LSO CO/Martín - Mozart, 29 March 2026

LSO St Luke’s

Bassoon Concerto in B-flat major, KV 191/186e
Horn Concerto no.3 in E-flat major, KV 447
Sinfonia concertante for violin, viola, and orchestra, KV 364

Benjamin Marquise Gilmore (violin)

Eivind Ringstad (viola)

Daniel Jemison (bassoon)

Timothy Jones (horn)

LSO Chamber Orchestra

Jaime Martín (conductor)

Images: Mark Allan

On the one hand, there can never be enough Mozart, whether that refer to works or performances; on the other, there can readily be more than enough, should the performances not at least come close to perfection. This LSO Chamber Orchestra concert oddly fell somewhere in the middle: a pleasant enough way to spend an hour and a quarter on a Sunday afternoon, lacking in the grotesqueries that disfigure most contemporary Mozart orchestral performances, yet also lacking in much to enable one to answer quite what the point of the concert had been, beyond giving LSO principals a chance to perform the works in question. All too often, what we heard sounded more like an accomplished run-through, skating on the Mozartian surface rather than plumbing its depths.   

Performances of the Bassoon Concerto – the only one that has survived, though Mozart may have written four more – are thin enough on the ground that this offered its own justification. There was much more than that: sensible tempi, clean, well phrased and articulated playing from soloist Daniel Jemison, and a largely cultivated sound from the orchestra. Here, it is probably fair to say that there are fewer depths for a conductor to plumb, and Jaime Martín offered decent enough leadership, though I could not help but think a little more insight might have been shown at his end. In the minuet-rondo finale in particular, less slow than sluggish, the orchestra sounded a touch reticent, even non-committal. Jamison’s playing was nonetheless excellent. Moreover, the opening Allegro sounded properly poised on the Rococo-Classical cusp; the slow movement enabled Jamison to show beguiling command of the long Mozart line. 

The Third Horn Concerto with Timothy Jones told a not dissimilar story, though its greater musical substance – not to diminish the Bassoon Concerto, but to elevate this – made relatively minor shortcomings more obvious, more keenly felt. Again, tempi were well chosen, and it was a relief to be spared fashionable ‘period’ mannerisms. Mozart needs more, though, and certainly here. He often received it, Martín and the orchestra pointing a syncopation here or a modulation there early on to good effect. A necessary sense of development was indeed strongest in the first movement. The slow movement unfolded without fuss, if occasionally with slight blandness, Jones’s lyrical playing not always matched by the orchestra. Still, one sensed Mozart’s tonal mastery, every inch the equal of Haydn and Beethoven’s. Jones’s navigation of the balance between hunting ebullience and subtle sorrow was sound in the finale, but alas Martín’s direction of the orchestra proved rather listless. Mozart, alas, is very difficult to get right; there is nowhere to hide, and sometimes it showed. 

The Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola is, of course, the acknowledged masterpiece of the trio. Here, expectations were highest. Although there was nothing especially wrong with the performance, again aspects of the orchestral direction in particular once again fell short enough to provoke slight disappointment. Violinist Benjamin Marquise Gilmore and violist Eivind Ringstad were excellent throughout, as was much orchestral playing, although there were some frays at the edges and a few too many phrases and paragraphs that did not tug the heartstrings as they might. The first movement started promisingly, Martín’s direction having regained the direction it had lost in the finale of the previous concerto. The great crescendo spoke for itself. solo playing was warm, lyrical, and wonderfully responsive. If there were a few instances of pulling the music round, emphasising the end of a phrase a little too much, we have all heard worse, far worse. The slow movement flowed nicely, but amiably; here, above all, we need to hear a grave, tragic beauty that flickered only intermittently. A bright, well-shaped collegial finale arguably offered greater tenderness, though the sense of loss related too much to what had preceded it rather than to emotional depths. If few Mozart performances offer the perfection Sir Colin Davis brought to the composer not so very long ago, with this orchestra and others, ultimately they should.

