BBC SO/Lintu - Boulez and Mahler, 4 August 2025

Royal Albert Hall

Boulez: Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna
Mahler: Das klagende Lied

Carlos Gonzales Napoles (treble)
Malakai Bayoh (boy alto)
Natalya Romaniw (soprano)
Jennifer Johnston (mezzo-soprano)
Russell Thomas (tenor)
James Newby (baritone)

Constanza Chorus (chorus master: Joanna Tomlinson)
BBC Symphony Chorus (chorus master: Neil Ferris)
BBC Symphony Orchestra

Hannu Lintu (conductor)

For my generation, as well as for me personally, Pierre Boulez’s Mahler was probably the most influential of all. My Mahlerian coming of age coincided with his decisive return to the composer, as recorded by Deutsche Grammophon. I recall hearing music from the Sixth Symphony for the very first time, on Radio 3’s Building a Library and immediately rushed out to buy the CD. I would hear Boulez conduct the work live twice, with the LSO in 2000 and with the Staatskapelle Berlin in 2007 (during those extraordinary Festtage in which Boulez and Daniel Barenboim between them performed all of the completed symphonies and most of the orchestral songs). Alas, I never heard him conduct Das klagende Lied, though he recorded it twice. Nor, unless I am forgetting, did I hear him conduct his Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna, though I was privileged to hear him conduct much of his music. (Alas, no Répons either, though surely the Ensemble Intercontemporain in 2015 continued to bear some of his imprint.) If London tributes to Boulez in his centenary have not been so plentiful as one might have hoped – surely Répons would have been in order somewhere – then many of us will continue to hear his repertoire through a Boulezian lens, not least when given by an ensemble such as the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Rituel emerged paradoxically – a mixture, perhaps itself paradoxical, of dialectic and mystery – out of something and nothing: not quite creatio ex nihilo, but not entirely unlike it either. The precedent of Berg’s op.6 Orchestral Pieces came strongly to my mind, but there are many others too. That quality of being neither one nor the other and of the music lying in that encounter extended to other apparent oppositions too: subjective and objective; involved and observed; regular and irregular (though never imprecise); tuned and untuned (though never, it seemed, unpitched). But above all, this was an immersive ritual, in which order and process, heard and felt, revealed.  Arabesques, flourishes, spirals, repeated experience of a figure so familiar from the composer’s future, all unfolded in eminently ‘natural’ fashion, Hannu Lintu knowing precisely when to conduct and when not. (In that, he reminded me of Peter Eötvös in a 2015 performance with the LSO.) It was a procession for the ears but also for the eyes, the spatial element readily appreciable in both ways. A mass of detail combined into something both complex and remarkably simple, or so it seemed. An array of different attacks on a single triangle was not only palpable, but connected with other musical parameters on that instrument, with others in its instrumental group, and beyond to other groups, mirroring, responding, combining. Reverberation, timbre, pitch, and so much more grew indissoluble: the very idea of serialism, one might say, as a musical and emotional necessity. Ultimately, it was the mesmerising, well-nigh Mahlerian quality that remained with us, long after the music had ceased; indeed, one doubted that it had ceased. 

For Das klagende Lied, the Proms programme heading (not Monika Hennemann’s informative programme note) told us we should hear the ‘original version, 1830’: a rarity indeed from thirty years before Mahler’s birth, contemporary with the Symphonie fantastique. This mysterious prenatal version, however, sounded pretty much the same as the more familiar ‘original’ written between 1878 and 1880 and could be experienced as such. Boulez gave the first British performance and made the first recording of the excised first movement, ‘Waldmärchen’. (His two recordings of the cantata as a whole are of the 1898 revision, as was his 1976 Proms performance.) One can go round in circles discussing versions, revisions, and editions, often to little avail. Suffice it to say I should always rather hear the full three movements; more to the point, Lintu and his musicians duly vindicated that choice. 

It was fanciful, no doubt, but in context perhaps not entirely absurd to hear the opening emerge similarly to that of Rituel, before taking a very different path. Mahler’s ‘voices’, as Julian Johnson has shown, are many. One of the many striking things about this work in particular is how many of them already seem to be here: not only stylistic traits, compositional method, even thematic material, but aspects of subjectivity such as we had already heard explored in Boulez’s work. ‘The great novel is sketched,’ as Boulez once wrote of this cantata, and we should ‘read its chapters progressively in the works to come’. From this orchestral introduction to ‘Waldmärchen’, Lintu seemed to have the music’s measure. If, occasionally, I found he drove a little hard, more often there was splendid flexibility, the BBC SO responding in further hallucinatory quality to his direction, Romantic vistas opening up before our ears. The Lied elements of this movement were also clear from the outset, or at least from when voices entered, as was Mahler’s Wagnerian inheritance. Uncanny choral singing – here from outstanding joint forces of the BBC Symphony Chorus and the amateur Constanza Chorus – already imparted a ghostly element, doubtless founded in German Romanticism but extending far beyond it; again in context, the versicle-response quality to Rituel endured. At least from where I was seated, the female solo voices made greater impact than tenor and bass, but that may have been as much a matter of acoustics as anything else. Natalya Romaniw switched from almost instrumental blend with Mahler’s woodwind to hochdramatisch declamation. Jennifer Johnston sounded splendidly Erda-like, harps a further Ring-echo. If there were inevitable echoes of Götterdämmerung in the choral writing, what struck in general was how little could have been written by anyone else, how intensely, convincingly personal this music was already. Harmonic coincidence with – at this stage, it could not be influence from – Parsifal, aptly enough on the words ‘Ihr Blumen’, pointed back to Tristan und Isolde, though again spoke clearly on its own merits. 

