusually prominent at times, to my ears anyway, were premonitions not of the over-invoked Shostakovich, but of his more interesting compatriot, Prokofiev, lying in a future somewhere between The Fiery Angel and Cinderella. Wind tattoos functioned likewise, provoking if anything still greater unease. In more ‘traditional’ vein, vistas I might foolishly have imagined might no longer astonish me still did, the aural lens stretched a little or more than a little at times, testing yet never abandoning overall coherence, whether in rapt, near-suspended animation at the close of the development or something more furious in a recapitulation of depth and breadth. 

The first Nachtmusik’s opening horn calls have been delivered more flawlessly, but so what? The sense was there. (I mention this only because Beckmessers may otherwise assume I did not notice.) More to the point, they initiated a sardonic, Nietzschean serenade on the cusp of the nihilist and the diabolical, subjectively ambiguous and the more powerful for it. Lyrical cellos suggested a world all the more alienated as a result. Cowbells on- and offstage sounded a desiccated memory of their presence in the Sixth Symphony. Dances were swung, yet with knowledge of what was to come: a Weill future already, disturbingly present. The Second Symphony’s faithful were despatched to purgatory, or worse. Aufersteh’n? If you say so, but not only Klopstock was dead. The Scherzo seemed firmly rooted in that other place. It snarled in defiantly post-Nietzsche fashion, even as it (aptly) danced. Zarathustra’s realm, hell, purgatory, or somewhere else? Why choose? Except it did, the Devil’s lair increasingly apparent: no monolith, but all the more frightening for its variegation. Perhaps – shudder – this hell was our earth. There was to be heard a distinctly Schoenbergian rage, disciplined by remnants of Prokofiev’s motor-rhythms, particularly when one peered between the cracks. 

More strange bedfellows were encountered in the second Nachtmusik, Adagietto strings taking a walk on the wild side, joined by guitar, mandolin, and the rest, to pass the Eighth Symphony, even Pierrot, to the unmistakeable world of Schoenberg’s Serenade and contemporary Webern. An orchestra (in large part, or so it sounded) of soloists tended to parody, in a world that had nothing left to parody, that strong initial grounding of the symphony’s opening as crucial as ever. Music appeared to pose a theological conundrum Mahler’s St Anthony might have blanched at: one for the fish, perhaps. And so, to the finale, to ask further unanswered, unanswerable questions. It blared and blazed, sang and danced, tracing a path between old and new that transformed before our ears. It was not the last word, nor did it try to be; indeed, its modernity lay in its provisionality, exhausted and exhausting, yet exhilarating in a restored radicalism whose nods to Mozart and Wagner did anything but clarify. It ate itself as it laughed (or mocked). Nietzsche or nihilist? Again, why choose? Angels on acid or devils on ambrosia? Perhaps they were instead on horseback. The Wunderhorn St Martha may not be the cook after all.               

                               

The Makropulos Case, Royal Opera and Ballet, 10 November 2025

Royal Opera House

Emilia Marty – Ausrine Stundyte
Krista – Heather Engebretson
Albert Gregor – Sean Panikkar
Baron Jaroslav Prus – Johan Reuter
Dr Kolenatý – Henry Waddington
Vítek – Peter Hoare
Count Hauk-Šendorf – Alan Oke
Janek – Daniel Matoušek
Stage Door Woman – Susan Bickley
Security Guard – Jeremy White
Hotel Maid – Jingwen Cai

Katie Mitchell (director)
Vicki Mortimer (set designs)
Sussie Juhlin-Wallén (costumes)
James Farncombe (lighting)
Sasha Balmazi-Owen (video)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Jakub Hrůsá (conductor)

 

Image: The Royal Opera / Camilla Greenwell

If the Royal Opera and Ballet’s new Makropulos Case does indeed prove to be Katie Mitchell’s final opera production, we should think of it more as a culmination than a farewell. If the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk, the outlines of Mitchell’s operatic work – part, to be sure, of her broader theatrical work, but a distinctive part – may now seem clearer to us all. Rightly or wrongly, for I can lay no claim to oracular status on this or any other question, they certainly do to me following this superlative evening, dramatically and musically, in the theatre, a splendid addition to the company’s Janáček series? May we hope for a Mr Brouček, even a Šárka or an Osud? Hope dies last, as the ambiguous, even oracular, saying has it. 

And death lies at the heart of this work, as does life—as does their cyclical relationship both in Janáček’s work as a whole and this production, in turn both in its overt presentation and in its broader, metatheatrical, even symbolic frame. One might say the same of women, their role in society, and their role in opera, Mr Brouček’s Excursions the great exception, for even From the House of the Dead has one feel their absence. The Makropulos Case is centred, of course, around a great female singer, a great survivor, a woman seemingly infinitely blessed, but in reality, if not infinitely, then gravely cursed. She is literally the creation of men, in some ways figuratively too. I say ‘a woman’ and of course she is, but as such and as a human, she deserves to be named: Emilia Marty, Elena Makropulos, and the rest. (We may, if we wish, recall Kundry’s many names and incarnations. Wagner was not a feminist; to claim so would be anachronistic nonsense. But his works are not without feminist themes and, more to the point, opportunities—as well as themes and opportunities that are anything but. The same, of course, may be said of Janáček.) Mitchell takes a further step: this woman is queer, standing in no need of men, whatever the history with which she has been furnished (by them) may claim. She has fond memories; she has produced numerous ‘bastards’ with them, but now does not care for them (men or children). 