Davies I and N/Bevan/Hobbs/Dunford - Dowland, 28 March 2026

Wigmore Hall

From The Third and Last Booke of Songs or Aires: ‘Behold a wonder ‘; ‘I must complain’; ‘Lend your ears to my sorrow’; ‘What poor astronomers are they’; ‘When Phoebus first did Daphne love’ (?); ‘Me, me and none but me’; ‘The lowest trees have tops’; ‘By a fountain where I lay’; ‘Time stands still’; ‘Say, love, if ever thou didst find Interval’; ‘What if I never speed’; ‘It was a time when silly bees could speak’; ‘Fie on this feigning’; ‘Love stood amazed’; ‘O what hath overwrought’; ‘Farewell too fair’; ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’; ‘Come when I call’; ‘Farewell, unkind, farewell’
‘The Frog Galliard’
‘Lachrimae’

Iestyn Davies (countertenor)

Daisy Bevan (soprano)

Thomas Hobbs (tenor)

Neal Davies (bass-baritone)

Thomas Dunford (lute)

The Wigmore Hall has done John Dowland proud with a whole weekend, Friday to Sunday, commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of his death. The composer’s lute songs will surely always remain at the heart of his renown, but these concerts have also explored his instrumental and sacred writing. The concert I was able to attend offered almost all of The Third and Last Booke of Songs or Aires: nineteen of the twenty-one, I think, although, unless my ears deceived me, one listed on the programme, ‘When Phoebus first did Daphne love’ was not sung and thus – I assume – replaced with one of those remaining. (I may, though, have misunderstood; the programme above I have simply reproduced from that I was given.) In addition, we heard two exquisite lute solos, as well as skilful ‘preluding’ in between from Thomas Dunford. The 1597 Frog Galliard, which may ultimately refer to Elizabeth I’s pet name, ‘my little frog’, for her French suitor the Duke of Anjou, was nicely spun as a memory of court dance. The ‘Lachrimae’ pavan that would become the celebrated ‘Flow my tears’ from Dowland’s Second Book, was its second-half counterpart, on which a little more below. 

Dunford’s contributions ran throughout, of course, a masterclass in the lutenist’s art, ever tailored to song, singer, and moment. His partnership with Davies in the opening song, ‘Behold a wonder here’ announced a wonder indeed: endlessly varied music-making, not despite the strophic form but on account of the variation it suggests and received. All four singers had their moments in the sun, including a four-song sequence at the beginning in which each introduced him- or herself. Thomas Hobbs’s ‘I must complain’ presented his pleasingly lyrical tenor; Daisy Bevan’s ‘Lend your ears to my sorrow’ offered similar verbal sensitivity and a nice sense of inwardness, her style broadly ‘early’ but not aggressively so; a sprightly, witty ‘What poor astronomers are they’ from Neal Davies rounded off the quartet. 

Part songs such as ‘Me, me and none but me’ and ‘Love stood amazed’, subtly yet crucially directed by Iestyn Davies, offered textural variety, a keen, variegated sense of euphony, and a good deal of variety within. ‘By a fountain where I lay’, for instance, had solos, well taken, from soprano and tenor, whilst tenor and countertenor shared those honours in ‘Say, love, if ever thou didst find’. Collaborative singing was crucial in the brazen repetitions of ‘come’ in ‘What if I never speed?’ Likewise the duetting between Bevan and Iestyn Davies in ‘Come when I call’. Neal Davies’s expert use of the Earl of Essex’s verse in ‘It was a time when silly bees could speak’ suggested words of their own volition becoming song, art concealing art. His sign-off here was a particular moment to cherish. The closing ‘Farewell, unkind, farewell’ struck just the right note as a farewell in itself: slightly lingering, but not too much.

Other highlights were a plaintive ‘Farewell too fair’ from Hobbs, followed by a wonderfully somnolent ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’ from Bevan, words and performance a powerful incentive to succumb to the ‘reconciling … rest that peace begets’, whilst at the same time reminding one why this could not be an option, given the quality of music-making on offer. Both, as well as the preceding four-voice ‘O what hath overwrought’, fell in the shadow of that ‘Lachrimae’ from Dunford. Here, one felt not only Dowland’s tears, but their salt, flavouring much of what was still to come.

