London Sinfonietta/Kemp - Boulez and Cage, 9 March 2025

Purcell Room

Cage: Six Melodies
Boulez: Improvisé—pour le Dr. K
Cage: Credo in US
Boulez: Dérive 1
Boulez: Domaines
Cage: Variations I

Francesca Amewudah-Rivers (actor)

Michael McCarthy (director)

Mark van de Wiel (clarinet)

Sarah Nicolls (prepared piano)

London Sinfonietta

Thomas Kemp (conductor)

Images: Monika S Jakubowska

This London Sinfonietta concert, ‘innovative’ in the best rather than the debased, trivial way, framed performances of works by Pierre Boulez and John Cage with engaging readings from their correspondence by Francesca Amewudah-Rivers and short filmed contributions. It made for an enthralling and enjoyable evening at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room, precisely because the level of performance was so high, ‘additions’, though they were far more than that, genuinely complementing rather than substituting for musical excellence. It was a delight, moreover, to see a sold-out venue, once again giving the lie to claims that no one is interested in hearing this music. Many of us have a deep thirst for it; the only reason we do not go more often is a lack of opportunities to do so. Many do not, just as many do not like all manner of things, whether Mozart, Beethoven, the Beatles, or anything else; there is no reason to be dishonest and substitute one’s own preferences and interests for the voice of the world-spirit. And there is every reason to welcome an all-too-rare opportunity to hear, rather than simply talk about, this music, especially in so illuminating a juxtaposition, which offered great musical contrasts as well as points of mutual historical fascination. 

The first reading came not from the correspondence as such, although it is included in the Cambridge University Press Nattiez-Samuels edition as its first item. It was instead taken from Boulez’s 1949 spoken introduction – both manuscript and a rough draft are part of the Paul Sacher Stiftung – to the performance he helped organise of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, given at Suzanne Tézanas’s Paris salon. A brief filmed excerpt was juxtaposed with a live excerpt from Boulez’s own Second Piano Sonata of the previous year. Different worlds indeed, though the excerpted correspondence that followed suggested genuine interest in mutual exploration too, Boulez’s apology for sometimes writing in French – ‘my [English] grammar is still too shaky’ (3/11/12 January 1950) – typical of a humility for which he is still too infrequently credited. 

Cage’s Six Melodies for violin and keyboard (piano) from this same year were given a delightful performance by Clio Gould and Elizabeth Burley, the rhythmic progression Boulez admired strongly yet far from didactically to the fore. Initially un-, even anti-‘violinistic’, the music seemed to grow both as music and as violin music, the third and fourth pieces in particular splendidly ‘fiddling’. It felt like a gateway to the meditative sensibility as well as to the chance operations that would increasingly characterise Cage’s music in the years to follow. Boulez’s 2005 revision of his 1969 tribute for the eightieth birthday of Aldred A. Kalmus of Universal Edition, Improvisé—pour le Dr. K, opened with typical piano éclat. A very strong initial sense of Schoenberg – and he is there somewhere – faded slightly when I realised: ‘of course: like the other Kalmus pieces, this was written for the Pierrot ensemble’. Flute trills and their generative tendency seemed prophetic of later explorations, not least … explosante-fixe …, though its progress was very different. It was over in a flash, as ever leaving one wishing for more. 

A clip from the film Works of Calder, also from 1950, followed, including Cage’s music: ‘the first time I have felt the music to be necessary to a film’ (Boulez, 30 December 1950). Although Cage’s Credo in US was written earlier (1942) it seemed here to pre-empt the composer’s growing interest in chance operations through its use of radio music. Rhythm and sounds of percussion were truly infectious, leading up, so it seemed, to those Sonatas and Interludes. Boulez’s Dérive 1 (1984) offered more contrast than complement, though was no less welcome for that; it seemed to take up the baton from his earlier piece, the SACHER reference’s generative quality seductively palpable. Febrile, ever-transforming, a feast of Messiaenic colour, it spoke of and through Debussy rather than Cage’s Satie, and in its woodwind arabesques, similarly proclaimed a Stravinskian inheritance thoroughly internalised and transformed. 

Mark van de Wiel’s performance of the solo version of Domaines (1961-8) proved a stunning tour de force. Whatever Boulez’s intention, the element of choice and mobility, the clarinettist selecting the order in which the pages, each on a different stand, are played, brings an inescapable element of what soon would be called music theatre to proceedings, the performer’s one-man show extended to two, counting his instrument. Apart from – though who could it be apart from? – van de Wiel’s equally outstanding virtuosity and musical understanding, one of Boulez’s triumphant reinstatements of the performer, what truly stood out was an almost Wagnerian unendliche Melodie. One felt vividly as well as merely heard the procedures at work in all parameters, attack included, in the longest of constructed lines.   

Is Cage’s layering of transparencies in Variations I (1958) – to be performed by any number of performers on any instruments and any number thereof – more radical? Perhaps. Less ’Western’? Perhaps. Less ‘musical’? Perhaps. Given the presentation, it is hardly unreasonable to have felt led to ask such questions. Again, though, it was the contrast brought by something no less triumphantly ‘itself’ that was truly the thing. It brought with it a breath of the fresh air many felt Cage had imparted to Darmstadt.

Uchida - Beethoven, Schoenberg, Kurtág, and Schubert, 7 March 2025

Royal Festival Hall

Beethoven: Piano Sonata no.27 in E minor, op.90
Schoenberg: Three Piano Pieces, op.11
Kurtág: Márta ligaturája
Schubert: Piano Sonata no.21 in B-flat major, op.posth., D 960

Mitsuko Uchida (piano)

An evening with Mitsuko Uchida is rarely less than a privilege, and this was no exception. One audience member at the start seemed to take the idea a little too far, resolutely continuing to film her despite verbal and gestural requests to stop. An usher had to walk across the hall and point a sign forbidding use of telephones in the person’s face. Extraordinary! What with that and an onslaught of coughing that again occasioned requests in vain from the platform to desist, we certainly experienced the worst of live performance. Fortunately, there was enough of the best to compensate. 

The first item on the programme, Beethoven’s E minor Sonata, op.90, took a while properly to get going (a state of affairs perhaps not entirely unrelated to the case of the manic telephone user). Contrasts, especially dynamic contrasts, were immediately present. More broadly, the strange, wonderful world of Beethoven on the cusp of ‘lateness’ was with us. If some of the first movement in particular was a little brittle, that was not entirely inappropriate for this fractured world. Accentuated by very sparing use of the pedal, much of it entirely unpedalled, here was a Beethoven that was anything but comfortable or routine, even if I sometimes felt a slight lack of the continuity that underlies discontinuity. An almost Schubertian intimacy to the close, presaging the second half of the recital, came close to erasing any such reservations. The second movement seemed to breathe the air already of the late Bagatelles, in particular their lyricism, even when turned outward. Occasional technical faltering was of little import; the crucial things were engagement with and expression of Beethoven’s truculent humanism. 

