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.

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

Rittersaal des Residenz, Domquartier

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

Members of the Orquesta Iberacademy Medellín

Krzysztof Wiśniewsiki (violin/director)

Alvaro Rodrigo Juica Paitan (conductor)

Karim Zech and Johann Zhao (piano)

Images: Wolfgang Lienbacher

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

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

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

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

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

 

Mark Berry

 

Salzburg Mozartwoche (4) - Aimard/Camerata Salzburg/Guzzo: Haydn and Mozart, 24 January 2026

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Haydn: L’anima del del filosofo, Hob.XXVIII:13: Overture
Mozart: Piano Concerto no.27 in B-flat major, KV 595; Six Minuets, KV 599: nos. 1,2, 5, and 6
Haydn: Symphony no.94 in G major, ‘Surprise’/’mit dem Paukenschlag’

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)

Camerata Salzburg

Giovanni Guzzo (violin/director)

Images: Wolfgang Lienbacher

And so, to a Mozart Week concert devoted entirely to Mozart’s last year, the partial exception being his final piano concerto, certainly completed and first performed in 1791, but whose origins may date back as far as 1788. In December 1790, Mozart had said goodbye, perhaps farewell, to Haydn as the latter prepared to leave for London with Johann Peter Salomon, also present at their dinner. Accounts in early Haydn biographies differ, Albert Christoph Dies having tears well from the yes of both composers, as Mozart suggested they ‘would probably be saying’ their ‘last farewell in this life,’ Georg August Griesinger telling of a happy meal at which Mozart forecast Haydn would be back soon, ‘because you are no longer young’. At any rate, it was to be the last time they saw each other, Haydn returning only in 1792.

It was during that first of his two visits to London that Haydn wrote his opera L’anima del filosofo, ossia Orfeo ed Euridice for the newly built theatre at the Haymarket (the old one having burnt down in 1789). Several of the composer’s London concerts would take place there too. It was fitting, then, that the Overture should open this excellent concert from Camerata Salzburg, led from the violin by Giovanni Guzzo. A dark hued, richly dramatic introduction both led to and contrasted with a lively ‘Presto’ section: fast, but not too fast, beautifully judged throughout and with evident delight in Haydn’s invention from the whole orchestra, perhaps all the more so for being led by one of their ‘own’. Harmonic, timbral, and other surprises registered with meaning, yet without exaggeration. It proved the perfect (metaphorical) curtain-raiser. 

Pierre-Laurent Aimard joined the orchestra for the piano concerto, which, whenever it is written, is so inextricably connected with our (at least my) ideas of late Mozart, its spareness, fragility, and rare beauty, its glimpse of the beyond, that effort to deromanticise seems almost, if not always, beside the point. That is not, of course, so say that it should sound lachrymose, which it certainly did not here, but simply that Mozart was in many ways as much a Romantic – he was certainly held to be so by ETA Hoffmann et al. – as a Classicist, all the more so by 1791, and that we lose something if reasoned scruples harden into puritanism. Whatever or whoever Mozart may have been, he was certainly no puritan, nor did this performance treat him as such. The first movement offered a tutti balance different from what we might once have expected, wind unquestionably more forward, although there was never ‘one way’: just listen to Klemperer’s Mozart, in other respects very different, but not in this. The crucial thing was the cultivated, detailed, tender playing, smiling through tears as this of all the piano concertos surely must. Moreover, it led inexorably to Aimard’s first solo entry, which also turned inwards – very 1791 – chromaticism implied even when not present, a little like Carl Dahlhaus’s idea of ‘secondary diatonicism’ that incorporates the chromatic exploration of Tristan in the unabashed C major of Die Meistersinger. The turn to the minor was exquisitely, movingly handled, all aware of the crucial role played here by oscillation between major and minor modes. Occasionally, balance between soloist and orchestra seemed a little tilted to the former, but this soon corrected itself. Aimard here and elsewhere offered certain embellishments, all effected with discernment. Mozart’s cadenzas said all that was required.

Warmth and tenderness characterised the slow movement, simplicity underlain by complexity and vice versa: another crucial, perhaps the most crucial, key to understanding late Mozart. Harmony guided the performance: one felt it throughout in deeply moving fashion. The finale’s character was born from equally keen senses of detail and the whole, strength and fragility united in opposition that is part balance, part dialectic. As an encore, Aimard offered an early contribution to Kurtág’s centenary: ravishing, at times well-nigh Debussyan accounts of three of the composer’s Játekók. Mozart remained, in the sense that every note, every touch of the piano counted. 