That sense of a page turning, of a new ‘chapter’, was readily apparent in the orchestral introduction to the second movement, ‘Der Spielmann’. One could almost see the illumination, even the script. Chorale snatches disconcertingly yet unmistakeably pointed to the Mahlerian future, the Rückert world of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Courtly echoes of Wagner’s ‘Romantic operas’ Lohengrin and Tannhäuser cast their spell, off-stage bands suggesting the former’s festivities turned (still more) sour. Johnston’s perfectly judged match of emotional intensity and humanity helped the tale on its way, at the close of the movement turning to an inheritance from Waltraute. The two boy soloists sang very well so far as I could tell, though evident amplification (perhaps necessary, though a pity) made it difficult to discern more. Throughout, the orchestral narrative was both founded in and punctuated by Mahler’s fateful descending scales. That is the composer’s doing, of course, but it was also a matter of performance to have it felt in our bones. The riotous celebration of the final ‘Hochzeitstück’ was, quite rightly, never without its dark side. The ‘proud spirit’ of the ‘proud queen’ was always going to be broken. Mobile telephone (really!) notwithstanding, the hushed close rightly took its time and made its mark.

BBC SSO/Wigglesworth - Birtwistle and Beethoven, 28 July 2025

Royal Albert Hall

Birtwistle: Earth Dances
Beethoven: Symphony no.3 in E-flat major, op.55, ‘Eroica’

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

This was a strangely disappointing Prom, which promised much in programming, received excellent playing from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and yet was somewhat let down in the first half, rather more than that in the second, by Ryan Wigglesworth’s conducting. Birtwistle and Beethoven offer in many ways an excellent pairing: much in common, not least aspects of temperament, an indomitability of what we might still cling to as embodying human spirit, and much that contrasts too. The goal-orientation that Birtwistle often – not always, and not always fully – eschewed is unquestionably central to Beethoven’s music, nowhere more so than in the ‘middle period’ more or less inaugurated by his Eroica Symphony. By the same token, the importance of continuity, no matter what the obstacles, remains crucial to both. Birtwistle himself pointed to the ‘wonderful example’ of Beethoven in ‘order or disruption of order’: ‘He never does what you think he is going to do. The surprise is perpetual.’    

We could have done with more surprise on this occasion, in both halves, though Earth Dances fared better. I should not be unduly harsh about what was in many ways a fine performance. Wigglesworth conducted The Minotaur at Covent Garden twelve years ago: very well, I thought, though I see now that I noted a certain ‘Classicism’ to his approach, which might be read in more than one way. Here, that translated, if indeed it were a similar thing at all, into apparent reluctance, doubtless furthered by the Royal Albert Hall’s cavernous acoustic, to let the music have its head. Clarity of detail was admirable and the performance was not without cragginess, but it came perilously close to drifting at times, especially during softer, slower passages. That said, there was a proper sense of the primordial at the beginning, of an aural landscape that had both always been and yet was anything but constant. It is difficult not to summon up some sort of images here, but the grit remained, as it should, in the music ‘itself’ and its tectonics, its dances not balletic but rather stratified and hieratic successors to Stravinsky’s Rite via Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Brute force and melancholy emerged as near-dialectical opposing forces in a world that lay beyond good and evil, a world that might be that of Nature yet is surely not only so. The performance was strongest when its dances registered as such, when fractures opened, volcanoes erupted; sometimes, though, it would have benefited from a stronger, not necessarily more interventionist but more determined (even Beethovenian) hand in having them do so. A due sense of return, not complete, not merely cyclical, proved nevertheless necessary and palpable at the close. 

The ecstatic reception accorded the Eroica in the hall bewildered me. To my ears, it never so much as stirred, at most skimming the surface in a performance that, to quote Dorothy Parker, ran the gamut of emotions from A to B. Put another way, it moved from an amiable first movement to a merely inconsequential finale, with only a hint of something more interesting in a Funeral March that disintegrated into something approaching stream of consciousness. It felt long, although it was probably on the quick side. (The two tend to go together, whatever metronome enthusiasts may tell you.) The first movement was certainly Allegro, arguably more than that, though brio was more or less entirely absent. It was less Bonaparte, let alone the memory of a great man, than Petit Trianon—with apologies to Marie Antoinette, in reality a far more interesting figure than that might imply. It had line, though scant sense of harmony, with a little more ib the way of temperament as time went on. Sadly, though, it was a matter of too little, too late. 

The second movement opened with greater promise. Although on the swift side, it was not unreasonably so; one sensed both greater character and more appropriate character. It was hardly granitic, yet there was nonetheless a darkness emerging from instrumental timbre without being limited to it. The turn to the major was odd, by turns tentative and insistent. Without a stronger – much stronger – sense of harmony, it all sounded rather episodic and empty. If designer Beethoven were your thing, the scherzo might have been it: sleek and, if not quite empty, little more than blithe. Exquisite horn playing notwithstanding, the trio offered little in the way of contrast. The finale offered a disjunct if pretty set of variations, with little in the way of humour, defiance, exultancy, anything Beethovenian. If ever there were a time in which our world needed to hear from the symphonic Beethoven, it would be now. Alas, he seems more distant than ever.

Hadelich/BBC SO/Oramo - Stravinsky, Mendelssohn, Davis, and Strauss, 24 July 2025

Royal Albert Hall

Stravinsky: Chant du rossignol
Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E minor, op.64
Anthony Davis: Tales (Tails) of the Signifying Monkey (European premiere)
Strauss: Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, op.28

Augustin Hadelich (violin)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Sakari Oramo (conductor)

Stravinsky seems unfashionable in London right now. Maybe it is my imagination, or maybe it is a consequence of increasingly non-existent public funding that what once stood at the very core of twentieth-century repertoire is now not considered ‘safe’ enough. I am sure, though, we used to encounter his music more frequently. Like the opera from which it is drawn, the Chant du rossignol seems always to have been curiously neglected. Goodness knows why; both are magical works and not obviously ‘difficult’. Boulez was, of course, a persistent and compelling advocate. It is perhaps especially fitting, then, that the BBC Symphony Orchestra should programme the work in his centenary year for the music festival at which Boulez was a longstanding, greatly valued guest, probably in no composer more often than Stravinsky. 