Voice-leading in the first of Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces seemed in context to take its leave not only from Brahms but directly from Beethoven. So, indeed, did much else: contrasts now here become fully dialectical; melodic fragments wending their necessary yet sometimes difficult way; and harmony, yes harmony, too. Above all, there was here a not entirely dissimilar obstinacy—and nobility of spirit. Formal command was unquestionable, as founded on harmony as, say, the Beethoven of Daniel Barenboim (or Wilhelm Furtwängler). Much the same could be said of the second piece, over which the spirits of Wagner and Liszt hovered still more clearly. The third felt very much like the final movement of a ‘sonata’ of a dark variety that was yet possessed of magical chiaroscuro. 

The second half opened with Kurtág’s 2020 miniature Márta ligaturája, written for cimbalom, but here played directly from what seemed to be small manuscript pages (presumably copies), rendering the tribute to the composer’s beloved wife Marta all the more moving. Again, harmony and voice-leading seemed to pick up from where we had left off, only all the more distilled. If kinship with Schoenberg’s op.11 came across with particular strength, the emotional import came closer to his evocation of funeral bells for Mahler in the last of the Six Piano Pieces, op.19. Harmonies, not least pristine major chords, surprised and beguiled. 

Schubert’s final piano sonata followed less attacca than might have been the case, given the audience’s inability to keep quiet. The opening was nevertheless a thing of magic, possessed of seemingly intimate dynamic gradations, strength lying in intimacy and fragility, in persistence. This movement, indeed the sonata, as a whole reminded us what happiness can be built on pain, and vice versa. The last thing one needs here is a maudlin path, tempting though it may be. (I recall my own youthful attempts.) Instead, Schubert’s nobility of utterance was treasured, allowing it to speak ‘for itself’, however illusory that performative idea might be in practice. Ambivalence ran deep, especially in oscillation between major and minor. The recapitulation was, quite properly, a second development: one of a very different nature from those of Beethoven, one that seemingly never gave him a moment’s thought. The sound of Uchida’s chords in the coda would have been worth the price of admission alone 

Beautifully judged in tempo, as in all else, the slow movement neither dragged nor was rushed. It built; it sang; it said what needed to be said. The revelation of C-sharp major silenced any questions about how to understand it enharmonically and in relation to the tonality of the piece as a whole; Schubert, Uchida, and we knew.  A light-footed scherzo, if not quite lifting the clouds, suspended them for a moment. Its trio’s ambiguity, strange even by Schubert’s standards, duly registered, thus paving the way for the manifold, still deeper ambiguities of the finale, its decidedly non-Beethovenian subjectivity simply present, immanent. That said, there was here too a decidedly human, as well as humanist, obstinacy that seemed to bind together all the compositional voices on this programme: in this case, both aptly and surprisingly, in the returns of the rondo theme and the alternative, fleetingly Mahlerian vistas of the episodes.

Lortie - Chopin, 27 February 2025

Barbican Hall

Études, op.10
Trois Nouvelles Études, B130
Études, op.25

Louis Lortie (piano)  

I do not think I had previously heard all of Chopin’s piano studies given on a single evening. Fortunately, Louis Lortie’s recital was not one of those occasions on which one ends up thinking that might have made more sense as a CD than a concert programme; there is certainly much to be gained by hearing the works together, not only the two celebrated sets, but also the Trois Nouvelles Études written in 1839 as a contribution to Ignaz Moscheles and François-Joseph Fétis’s Méthode des méthodes de piano. It is not unusual in a piano recital to feel that the music following the interval flows more freely; if that was the case here, that is not to say that the first half was without interest, far from it. And whatever quibbles one might have – there will always be something – there is something heroic to the very attempt, let alone to its navigation with such success. 

Indeed, Lortie’s way with the op.10 Études was in some ways surprising. Often, the technical difficulties underlying the idea of a study came across more strongly than usual as essence as opposed to mere starting-point. In the opening C major piece, fingerwork and basic figuration very much were the music material. In the F major Étude, all was generated from tightly sprung rhythms. Voice-leading very much did its work in the E-flat major and minor studies. There was a keen sense of progression too, the C-sharp minor study vehement, torrential even, and notably proceeding from its two immediate predecessors. That is not to say there was not lyricism, as for instance in the E major study, given not without rubato yet enough simplicity; but even there, the technical ‘point’ of the piece shone through. Whether the balance tilted too much in that direction is doubtless in part a matter of taste, though for me sometimes it did. I certainly felt the loss of subjectivity in the ‘Revolutionary’ Study, an odd anti-climax whose detachment felt at odds with ‘problem’ and material alike. 

The three Nouvelles Études seemed to strike a better overall balance, as did the op.25 set. In the former, Scarlatti’s ‘ingenious jesting with art’ came to mind, Lortie uncommonly successful even among great pianists in transforming the ‘problem’ into music from the outset. The first in particular can readily sound more an ‘exercise’ than anything else, but here was deeply involving; as, in its necessarily lighter way, was the second. The A-flat major opening study of op.25 built and sang, its trajectory beautifully plotted. Slightly odd hesitations in the second piece of the op.10 set were nowhere to be heard in the long line of its counterpart here, whilst the richness of texture in the succeeding F major study proved duly engrossing. Technical demands were not banished, but there was a more consistent, conventional sense of these as miniature tone poems proceeding from a technical question: nowhere more so than in the G-sharp minor Étude. A delectable G-flat major Étude dug just deep enough. The concluding C minor piece of this set worked considerably better to my ears as a conclusion than its counterpart prior to the interval, very much a profound utterance of the soul. 

The first encore – alas, I missed the second – a generous G minor Ballade, was oddly dream-like: not necessarily how I think of it, but successfully reimagined on Lortie’s own terms. This was, then, anything but a run-of-the-mill Chopin recital. I was often thrilled and, even where slightly puzzled, found myself at least intrigued.

Götterdämmerung, Regents Opera, 16 February 2025

York Hall, Bethnal Green

Images: Steve Gregson
Siegfried (Peter Furlong), Hagen (Simon Wilding), Gunther (Andrew Mayor)

First Norn - Ingeborg Novrup Børch
Second Norn, Flosshilde – Mae Haydorn
Third Norn, Woglinde – Jillian Finnamore
Brünnhilde – Catharine Woodward
Siegfried – Peter Furlong
Gunther – Andrew Mayor
Hagen – Simon Wilding
Gutrune – Justine Viani
Waltraute – Catherine Backhouse
Alberich – Oliver Gibbs
Wellgunde – Elizabeth Findon
Vassals – Davide Basso, Max Catalano, Anthony Colasanto, Jacob Dyksterhouse, Tim Sawers, Alfred Mitchell, Ed Walters, Robin Whitehouse, Guy Wood-Gush

Director – Caroline Staunton
Assistant directors – Eleanor Strutt, Keiko Sumida
Designs – Isabella van Braeckel
Lighting – Patrick Malmström
Producer – CJ Heaver  

Members of London Gay Men’s Chorus

Members of Regents Opera Upper Voices Chorus

Regents Opera Ensemble

Ben Woodward (conductor)

The Norns (Ingeborg Novrup Børch, Mae Heydorn, Jillian Finnamore)

Wagner’s Ring is the drama of our time, yet it is surely the drama of every time. Seeing Opera North’s concert Rheingold only five days after the fateful 2016 referendum, the work seemed to take its leave from that. In our present malaise, Götterdämmerung inevitably seems closer than ever. Wagner, after all, pointed to the great virtue of myth being its alleged truth for all time, its content inexhaustible for any age. He is not saying quite the same thing there, although nor is he saying something entirely different. Tempting though it might be to proceed down that road, the particularity of this particular production and performance should be our primary concern. If my personal experience was less than ideal, in that I was unable to see Die Walküre and Siegfried, the final day of Wagner’s Ring spoke mostly for itself, with tantalising suggestions of what I might have missed—and dearly wish that I had not. 