My only real doubt concerned whether some aspects of the performances fell a little too strongly on the polite side: not only for itself but because it precluded the greater variety that might have come from more clearly developing the lead set by Dunford and Davies (Iestyn) in that respect. If not quite Choral Evensong, it was not entirely not of that world either. It might seem silly to criticise a performance of English music for being too English, even Anglican, and this was an intermittent matter of degree. This is a hesitant cavil, though, nothing more, and doubtless in part a matter more of taste than of judgement. There could, in truth, be no gainsaying the intelligence and musicality of these performances.

Takács Quartet: Haydn, Assad, and Debussy, 24 March 2026

Wigmore Hall

Haydn: String Quartet in G minor, op.74 no.3, ‘Rider’
Clarice Assad: Nexus (London premiere)
Debussy: String Quartet in G minor, op.10

Edward Dusinberre, Harumi Rhodes (violins)

Richard O’Neill (viola)

András Fejér (cello)

Contrary to some rumours I have seen spread, the Takács Quartet is not about to disband. Instead, at the end of this season, it will say goodbye to András Féjer, the last member of the founding group of players, after fifty-one years as its cellist. There was not the slightest sign of dimming powers at this Wigmore Hall concert; quite the contrary. At times, Féjer seemed almost to rise to first among equals, but then so, at other times, did his colleagues. Indeed, both programming and performance might have been designed to illustrate the many lives, within one greater life, of the string quartet as genre and the Takács Quartet in particular.

It always, of course, comes back to Haydn, here in the guise of his ‘Rider’ Quartet, op.74 no.3. The six opp. 71 and 74 quartets written in 1793 mark a watershed in the idea of quartet performance: the first the ‘father’ of, though not quite the first composer in, the genre composed with the idea of public performance at least partly in mind, as would be the case the following year on his second visit to London, in the Hanover Square Rooms (a very short walk away from the Wigmore Hall). There was no questioning the engagement of this concert audience—as, I suspect, there was not 232 years previously. The sense of musical character(s) increasingly formative and generative in Haydn’s parallel public-symphonic writing was vividly apparent in the Takács’s performance of the first and indeed subsequent movements here, a slightly tipsy, Jahreszeiten-presaging first violin part (Eduard Dusinberre the latest incarnation of the great Johann Peter Salomon) included. Féjer looked as well as sounded very much at home, though never too comfortable. Haydn’s latest play with sonata form proved every inch an intellectual challenge and joy. The slow movement sang and developed in gripping fashion, proto-Beethovenian – it is, of course, the other way around really – violin ‘ornamentation’ ornate, yes, but as fundamental to line as it would be in Bach, Beethoven, or Schoenberg. The concision marking the whole quartet was especially apparent in the minuet and trio, typically Classical play between tonic minor and major a microcosm of the Quartet as a whole. And the finale was all it should be, a thrilling ‘ride’ for the so-called ‘Rider’. 

Debussy’s early String Quartet marks in some ways a further step in the idea of public performance, in that it is very clearly a concert work written by a composer with a deep appreciation for string instruments but not a string player himself (which would have verged on the incomprehensible to Haydn). Debussy was neither the first nor the last composer in that category, but his Quartet is a characteristic work in that development, all the more so if – I repeat ‘if’ – one takes on board Hans Keller’s typically provocative claim that ‘you can come to understand a symphony by listening to it, but you cannot completely understand a string quartet without playing it,’ the string quartet being ‘the esoteric symphony,’ with a ‘more absolute need for … immediate experience’. One might say a string player rather than, say, conductor or orchestral musician would say that, would he not, but let us leave that (and Mandy Rice-Davies) alone for now.