Sakari Oramo’s predecessor would surely have admired the éclat with which this performance opened and might well have heard more than a little of his own compositional history in what followed. Not that Oramo neglected Stravinsky’s ‘Russianness’ in a colourful, detailed, incisive, and magical performance that also boasted a good measure of Debussyan languor when called for, humour too (for instance in downward trombone slide). Echoes – more properly, pre-echoes – of Petrushka and The Rite of Spring were to be heard in harmony, metre, timbre, and much else. Narrative was clear and meaningful, in what duly sounded as a drama in (relative) miniature. Perhaps, though, it was the haunting stillness at the work’s heart that lingered longest in the memory. Solos – flute, violin, trumpet, and others – were all finely taken by BBC SO principals. I have little doubt Boulez would have loved the harp playing too. 

I cannot recall offhand whether Boulez ever conducted the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, but I imagine he might have done. He certainly admired the composer’s orchestral music, contrasting it and that of Berlioz to Schumann’s, in that one would never retouch or rebalance, given the composers’ perfect scoring. The opening is tricky, though it should never sound so—and certainly did not here, in a beautifully ‘natural’-sounding performance of the first movement that flowed fast without ever sounding rushed. Conductor, orchestra, and the simply outstanding soloist Augustin Hadelich captured Mendelssohn’s world, emotional as well as stylistic, to a tee. A poignant second subject was never remotely sentimentalised. Indeed, all had just the right sort of Romantic ardour and humanism to it. There was a wonderfully fresh sense of discovery too; at times, one might almost have been hearing it for the first time—and doubtless some in the audience were. The movement’s concision once again astonished me: seemingly over before it had begun, and just as dramatic in its different way as the Stravinsky. Transitions between movements were equally well judged, the central Andante given with a rapt lyricism that was far from restricted to the violin. Unendliche Melodie, as Wagner might have been compelled to admit. Like the concerto as a whole, it was deeply moving without evidently trying to be. An elfin finale, as infectious as anything in the Midsummer Night’s Dream music, emerged bright as a button, Hadelich’s playing both splendidly old-world and very much of now. The encore – which I have had to look up – was his own arrangement, effortless in idiom and despatch, of Carlos Gadel’s ‘Por una cabeza’. 

It is probably better to pass over what Boulez might have made of the European premiere of Anthony Davis’s unabashedly tonal Tales (Tails) of the Signifying Monkey, drawn from his opera of the same year (1997) Amistad. Davis clearly has a fondness, as his admirably informative programme note made clear, for unsual metres: dances in 11/8, 13/8, and so on. Likewise for ostinato: perhaps one of Stravinsky’s deadlier legacies. He knows what he is doing in writing for the orchestra too, and deftly brings in sounds from the jazz world. I could not help thinking, though, that what we heard sounded considerably over-extended and might have worked better illustrating a television series. Applause was polite yet reticent; I think the audience had it right. The United States is truly a foreign country, nowhere more so than its musical culture. (Consider Boulez in New York.)

Till Eulenspiegel is a relatively rare example of a Strauss work Boulez conducted. There is an excellent live recording with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, once released by the orchestra itself and which seems to be available on YouTube too. How different things might have been, had Wieland Wagner’s death not brought to an end the prospect of Boulez and him collaborating on Salome, Elektra, and Ariadne auf Naxos. An endearingly, acutely strange commercial recording of Also sprach Zarathustra suggests they would have been as different from hitherto received wisdom as the Wagner and Mahler that changed the way we hear and understand that music forever. Back to the present, Strauss’s tone poem received a finely judged performance from Oramo and the BBC SO that lacked nothing in requisite virtuosity, yet likewise did not take that virtuosity for musical substance. If I found it occasionally a little hard-driven, there was plenty of flexibility where called for. Episodes were discerningly characterised whilst taking their place in the grander narrative. Counterpoint was admirably, necessarily clear, characters and situations leaping off the page. The BBC may have been in anything but safe hands since Boulez’s time; Radio 3 is now reduced to screaming ‘Adventures in Classical’ from garish banners hung around the Royal Albert Hall. Its eponymous Symphony Orchestra continues to do very well indeed.

Die schweigsame Frau, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 22 July 2025

Images: Bernd Uhlig

Sir Morosius – Peter Rose
Housekeeper – Iris Vermillion
Barber Schneidebart – Samuel Hasselhorn
Henry Morosus – Siyabonga Maqungo
Aminta – Brenda Rae
Isotta – Serafina Starke
Carlotta – Rebecka Wallroth
Morbio – Dionysios Averginos
Vanuzzi – Manuel Winckhler
Farfallo – Friedrich Hamel

Director – Jan Philipp Gloger
Set designs – Ben Baur
Costumes – Justina Klimczyk
Lighting – Tobias Krauß
Video – Leonard Wölfl
Choreography – Florian Hurler

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Dani Juris)

Staatskapelle Berlin 

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Christian Thielemann’s first new production as music director at the Staatoper Unter den Linden was always going to be a special event. A declaration of intent, no doubt: of respect for the house’s traditions, whilst subtly extending them. For all his superlative strengths, Daniel Barenboim was not much of a Straussian, at least in the opera house—and I think that points to a more fundamental difference between Thielemann and his predecessor, perhaps to be explored more fully another time. In any case, one might say that that regard for canon and tradition, whilst understanding and indeed aiding its mutability was tailor-made for the art of both Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig. So indeed it proved to be. 