Caroline Staunton’s production continues to tell the story with great intelligence and clarity, further framing refreshing rather than distracting. The sense of a collection of objects, a museum or gallery even, has developed since Rheingold’s contest of Valhalla and Nibelheim, to something less distant, incontestably ‘present’, as many of the best Götterdammerungen have always been. In any Ring, thoughts almost inevitably turn to that of Pierre Boulez and Patrice Chéreau: testament not only to its extraordinary quality, almost taking upon itself that mythical quality to which Wagner referred, but also to its historical fortune, falling in the right place at the right time, and with the right technology (television) spreading its word. This is unquestionably, as Chéreau remarked and showed, a post-religious society of increasingly desperate rituals, which knows no morality and finds it difficult, perhaps impossible, to ‘know’ at all. Here, the sense of objects curated, possessed, and, like the gold, fatefully valued – an ‘art market’ not so very different from what one might encounter, say, in the Tate Modern’s Turner Prize – entwines with Wagner’s epic, genealogical method, verbal and musical, of telling, retelling, adding standpoints and perspectives, never repeating. The world of the Norns seeks, perhaps, to protect objects gathered from earlier instalments. One can see and feel this when, as a gallery spectator, one ventures during the intervals to inspect the saucepan and tins, presumably Mime’s, from Siegfried, and other such objets. 

Hagen, Gunther, Brünnhilde, (Catharine Woodward) Gutrune (Justine Viani)

The following world of the Gibichungs glories, trivially yet palpably, in their extraction and abstraction, in the fetishist need to add to the collection, as Alberich needed to add to his hoard, Wagner’s furchtbare Not turned Lacanian. (We might reflect on that as we seek to add to the collection of Ring performances we have seen. Why are we doing this? Is it as mere collectors, perhaps closer to Nietzsche’s ‘Wagnerians’ or as something more active, as participants, as the revolutionary audience Wagner himself demanded?) I could not help but think of the denizens of Frank Castorf’s Götterdämmerung safeguarding their Picassos as Brünnhilde, purposely underwhelmingly, set Wall Street (slightly) ablaze. That consumerism appears to be what drives Gunther and Gutrune to wish to acquire Siegfried and Brünnhilde, though Hagen of course knows better and deeper. When all is returned to the Rhinemaidens, one can read this in all manner of ways; an ecological imperative is not necessarily to the scenic fore, though it hardly need be, since it will surely present itself to any thinking person in the midst of our climate emergency. 

Instead, we are prompted to think of the role art and its commodification, as well as more general sliding into the ‘mere’ craft, indeed ‘effect without cause’ Wagner diagnosed in the more meretricious would-be art of his own time. Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century, is transposed to the Ring in a Bethnal Green boxing ring. And the ring itself, like various of these objects more akin to Loge’s Rheingold toyland ‘Tand’ than the fearsome object we have been led to believe, gains whatever power it might have through the act of investing. It is less a matter of it working on account of belief, than on account of its valuation, or perhaps better a financialised, late-capitalist merging of the two; until, that is, the bottom falls out of the market, as it always will, rope of Fate or otherwise. 

Gunther, Brünnhilde

Conductor Ben Woodward and his small ensemble continued to work wonders. Of course there are times when one longs for a full orchestra, just as in a large theatre, there are times when one longs to be able to see the faces of those onstage. What surprised was how relatively few they were. Götterdämmerung surely presents the toughest challenge in this sense of the four dramas. Das Rheingold as Kammerspiel makes considerable sense, but the cosmic scale and grand opéra hauntings of this tale of Siegfried’s death and Brünnhilde’s redemption, heard through all that has passed before, seem to require something different. Maintaining tension over its vast span is difficult enough at Bayreuth or Covent Garden. Even the most exalted orchestras will slip here and there. This, however, was decidedly not the moment for Beckmesserish quibbles. Musical drama unfolded with care and intelligence, in tandem with the staging yet far from enslaved to it. Opportunities to hear it anew, sometimes even a little ‘inside out’, were gladly taken, forming part of an overall refreshment for the jaded, as well as a riveting introduction for those enabled to attend for the first time. The instrumentalists deserve nothing but praise for their contributions throughout, and choral forces brought welcome and, in this context, all the more telling contrast, permitting that larger-scale operatic world thrillingly to burst in. 

Hagen

None of this could, of course, have been achieved without the contributions from an excellent set of singing-actors. Different audience members will have had different favourites, and all contributed to a drama that was very much greater than the sum of its parts. Nonetheless, I was particularly struck by Simon Wilding’s Hagen and Catharine Woodward’s Brünnhilde (partly the roles, no doubt, though only partly). Wilding’s Hagen, dark and dangerous, simply owned the stage, a study in evil and its undeniable charm. The scene with his father proved especially moving, Oliver Gibbs not so much reprising as developing his outstanding Alberich for new, still darker times. Woodward’s Brünnhilde was similarly blessed of stage presence. Art in many respects conceals art: it was difficult not to feel that this simply ‘was’ the Valkyrie, and these simply ‘were’ the final phases of her journey. She could certainly sing too, offering an Immolation Scene of equal humanity and grandeur, in tandem with conductor and orchestra. It seemed, then, in many ways fitting that, at the end of the second-act trio, perhaps haunted here more by Verdi than Meyerbeer, Staunton should offer the twist of an unexpected passing union between Hagen and Brünnhilde. 

Gunther and Gutrune offer different challenges, of course. Vocal portrayal of weak characters is always a tough call, to which Andrew Mayor and Justine Viani rose very well indeed. The key, it seemed, lay in portrayal arising from the text, as was also the case with Peter Furlong’s tireless Siegfried, the character clearly, intriguingly traumatised. I suspect a clue to this would have been found in Siegfried; even without, it pointed to the difficulties our age and indeed Wagner’s (later Attic tragedy too, for that matter) have found in heroism. Catherine Backhouse gave a heartfelt reading of Waltraute’s pleading. Norns and Rhinemaidens emerged in fine ensemble, without sacrifice to individual voice. 

To conclude, then, may I once again suggest that any reader feeling able to do so might consider supporting this extraordinary venture, thrice denied Arts Council funding? The ecology of opera in this country is now as parlous as that of the world around us. Maybe, just maybe, Götterdämmerung can still be averted.