Now forty-plus = or so she claims and appears – EM seeks women on ‘dating’ apps. With a technological bent very much of our time, the opera begins, app and text message communications, courtesy of Sasha Balmazi-Owen, running parallel to, interacting with, and sometimes undercutting the work ‘itself’. Krista and Janek intend to rob her, the former (‘they/them’) ensnaring her prey 200 metres distant and securing an invitation to her hotel room. The proceeds, whose net worth Janek instantly checks online as Krista photographs them, include an eighteenth-century medallion and a rare, early twentieth-century playbill. Yet ultimately, Krista falls for EM, mesmerised as her male admirers, yet apparently feeling and sharing something deeper. Rather than absconding to Berlin with her (former) lover, she shoots him: shades of Lulu, perhaps, yet with the crucial distance that this is no blank canvas onto which male fantasies are projected. This is women in love, by women, for women.

Surtitles are contemporary English in tone, without becoming paraphrase. Additional communications fly across the ether: ‘Berlin or bust’, popular abbreviations, emojis, and so on. Like anything else, use of text messages – also here telephone calls, audio and video – can be a cliché, a gimmick, and too often is. Here, unlike in, say, Simon Stone’s tedious, extravagant, and tediously extravagant Cherubini Médée – if ever there were an opera crying out for the Mitchell touch… - or Kirill Serebrennikov’s silly Marriage of Figaro, it serves a useful dramatic purpose, both straightforwardly and more metatheatrically in its extension of live cinema to new realms in successful pursuit of Mitchell’s longstanding and, in this case, unapologetically queer subversion of the male gaze both generally and in specifically operatic guise. For when the diva comes at long last to die, she is not so much a creature of opera, but opera itself. Has the director killed the genre or let it die? More significantly, has it in its death, which may yet permit of rebirth though not artificial prolongation, at last been liberated of the male gaze. On an optimistic reading: yes, at least in part. The elixir is bequeathed to Krista as a gift of what appears to be love, but does it remain a poisoned chalice; can it be cleansed?

Janácek’s score naturally invites some degree of optimism, its increasingly rapt lyricism, orchestral motifs coalescing, combining, and expanding into something greater, brought home in wondrous, golden immediacy by Jakub Hrůsá at the helm of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. That Hrůsá is the real thing no one who has heard him will doubt, but this proved a significant achievement even by his standards, as intellectually as it was emotionally involving. The same must be said of Ausrine Stundyte’s all-encompassing assumption of the title role, rightly permitting of various readings whilst ever sure of its direction. No wonder the rest of her world lay in her thrall. All contributed something to the greater whole, showing what the world of opera can and should be. I shall note Sean Panikkar’s typically ardent, lyrical Albert Gregor, Peter Hoare’s sharply characterised Vitek, Heather Engebretson’s sparky Krista, and, in another tribute, conscious or otherwise, to the best of an opera company and its progress of time, Johan Reuter ‘moving up’ from, say, Orest and Birtwistle’s Theseus to Baron Prus, and Susan Bickley from numerous Covent Garden roles (and her ENO Dido with Mitchell) to the cameo of the Stage Door Woman. It was, though, a collaborative effort, as production, conductor, work, and any future for the genre demand.

From that ENO After Dido, Purcell’s jewel forming part of a greater theatre piece, through a Salzburg Al gran sole carico d’amore I imagine I might understand better now than I did in 2009, live cinema again offering a feminist corrective or at least enhancement to Luigi Nono’s project of telling European revolutionary experience from the standpoint of female revolutionaries,  the woman’s revenge of Written on Skin and queer love of Lessons in Love and Violence, the postdramatic feminism of The Blue Woman, and important reassessments such as her Aix Ariadne auf Naxos and Pelléas and Covent Garden Theodora, a path becomes traceable towards this Makropulos Case. Is it the end of the line? That should not really even be the question; it is certainly an important, musicotheatrically riveting contribution, one I am keen to see again, should I be able. 

Cathérine Clément notoriously described opera as the ‘undoing of women’. Perhaps, if one is extremely selective—and one treats it only in terms of libretti. Go back to Monteverdi’s Poppea or forward to Rebecca Saunders’s recent operatic debut and it seems anything but. Nevertheless, that book or at least its title remains, whether we like it or no, part of operatic discourse. Carolyn Abbate’s review said most, perhaps all, of what need be said about it. And here, as it must, that theory is realised in practice, without in any sense jettisoning necessary critique. Actually existing opera houses and their ways are, or can be, another thing. This is not in any sense intended to refer to the Royal Opera House in particular; indeed, its relatively recent, highly publicised appointment of an intimacy coordinator marked an important step forward in one respect. I know no details of the opera-world misogyny Mitchell has endured – her recent interview lies behind a Murdoch paywall – and I do not intend to speculate. What I can say is that operatic works, historical and contemporary, and performances offer greater scope for critique and, dare I say it, redemption than the day-to-day activities of any company will. This year’s greatest musical centenary, that of Pierre Boulez, reminds us of the necessary utopianism of his celebrated 1967 interview with Der Spiegel.