Thielemann has been pretty much universally acclaimed for his Strauss—and rightly so. His ability to ‘play’ the orchestra as if it were a keyboard instrument is remarkable, yet equally worthy of note – and of hearing on this occasion – was his Barenboim-like willingness to have the musicians engage in Kammermusik that could be shaped, if needed, into something larger but never greater. The Staatskapelle Berlin, always the jewel in this house’s crown, played not only with perfection but palpable commitment. It could be a Mozart serenade writ large via Wagnerian polyphony; it could be a telling arabesque duet with voice; it could be a sly piece of word painting; it could, just occasionally, be the full orchestra letting its presence felt, but also felt as necessary. Everything felt ‘natural’, however much art there might be in that; everything felt both rehearsed and spontaneous. Most important of all, the orchestra told us what mattered most—to Strauss and, one hopes, to us, at least during those magical hours spent in the theatre. Art is not to be equated to life; it is both less and more. Strauss knew that; so did Thielemann and the orchestra; so, I think, did we. 

For Strauss – Zweig too – is here, as ever, intimately and, yes, beautifully concerned with music and its history, with art more broadly and its history too. The canon is not an immutable thing He can do no other, which is part of the wonder of his aestheticism. The craft from both is astounding, especially when one does not notice it. Everywhere an allusion, everywhere an illusion—all the more so when one barely notices. Some of that is doubtless unconscious; one might say the same of performances and staging too. None of us works, thinks, makes art, or indeed makes society in a vacuum. Is/was Henry and Aminta’s sheltering in another room whilst Sir Morosus finds rest – low D-flat for contrabassoon, organ, and his ‘Dank!’ – an echo of Walther and Eva doing likewise at the close of their second act in Die Meistersinger? It looked and even sounded like it, but may also be a function of genre, of the unconscious, even of chance. We make our own connections, though we are led along the way. Actual quotation is less mistakeable, or is it? How many of us waver over Rossini-Monteverdi here? Presentiments too: how much of Sir Morosus is there in Capriccio’s La Roche, or vice versa? Is he Baron Ochs partly wiser, even transfigured, or is that to partake in the cardinal sin of sentimentality? Perhaps it is all, as the Marschallin would counsel, a farce, no more but also no less. Yet what knowing irony there is in that claim, as Straussians will know all too well. 

Let us leave that on one side for the moment to consider Jan Phillip Gloger’s production. Thielemann and Gloger have collaborated at Bayreuth and in Dresden, so again this might offer a harbinger of sorts. I had my doubts at points yet ultimately was won around by Gloger’s concept, not least since it developed so finely in collaboration with musicians onstage and in the pit—what opera is or should be, and be about. There is none of Ben Jonson’s London here, though predicaments that faces Londoners still more than Berliners – yes, I know the latter will protest, but they should try living here – come to the fore: initially, the housing crisis, but increasingly that of loneliness and how society treats the elderly in an age of generational conflict in which the latter may seem to hold too many of the cards. (They do not, of course, or not straightforwardly; it is a useful culture-war camouflage for capital. But enough of that for now.) As the opera begins, we see increasingly desperate ‘refreshing’ of a screen by someone attempting to find city accommodation – many of us have been there – followed by the stage revelation of a wealthy, single, older person living in an expansive apartment to himself, attended to by housekeeper and barber (here, more general ‘wellness’ consultant). Yet we are also confronted – I can see, even hear, the raised eyebrows – with statistics before the second and third acts, that is on the curtain during the intervals, that challenge our preconceptions, for instance how many older people who might wish to move to smaller accommodation might end up paying more in rent if they do so (and they might not be able to).

That, however, becomes ever more a context than concept. More fundamentally, the tale is one of conflict and reconciliation, furthered by understanding and willingness to accept the new. A trick, in many ways quite horrible, is played on Sir Morosus. The characters relish it in some ways, yet are also not without guilt, faithfully following Zweig and Strauss. One may or may not like the garish way in which Sir Morosus is married to his apparently ‘silent’ woman, Timida/Aminta, but it makes its dramatic point. Perhaps some of the metadramatic interventions are, like the statistics, a bit crass, but they do no real harm. Holding up a sign saying ‘Regietheater’ both alerts some, less receptive in the audience, to what might be happening not only onstage but to the stage that has been enacted onstage, and may even remind them that all this is not nearly so new as some would have them believe. No one, after all, was a greater practitioner of the cause they excoriate than Richard Wagner, whose Hans Sachs, one of Morosus’s many progenitors, reminds us: ‘Es klangt so alt und war doch so neu!’ 

Reconciliation is arguably more problematical in Die Meistersinger than here, the world of what is ‘deutsch und echt’ notable by its absence (which may, admittedly, prove to some still more problematic). For the time being, though, we can share in the old man’s joy in true acquaintance with, perhaps even growing love for his nephew and adoptive son and his wife, their troupe, and even a little of the music he once so detested. We can share in theirs for him too, heartwarmingly portrayed – for once, I mean no irony, and Strauss appears not to do so either – in the closing display of a Morosus Community, in which none need be silent and, just as important, none need be alone. One can be, of course, and Morosus is grateful for time on his own, for peace and quiet, for the music to have stopped, but as a free choice rather than faute de mieux. Solitude, as any Romantic will tell you, can be a good or bad thing; it depends very much on context and will. 

Stage performances were outstanding. As Sir Morosus, Peter Rose was everything would have hoped for, placing the character somewhere justly between Ochs and La Roche – I have been treated to the former, though not yet to the latter – but above all creating an individual human being of his own, whose ‘difficulty’ we increasingly understood and sympathised with, coming to know a somewhat different person than the one we had assumed he was. His way with Zweig’s German was second to none. Siyabonga Maqungo presented an ardent, lovelorn, equally human Henry, well matched to Brenda Rae’s Aminta. Rae played that role in a very different production (Barrie Kosky’s) the only other time I have seen the opera in the theatre. Here, her vocal glitter and precision were matched, indeed exceeded only by her humanity. The animating presence of Samuel Hasselhorn as the barber Schneidebart was a joy from start to finish, as finely conceived theatrically as it was musically. It was a similar, if more fleeting joy, to welcome Iris Vermillion back to the Berlin stage as Morosus’s housekeeper. There was the finest sense of company from all concerned, not least a chorus superbly trained by Dani Juris, which reciprocated the ensemble favour in appearing very much as a cast of individuals brought together. 