Concision was again a hallmark of the performance, albeit naturally of a different kind, just as its development was. (I do not find the word ‘cyclical’ very helpful here, though many do.) The rich, variegated tone we heard from the outset was never present for its own sake, but as a means of expressing the idea – even the Idea – of the work. Each movement’s form was unerringly communicated, not as a formula, but as the revelation of its musical content in time. For that, detail must be just as clear—and it was, as, for instance, in the thrilling pizzicato of the second movement. The slow movement seemed to speak of the ambiguities to come of Allemonde, on the threshold, as it were, of Pelléas et Mélisande. You think this is malevolence; and surely it is. But is it? At any rate, it moved into a rapturous fourth movement, with more than a little of Tristan to it at times—as well, of course, as a reinvention of that G minor/major tension heard in Haydn too. I honestly did not find the Quartet’s conclusion any more convincing than I have before, but perhaps I am being too German. For the rest, it was a wonderful performance I should readily have heard again immediately. 

Sadly, I could not say the same for the intervening work, Clarice Assad’s Nexus. There was no concision on display here, though I suspect it lasted for roughly the same time as the Haydn and Debussy works. Treated as a conceptual view of what might be involved in chamber music performance, as the ‘search for connection’ signalled in Dusinberre’s significantly more interesting spoken introduction, it offered something, I suppose. I imagine it took its place in this programme on that basis, but I am speculating. The problem was that its three movements, ‘(Dis)connection’, ‘Connection’, and ‘Synchronization’, came across as merely descriptive rather than analytical or exploratory. I gleaned nothing from them I should not have done from a string quartet with more interesting musical material. At best diffuse, the content was mostly gestural: walking on and off stage, stamping of feet, actorly expressions, acts of imitation, and so on. (There lay some mild interest in trying to guess which expressions were ‘natural’ and which were part of the work.) Playing was beyond compare; players seemed to be having fun; much of the audience seemed to be doing so too. If only the music ‘itself’ had not been more akin to a television soundtrack, vaguely modal, and relying on extraneous meta-activities for anything that might approaching interest.

Rinaldo, Royal Academy Opera, 19 March 2026

Susie Sainsbury Theatre, Royal Academy of Music

Almirena (Abigail Sinclair) and Rinaldo (Ella Orehek-Coddington)
Images: Craig Fuller

Goffredo – Owen Lucas
Rinaldo – Ella Orehek-Coddington
Almirena – Abigail Sinclair
Argante – Tom Butler
Armida – Grace Hope-Gill
Eustazio (Cupid) – Theodore McAlindon

Director – Julia Burbach
Designs – Bettina John
Lighting – Robert Price
Choreography – Cameron McMillan

Royal Academy Sinfonia

David Bates (conductor)

Rinaldo, Handel’s first opera for London, received a bright, enjoyable, and – more surprisingly – succinct new production at the Royal Academy of Music, directed by Julia Burbach and conducted by David Bates. As ever, with conservatoire opera, the ultimate point is to afford young singers experience, but that can never, should never be the only point: unless there is positive musical and dramatic reason for an audience to attend, the singers will gain no meaningful experience. The virtues of a small theatre, in which all are close to the action, are many; but again, they will be as nothing without excellence in performance. As so often, that was forthcoming, a fine young case requiring no apology and proffering many grounds for praise. 

Goffredo (Owen Lucas)

Handel’s operas are no stranger to cuts. A standard version in the modern sense is arguably an anachronism in such opera seria, as is a modern conception of the ‘musical work’—in some ways, more so than it might be for Monteverdi (in others, less so). The music we heard was expected, though not all of it was heard. For to compress almost three hours of music into a two-hour span including a twenty-minute interval required radical surgery—much, though far from all, lying in elimination, as opposed to pruning, of recitative. That is not to say there was none at all, but there were a good few cases when aria simply led to aria. There are losses to such a path, of course; one can tell that even when one does not know the work so well. To an extent, the production helped fill in the gaps, but there were narrative elements that came to seem underdeveloped, even arbitrary. Most smaller parts, sung or merely acted, were dispensed with. 