New German opera houses certainly look very modern—from the outside; on the inside, they have remained extremely old-fashioned. To a theatre in which mostly repertory pieces are performed one can only with the greatest difficulty bring a modern opera—it is unthinkable. 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? 

In turn, that echoes a Wagner’s diary entry from 1849.

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.

 

This latest death  will not destroy our opera houses and companies, nor even leave them peacefully to die, but should at least ask us whether that would be advisable. Is this, rather than opera as the undoing of women, then, women as the undoing and possible rebirth of opera? It might, considered in utopian fashion, constitute an act of operatic reform or revolution to be compared with the work composers such as Wagner, conductors such as Boulez, directors such as Stefan Herheim, and singers such as Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, noting ruefully and purposefully the gender balance of historical examples, whilst recalling Boulez’s own caution that, although Wagner’s Bayreuth project was in almost every respect right and necessary, it has not had the slightest effect on the day-to-day life of our benighted operatic culture. And yet, it has, for our revolutionary-reformers continue to offer a critique of patriarchy, of heteronormativity, and of capitalism many of us continue to heed. To do more than criticise, we must all play our part. The Royal Opera and Ballet has done so too, staging Janáček’s opera (incredibly) for the first time and supporting a new way forward. The Royal Opera and Ballet has done so too, staging Janáček’s opera (incredibly) for the first time and supporting, among many other things in its necessarily mixed economy, some seeds of a new way forward. 

Horton - Chopin and Bach, 29 October 2025

Wigmore Hall

Chopin: Prelude in C-sharp minor, op.45
Bach: English Suite no.2 in A minor, BWV 807
Chopin: Waltz in A minor, op.34 no.2; Fantasy in F minor, op.49; Polonaise in C-sharp minor, op.26 no.1; Polonaise in E-flat minor, op.26 no.2; Mazurka in B major, op.63 no.1; Mazurka in F minor, op.63 no.2; Mazurka in C-sharp minor, op.63 no.3; Polonaise-fantaisie in A-flat major, op.61

Tim Horton (piano)

Tim Horton’s Wigmore Hall residency, in which he presents Chopin’s music alongside important predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, has reached Bach, offering the second English Suite and an illuminating Chopin selection. The C-sharp minor Prelude – Chopin’s, not Bach’s – opened and proceeded in a way that set the tone for the entire recital: both muscular and melting, clarity and direction likewise two sides to the same musical coin. The notes mattered, and one felt that; so too did Chopin’s harmonic surprises. Not for the last time here, without necessarily sounding Lisztian, the playing made one keen to hear Horton’s Liszt. At the opposite end of the first half, the A minor Waltz, op.34 no.2, explored its tonality with a sadness emerging from its material, rather than applied to it, and thus all the stronger for it. Rubato here, as elsewhere, was unexaggerated yet telling. Chopin’s harmonic transformations and much else stood in Bach’s line, whilst remaining ineffably the composer’s own. 

In between came the English Suite, its A minor presaging the Waltz. This was not Chopinesque Bach as such; it had its own validity. It was, though, a validity that drew connections and created a properly satisfying musical programme, reminding us that Bach’s may be the greatest piano music of all (with absolutely no apology to devotees of other keyboard instruments). The Prelude, rhythms tightly sprung, offered a fine framework for melodic and harmonic exploration and expression, striking an excellent balance between dynamic contrasts that were of the moment and structurally conceived, in fact showing the distinction ultimately to be illusory. Following its relative extraversion, the Allemande turned inwards, again relatively speaking, leading to a Courante that was both robust and subtle, its lineage unmistakeably French, albeit with equally unmistakeable German colouring and grounding. A beautifully dignified, even luxuriant Sarabande led us into the harmonic labyrinth, but also guided us through it. The Bourrées and Gigue offered both intensification and release, just as they should. 

The F minor Fantasy, op.49, opened the second half, inheriting and extending the recital’s preceding virtues, whilst delineating this piece’s decidedly particular character and form. Echoes of Schumann, however fleeting, registered clearly in a musical kaleidoscope that again, if not exactly Lisztian, was not exactly un-Lisztian either. This music can readily fall apart when presented according to pre-conceived structural ideas that are not Chopin’s; not so here, quite the contrary. The two op.26 Polonaises and the were eloquently presented in relation to one another, harmonic foundations key to that conception. The anger and grief of the latter, in E-flat minor, spoke with a sensibility it was difficult not to think tragic, albeit finely differentiated. (But then, is not Hamlet?) I found it deeply moving. 