Mary, Queen of Scots, ENO, 15 February 2025

Coliseum

Images: Ellie Kurttz
Queen Mary (Heidi Stober)

Queen Mary – Heidi Stober
James Stewart, Earl of Moray – Alex Otterburn
Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley – Rupert Charlesworth
James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell – John Findon
David Riccio – Barnaby Rea
Cardinal Beaton – Darren Jeffery
Lord Gordon – Alastair Miles
Earl of Ruthven – Ronald Samm
Earl of Morton – Jolyon Loy
Mary Seton – Jenny Stafford
Mary Beaton – Monica McGhee
Mary Livingston – Felicity Buckland
Mary Fleming – Siān Griffiths

Director, designs – Stewart Laing
Associate costume designs – Mady Berry
Lighting – D.M. Wood

Choreography – Alex McCabe  

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

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Joana Carneiro (conductor)

Written to the composer’s own libretto based on Amalia Elguera’s unpublished play Moray – direct collaboration having proved difficult – Thea Musgrave’s Mary, Queen of Scots has had, by contemporary operatic standards, rather a happy history since its 1977 Edinburgh premiere. It has reached various stages in the United Kingdom, United States and Germany. Last year, a new production was mounted in Leipzig. Now, in co-production with San Francisco Opera, it receives its premiere at ENO. It may have seemed a bold step for the company in its current, parlous condition, yet it was rewarded with both an artistic success and something approaching a full house. It was a delight to see the composer, approaching 97, in the audience and receiving justly warm and prolonged applause. 

Earl of Bothwell (Barnaby Rea), James Stewart (Alex Otterburn), Mary

People can create, perform, and appreciate successful art regardless of personal circumstances; there nevertheless seems something apt for a Scottish woman who received part of her education in France (studying with Nadia Boulanger) who thereafter spent much of her life, if not in exile then working in another English-speaking country (the USA), to have written an opera on this theme. If it does not fall into the category of experimental opera, seeking to reinvent or reimagine the genre, to expand its theatrical and/or musical boundaries; nor is it seeking to do so, without proving self-consciously archaising. Mary Queen of Scots is rather a highly competent, engaging work which, in its three acts, come across as the equal of many an accomplished work by the likes of Britten or even, in some moods, Henze. In musical dramaturgy, if hardly language, the opera takes its place more in a line from Verdi than Wagner. Musgrave is equally, palpably adept at many of the classic set pieces and expectations of the genre, evoking with similar sureness requirements and shifts in general atmosphere, music for dancing, and crowd scenes set against individual feeling. Turning inwards for an aria, in which certain instrumentation colours a character’s – and our – response, music and drama might be understood as traditionally operatic, without pushing any particular aesthetic as to what anything other than itself should be.

Likewise, a broadly tonal musical language sounds straightforwardly to be what it is, rather than self-consciously reinstating tonality—or anything else. I could sense a mind at work planning its musical structure in tandem with the drama, without bringing that modernistically to the fore. The ENO Orchestra and (a regrettably thinned down) Chorus under conductor Joana Carneiro were surely instrumental to realising this success. One would never have had the sense this was not a repertory work they had been playing for years—save, perhaps for the keen sense of discovery. We felt, even knew, we were in safe hands, though. 

The cast was, of course, similarly crucial to such achievement. Heidi Stober gave a touching, multi-faceted performance in the title role, in no evident sense bound by the expectations such a portrayal must necessarily greet. One felt in her plight the twin demands of life and fate ground tragically by politics low and high. Alex Otterburn’s quicksilver James Stewart proved nicely enigmatic. If there remained a nagging suspicion one should dislike the character more than one did, that stood testament to the artists’ gift for bringing alive both the character and his own necessities. Rupert Charlesworth had one properly despise Darnley in his amoral weakness. I struggled somewhat to gain the measure of the Earl of Bothwell, but that seemed to be more inherent in the drama, perhaps the staging too, than in John Findon’s well-sung performance. Darren Jeffery’s Cardinal Beaton and Barnaby Rea’s Riccio were clearly, vividly presented; not that the two have much in common beyond that. Smaller roles were all well taken, rebuking the idea that one can, let alone should, uproot a company such as ENO and dump it somewhere else; such depth comes from building on a living tradition, not that the Arts Council has idea or interest in such an idea. 

David Riccio (Barnaby Rea), Lord Darnley (Rupert Charlesworth), James Stewart

Stewart Laing’s production was at best a mixed bag, though that may in part have been a matter of limited resources. If it tried to do more with a broadly comparable black-box space than Ruth Knight had for Britten’s Gloriana in 2022, Knight’s caution emerged all the wiser. A marquee was built and taken down with considerable noise: a metaphor, no doubt, yet one that added little. Other than that, we had strangely inappropriate costumes, their lack of social differentiation was puzzling. Warm anoraks were the thing across the board, perhaps because the opera is set in Scotland, although, especially in crowd scenes, we appeared to be closer to the world of The Flying Dutchman. If the idea – and I think it may have been – was to evoke twentieth-century Protestant-Catholic sectarianism, then it might have been more rigorously applied, strange exceptions throwing the whole thing into disarray, unaided by other aspects of the staging. To be fair, though, one could certainly understand why Mary would only have returned to this Scotland with the greatest of reluctance; it was difficult to imagine how what we saw would have been worth a mass, a Lord’s Supper, or anything else. 

Cardinal Beaton (Darren Jeffery)

I could not understand why Alastair Miles’s dour yet honest Lord Gordon wore a dog collar; let alone why, if so, he should be dressed more as Presbyterian minister than Catholic priest. But then his part in the drama more generally seemed strange on any discernible historical terms, not least in his stabbing of James Stewart (as the Earl of Moray is referred to). Conflation of characters, however much it may pain historians, is far from an unusual dramatic device; if we go down this route, we shall be here all day. This nonetheless remained a perplexing choice. Bothwell’s rape of Mary nevertheless registered in duly horrifying fashion. I do not know the work itself well enough – indeed at all, other than from this performance – to be sure whether the nature of the act is originally so clear. I sensed there might be a suggestion of greater ambiguity, though that may be entirely wrong. In any case, there none here; it cast its dark, terrible shadow over all that remained to be shown.