So far as I could tell – I shall happily be corrected by those more deeply acquainted with the opera – the music heard was essentially from the ‘original’ version, including some of that later cut. However, Goffredo was sung by a tenor, as in the major 1731 revision – damned by Anthony Hicks as ‘in effect … a pasticcio’ – a decision I could not help but think marking an improvement. In any case, the 1711 ‘original’ includes so much earlier music from Handel’s Italian period, it is unclear to me how meaningful such a distinction might be, in theory or in practice. There is much I believe we still do not know about what was sung for revivals in between 1711 and 1731; there is ever reason to choose pragmatically, according to singers available and other performing conditions, just as Handel would have been. 

That out of the way, the abridged version had much to offer musically—and more dramatically than one might have expected. Ella Orehek-Coddington gave an impressive account of the title role, truly growing into the part as it progressed, which seemed to be a dramatic strategy rather than simply warming up. Her tone was both bright and warm, her coloratura secure; to an age in which countertenors are more often preferred in this repertoire – the RAM’s double-casting offered both – she reminded us of the distinct virtues her vocal type can offer here (which was, after all, a signature role for Marilyn Horne). Grace Hope-Gill presented a fiery sorceress Armida, one with whom one could not but help sympathise, ably complemented by Tom Butler’s Argante, both singers employing technical command as a spur to greater emotional commitment—on their part and on ours. 

Argante (Tom Butler), Almirena

Owen Lucas offered model Handel singing, clarion-like as Goffredo, leader of the First Crusade, looking the part in Bettina John’s costume too and employing it to suggest compromising vanity. Abigail Sinclair’s Almirena was sweetly sung, blending well almost as if a member of the orchestral wind in that aria, ‘Lascia ch’io panga’, whose ornamentation was relatively lavish from all concerned, yet in no sense excessive. Eustazio, a role which, unless I am mistaken, was written for contralto, was here sung by bass Theodore McAlindon, doubling up (slightly confusingly) as Cupid. Not that doubling of roles is necessarily confusing, but presenting this newly invented role as one and the same was a little. I suspect the reasoning was its relatively thankless nature as it stood; indeed, it was omitted in revivals later than that of 1713. The dual role gave McAlindon more to do, his acting accomplished as well as his vocal artistry.

Eustazio (Theodore McAlindon)

Bates led the Royal Academy Sinfonia and singers alike in a warm and spirited performance that, whilst often swift, only occasionally seemed rushed. This was excellent playing indeed from the orchestra, whose variety in timbre, colour, and much else suggested a larger and more varied ensemble than was actually the case, the composer’s resourcefulness showcased in the pit as well as onstage. Concerning the latter, Burbach trod in the best sense a fine line between straightforward telling and framing of the action – all the more necessary given how much it must fill in or even invent – and creation of a world in which strange fantasies might germinate, take root, and surprise. Cameron McMillan's choreography added considerably to the sum of the parts. If, at times, I might have preferred a production that took more of a ‘view’, not least with respect to the Crusader setting, I can equally see why one might not wish to do so. The work is not ‘about’ that, of course, and we return to the ultimate point of conservatoire opera. In that and in much else, this Rinaldo succeeded very well indeed.

Hannigan/LSO/Avni - Bowler, Ligeti, and Strauss, 5 March 2026

Barbican Hall

Laura Bowler: The White Book
Ligeti: Lontano
Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra, op.30

Barbara Hannigan (conductor and soprano)

Matthew Fairclough (live electronics)

Bar Avni (conductor)

London Symphony Orchestra

Barbara Hannigan’s LSO concerts – her concerts more generally too – always offer interesting, insightful programming as well as her extraordinary gifts as a performer. This was no exception, presenting the LSO’s new co-commission, The White Book, by Laura Bowler, with Ligeti’s Lontano and Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra. Clear that The White Book was not ‘a sing/conduct piece’, Hannigan elected to sing, whilst her protégée Bar Avni, Chief Conductor of the Bayer Philharmonic from 2021 to 2024 conducted. She then took to the podium alone for Ligeti and Strauss in the second half. 