So too were the three op.63 Mazurkas, similarly conceived as a set, yet ever alert to individual qualities. A particularly Chopinesque sadness to the second contrasted with and in its way confirmed both the well-sprung first and the syncretic, unifying qualities of the third. Counterpoint and harmony, as with Bach, were indivisible. The Polonaise-fantaisie is not my favourite Chopin, but this attentively painted performance had me listen and, I fancied, understand its structure as rarely before. Unfailingly eloquent, it unfolded both on its own terms and in light of what had gone before. As Jim Samson points out in his typically excellent programme note, examination of Chopin’s sketches shows that Chopin was ‘really composing a Fantasy, similar in conception and even in tonal organisation to the other Fantasy performed thius evening, and that he added the polonaise rhythm … to the principal melody as an afterthought.’ Compositional origins sounded here with musical immanence. As an encore, we heard a characteristic op.9 no.2 Nocturne, direct and sensitive in equal measure. Once again, I look forward to future instalments in this fascinating series.

Takács Quartet/Ridout - Mozart, 20 October 2025

Wigmore Hall

String Quintet in C major, KV 515; String Quintet in G minor, KV 516

Edward Dusinberre

Harumi Rhodes (violins)

Richard O’Neill, Timothy Ridout (violas)

András Fejér (cello)
 

Visits from the Takács Quartet are always a highlight, for me, of a Wigmore Hall season. To be joined by Timothy Ridout for two Mozart string quintets made this one, if anything, still more so. Both works from spring 1787, falling between Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, they breathe the air of those operas. It was difficult not to think of them from time to time during these performances—and why would one try? Also characteristic of both was a sense of ‘rightness’ to tempo. Rarely, if ever, will there be a ‘correct’ answer in absolute terms, though there may sometimes be something closer to that in proportionality; but this spoke of knowledge of and ease with the works, as a springboard to further exploration. It was clear that the players relished the fuller texture of a viola quintet, equally clear that this was shared by a receptive audience. 

In any case, the C major Quintet opened as one sensed it ‘should’, cello and first violin duet presaging many other such passages, shared between the entire quintet, other entries propelling the first movement’s opening rhythmically and harmonically and its development thereafter. Mozart’s developing variation of the opening arpeggio figure was neither more nor less prominent than balance and motivic coherence and consequence required. Formal expectations and surprises were, similarly, equally fulfilled, simplicity and complexity shown to be not only in balance but two sides to the same coin. Pairs of instruments again came to the fore delightfully in the minuet, the two violas perhaps a special joy. Its trio threw everything up into the air, music resettling in magically restored order. Echoes of orchestral dances, both passed and to come, resounded. Taken third as it usually though not always is, the Andante benefited from judicious balance between space and momentum, harmony and counterpoint. Instrumental drama played out as if this were a scene from Figaro. Above all, the finale smiled: not in spite of the cares and tears, but on their account. As light as it was rich as it was deep, it again permitted all to fall into place, however much that were a case of art concealing art. 

The turn from major to minor in the guise of the G minor Quintet was less a turn from happy to sad – Mozart is rarely without sadness – than from comedy to tragedy, at least to begin with. A Shakespearean realm, or perhaps better a different such realm, had been entered, inevitably foreshadowing the great G minor Symphony, though this particular tonality has much wider resonance than that with Mozart. Pamina too, came to mind in a first movement both light yet involved, seemingly effortlessly generative. If the performance occasionally approached Beethoven, as indeed did that of its counterpart in the C major Quintet, that is only because Mozart does. The development was full of surprises, even – especially? – when they were expected. There have been more vehement returns, but there are many ways to accomplish this, and relative lightness of touch was not to be confused with lightness of attitude. The radicalism of the minuet was furthered rather than effaced by the ambiguity of its consolations. Its trio emerged as a dramatic necessity, instrumental necessities ‘speaking’, or perhaps better singing, as if dramatic asides. If Beethoven came to mind again in the slow movement, the contrasts were as striking as any similarities, both in any case a matter of substance rather than mere ‘style’. Its veiled quality – literally muted – seemed to hark back to older consorts, only for an inner sigh to change everything, prophetic as much of a Schubert song as of opera. There was likewise a far from inappropriate hint of Schubert to the mysteries of the finale’s introduction, before new vistas both delighted and chilled. If transition to the Allegro partly suggested Haydn, the emergence of the first subject ‘proper’ attested to twin fragility and strength that could be none other than Mozart’s, both born of and liberated by the very texture of the viola quintet.