This proved, then, an excellent and deeply moving evening. Strauss and Zweig’s Schweigsame Frau sang in and for itself; but also for music; for opera; for Berlin; and, I like to think, for this exiled Berliner back in town for all of twenty-two hours, a good few of them, like those of Sir Morosus, spent asleep before returning to the city in which the opera ‘should’ be set and in which Jonson’s Volpone not only is set but was first performed. These three-and-a-half hours, though, proved more than worth the journey, a reminder less of the horrendous world around us – though that made its presence softly, touchingly felt – than of what, if we can make it a little horrendous, we might actually live for. That is, it reminded us what Strauss and his aestheticism are ultimately concerned with and why this work from the 1930s, derived from and transforming an English comedy of more than three centuries earlier, might yet matter to us in 2025.

‘Wie schön ist doch der Musik!’ And just perhaps, as Morosus continues, ‘aber wie schön ist, wenn sie vorbei ist!‘ The music was indeed beautiful, and there was unquestionably something poignant, even painful in the beauty of its fleetingness, of its passing. That it cannot be grasped is worth our grasping; in that way and in reflection both upon it and upon its passing, it will often remain with us all the longer. As ever, at least in a performance worth its salt, one does not want the Straussian epilogue to end, but it does and it must, and we are better for it. And with that, both my opera season and that of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden draw to a close. The latter’s next will open with Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Ring, conducted by Christian Thielemann.

Munich Opera Festival (2) - Pénélope, 21 July 2025

Prinzregententheater

Images: Bernd Uhlig
Pénélope (Victoria Karkacheva)

 

Pénélope – Victoria Karkacheva
Ulysse – Brandon Jovanovich
Euryclée – Rinat Shaham
Eumée – Thomas Mole
Cléone – Valeria Eickhoff
Mélantho – Seonwoo Lee
Alkandre – Martina Myskohild
Phylo – Ena Pongrac
Lydie – Eirin Rognerud
Eurynome – Elene Gvritishvili
Antinoüs – Loïc Félix
Eurymaque – Leigh Melrose
Léodés – Joel Williams
Ctésippe – Zachary Rioux
Pisandre – Dafydd Jones
Shepherd – Nicolas Bader
Ulysse double – Stefan Lorch
Pénélope double – Teresa Sperling
Archer – Daniela Maier

Director – Andrea Breth
Designs – Raimund Orfeo Voigt
Costumes – Ursula Renzenbrink
Lighting – Alexander Koppelmann
Dramaturgy – Lukas Leipfinger, Klaus Bertisch

Vocalensemble ‘LauschWerk’ (chorus director: Sonja Lachenmayr)
Bayerisches Staatsorchester
Susanna Mälkki (conductor)

 

Pénélope, Ulysse (Brandon Jovanovich and Stefan Lorch)

Fauré’s only opera Pénélope was premiered at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo in March 1913, moving to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées only two months later. It has fared incommensurably less well with posterity than the Stravinsky ballet that had its premiere there later that month. The opera is no Rite of Spring, of course, yet what is? In an excellent new production for Munich directed by Andrea Breth and conducted by Susanna Mälkki, Pénélope emerged as an opera quite undeserving of its neglect, intrinsically and by comparison with more than a few ‘repertoire works’, especially from the previous century. What we heard should also have confounded some lazy preconceptions about the composer. 

Breth’s production is a typically serious piece of theatre, which grapples with the highly untheatrical nature of the work and, to my mind, largely succeeds. A fellow musicologist friend I met at the performance pointed to its place in a specifically French conception of drama dating back at least as far as Corneille and Racine, in which little happens onstage in terms of stage action, almost all unfolding through words, I am sure he is right. The classical unities are also certainly observed. I thought also, inevitably, of Pelléas et Mélisande, though the relationship between Fauré and Debussy was not an easy one. They certainly shared contexts and influences and neither cared for operatic display, to put it mildly, but ultimately this was probably more correspondence than anything else. 

In any case, Breth’s mixture of realism and ritual, the latter founded in doubles for characters, but also ways of acting (in more than one sense), proved compelling and fitting, removing any doubts that this might be an oratorio or something else masquerading in operatic guise. Characters processed, imitated, took their time, and just occasionally acted hurriedly—in keeping with the work yet not bound by it. Opening action during the Prélude presented an elderly man guiding a woman in wheelchair to view museum exhibits, stark yet broken. This Pénélope and Ulysse framed the action and in some sense presaged it, three suitors, ready for action, later removing their shirts and adopting the poses of those statues. There was, then, a circularity that came into conflict with yet also helped form the drama literary and staged. What we saw and heard played with time and involved characters and audience in reception of myth and opera alike. 

When revenge came, economic presentation unmistakeably evoking the rural hinterland of Ithaca, before closing in once again on the palace, it lacked nothing in brutality, suitors treated as replacement pieces of meat for those they would have served at the banquet. It was clear and direct, like the work itself, meaningfully adding to rather than merely doubling or indeed contradicting it. If the conclusion struggled to convince – two people in front of me talking through the closing bars did not help – then that is more a problem with the work. A hymn to Zeus is one way of rounding things off, I suppose, but something a little more ambiguous or indeed human might have worked better. That is not what we have, of course. One might sense Breth undercutting things with the frozen, tableau dimension to what we see at the close, or one might not. Perhaps that was the point. 