Bowler’s response to Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-shortlisted novel bears the hallmark of loss: in the latter case, of the writer’s elder sister, who died just hours after her premature birth; in the former, the recovery of the composer’s mother from leukaemia, only to die in an accident before it was possible to say goodbye. I do not know the novel, so can only proceed from what I heard, but the encounter made a strong impression and was warmly acclaimed by a large Barbican audience. There was theatre to Hannigan’s ascent onstage, appearing as part of the performance, clad in a ‘one-of-a-kind confection of white silk and wool linen designed by … Yuma Nakazato,’ from his Glacier Collection, for which Hannigan apparently ‘needed a video tutorial to be shown how it worked’.  The piece unfolded – perhaps better. ‘dropped’ – like the sleeves that ignited the orchestral introduction to the first of the five movements, ‘Wave’. Its icy precision and character, much of it founded on long, oscillating instrumental lines, was partly matched by and partly contrasted in a vocal part that required and received a cornucopia of vocal techniques that were yet combined in single, long lines of their own. Repetition, maintenance, and oscillation of pitch sounded as the musical key to all, until its sudden stop. 

‘Breath-cloud’ sounded and even looked as its name suggested. Related yet distinct orchestral technique and atmosphere led to a rocking incantation of the biting words ‘On cold mornings’ in lengthy melismata as clear as the LSO’s razor-sharp playing. Eventually, it tailed off, unaccompanied, into ‘the empty air’. There was something cyber- or Olympia-like – one might also think of her vocal Ligeti – to the abrupt transformations in Hannigan’s voice in the following ‘Sand’: partly so. It was as if vocal and verbal half-lives were fated to almost-eternal recurrence: perhaps in recognition of and response to trauma. There was some quasi-traditional word-painting on the word ‘slipping’, both in vocal line and orchestral penumbra, though never predictably so, the beginning of upward slipping a case in point. The suspended animation of a close when music, perhaps even life, slipped ‘stubbornly through fingers’ made its point with a chill. 

The fourth movement, ‘Silence’, was not silent but eerily still with, yes, some crucial silences. The vocal line took up a pattern of descent from its predecessor, albeit in distinct, scalar fashion rather than ambiguously slipping. The orchestra often took a similar route, sometimes coinciding precisely, both reinforcing one another. Ironically, a long crescendo of orchestra and electronic echoes led to (as yet) the work’s greatest climax; the rest played out in its shadow. ‘All whiteness’ offered, naturally, a climax to the work as a whole. Occasional sounds, even harmonies, brought Messiaen to my mind, but I think that was more a matter of me than the writing as such. At any rate, this ‘whiteness’ was properly comprised of the colours of the spectrum, like the sense of the sacred invoked in the glacier of the text, ‘unsullied by life’. Vain verbal and musical repetition on the words ‘shafts of’ attempted to surmount something – tragedy? – that could not be surmounted. Again, the rest played out in disquieting shadowlands of the movement’s climax. 

Lontano’s opening brought oscillating correspondences with that of The White Book, soon turning in different directions. There was a keen sense in such fluctuation of the outset of something akin to a journey, the excellence of the LSO’s performance commensurate to the extraordinary achievement of the work. It imparted the sense, illusory or otherwise, of changing the way one listened, so that nothing would ever sound quite the same again. Moreover, Ligeti’s writing sounded more strongly as a successor to the particular Klangfarbenmelodie of Schoenberg’s ‘Farben’ in a way I had not previously appreciated, captivating in its eternal transformation (as opposed to earlier eternal recurrence). It felt almost as if melody itself, perhaps harmony too, were being created or recreated before our ears, out of something both older and newer.

Also sprach Zarathustra similarly opened – no news here – with a single pitch, again heading in very different directions, although its organ music in particular (Richard Gowers) intriguingly suggested points of contact with the manipulations and oscillations of the earlier pieces. There was a fine sense of irony to Strauss’s response to Nietzsche: too often missed in performance, but not here. The LSO’s performance was once again outstanding, boasting uncommonly rich string playing (not least for the Barbican acoustic). There was throughout a welcome sense of space to the work’s unfolding, without that in any sense implying slow tempi. Processes were as clear as in Ligeti, especially earlier on. Did the performance lose its way somewhat later on? Perhaps, though it is a notoriously difficult work to grasp as a whole, whether as performer or listener. There was, at any rate, something fittingly phantasmagorical to the whole.  