Das Rheingold, Regents Opera, 9 February 2025

York Hall, Bethnal Green

Images: Matthew Coughlan (unless stated otherwise)
Rhinemaidens (Jillian Finnamore, Justine Viani), Alberich (Oliver Gibbs)

Wotan – Ralf Lukas
Donner – Andrew Mayor
Froh – Calvin Lee
Loge – James Schouten
Fricka – Ingeborg Børch
Freia – Charlotte Richardson
Erda, Flosshilde – Mae Heydorn
Alberich – Oliver Gibbs
Mime – Holden Madagame
Fasolt – Henry Grant Kerswell
Fafner – Craig Lemont Walters
Woglinde – Jillian Finnamore
Wellgunde – Justine Viani

Director – Caroline Staunton
Assistant directors – Eleanor Strutt, Keiko Sumida
Designs – Isabella van Braeckel
Lighting – Patrick Malmström
Producer – CJ Heaver

Regents Opera Orchestra
Ben Woodward (conductor)

Fricka (Ingeborg Børch), Wotan (Ralf Lukas)

 
In some ways the most radical of all Wagner’s dramas and, far from coincidentally, both the most brazenly socialist in its content and the most aesthetically distant from traditional ‘opera’, Das Rheingold will never cease to astonish. Should it not, them something has gone seriously awry. Experience nonetheless teaches one to be prepared for anything. What a joy, then, to be quite unprepared for the extraordinary success of the first instalment of Regents Opera’s Ring at York Hall, Bethnal Green.

 The space itself is part of the magic. (Doubtless the venue for earlier Regents Opera performances, the contemporaneous yet very different Freemasons’ Hall in Holborn, will also have been.) The Wimbledon or Wembley of British boxing, yet speaking far more clearly of its East End working-class roots, York Hall will doubtless have been new to many in the audience; it was to me, though I lived for some years further east, in Poplar. This is a Ring in the round, encircling what would be the (boxing) ring itself. I have never experienced a Ring so close to the stage, however small the theatre, and that both allows an intimacy one would never otherwise experience and necessitates a form of detailed acting that might otherwise only intermittently be noticed. Fortunately, Caroline Staunton’s production, as theatrically alert as any I have seen, offers Personenregie fully equal to the task—and singers fully equal to it too. 

Production and performance tell the story, but also allow you to (re-)tell it. What characters do, who they are, what this might represent and mean: these are not only accomplished through words, music, gesture, and staging, but captivatingly so. Isabella van Braeckel’s set and costume designs may stand for themselves; they tell us important things about the world in which this is taking place. They are also amenable to interpretation, without imposition (not that I am opposed to this, far from it) of any one conceptual strand upon the performance. Plinth-like objects suggest the world of the gods, notably ruling over the first scene too, with resonances of the Attic tragedy Wagner so revered but also something more recent, Speer-like, as well as the vain sacrifices to a belief that in Götterdämmerung will already all but have died. They can also suggest workbenches for and display for the products of Nibelheim, and adapt readily to the transformation in circumstances of the final scene. Objects are indeed to the fore throughout: crucial in Wagner, as has been wearily established in recent stagings (Dmitri Tcherniakov in Berlin and, far worse, Valentin Schwarz in Bayreuth) that have blithely disregarded the near-necessity of having something that on some level might represent the spear, the gold, Freia’s apples, and so on. How this is accomplished is entirely open. Here, a variety of resourceful solutions is found. Lighting, costume, gold paint, physical (in one case, highly phallic) objects, a disturbing, power-based contagion leaping from victim to victim, blocking, dance, and of course the text of the work in performance. All has been thoroughly thought through; yet equally important, all comes up fresh as new. This is, in short, a splendid theatre-piece: one that is in some sense about theatre and music, and what happens when they come together, without wearing metatheatricality on its sleeve (as in, say, Stefan Herheim’s wonderful Deutsche Oper Rheingold). 

Froh (Calvin Lee), Alberich, Loge (James Schouten), Wotan

It is not only that, of course. Wagner’s musicodramatic dialectic is such, like that of any opera composer worth his/her/their salt, that intensification of one element necessitates elements of the other. (As we see painted on Alberich’s back: GESAMT KUNST WERK). Any orchestral reduction will have consequences, yet this scaling down to twenty-two-piece orchestra (on the stage above) does a splendid job in situ of conveying more than one would ever have thought possible, very much of a piece with the intense, intimate theatricality of the staging. Ben Woodward’s conducting does likewise, as does the instrumentalists’ playing. If I say that I rarely noticed them in themselves, that is not to say they were somehow neutral or featureless, but rather that the finely judged ebb and flow seemed to spring from the same source as staging and vocal performances, so that one could hardly be distinguished from the others. Use of a synthesiser was, wisely, sparing, yet assisted, for instance, with deeds of staging rendered audible (to invert Wagner’s own formulation) such as the Tarnhelm’s mysterious magic, itself splendidly acted out by Oliver Gibbs as Alberich. 

If I say that portrayal was an excellent instance of the singer-actor’s art – I could of most I saw and heard – that is not, as I know we sometimes do, to use the term as a euphemism for vocal shortcomings, but again to point to a fine alchemy in which all was considerably more than the sum of its parts. Indeed, Gibbs’s growth – negative growth, if you will – as a character was achieved precisely through that alchemy. His great antagonist, Wotan, received a thoughtful, dignified, yet ruthless performance from Ralf Lukas, finely matched by Ingeborg Børch’s human yet steely Fricka as consort. A fine Loge will always steal the show; James Schouten accomplished that and more in as complete a performance as I can recall on any stage, from Bayreuth to Bethnal Green. His palpable commitment was truly infectious—and surely a first-class invitation to consider words, music, and their meaning in a production that was text-driven in the fullest sense. (So many fall into the trap of thinking ‘text’ refers only to words—and in Wagner of all composers.)

Mime (Holden Madagame)

Yet there was more than one showstealer, Holden Madagame’s quicksilver, traumatised Mime another case in point, stage and vocal energy combined in a veritable whirlwind. Henry Grant Kerswell’s faltering, latterly lovelorn Fafner stood in dark contrast with the cynical thuggery of his brother Fafner from Craig Lemont Walters. Estimable contributions also came from an uncommonly fine trio of Rhinemaidens, distinct characters who blended with similar finesse, Mae Heydorn doubling as Erda, and well-sung Donner, Freia, and Froh (Andrew Mayor, Charlotte Richardson, and Calvin Lee).

Image: Steve Gregson
Erda (Mae Heydorn)

I now regret more deeply than before my inability to attend Die Walküre and Siegfried. However, I shall be back next Sunday for Götterdämmerung and shall hope this Ring will receive another outing. It certainly comes with my highest recommendation, whether for dyed-in-the-wool Wagnerites, neophytes, or anyone in between. New to the work, my guest loved it, apparently now as eager as I for the end of the world to come. As for the Arts Council – sorry, the article-less ‘Arts Council England’ – and its determination to destroy what remains of English operatic life, the resounding success of this project offers a stinging rebuke to its threefold rejection of Regents Opera’s applications for funding. If you can, please consider giving, lest such opportunities wither, like the World-ash, forever. Any purchase or donation will be generously repaid in terms that Nadine Dorries and Nicholas Serota could never understand, but which will long outlive their ephemeral notoriety.