The second half took us first to Vienna’s Redoutensaal, to music for dancing—and one certainly felt it to be so in four of the KV 599 Six Minutes, my sole regret that it was not all six. At any rate, the four we heard were exquisite in every respect, whether lilt, colour, or otherwise, culminating in the symphonic grandeur (and Haydnesque surprise) of the sixth. Whereas in the first concert of the festival, Ádám Fischer’s occasional turns to solo instruments could sound mannered, here it seemed the most natural thing in the world, as indeed did the performances as a whole.

We then returned, now with the violas absent from Mozart’s band, to Haydn: for the ‘Surprise’ Symphony, or, as it is known in German, emphasising a different, yet related aspect of his writing, ‘mit dem Paukenschlag’. The first movement introduction, echoing the concert opening, was spacious, full of promise, yet miraculously concise, the Vivace assai bursting forth likewise with evident kinship to the opera overture. Spirited delight characterised both detail and the whole, colour, concision, and coherence inextricably connected. It developed, returned, and continued to develop: the essence of sonata form. This was, quite simply, glorious. The Andante offered a surprise of its own, extra percussion jolting us out of our knowledge-born complacency. The working out of form and content was the true delight, though. What a musical mind Haydn’s is, and what a joy it was to be guided by it in so enlightened a performance as this. There followed another wonderful minuet, taken at a more rollicking tempo than Mozart’s, unquestionably one-to-a-bar, but then this was never intended for dancing. In my heart of hearts, I may prefer something statelier, but this worked well on its own terms, and lacked nothing in sparkling of the eye, replete with further ‘purely musical’ surprises. Chamber playing in the trio evinced a similar naturalness to that heard in Mozart. The finale was every inch a ‘Haydn finale’. Tempo, character, lilt, grandeur, edification, and intellectual coherence: this had it all. Bravo!

Salzburg Mozartwoche (3) - Die Zauberflöte, 23 January 2026

 

Haus für Mozart

Images: Werner Kmetitsch

Sarastro – Franz-Josef Selig
Queen of the Night – Kathryn Lewek
Tamino – Magnus Dietrich
Pamina – Emily Pogorelc
Papageno – Theodore Platt
Papagena – Tamara Ivaniš
Three Ladies – Alice Rossi, Štěpánka Pučálkova, Noa Beinert
Monostatos – Paul Schweinester
Speaker, First Priest – Rupert Grössinger
Priests and Armoured Men – Maximilian Müller, Maximilian Anger
Three Boys – Frederick Derwein, David Platzer, Laurenz Oberfichtner
Mozart – Vitus Denifl
Constanze – Victoria D’Agostino
Carl Thomas Mozart – Paul Tanzer

Director – Rolando Villazón
Set designs – Harold Thor
Costumes – Tanja Hofmann
Choreography – Ramses Sigl
Lighting – Stefan Bolliger
Video – Roland Horvath/rocafilm
Dramaturgy – Ulrich Leisinger
Assistant director – Bettina Gayer
Theatre manager – Kirsten Kimmig

Philharmonia Chor Wien (chorus director: Walter Zeh)
Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra
Roberto González-Monjas (conductor)

It has been a while since Salzburg’s Mozartwoche gave a fully staged version of a mature Mozart opera. The choice of The Magic Flute, directed by Intendant Rolando Villazón, was not arbitrary, but rather a centrepiece to the 70^th anniversary festival’s focus on Mozart’s last year. The opera could hardly be more emblematic of 1791; it was the last, barring fragments, to be completed and first performed, although most of the score was composed before La clemenza di Tito. Moreover, Villazón’s staging is set in that year, on the final night of Mozart’s life, presenting on stage the broader concept of his final-year focus and its motto ‘Lux Aeterna’: that on his death, Mozart was for us truly born. 

In that, we saw the production’s most arresting image, shortly after having heard its most arresting, if doubtless controversial, musical surprise. The Queen of the Night and Monostatos (here spelled ‘Manostatos’ after Mozart’s autograph) having threatened to destroy the temple and so on, Mozart finally expires, having been with us all along (on which more anon); the orchestra cuts to the Requiem’s ‘Lacrimosa’. I could have done without a man behind me loudly exclaiming ‘Requiem! Requiem! Requiem!’ (Thank you for your musicological input; we should never have known otherwise.) Nevertheless, the assembled company joining to sing the composer’s final music, beyond the point at which the autograph stops yet not until its close, proved surprisingly moving. The lurch back to Sarastro’s announcement of victory initially jarred, yet such musical difficulties on my part were more or less effaced by the composer’s apotheosis. In a likeable, post-Amadeus portrayal by Vitus Denifl he was transformed into a Kugel-version of Mozart, laughing and somersaulting above. Like the best of those chocolates – hint: buy them only from Fürst – it was an unexpected delight, not least to serious clowning on Denifl’s part and a strong musical account. 