Tamestit/MCO - Bach, Hindemith, Schnittke, and Shostakovich, 2 March 2026

Kammermusiksaal

Bach: Chorale, ‘Von deinen Thron tret’ ich hiermit’, BWV 327
Hindemith: Trauermusik for viola and string orchestra
Bach: The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080: Contrapunctus I and III
Schnittke: Monologue for viola and string orchestra
Bach: The Art of Fugue: Contrapunctus II and IV
Shostakovich, arr. Rudolf Barshai: Chamber Symphony, op.111a
Bach: Chorale Prelude, ‘Von deinen Thron tret’ ich hiermit’, BWV 668

Antoine Tamestit (viola)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra

(My photograph)

The Berlin Philharmonic’s International Chamber Orchestra series, its home in the Philharmonie’s younger sibling, the next-door Kammermusiksaal, always offers a rich and rewarding selection of programmes. This Mahler Chamber Orchestra concert, given with artistic partner, violist Antoine Tamestit, was very much a case in point, music by Bach interspersed with works of lament and mourning by Hindemith, Schnittke, and Shostakovich. Bach of course offers life, death, and the beyond. Here we began and closed with him approaching God’s throne, beseeching the Almighty for hope, forgiveness, and the promise of everlasting life, including a transcription of his deathbed chorale prelude, with the first four Contrapuncti from the Art of Fugue offering a taste, even a banquet, of the music of the spheres. ‘Bach, c’est Bach, comme Dieu c’est Dieu,’ in the words of Berlioz. 

The opening chorale, BWV 327, bears no words in the surviving text and sets a melody associated with the hymn ‘Herr Gott, dich loben alle wir,’ the alternative words given to it by the editors of the Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe. If you were expecting a rousing ‘Old Hundredth’ opening, nothing could have been further from the reality. Instead, front desks only from the string orchestra offered a slow, veiled, vibratoless, Passion-like introduction, soft humming suggesting a congregation, perhaps even of the netherworld. In a sense, it brought together old and new Bach, the speed more Klemperer-like than anything one might hear today, the total lack of vibrato looking back (or so we imagine) to early consorts as well as forward to the present, the difference being that this proved to have been an artistic rather than a dogmatic choice. 

The chorale is quoted in Hindemith’s Trauermusik for George V. The British monarch may not seem the most promising object of a musical tribute, but there have been far worse—before, in Bach’s age, Hindemith’s, and our own. Trauermusik was written on 21 January 1936, following news of the king’s death the night before (as we now know, killed by his physician in order to make the following day’s newspapers). The concert in which Hindemith had been due to play his own viola concerto was cancelled, but this new work, conjured up at Mozartian speed in a BBC office for the occasion, was given in a broadcast instead, with the same performers: Hindemith, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and Adrian Boult. I have not especially warmed to the piece before – indeed, last time I heard it, I found it rather dull – so was delighted to find myself far more involved this time around, no doubt on account of the excellent performance from Tamestit and the MCO. The effect of the ‘new’ orchestral sound was of coming into ‘modern’ focus that yet intangibly built upon Bach. The four brief movements were dignified, at times passionate, yet never lachrymose, always guided by melody, harmonic rhythm, and their combination. This was recognisably the world of Mathis der Maler, with Bach’s chorale (which Hindemith was unaware had not set the words printed in the BGA) sounding as a reminiscence of the world in which it had been set as well, obviously, as of Bach. Played initially with low – not no – vibrato and gradually intensifying, it imparted a sense not only of coming ‘up to date’ but also of a life gathering force until its close, at which the music duly receded. 