Barenboim/Nouno - Boulez, Attahir, Manoury, Chaker, and Roustom, 12 October 2025

Purcell Room

Boulez: Anthèmes 1
Benjamin Attahir: Retour à Tipasa
Philippe Manoury: Partita II
Layale Chaker: Before bloom
Kareem Roustom: Pavane (pour les enfantes défuntes) (UK premiere)
Boulez: Anthèmes 2

Michael Barenboim (violin, viola)

Gilbert Nouno (live electronics)

Michael Barenboim’s Sunday afternoon Purcell Room concert, given with Gilbert Nouno, offered not only a welcome new standpoint to the Boulez centenary celebrations, but also the United Kingdom premiere of Kareem Roustom’s Pavane (pour les enfantes défuntes), for viola and live electronics, Barenboim’s own commission for ‘something for the children of Gaza’. Words, music, money, anything at all may seem hopelessly insufficient in the face of genocide, and of course they are. That does not mean, though, that we should not bear witness as we can. Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw does not efface, let alone undo, what was done, nor does it intend to. Extending his father’s humanitarianism and indeed as much in the tradition of Edward Said, co-founder of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Michael Barenboim, the orchestra’s longstanding concertmaster, has consistently shown great courage in doing so in the face of implacable opposition from German media and the German state. Indeed, to have given the work’s world premiere in Berlin just under a year ago, in the rare friendly space of the city’s Pierre Boulez Saal, was itself an act of witness. 

An opening cry, far from histrionics, yet all the more powerful for it, spoke of something more fundamental—in more than one sense. Roustom’s piece takes its leave, of course, from Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte, and specifically the absurdism of its title, an absurdism we have seen and heard, via Beckett and the debris of post-Holocaust art, inflicted on children in Gaza and beyond. Neither overtly representational nor overtly abstract, its hope in some sense to speak, perhaps to sing, despite and through trauma seemed woven into both piece and performance, as well as to our necessary reactions. That it ultimately approached Ravel and his piece themselves, without the slightest incongruence, itself seemed both absurd and necessary, electronics creating a strange piano echo of their own.   

In a carefully planned programme, this Pavane stood as a counterpart to the first-half Retour á Tipasa for violin and electronics, by Boulez pupil (at the Lucerne Festival Academy) Benjamin Attahir, also following on meaningfully from Layale Chaker’s Before a bloom for solo viola. Both works bridged, like Roustom’s, ‘East’ and ‘West’, not in a banal cross- or inter-culturalism, but as a natural form of expression. The opening éclat – that indispensable Boulezian quality – of Attahir’s work, a dazzling pizzicato figure, was immediately bathed, magnified, and transformed in dialogue with an electronic penumbra that offered more of a sense of aural landscape, though not only that, than Boulez would have been likely to consider. North African melodic and rhythmic inflections – to our ears, they may sound Scottish, but that is our problem – evoke or hail, again without mere representation, the Punic-Roman-Algerian port of Tipasa. Shifting relationships between solo instrument and electronics, as well as a clear, dramatic overall trajectory bore their own witness: not necessarily one to be put into words, but no less important for that. Likewise, in Chaker’s solo piece, whose pizzicato ‘accompaniment’ and solo arco line – it is more complicated than that, but perhaps not entirely – seemed to me strangely, expressively to echo the world of Bartók’s rhapsodies for violin and piano. Originally composed for cello, it showed no obvious sign of transcription, benefiting from rich, variegated viola playing and, again, unfailing sense of overall line. 

Philippe Manoury’s Partita II for violin and electronics came across as effortlessly – however much art conceals art – conceived for violin, electronics, and their joint capabilities: as ‘natural’ as Chopin writing for piano, or Mahler for orchestra. A magical realm of precision, consequence, and highly expressive potential and achievement radiated, Boulez-like, from the ‘solo’ instrument, although it is far from clear that  ‘influence’ or at least inspiration, may not have run as much in the opposite direction.  Both like and unlike a violin concerto, its nine stands’ worth of music was full of surprises that were anything but arbitrary, Barenboim’s virtuosity here as elsewhere so clearly in the service of the music one might readily overlook it—yet should not. 

Opening and closing the programme were Boulez’s own Anthèmes 1 and Anthèmes 2, the former for solo violin, the latter its expansion for violin and electronics. In both, Barenboim – and Boulez – made crystal clear from the outset the nature and contrasts of the musical material: the figure from his …explosante-fixe… ‘kit’, treated in almost sequential yet never predictable variation, and single notes of long duration. It was their story, told in illuminated style that recalled old ‘anthems’ on the acrostic Lamentations of Jeremiah, consecutive Hebrew letters beginning each verse. (Recall also Stravinsky’s Threni.) Performed with a keen, yet never remotely flashy sense of drama, the works’ structure became form before our eyes and ears. Serial-Bachian procedures redolent of the Musical Offering and Art of Fugue, especially in Anthèmes 2, evoked the instrument’s past and perhaps its future, proliferation pointing toward an apparent eternity. Musical rays shone outwards from the violin; at other times, the instrument sounded as if a single ray, albeit the brightest, from within a spectrum. This is not spectralist music, far from it, yet the distance may not prove so great as many of us may have thought. I was struck anew by surprisingly Messiaenesque harmony at its centre, by the singular use of electronics in ‘real time’, by the music’s multi-dimensionality. It felt as if the pages of Anthèmes 1 had been opened, their notes, numbers, metaphorical flowers turning to the sun—and then away from it, inspired, emboldened, given new life. There may or may not be hope, but there is still music.

