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

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

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

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

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

Images: Monika Rittershaus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philharmonie

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

Noah Bendix-Balgley (violin)

Bruno Delepelaire (cello)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Tugan Sokhiev (conductor)

Images: Stephan Rabold

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

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

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

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

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

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

Owen Wingrave, Guildhall, 23 February 2026

Silk Street Theatre

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

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

Guildhall School Orchestra

Dominic Wheeler (conductor)

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

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

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

Lechmere (Tobias Campos Santiñaque)

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

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

Mrs Coyle (Hannah McKay)

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

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

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

 

Milton Court

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

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)  

Images: Ed Maitland Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coliseum

Images: Tristram Kenton

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

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

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

Orchestra of the English National Opera

André de Ridder (conductor)

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

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

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

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

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

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

JACK Quartet: Lachenmann, 7 February 2026

Wigmore Hall

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

Christopher Otto, Austin Wulliman (violins)

John Pickford Richards (viola)

Jay Campbell (cello)  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Queen Elizabeth Hall

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

Idrīsî Ensemble

Thomas Fournil (director)

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

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

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

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

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

The English Cat, Bavarian State Opera, 25 January 2026

Cuvilliés-Theater

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

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

Bayerische Staatsorchester
Katharina Wincor (conductor)

Images: Geoffroy Schied

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grosses Festspielhaus

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

María Dueñas (violin)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Karina Canellakis (conductor)

Images: Wolfgang Lienbacher

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

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

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

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