Contrapunctus I followed, each of the Art of Fugue pieces given by four solo strings, Tamestit one of them. Each begins in a different voice, this therefore initiated by the ‘second’ violin (actually, front desk first violinist, but not leader) Alexandra Preucil, to which Matthew Truscott soon responded as ‘first’. It was interesting, even before the entry of viola and cello, to note how different the two violinists’ playing was: not in any sense predictably so, but in response and complement. In a sense, it offered a microcosm of a concert in which nothing was taken for granted. This was warm, intelligent, unaffected playing, in which the illusion of the music ‘speaking for itself’ could readily be believed in, though it offered subtle insight aplenty as soon as one listened, just as in, say, music from the ‘Golden Age’ of vocal polyphony. The following fugue sounded as if a long-range ‘answer’, which in a way it is. Procedural relationships were clad in both flesh and the emotions that attend it. It was deeply involving and affecting. 

Like Contrapunctus III, Schnittke’s 1989 Monologue begins with a viola line, albeit against a backdrop of orchestral second violins and violas. Written for Yuri Bashmet, it is as well that it has been taken up by other violists, since we are unlikely to hear Bashmet in the ‘West’ for the foreseeable future. Tamestit, in any case, had nothing to fear from comparisons, leading a performance it was not difficult to think ‘definitive’ (however vain the idea), every note being made to count without a hint of pedantry. The piece’s darkness was apparent; so too was the happenstance of kinship with Hindemith, at least in initial retrospection, though its ghostliness extended, as one might expect, far further. Indeed, it offered a kind of bridge between Hindemith and Shostakovich. If sometimes I had doubts about the quality of the material ‘itself’, performance rendered such doubts, as it were, more or less immaterial. 

Bach returned for Contrapunctus II and IV. No such doubts here, of course, the extraordinary, unanswerable invention and integrity of harmony and counterpoint reminding us once again of Berlioz’s dictum. What struck me on coming to the fourth was how the player first intoning the subject had apparently taken the lead for the way in which the fugue would be played as a whole: not, of course, that this had not been playing of mutual responsiveness, but that it had rightly made its mark (just as voicing would necessarily do so on the piano). Chromaticism naturally offered its own seasoning. 

Rudolf Barshai’s Chamber Symphony arrangement of Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet has long been admired, not least by Shostakovich himself. It sounded here in no way as if it were ‘merely’ an arrangement, but rather as if it were what had always been intended. Moreover, it would be difficult to imagine a better or more committed performance than that we heard from the MCO, Tamestit in its ranks on the first viola desk. The opening ‘Largo’ seemed, perhaps inevitably, to speak to our current predicament, little more than two days after the shocking attack on Iran. It was sad, bleak even, but human. Detail and the longer line were unerringly drawn, contributing to one another. The second movement as hysterical outburst knocked Schnittke into distant second place, its astonishing string playing further vindication of Barshai’s work. Capturing letter and spirit to perfection, the third movement performance moved from initial innocence to something lunging and sardonic; for once, comparison with Mahler did not seem beside the point. The weird after-life of this ‘Allegretto’ seemed more like hell on earth. For the two remaining ‘Largo’ movements, the first lament was icy yet warm, briefly brought into a winter sun that was swiftly banished; the second, kindred in spirit, also performed its function of quasi-cyclical return. Even for someone such as I who is not in general Shostakovich’s greatest fan, this was haunting music and haunting music-making. 

And so, to Bach’s final work, the last of the ‘Leipzig chorales’, moving effortlessly in true Bachian fashion from organ to strings, binding together the programme in various ways, not least since it was also the chorale with which Bach closed but not completed The Art of Fugue (albeit under the name ‘Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein’), allegedly on his deathbed. Hindemith was, of course, unaware that Bach had always used a different melody for the chorale that he included in his work. This true ‘Von deinen Thron’ therefore effected a kind of historical as well as aesthetic reconciliation, albeit of a properly complex variety. I have simplified the above, perhaps to the extent of distortion, for which please accept apologies if necessary. There was no distortion and certainly no need for apology, though, in the profoundly moving music-making that concluded this outstanding concert. The whole string orchestra, Tamestit included, gave an intimate, unveiled performance of ultimate integrity, reminding us that Bach offers as close to ein’ feste Burg as we shall come in this life: not in stoicism, which may or may not be all we have, but in faith.

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.