Susanna Mälkki’s direction of excellent orchestra, chorus, and cast was similarly sympathetic and comprehending, with work and staging alike. One sensed, rightly or wrongly, that musical and stage interpretation had developed in tandem. Where there was a light sense of Götterdämmerung’s Gibichung decay onstage, perhaps even a stylised Gallic return for Salome/Salomé, so was there in the music, Mälkki knowing what was and was not Wagnerian in Fauré’s method and soundworld, the latter more than one might expect, though far from all. Likewise with Debussy. Orchestral lines developed differently, of course, at times not unlike Fauré’s chamber music; vocal lines emerged woven like Pénelope’s shroud, again showing consciousness that, whilst there were unsurprisingly aspects in common with the composer’s songs, this was not a song cycle writ large but an opera.    

Victoria Karkacheva and Brandon Jovanovich made for a compelling central pair, musically and dramatically conceived in utmost sympathy with work and staging. There was a deep connection between the two expressed in words, music, and gesture, that did not shy away from darker aspects of fate and revenge, without being merely consumed by them. Rinat Shaham’s nurse Euryclée offered an exquisite, chalumeau-like voice of wisdom and recognition. The similarly faithful shepherd Eumée received compelling characterisation from Thomas Mole. A duly nasty yet individual set of suitors received what it deserved yet offered much vocal pleasure in the meantime. Loïc Félix’s ringing Antinoüs, Leigh Melrose’s typically compelling Eurymaque, and Joel Williams’s subtle Léodés especially noteworthy (to me). But there was no weak link in the cast. The evening’s success relied throughout on collaboration—acted as well as sung, for which Stefan Lorch and Teresa Sperling as doubles for Pénélope and Ulysse and Daniela Maier gymnastically stringing the latter’s bow must also be credited. 

Comparisons with Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria are near inevitable for the opera-goer, yet are not especially helpful. What would not pale slightly at least in its shadow? If only we lived in a world in which comparisons with Dallapiccola’s Ulisse were meaningful. Perhaps one day. In the meantime, this excellent staging and these equally excellent performances can well stand for themselves. They may just prove a milestone in this opera’s unlucky reception history.

Munich Opera Festival (1) - Die Liebe der Danae, 19 July 2025

 

Nationaltheater

Image: © Geoffroy Schied

Jupiter – Christopher Maltman
Merkur – Ya-Chung Huang
Pollux – Vincent Wolfsteiner
Danae – Malin Byström
Xanthe – Erika Baikoff
Midas – Andreas Schager
Four Kings – Martin Snell, Bálint Szabó, Paul Kaufmann, Kevin Conners
Semele – Sarah Dufresne
Europa – Evgeniya Sotnikova
Alkmene – Emily Sierra
Leda – Avery Amereau
Four Watchers – Bruno Khouri, Yosif Slavov, Daniel Noyola, Vitor Bispo
A Voice – Elene Gvitishvili

Director, choreography – Claus Guth
Set designs – Michael Levine
Costumes – Ursula Kudrna
Lighting – Alessandro Carletti
Video – rocafilm
Dramaturgy – Yvonne Gebauer, Ariane Bliss

Bavarian State Opera Chorus (chorus director: Christoph Heil)
Bavarian State Orchestra
Sebastian Weigle (conductor)

© Monika Rittershaus

For what continues to be considered an ill-fated rarity, Die Liebe der Danae has had several outings over the past couple of decades or so. I have seen three productions before this, two admittedly at its Salzburg Festival ‘home’ and none in Britain, though Garsington staged it a little before my time in 1999. (A recording, under the late Elgar Howarth, remains available.) Claus Guth’s Munich production, first seen earlier this season in February, is the Bavarian State Opera’s fourth. Rudolf Hartmann directed it twice; his first, 1953 version travelling on a company visit to the Royal Opera House, which has neglected to present it since. Hartmann’s 1967 production was designed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, no less, whilst 1988 saw a new version from Giancarlo del Monaco. With Rudolf Kempe, Joseph Keilberth, and Wolfgang Sawallisch conducting respectively, some of those occasions will surely have been fondly recalled by some in the Munich audience this time around. Nearly forty years on, though, it was time for something new. Perhaps ironically for an opera concerned in part with the baleful influence of gold, little expense would seem to have been spared. I wish, then, I could have felt greater enthusiasm, especially prior to the third act, for what I saw—and to some extent heard. 

Guth’s production opeened before the work with Danae posing for a photo shoot. Following a number of poses and loud clicks, the music could begin. The action played out exclusively in a penthouse with views of skyscrapers and the odd helicopter (as when Midas arrives). Pollux was dressed as a caricatured Donald Trump, silly hair, red tie, and overweight. His first appearance was enough to elicit laughter, which is fair enough: it was, for once, an amusing joke, but that was it really. Nothing was done with the identity beyond a love (common to all characters, it would seem) for the crass vulgarity of dictator-chic gold. That may have been a cause for relief given the impending shower of gold and indeed the question of Pollux’s relationship with his daughter Danae, but it ultimately seemed a bit cheap. (Perhaps that was the point.) And so, it continues, golden appearance clearly a sham, although the particularly trashy get-up of Jupiter as Midas is not without unfortunate connotations of Jimmy Savile, at least to a British viewer. 

© Geoffroy Schied

For the third act, everything changed—as, in a way, it should. The bubble had burst, though the physical devastation suggested war rather than a ‘mere’ credit crunch. (One might well argue that the two cannot be so readily separated. Indeed. But that probably needs to be shown rather than merely assumed or elided.) The drama that apparently truly interested Guth – up to a point, one cannot blame him – could commence in these new circumstances and one could actually begin to relate to the characters. In that, Guth’s conception was seemingly matched by a more committed performance from conductor Sebastian Weigle. They were doubtless following prevailing opinion; faced with the proverbial revolver to the head, who would not preserve the final act over the preceding two? But we are not—and perceived or actual imbalance is surely all the more reason to ask how we might elevate the latter. I am sure no one intended to reinforce (relative) critical opprobrium, but the first act in particular came across as often merely expository and, worse, expository of things that did not appear to have much in the way of consequence later on. If there was in Guth’s case unquestionably a guiding intelligence to the whole, contrast of ‘before’ and ‘after’ very much the thing, a little more sense of why we might care about these people and the situation they were in would have done no harm. 