How we got there, scenically, had its moments. The idea of presenting Mozart’s hallucinations from his last days  unable to attend a performance at the Freihaus-Theater an der Wieden, yet imagining it in his head, was a good one, especially in this specific setting, part commemorating and part celebrating Mozart having become ‘Mozart’. It combines two accounts: the first from Stendhal via the 1798 Allgemeine Zeitung (possibly from Constanze herself) following the performances at home, looking at the clock and imagining what must be on stage; the other from an 1840 letter from the composer Ignaz von Seyfried to the theatre director Georg Friedrich Treitschke telling of Mozart on the evening of 4 December 1791 hearing his sister-in-law sing the Queen of the Night’s aria in the theatre. And so, the clock bore a particular role in demarcating certain moments—rather brightly, I could not help but think, although I suppose that was the point. It also offered a place to hide; indeed, Harold Thor’s set designs proved resourceful throughout in use and reuse. 

That, I think, was to be applauded, not least since a notable,  welcome feature of the Mozartwoche as a whole is its grounding in Mozart scholarship: not a Beckmesserish (at best) school of ‘performance practice’, perhaps now at last waning, that loves nothing more than to condemn something as ‘inauthentic’, but rather respect for far broader and more interesting historical grounding that will enable and enrich modern performance of various kinds. Some of that one might like, some one might not, but it enters into dialogue rather than assertion of either fundamentalist domination or lazy solipsism. The problem more was that it did not become much more than a frame for what otherwise was a rather conventional portrayal of the actual dramatic action. Mozart interacted a little with the characters. He also instructed his son a little. More tenuously, Constanze became enraged at the misogyny of the priests, hitting them and her husband, suggesting their remarks were to be taken seriously, Mozart’s own music suggesting otherwise. In terms of a view about what the work ‘itself’ might be, what it might have to offer, and indeed how it might thus have ultimately come to participate in the creation of ‘Mozart’, I struggled to divine anything very much. 

Moreover, further character references seemed to me obscure. Without reading in the programme that Villazón intended the Three Ladies as three female artists – a poet, sculptor, and painter – I am not sure I should have noticed. Even if I had, nothing much was done with the idea. Presenting Tamino as a musician was fair enough; he plays the flute after all. Beyond that, it seemed another missed opportunity, soon more or less forgotten; likewise Monostatos/Manostatos as commercialisation of art, and so on. In encounters between multiple concepts, some fared better than others, though those of Mozart and Emanuel Schikaneder rarely so well.

To return, though, to what made that final scene – and much else – worthwhile, Roberto González-Monjas’s conducting of the Mozarteum Orchestra marked him out as that rarest of things, a musician who could draw from an orchestra a true sense of the breadth and depth of Mozart’s score, without imposing himself on it and subjecting it to strange eccentricities. One will almost always find differences between what one hears in one’s head – watching the clock, like Mozart, or otherwise – but what matters is whether one can make sense of what is put before one, whether it animates the drama, whether it enables the singers and actors to flourish. In all of those respects and more, González-Monjas’s account scored. So too did the warm, sympathetic playing of the orchestra. This ought not to be so rare as it is, but the demands of Mozart and ‘Mozart’ alike are never to be underestimated.

 

There was, moreover, a good sense of a troupe more than the sum of its parts among those singers and actors. Magnus Dietrich’s Tamino and Emily Pogorelc’s an alluring young pair vocally. Their arias touched and ennobled without contrivance. Franz-Josef Selig’s Sarastro is a known quantity to many of us, yet proved no less welcome in reasoned compassion for that. Kathryn Lewek’s Queen of the Night offered accuracy and bite, also reminding us that a flesh-and-blood woman lay behind the costume and coloratura. Hearing more dialogue than often one does – especially outside German lands gave a more proper sense of Papagena, as did a spirited performance by Tamara Ivaniš. Theodore Platt’s Papageno stole the show, as many do, and deservedly so, sheer theatrical presence married to innate musicality, a winning tribute to Schikaneder. Indeed, the thought occurred to me that that might have been an obvious personification for the production. But there will be other Flutes, and this offered magic enough, heightened by the experience of an afternoon visit to an exhibition at the Rupertinum, showing materials from earlier stagings, including that of Oskar Kokoschka, invited by Furtwängler, who alas died before they could collaborate. As Villazón’s concept for the festival as a whole reminds us, birth and death have always stood in a complex relationship, not least in the case of Mozart.