London Sinfonietta/Benjamin - Boulez, 5 October 2025

 

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Mémoriale; …explosante-fixe…

Michael Cox (flute)
Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble

Sound Intermedia (sound projection)

London Sinfonietta

George Benjamin (conductor)

Pierre Boulez’s centenary celebrations are far from over. Here, the opening concert of the London Sinfonietta’s 2025-26 season presented the complex relationship between the 1985 Mémoriale, written in memory of flautist Laurence Beauregard, and …explosante-fixe…, initially a Stravinsky memorial, which both furnished material for Mémoriale and, in its final form, of 1993, written once technology permitted, in turn drew on the earlier (and later) work. 

First came the shorter Mémoriale (following an introduction to the composer in the Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer by Jonathan Cross and Gillian Moore). Knowing …explosante-fixe… better – also having heard it more recently, at this year’s Salzburg Festival – I immediately began to notice and reflect on the differences and points in common, perhaps most obviously that Mémoriale is very much a piece for solo flute and small ensemble, whereas the later work seems increasingly to derive its larger ensemble, not only electronics, from a flute at its physical and conceptual centre. It sounded akin to a flute concerto in miniature, Michael Cox here and later the expert soloist, euphonious, virtuosic, and much more. Boulezian proliferation was experienced as vividly as anyone might imagine, perhaps more so, surrounding, ornamenting, and in turn shaping an unmistakeable, almost Classical line at its centre, albeit very much haunted and inspired, like so much of Boulez’s music, by Debussy. 

There followed an enlightening discussion between Moore and, first Andrew Gerzso, with whom Boulez worked on the realisation of …explosante-fixe…, among other works, followed by George Benjamin, who would conduct the work this evening, armed with players of the London Sinfonietta and their side-by-side Royal Academy Manson Ensemble colleagues to illustrate with musical examples. Gerzso clearly explained Boulez’s dissatisfaction with earlier attempts to integrate acoustic and electronic music, needing ‘score-following’ technology such as he first heard in Philippe Manoury’s Jupiter, so as to avoid the players’ enslavement to the tape. Boulez’s longterm interest in music as commentary upon itself, multiphonics, the airiness of ‘Aeolian’ sounds, the importance of Paul Klee, and much more were rendered vividly comprehensible. Benjamin in turn attended to the work’s musical content and form, Boulez’s melismatic writing but one of many telling links between the two commentaries (as, one might say, in his composition too). 

For …explosante-fixe…, Cox was joined by co-soloists Karen Jones and Sofia Patterson Guttierez. Whether it was the particularity of performance, that particularity integral to Boulez’s use of electronics, the contextualisation afforded by prior discussion, or something else, much sounded strangely, if hardly surprisingly, post-Stravinskian, flute lines included. The Rite of Spring can rarely have seemed so present, so haunting. Benjamin imparted an urgency to the opening perhaps greater than I have previously heard, instigating a frenetic, delirious outpouring of sound. He soon relaxed, though, in a notably fluid reading, enabling éclat to transform itself into sensuality, both of course hallmarks of Boulez’s music. In composer, conductor, and players’ bending of time, rubato and performance seemed reborn before our ears. I was struck anew by the nerviness of some of the string writing and its proliferating consequences, but equally later by exquisite, frankly erotic longing. All manner of other detail emerged as if for the first time: perhaps, in some cases, it was. Electronics assumed their rightful role as another section, here almost in place of percussion though that need not be so, of the organism we know as the orchestra. In its three-movement form, the ‘modern classicism’ (Arnold Whittall) of this phase in Boulez’s career courted comparison with Mozart: a sinfonia concertante reimagined. The clarity Benjamin brought to the score would surely have impressed the composer himself. It was difficult also not to feel that melancholic, even elegiac quality to the close, as all returned to E-flat (Es/S for Stravinsky), might have moved him as it did us.

BBC SO/Oramo - Mahler, 4 October 2025

Barbican Hall

Symphony no.9

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Sakari Oramo (conductor)

Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is not a young person’s work—a young person as conductor, that is, not as listener or indeed orchestral musician. There will be exceptions; there always are. It is not, though, a work to be rushed into; frankly, no Mahler symphony is, though that has not stopped many. That is not, of course, to say it need be an old person’s work; Mahler, after all, was in his later forties when he wrote it. Coincidentally or otherwise, Claudio Abbado was more or less – very slightly less, I think – the same age when he first conducted it. It benefits, at least, from a degree of maturity: musical, but also emotional and intellectual. Serious musician that he is, Sakari Oramo has wisely left it until last. There was no doubting, though, the preparation that had gone into this, his first time conducting the work. He had its measure and communicated it well to a packed Barbican audience, drawing out the best from the BBC Symphony Orchestra, of which he is now its longest serving conductor. I hope we shall hear it again from him before long, but this was an auspicious, well-considered, and well-timed debut, taking nothing for granted and thereby resulting in a fresh, convincing performance of a work whose confrontation with mortality and what might lie beyond can, given the present state of the world, rarely have spoken more personally or necessarily. 