Le nozze di Figaro, English National Opera, 7 February 2025

Coliseum

Count Almaviva – Cody Quattlebaum
Countess Almaviva – Nardus Williams
Figaro – David Ireland
Susanna – Mary Bevan
Cherubino – Hanna Hipp
Marcellina – Rebecca Evans
Dr Bartolo – Neal Davies
Don Basilio, Don Curzio – Hubert Francis
Antonio – Trevor Eliot Bowes
Barbarina – Ava Dodd
Bridesmaids – Claire Mitcher, Sophie Goldrick

Director – Joe Hill-Gibbons
Set designs – Johannes Schütz
Costumes – Astrid Klein
Lighting – Matthew Richardson

Associate director, movement – Jenny Ogilivie  

Chorus (chorus director: Matthew Quinn) and Orchestra of English National Opera

Ainārs Rubikis (conductor)

Images: copyright Zoe Martin

Joe Hill-Gibbons’s production of The Marriage of Figaro opened briefly at the Coliseum in 2020, only for Covid to put a stop to it. Five years have passed before it has had another opportunity. I wish I could say it had been worth the wait. Hill-Gibbons claims, in the programme, that his ‘primary job was to deliver Figaro in all its joy, power and complexity, rather than remake it for today’. Judged by his own criterion, I am afraid this can only be accounted a failure, though I am not sure he managed to ‘remake it for today’ either, whatever that may mean. 

Put simply, the production, as opposed to musicians’ performances, offered no sense of: who these people were; how they might relate to one another; why they might be doing what they were doing; and, quite often, even of what they were doing. In the latter case, the fourth act’s ‘complexity’ was entirely absent, yet still managed to confuse. The audience managed nonetheless to destroy any sense of, well, anything by laughing when the Count begged for forgiveness. Everything was flattened. There was no sense of social hierarchy, and certainly no sense of social or political, let alone religious, meaning. It was perhaps the most singularly boring Figaro I have seen: a singularly perverse achievement. My companion indeed described it as ‘almost unbearable’, like a sitcom, albeit without the dramatic depth or content. 

Plain to a fault, Johannes Schütz’s white set suggested a hotel room corridor slightly abstracted, with occasional views of something, though very little, downstairs. That was it, really, not only for the set design but for any sort of dramatic concept. To be fair, Astrid Klein’s costumes, well designed in themselves, seemed to represent an attempt to offer a sense of updated commedia dell’arte. All well and good, although Figaro, whether as play or opera, is not The Barber of Seville, and Hill-Gibbons is certainly not Ruth Berghaus. In both cases, there was something rather dated and somewhat ‘German provincial’ to the ‘look’, without that dated quality seeming to be the point. Memories of Michael Grandage’s Duty Free staging for Glyndebourne surfaced. Cherubino’s strange appearance made nonsense of his character. Any mezzo worth her salt would usually be able to portray him as an adolescent. Here, poor Hanna Hipp, who sang and, within the constraints imposed upon her, acted very well, was left looking no more like a page boy or an army officer than if she had worn a dress all along. 

Jeremy Sams’s English translation proved variable, presumably deliberately—and often deliberately wordy. Perhaps some, comatose since c.1955, found Dr Bartolo repeatedly singing ‘that bastard Figaro’ edgy. For me, it was simply out of place, whether with respect to the work or other parts of the translation. In some cases, it remained reasonably faithful, whilst in others, it went beyond paraphrase: all the while a little too keen to attract attention. At least, though, there was an intelligent mind behind it, which, if one must have translation at all, is something. 

Conductor Ainārs Rubikis was clearly going to have his work cut out to make anything much of the musical drama. Hamstrung as he was, that he did so intermittently was again something. I should be interested to hear what he might make of this or another Mozart opera in a different context. Rubikis and the ENO Orchestra were often at their best when bigger boned, conjuring a sense of coherent drama entirely lacking onstage. There were some fine intimate moments too. What lay in between was sometimes more of a problem, as was proportionality of tempo, the sections of, say, the second-act finale sitting oddly with another. Alas, the musicodramatic life and form of the recognition sextet, key to the entire third act (at least), also fell flat. But then so did everything else about it, some people in strange outfits simply standing nowhere in particular, singing to no one in particular about nothing in particular. There was little or nothing after all, to recognise. Secco recitatives were sometimes a little heavy, but that was more a matter of having to deal with the English translation than anything else. I think the fashionable ‘Moberly-Raeburn’ reordering of the third act may have been used; yet, truth be told, even on the morning after, I cannot quite remember, even on the morning after—which may indicate something about how inert the drama turned out to be. ‘Standard’ excisions were certainly made from the fourth act. They would doubtless have been well sung; for once, keen as I was for it all to end, I welcomed them. Music long since having been reduced to ‘incidental’ status, a finely crafted libretto likewise, there was little to stay awake for.

Fortunately, there was some good singing, though it was more difficult to tell than would usually be the case. In addition to Hipp, the female cast acquitted themselves especially well, Nardus Williams’s Countess somehow maintaining presence, dignity, and well-spun line throughout. Mary Bevan offered a lively Susanna, though the production militated against her becoming the truly animating presence she might have been. ‘Deh vieni’ gave a powerful sense of what we lost. Rebecca Evans’s Marcellina, like Neal Davies’s Bartolo, were keenly observed and equally finely sung. David Ireland’s Figaro deserved better. He made the best of a poor hand, his way with the libretto, even in translation, second to none, converting it with an art concealing art into an excellent performance. The ‘smaller’ roles were all well taken. Cody Quattlebaum’s Count, though, was a decidedly odd portrayal: doubtless in good part the production, which seemingly had no idea what to do with the character (!), but strange vowels and intermittent wooliness of tone were also a problem. Perhaps, not unreasonably, he would have been more comfortable singing it in Italian. 

Ultimately, then, this seemed designed to be a Marriage of Figaro for people who do not like or understand the opera. It is difficult to imagine such people exist, but there they were, chattering, guffawing, and, I kid you not, noisily guzzling popcorn (now on sale at the bar, so as also to provide a miserable olfactory auditorium ‘experience’). It was less Twelfth Night than Terry and June without the characterisation or the drama—although, to be fair, even the latter might have had its moments compared to this. I cannot have been unusual among opera lovers in having Figaro as one of the first operas I grew to know and love. Had this been my first encounter, I fear I might not have pursued work or genre further. 

I shall conclude with words from an interview with assistant/movement director Jennie Ogilvie, supplier of the tediously silly dancing long mandatory for any such production: ‘I find it frustrating when people need everything to make sense in an opera. … we have all been watching music videos for 30, 40 years, which really do not make sense, and yet they are the best way of expressing that bit of music. I wish that we could come to other live forms of music like opera and extend the same permissions.’ Hmmm.

Aimard/Philharmonia/Honeck - Weber, Beethoven, and Dvořák, 2 February 2025

Royal Festival Hall

Weber: Overture: Der Freischütz
Beethoven: Piano Concerto no.3 in C minor, op.37
Dvořák: Symphony no.9 in E minor, ‘From the New World’, op.95

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)
Philharmonia Orchestra
Manfred Honeck (conductor)

Manfred Honeck’s unfussy musicianship has long offered an antidote to crass media veneration of mediocre ‘star’ performers. Much the same might be said of Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who, although certainly celebrated, could not stand further removed from the likes of… [I had better stop there]. The Philharmonia, on better form than I have heard it for some time, clearly relished the opportunity to perform with both in this Sunday afternoon concert at the Royal Festival Hall, which also went to show there is life yet in the ‘classic’ overture-concerto-symphony programme, whose popularity may have been attained with good reason. 