Did we need, though, Juno to wander around above the stage without doing anything of obvious import? Having that higher level was not a bad way of emphasising difference between gods and humans—and of showing in which guise Jupiter should be understood at which time. Yet beyond that, I ended up regretting Strauss had not written a part for the goddess, perhaps in wry homage to Handel’s Semele, which, given his profound knowledge of all manner of musical history, he must have known. Merkur’s dancing above – that of everyone else too – is best forgotten, suffice to say that, having tried his hand at choreography, Guth would be well advised to stick to the day job. 

© Monika Rittershaus

If it was interesting and in itself moving to see at the close film of old Munich and of Strauss walking in his garden, presumably at Garmisch, they nonetheless suggested a certain abdication of responsibility. Danae was written for Salzburg, not Munich, and never received its full premiere in Strauss’s lifetime precisely because he wished it to take place across the reinstated border. Whilst we can look for traces of the composer in the work, it is also not obviously ‘about’ him, even a fictionalised him. It is not Intermezzo and it is not obviously laced with one of Strauss’s greatest musicodramatic gifts: irony. In the end, though, the story had been clearly enough told, as it has been on all occasions I have seen the work—and this was in every way preferable to the unconcealed racism of Alvis Hermanis for Salzburg in 2016. 

To my surprise, Weigle proved less flexible than he had in an excellent reading at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper in 2016. If orchestral playing was more or less beyond criticism in itself – and the conductor doubtless merits some credit for that, but it was difficult to avoid the Bayerische Staatsorchester would have played with exemplary clarity, balance, and heft no matter what. The problem, rather, lay with Weigle’s reluctance or inability to let the score flow. Especially earlier on, too much emerged as unrelentingly loud. There is extraordinary variegation in the score, much of which had been more successfully presented in Berlin—and it needs a helping hand or two to draw it out. The difference may have been in part a matter of acoustics, but it is surely part of the conductor’s job to deal with that. I cannot recall feeling quite so bludgeoned in the Nationaltheater before. The third act, like Guth’s, was considerably more successful. Earlier on, lack of Straussian sweep tended to draw attention to the infelicities of Joseph Gregor’s libretto: something a fine performance can readily have one forget. 

© Monika Rittershaus

Volume issues extended to some singing too; again, this was surely at least in part Weigle’s task to moderate. As Midas, Andreas Schager was particularly in need of some restraint. Schager is, of course, an extraordinary Heldentenor. It seems churlish to cavil, given long years we endured when no one could sing Siegfried and few if any could master other Wagner roles. Here, he proved indefatigable as ever and also showed himself perfectly capable of softer, more sensitive singing in the third act. A little more shading elsewhere would nonetheless have been welcome. Another near-impossible role, arguably more so, is that of Jupiter, in which Christopher Maltman’s recent forays into heavier roles, Wotan included, fully justified themselves. Maltman despatched the lower, darker reaches of the role, movingly indeed and with echoes of the latter god’s farewell to Brünnhilde, whilst attaining rich and ringing clarity at the top, to suggest an almost Kaufmann-like tenor. In the title role, Malin Byström proved agile, fearless, and – important, this – rather likeable. Hers may not be the largest of voices, but she knew what to do with it and did it well. Smaller roles were all well taken, as were the choruses. Special mention should go to the quartet of ‘elder’ ladies, amusingly portrayed in sex-and-shopping mode and beautifully sung by Sarah Dufresne, Evgeniya Sotnikova, Emily Sierra, and Avery Amereau. 

As for my reservations, perhaps it is time to accept that this is a very difficult work to bring off. Not every attempt will be entirely successful, any more than it is with, say, Der Rosenkavalier or Salome. Passing slowly yet surely into the repertoire would not be the worst of things, far from it.

Salzburg Festival (1): ORF SO/Metzmacher - Henze, 18 July 2025

Felsenreitschule

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

  

Das Floss der Medusa

La Mort – Kathrin Zukowski
Jean-Charles – Georg Nigl
Charon – Udo Samel

Bavarian Radio Chorus (chorus director: Max Hanft)

WRD Radio Chorus (chorus directors: Paul Krämer, Alexander Lüken)

Salzburg Festival and Theatre Children’s Choir (chorus directors: Regina Sgier, Wolfgang Götz)

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)

Hans Werner Henze’s oratorio The Raft of the Medusa has long been as celebrated for its abortive Hamburg premiere at the close of 1968, disrupted by riot police acting with as much justice as they do on Berlin streets and elsewhere today in pursuit of anti-genocide protestors. In rehearsals, the RIAS Chamber Choir, flown in from West Berlin to boost local forces, had been deliberately uncooperative, disdaining Henze’s politics. Hamburg waited for a new millennium finally to make amends, although the final rehearsal had been recorded, so it was broadcast instead. Even Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, according to Henze’s autobiography Bohemian Fifths, took out his fury at the composer rather than those actually responsible, whilst poor Ernst Schnabel, the librettist and former controller of North German Radio, responsible for recording that rehearsal and thus tempering further disaster, found himself ‘thrown through a plate-glass door by a representative of the forces of law and order and … briefly locked up in a cell for opposing the state’s authorities.’ It is a story worthy of staging or perhaps a film, and is told a little more fully in my review of the Komische Oper Berlin’s Tempelhof staging in 2023 and considerably more so in Bohemian Fifths. But whilst it is unavoidably part of what the work has now become, it is salutary to hear it more or less for itself, not least at the opening of this year’s Salzburg Festival with a considerable part of the local haute bourgeoisie in attendance—part of it at least, it seems, never happier than when being lectured on its depravity by an artist of the left. Indeed, unavoidable as reception becomes in this context, it put me in mind of the success of The Bassarids the first time around, in what was then Herbert von Karajan’s citadel, for its 1966 premiere: both in itself and because it proved a crucial station on the path to the more obvious political commitment of The Raft of the Medusa. Almost thirty years later, Henze would recoil from the prospect of having become a ‘world success’. What would that mean, he asked mischievously? Becoming a Leonard Bernstein? 