The opening was tentative and uncertain in the right way: that is, such was its mood, not a characterisation of the playing. The vast Andante comodo, often accounted Mahler’s single finest sonata-form achievement, built slowly and, by contrast, certainly. Yet, almost before one knew it, there came the first great orchestral cri de cœur, with all its multivalence and complex ambiguities. The music continued to sing, as it must. Variegated string playing, articulation in particular, was detailed – Mahler’s instructions are nothing if not detailed – and yet without fuss. How malevolent the darker timbres and harmonies sounded. I was put in mind of an observation by Adorno concerning Parsifal, so rich in implication for late Mahler in particular, of ‘eine düstere Abblendung des Klangs’, a ‘lugubrious dimming of sound’ that yet left space, even necessity, for agonies, such as those of Parsifal in and after Wagner’s second act, to play out. This was especially the case for the wind – shades of Kundry as ‘rose of Hell’ – even to the extent of according to an edge, in context rather than by design, to the purity of Daniel Pailthorpe’s flute solos, and certainly to those harp phrases (Elizabeth Bass and Elin Samuel) on the threshold of the Second Viennese School. The greater trajectory was all there, but it was properly built from detail; a broad brush, if every appropriate, could hardly be less so. Form and, if one may call it this, musical narrative unfolded with an urgency that had everything to do with understanding and nothing to do with minutes on the clock. Urgency does not and never should equate to mere speed. If, just occasionally, I felt that climaxes might have opened up further, in retrospect that single-mindedness was amply justified; far better that than sentimentalism, and there is no single way here. More importantly, the music peaked neither too early nor too frequently. Grief-laden, yet anything but mawkish, it seemed to suggest, even to say: this is how the world is. And it is, is it not? When consolation came, it had been earned and came from within. A sense of return at the movement’s close was not a case of full circle, but of revisitation given what had passed in the meantime. 

Oramo and the orchestra offered a splendidly deliberate foundation, its strength and integrity almost Klemperer-like, on which the ambiguities of the scherzo could rest, and/or from which they could grow. Overused it may be, but it is difficult not to reach for the word sardonic. Puppets danced above the abyss, somehow suspended from something that would not let them fall, something or even someone that may not, perhaps cannot, be named. Bruckner night at Wozzeck’s tavern ceded, or at least shared the stage with, sounds of the Prater and, more distant, more insidious, strains of Götterdämmerung. A Ländler corroded and transformed: what did it mean? And again, who might say? Yet, that it had meaning, whether or no it could be put into words, could hardly be doubted: a Viennese dream that not only permitted but demanded interpretation. 

The Rondo-Burleske, ‘sehr trotzig’, raged with a malevolence that may have been intrinsic or may have reflected a world to which the music ‘itself’ reacted. There was, at times, especially earlier on, a smile too, though by the close it would be but a bitter memory. Again, there was an impression of marionettes playing out their drama, or it being played out for them, through them. Who pulls the strings? Driven equally by harmony and counterpoint, it offered a final Mahlerian tribute, beleaguered and yet in its way triumphant, to Bach. Marching bands would not, could not fall silent. Indeed, for a few heartrending moments, the world of the Third Symphony seemed if not to return, then to be fondly recalled, only to be banished by something closer to the spirit of the Sixth. 

The finale followed attacca, its opening as rich in compassion as in texture and in string sentiment expressed with – not dependent on – vibrato. There were still daemons to be exercised, but there was, it seemed, a God—and He might just aid us. Clear reminiscences of the first movement made clear the nature of the journey we had taken. Violin tone was transmuted from gold into silver, even for a moment into ice that chilled the bones. There would be no easy to path, yet we could trust that there was one. Stoically, Mahler summoned the reserves to keep going. For the lights might be going off – one could hear and almost see them, one by one – but there was no alternative. The Mahlerian subject somehow, somewhere remained, a voice of humanity, the hymn’s ‘still small voice of calm’, or even a peace that passed all understanding. Having passed through a weird twilight zone, metaphysical (Wagner, Schoenberg, and others) and even political (Nono, I fancied, might have divined the Gramscian ‘Now is the time of monsters’), and having refused to let go, humanity spoke—and sang. In a ghostly revisitation of Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, there was a flicker: maybe of hope, maybe even of peace, unquestionably of something. Music bore witness.

(The performance will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Thursday 16 October at 7.30 p.m.; it will be available for thirty days thereafter on BBC Sounds.)