Weber’s Freischütz Overture announced a reassuringly large orchestra, sounding very much as ‘of old’. Taken in gorgeously relaxed fashion, the introduction unfolded rather than being harried. Not that it lacked the tension and release of incipient drama, whether in dark, threatening intimations of the Wolf’s Glen or elsewhere, later glorying in the gentlest of lyricism and well-nigh Brucknerian power of silence. 

A smaller Philharmonia, strings thinned by several desks, reassembled for Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, Aimard at the keyboard. As Donald Tovey observed, the opening movement’s difficulty lies first in the ‘sheer symphonic exposition’ offered by the orchestra; ‘it rouses no expectation of the entry of a solo instrument, and … leaves nothing essential for the pianoforte to add when its time comes.’ Save to the most strenuous musical minds, doubtless counter-productively strenuous, Beethoven saves the day, although a fuller learning of Mozartian lessons, such as we see in very different ways in the Fourth and Fifth Concertos, would have avoided the problem in the first place. Why mention this? Because, perhaps through estimable fidelity to the work in all respects, Honeck and Aimard brought that difficulty to the fore, before settling down to a fine performance. Honeck’s ‘first exposition’ was motivically coherent and imparted a strong sense of goal-orientation; but it was only after the piano’s second attempt, as it were, announcing a true partnership between soloist, conductor, and orchestra, that all fell quite into place, the basic tempo slightly broadening in a reading of mutual responsiveness. Aimard’s way with the piano was, as one might have expected, not to be pigeonholed. Neither old-fashioned, nor ‘period’, doubtless modernist in its way, though without shouting about it, it gave a sense of having considered the music anew, without stinting on spontaneity of the moment. The first movement close provided a case in point, suspense and climax working so well because fully prepared from all. 

That disinclination to be categorised was certainly to be heard, if so inclined, in the slow movement too. Shaped rather than moulded, it was always heading somewhere, yet with plenty of space to enjoy what arose during the journey. Possessed of an ultimately long line, yet with much variegation within, it spoke of a Beethoven once again – is he not always? – in transition, in a noble, deeply felt utterance from piano and orchestra alike. Taken attacca, the finale sounded as a necessary response. Occasional slight gear changes might have been better avoided or integrated, but the crucial thing was a feeling of life, of drama. No ‘designer Beethoven’ here. Fortunately, this was not a performance in keeping with a bizarre programme note attributed to Andrew Mellor, reading at best as if the work of ‘artificial intelligence’ (sic): ‘That realisation [of deafness] had a cataclysmic effect on Beethoven as a person and shot entirely new sentiments and concepts into his music, starting with this piece. … Beethoven got wise to that new reality in this piece.’ It is difficult to know where to start with that, so let us instead end by saying performers and audience, let alone Beethoven, deserved far better. In all other respects, they received just that—other programme notes, by Joanna Wyld and Douglas Shadle, included. 

Dvořák’s ‘New World’ Symphony came up similarly fresh, even if I left not quite convinced that elements were strongly integrated enough to avoid accusations – more justly levelled at work than performance – of the episodic. As might be expected, I felt that above all in the finale, though I should not wish to exaggerate. Otherwise, there was much to enjoy from the large orchestral forces reassembled. The first movement’s introduction proved tender and wistful, speaking of both darkness and light; in essence, it told, as surely it must, of many things. Indeed, that movement as a whole proved full of drama, flexible without meandering, musicians at the top of their game both in solo and tutti work. Antiphonal violins had one ask why anyone would ever have considered placing them together. 

Warm, dignified, excellent playing from all, not only but certainly including Henry Clay’s cor anglais, characterised the slow movement: much implied, no overstatement. Horns, as in the Weber, were simply to die for. String playing would have gladdened any of the great conductors from the past who had led this work, whether with the Philharmonia or other orchestras. The scherzo was urgent, perhaps at times a touch hard-driven, yet certainly giving a proper sense of release and relaxing without meandering. Transition to the trio was intriguingly disorienting, suggesting a more ‘modern’ Dvořák than many of us might be used to, material almost dream-like prior to sharpening of focus. The finale was likewise urgent, though not breathless. Tender strings, characterful woodwind, and implacable brass more or less suspended those nagging formal doubts.

MCO/Uchida - Mozart and Janáček, 1 February 2025

Royal Festival Hall, London, 1.2.2025 (MB)

Mozart: Piano Concerto no.18 in B-flat major, KV 456
Janáček: Mládi for wind sextet
Mozart: Piano Concerto no.21 in C major, KV 467

Mitsuko Uchida (piano, director)
Mahler Chamber Orchestra

Mitsuko Uchida’s series of Mozart piano concertos with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra reaches nos 18 and 21, on this occasion sandwiching an outstanding performance from MCO soloists of Janáček’s Mládi. If KV 456 took a little time to settle – its first movement a little too ‘neutral’ in character – then its later movements and the whole of KV 467 witnessed pianist and orchestra alike on excellent form. 

B-flat major is a funny key. My ears ‘tuned’ by orchestral tuning, I could not help but notice its flatter character. Even beyond that, though, that first movement sounded somewhat subdued. The MCO strings offered more extroverted playing in some tutti passages; there were gains too in the intimacy and the need properly to listen. It was only later on, though, that I really felt the music’s inherent drama, though tempo and balance could not be faulted. A barrage of coughing notwithstanding, the opening of the slow movement suggested the subtle tragedy of a great seria aria, and that sense only increased with its passage. There have doubtless been more overtly Romantic readings, but the MCO’s relative understatement did not undersell; nor did Uchida’s dignified response, voice-leading and harmony already pointing toward Mozart’s later years. Orchestral Furies vied with Orphic pleas, leading to a mesmerising close in which time stood still and once again moved—for it could do no other. In the best sense, that drama hung over a finale that truly smiled – rarest of delights – though sterner moments were equally moving. A slip from Uchida went for little; if anything it enhanced the sense of deeply human music-making. 

It is difficult not to regret a relative lack of concert music from Janáček, though certainly not at the cost of his operas. In any case, Mládi showed us how intimately connected are both ‘sides’ to his output, the music breathing the air of the late operas, instruments assuming the roles of dramatic characters, as if in anticipation of the music theatre of composers such as Birtwistle. As characteristic as it was compelling, a kaleidoscope of emotions was unleashed in the first movement, only to be added to or deepened in its successors. The second emerged as if the composer’s counterpart to that in the preceding piano concerto, its multiplicity of inflections and incitements, moods both shifting and abruptly changing, highly dramatic throughout. As bubbly as they were mysterious, the third and fourth were not only dramatically consequent but blessed by tremendous, unfailingly eloquent wind playing. 