Salzburg Mozartwoche (2) – Apkalna: Mozart, Bach, Vasks, and Pärt, 23 January 2026

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum, Salzburg, 23.1.2025 (MB)

Mozart: Suite in C major, KV 399: ‘Ouverture’
Bach: Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582
Peteris Vasks: Viatore
Mozart: Masonic Funeral Music, KV 477, arr. Heribert Brauer
Arvo Pärt: Trivium
Bach: Partita no.2 in D minor for solo violin, BWV 1004: Chaconne, arr. Matthias Keller

Image: Wolfgang Liebacher

Mozart famously named the ‘king of all instruments’ in a letter to his father of 1777, though somewhat oddly one encounters the phrase more often with ‘queen’ in German—as in the title given to this Mozart Week recital by Iveta Apkalna. We are all gender fluid now, I suppose, and it is not as if ‘monarch’ would work any better in German, given the distinction between der Monarch and die Monarchin. Perhaps it was a little surprising not to hear here the works Mozart wrote for mechanical organ, especially given the festival’s focus on Mozart’s last year, but Apkalna came up with an enterprising programme of her own. I cannot share enthusiasm for the ‘holy minimalism’ of Peteris Vasks and Arvo Pärt, though again I tried, but all works on offer received due advocacy on Hermann Eule’s 2010 ‘Propter-Homines-Orgel’. 

The ’Ouverture’ to Mozart’s fragmentary C major Suite is generally encountered on the piano, whether modern or ‘period’, but Apkalna showed us there is no reason it should not be played on the organ. The simple act of listening to it like thus brought home correspondences with those late organ works that might otherwise be missed, but I suspect it was Apalkna’s performance too. The Suite’s other movements are more ingratiating and to my mind successful too, but this shows the devotee of Bach and Handel – Bach particularly in this movement – grappling with their keyboard legacy in well-nigh pastiche form. Certain suspensions and other harmonic touches gave a little more of the game away, though fewer than one might imagine. 

Bach’s great C minor Passacaglia should sweep all before it, and did so here in a performance of laudable inevitability, detail and form conspiring to offer a deeply moving experience. Registration and manual changes clarified structure, but also contributed to a sense of the character of each variation, the final fugue emerging as crowning glory on this crowned head of instruments. In an age in which, as Adorno lamented even in 1950, Bach is so often robbed of emotional and intellectual content, let alone grandeur, it was very good to welcome back the composer who inspired Mozart and so many others.

Vasks’s Viatore opens with a slow, repetitive melody that eventually changes over a long pedal note, which then cedes to a slow-moving line on another manual. Some material seemed strongly to echo the Passacaglia theme, a coincidence that was surely deliberate in programming. There was no gainsaying the commitment of the performance, but the work’s repetitions soon palled; the longer it went on, the less there was to show. Eventually, it stopped. I could not help but think I should have preferred an actual improvisation rather than vague mood music that suggested one. At least it was not aggressively tedious in the manner of Pärt’s Trivium. The composer’s devotees will doubtless tell us that is the point, or one is not listen properly, one is soulless, and so on. Whatever… Inconsequential triads repeated themselves over and over, occasional relief offered by registration changes and relative dissonance. I suppose ‘AI’ would do this sort of thing now, fifty years on. 

A skilful arrangement by Heribert Brauer of Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music fell in between: an oasis of genuine intellectual and emotional involvement, by a composer who saw only identity between Christian faith and membership of the Craft, famously writing to Leopold, shortly before the latter’s death, that death was the true goal of existence, the best and truest friend of mankind. No one would mistake this arrangement for the original, opening use of the swell pedal making that abundantly clear, but that is not the point; this captured much of its spirit and again served to highlight connections with Mozart’s writing for organ, as well as with Bach. 

It was to Bach we returned for the final piece on the programme, Matthias Keller’s arrangement of the D minor Chaconne. The element of tour de force inherent not only in the original, but also, in very different ways, in the piano transcriptions by Brahms and Busoni, was perhaps not so apparent here, but there is by contrast a case to be made for occasional ‘normalisation’ too, like a less outrageous – much less outrageous – contribution to the school of Stokowski. Again, registration coloured the variations nicely, in a performance that gave a fine account both of piece and instrument. As an encore, we heard another Bach arrangement, this time a grateful, graceful version of the aria known in English as ‘Sheep may safely graze’.