 

Iphigénie en Tauride, Blackheath Halls Opera, 28 September 2025

Blackheath Halls

Images: Julian Guidera
Iphigenia (Francesca Chiejina) 

Iphigénie – Francesca Chiejina
Thoas – Dan D’Souza
Oreste – Dan Shelvey
Pylade – Michael Lafferty
Priestesses – Emily Williams, Ava Reineke, Eva Hutchins
Scythians – Byron Davis-Hughes, Zac Conibear

Director – Laura Attridge
Designs – Peiyao Wang
Lighting – Charly Dunford
Movement – Corina Würsch
Fight director – Mark Ruddick

Students from Greenvale School and Charlton Park Academy

Blackheath Halls Chorus and Youth Company

Blackheath Halls Orchestra

Chris Stark (conductor)

Priestesses as Diana (Emily Williams, Ava Reineke, Eva Hutchins)

Unquestionably Gluck’s greatest opera and, to my mind, the greatest eighteenth-century opera whose composer is neither Rameau nor Mozart, possibly even that is simply not by Mozart, Iphigénie en Tauride needs to come across as such. In a sense, all is secondary to that. Hats off, then, to Blackheath Halls Opera, employing a mixture of professional soloists, conservatoire students, and local residents of all ages, that the results should be quite so compelling, a vindication of community opera in itself and as dramatic experience. No attentive viewer and listener would have been in any doubt as to the work’s stature in a vividly direct performance and production that displayed not only commitment, but resourcefulness and imagination too. 

Laura Attridge’s production stood at the heart of this, neither imposing something extraneous on the work nor shying away from interpretation, rooted in the work but not confined by it: a metaphor and, I suspect, a foundation for the enterprise as a whole. (The idea that there can be a performance or indeed a reading without interpretation is self-evident nonsense, although it proves curiously persistent.) The drama grabbed and did not relinquish us: Euripides re-created, partly reimagined, but above all given new life; Gluck and librettist Nicolas-François Guillard recreated in turn. Stories, dramas, and their meanings change over time, but a core remains, endures, and in some ways is even strengthened. I am sure this would have been the case whether new to it, as many would have been, or a fervent Gluckian (as a few eccentrics might think ourselves). Such is the magic of human creation—and its riddle, as Marx for instance puzzled over, asking how, in his abidingly historical world-view, the art of the Greeks could continue so directly to speak to us Peiyao Wang’s set made excellent use of the space: on two levels, though not in the fashionable way of large theatres, in which too often those in the less expensive seats struggle even to see the higher level of action. Here, action extended downwards from the raised stage, affording a perfect view to everyone. An upside down house, hanging from the ceiling, served as a constant reminder that, in the aftermath of war and other ‘conflict’, all many involved want is to go home, yet are unable to do so. It may no longer exist or have been so transformed (destroyed) as to render the dream impossible. Iphigenia, worlds away from Mycenae, was foremost among those people onstage, though after the interval, the advent of children playing with smaller houses below reminded us she was far from alone. Beyond the stage, refugees remain on all our minds. And it was clear, quite without fuss, that Orestes and Pylades have not only the most intense, meaningful of male friendships, but are truly in love, sealed with a reuniting kiss at the close. The libretto may say ‘amitié’ rather than ‘amour’, but how could it otherwise? This opera has always been a special case; here, the English ‘love’ conquered all. 

Pylade (Michael Lafferty),Thoas (Dan D'Souza),Oreste (Dan Shelvey)

So too did much of the singing. Francesca Chiejina was a wonderful Iphigenia: compassionate, vulnerable, inwardly (and outwardly) strong, her clarity of diction as noteworthy as that of dramatic purpose. Dan Shelvey and Michael Lafferty offered noble and yet similarly, deeply human portrayals of Orestes and Pylades, oppressed and resurrected by Fate—or Diana, strikingly portrayed by three High Priestesses together: Emily Williams, Ava Reineke, Eva Hutchins. Dan D’Souza brought Thoas, the Taurian king, vividly to life with cruelty and not a little charm. Byron Davis-Hughes and Zac Conibear stepped forward to make the most of their time in the vocal spotlight as two Scythians. Various crowds assumed their parts, vocal and dramatic, presenting individuals who together were considerably more than the sum of their parts. Chris Stark led the musical side, the Blackheath Halls Orchestra included, with a keen ear both for dramatic purpose and for what was desirable in this particular situation. Orchestral drama, of which there is much, unfolded as keenly as that onstage, ballet music considered from all quarters integral to the drama in a venerable line of descent from Rameau and ultimately Lully. 

Thoas

Given in English as Iphigenie in Tauris, in a new translation commissioned from Martin Pickard, this knocked spots off my previous evening’s Cenerentola at ENO, which had fallen victim not only to half-baked staging and conducting but to an often excruciatingly unmusical translation. Opera in translation, even from French, can work—and was clearly the right decision in this context. It is, moreover, not only what Gluck would have expected, but what he did when presenting the opera in Vienna for the visit of Russia’s Grand Duke Paul in 1781, only two years after the Paris premiere. (An Italian version would be given in the same theatre only two years later, in light of the failure of the National Singspiel, in a translation by one Lorenzo da Ponte.) One sensed, moreover, a strong partnership between Pickard and Attridge, herself a poet (as well as someone who speaks great sense about what the role of an opera director is—and is not). A memorable occasion, then, all in all: dare we hope for more Gluck in London, and even in Blackheath?