The C major Piano Concerto, KV 467, had the second half to itself. From the off, the orchestra – still on the small side – sounded more energised than at the start of the earlier concerto, as did Uchida’s direction. A larger wind section made its presence felt, as did the commitment of the MCO strings—and of course Mozart’s (natural) trumpets and drums. Phrasing, mood, detail: all came into grater focus. Mozart’s oscillation between major and minor structured an emotionally engaging tonal drama, replete, where called for, with imperious C major ‘public’ grandeur. I assume the cadenza, conceived on a grander scale and inflected with greater modernity than those for the B-flat concerto, was Uchida’s own; at any rate, I did not recognise it. 

In the slow movement, the strings again were at least equal partners, whether in their celebrated pizzicato passages or bowed music with meaningfully varied vibrato. A black and white pearl, one might say, of a movement. The tempo, if a little faster than once might have been the case, felt right. Mozart’s music sang and bewitched, in a performance that seemed to conceive his writing in a single breath. At times, I found the finale just a little hard-driven, at others, it scampered delightfully. Uchida’s collegial music-making – rarely did I think of her as a ‘soloist’ – nonetheless proved throughout a treat.

Lowe/Fisher/Mozartists/Page - Ordonez, Hasse, Mozart, Haydn, and Benda, 29 January 2025

Cadogan Hall

 

Karl von Ordonez: Symphony in G minor, Gm8
Hasse: La Danza: ‘Se tu non vedi’
Mozart: ‘Si mosra la sorte’, KV 209; ‘Con ossequio, con rispetto’, KV 210; ‘Voi avete un cor fedele’, KV 217
Haydn: Il ritorno di Tobia: ‘Quando mi dona un cenno’
Georg Anton Benda: Medea: extract
Haydn: Symphony no.67 in F major

Alexandra Lowe (soprano)

Alessandro Fisher (tenor)

The Mozartists

Ian Page (conductor)

Unable to attend this year's Salzburg Mozartwoche, I caught instead this fascinating concert of music from 1775 by The Mozartists (formerly Classical Opera Company) and their artist director Ian Page, joined by soprano Alexandra Lowe and tenor Alessandro Fisher at London’s Cadogan Hall. Chelsea is not Salzburg, although the site of the Mozarts’ home for a few weeks eleven years earlier on Ebury Street – then ‘Fivefields Row’, now Mozart Terrace – stands less than ten minutes’ walk away. 

It made for an enlightening alternative, though, nowhere more so than in a G minor symphony by the Viennese violinist and composer (both pursuits of his spare time) Karl von Ordonez. The first movement’s material was characterful and consequent; here, unquestionably, was someone who understood symphonic form rather than simply using it by default. Page’s chosen tempo sounded ideal. Work and performance alike showed counterpoint and harmony in excellent balance and interrelationship; one could well imagine the composer playing second violin, as remarked upon by Charles Burney, for Haydn quartets at the home of the British Ambassador a few years earlier. A warmly expressive Andante was not rushed, as is so often the case today. Indeed, it was difficult not to find many of these accomplished performances considerably more sympathetic than those of the ‘period style on modern instruments’ crowd, which have a tendency, not always but often, to offer the worst of both worlds. A duet for two solo violas made for an appealing surprise. The fast – but not too fast – and furious finale was closer to Haydn than Mozart, but certainly not to be reduced to or merely likened to him. The Mozartists’ unshowy rhetoric, properly rooted in Classical style, made a fine case for Ordonez, from whom I should be keen to hear more. Might we even hope one day for one of his two operas, or some sacred music?   

A sequence of arias followed: first, one of two from Hasse’s late cantata La Danza, to a text by Metastasio previously set by Giuseppe Bonno (1744) and, in extended form, Gluck as a one-act opera in 1755. Hasse’s final opera, Il Ruggiero, had a few years earlier (1771) been eclipsed by Mozart’s Ascanio in Alba at the Archduke Ferdinand’s wedding to Maria Beatrice d’Este. It was difficult not to hear some of the younger composer’s influence – yes, even at so tender an age – in this aural glimpse of Hasse’s Venetian retirement. Pastoral, though not generically so, the performance was again stylistically well situated, enabling Lowe’s character, Nice, to step forward from the text even in excerpted form. Her vibrato focused attention on the line rather than obscuring it, the Mozartists proved lively and supportive throughout. Should the aria be a little over-extended for some modern tastes, so much the worse for them; it held my attention throughout and, again, made me keen to hear more. 

The three Mozart arias are naturally better known, if hardly everyday encounters. The first two are tenor insertion arias from May 1775, the destination of ‘Si mostra la sorte’ still unknown. If the Hasse aria had come surprisingly close to Mozart, here was the real thing—and it sounded like it in music whose drama and lyricism were far from confined to Italianate performance of the vocal line, wooden flutes offering balm of their own. ‘Con ossequio, con rispetto,’ for Niccolò Piccinni ‘s L’astratto, fizzed in energetic contrast, again highly operatic in its creation of character. Lowe returned for ‘Voi avete un cor fedele’, written for Baldassare Galuppi’s Le nozze di Dorina, revealing writing that gave a remarkable impression of a greater drama and characterisation at least as striking as anything in the preceding Il re pastore. With splendidly expressive coloratura, this was rightly a performance on the grand scale. Haydn’s ‘Quando mi dona un cenno’ offered a rare, edifying opportunity to hear music from his ‘other’ oratorio, Il ritorno di Tobia and Fisher the chance, beautifully taken, to turn inward to expressivity of a different nature in a sweetly sung performance of striking emotional sincerity and estimable stylistic command.

Georg Anton Benda’s three melodramas are frequently cited in music histories, yet seldom heard in the concert hall. The English-language excerpt from Medea, Benda’s second, opened the second half. Lowe again showed herself a fine actress – I recalled a Pierrot lunaire from 2022 – from the offset: ‘I am still Medea…’. Stillness and horror prior to ‘It is done’ said it all, against a somewhat Gluck-like (for instance, the Don Juan music) musical cauldron. Here was another work I should love to encounter in full in the concert hall. 

Haydn’s received a performance of admirable clarity and purpose, only sometimes lacking a little in warmth. Its minuet was a little on the rushed and acetic sides and perhaps lacking in the harmonic grounding one finds in, say, Antal Doráti, although the lovely surprise (even when one ‘knows’) of the trio’s viola duet, in delightful echo of Ordonez, will surely have warmed many a heart. Similarly delightful was the element of surprise in the first movement’s development section, the exposition having done precisely what the term implies: delineating material and character in duly consequent fashion. ‘Hunting’ elements delighted in a dramatic, energetic account that exuded grace. If I am often sceptical of the value of employing natural horns, here their use brooked no argument. The second movement was likewise familiar—until one listened. Rhetorical flourishes were given their due without exaggeration. Certain characteristics seemed close to late Mozart, though of course it is the other way around. If I have heard performances of stronger ‘line’ in the finale, it brimmed with character, twists and turns generally well traced. Strings, led by Matthew Truscott, used and varied vibrato expressively. Whatever my odd cavil, here was a performance of numerous delights to conclude a concert of many more.