If it were merely a lecture, merely agitprop, The Raft of the Medusa would doubtless be of historical interest, but not so much else. Here, in outstanding performances from all concerned, it showed beyond doubt that it is far more than that: of its time, no doubt, but equally of ours, message as well as material as urgent as ever. The vast forces were superbly marshalled by Ingo Metzmacher; in a work such as this, there is a great deal of ‘crowd control’, but it was never only that, any more than in a fine performance of the larger symphonies of Mahler. Indeed, from its entry, the ORF orchestra played this with the familiarity and commitment one might expect from the greatest of ensembles in such repertoire—and Henze’s Mahlerian heritage was clear from reinvention of his predecessor’s division of the greater whole into finely tuned (in every sense) ensembles. The ship’s negative roll call sounded as if a bitterly ironic Wunderhorn reveille. 

The Choir of the Living was drawn from the Bavarian Radio Chorus, the Choir of the Dead from the WDR Radio Chorus. Make of that what you will; nothing ideally, for all choral singing, the Salzburg children’s choir certainly included, was excellent. The latter’s apparent childlike simplicity – far more difficult than it might sound, when set against orchestral slithering – was both exquisite and disconcerting. Without retrospectively wishing to dismiss the Komische Oper’s undeniable achievement at Tempelhof, this showed beyond doubt that, whilst good staging will do an oratorio no harm, an oratorio need not be staged and will probably work best without. The visual element of choral singers moving from left, the ‘Side of the Living’, to right, the ‘Side of the Dead’, in front of which initially La Mort stands alone, but to which she will soon recruit, is more than enough: starkly powerful without distraction from words and music, enabling the chorus to assume its true and indeed traditional vocation. ‘We speak with two voices,’ as Charon, spoken by Udo Samel, informed us in the Prologue: that of ‘Madame: La Mort,’ the chillingly seductive, strikingly clear Kathrin Zukowski, and that of Jean-Charles, ‘the mulatto from Djefara in French service, whom you will remember from Géricault’s painting’, less played than inhabited by a well-nigh possessed – and very un-Fischer-Dieskau – Georg Nigl. 

Henze’s use of ‘African’ percussion might raise eyebrows now, but it is unquestionably well meant and certainly atmospheric. It reminded us not only of the world beyond European shores, but of oppression both more specific and more general as truth, reality, and delirium closed in: a colonial oppression to which open resistance would break out in the drum-beat of the closing orchestral section. Ominous, fatal (this year’s Overture Spirituelle theme is ‘Fatum’), and a cry of solidarity, it grew to a climax, as if to incite through the implicit call of ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’, then Wozzeck-like, stopped: over to us. So far, so good, and that final message was overwhelming. Yet what happened to lead us there was just as important and involving. This was a tale of humanity, but also of class struggle, in which ‘lesser’ ranks were heartlessly betrayed – ‘we for whom there was no room in the longboat’ – yet those who survived ‘returned to the world again, eager to overthrow it’. Contest between Jean-Charles and La Mort was unequal, yet real; this was no foregone conclusion, save when it had happened. ORF wind beguiled and disturbed, in context perhaps – and recalling the actual premiere took place in Vienna – an ambivalent homage to Henze’s beloved Mozart. Ghosts of Berg, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg were also present in the harmonies – Wozzeck surely a case of more or less direct allusion – but so, I think, was Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero. Haunted above all by Bach, here was a secular, revolutionary passion: like Bach’s, both a work of mourning and yet imbued with some redemptive hope. Raising of the giant score at the end suggested where, aesthetically at least, some form of redemption might lie. If Berg's Violin Concerto, 'to the memory of an angel', echoed in harmony as well as violin solo, then here lay other angels, waiting to rise or even risen.

Surtitles came and went in what I assume was a technical malfunction rather than arbitrary selectivity. That was doubtless something of a pity for an international audience – probably less international than in August – although the vivid, visceral nature of communication in person was more than ample compensation. Bar a slight slip, unless I were mistaken, in Charon’s opening narration, and overmiking of Samel’s spoken contributions – at least we could readily discern every word – I am not sure I can find another cavil. This was an outstanding opening, then, to this year’s Salzburg Festival: as fine a Henze performance as I have heard, its 2018 revival of The Bassarids included, and unquestionably the most moving.

I shall return to Salzburg in mid-August to review several more performances. This, however, will take some matching. For those who missed it, cameras were present. There will also be two Munich performances next February in Henze’s centenary year, from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Simon Rattle, Anna Prohaska, John Tomlinson, and Nigl once more, conducted by longstanding advocate Simon Rattle. Now, let us remember the rafts and ‘small boats’ upon the treacherous seas, and the bodies and souls of those who cling to them.

Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (4) – Degout/Quatuor Diotima: Ligeti, Respighi, and Schoeck, 10 July 2025

Conservatoire Darius Milhaud

Ligeti: String Quartet no.1
Respighi: Il tramonto
Schoeck: Notturno, op.47

Stéphane Degout (baritone)

Yun-Peng Zhao, Léo Marillier (violins)

Franck Chevalier (viola)

Alexis Descharmes (cello)

 

(Picture taken by me)

For a second outstanding concert at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, the Quatuor Diotima was joined by Stéphane Degout, another musician whom I have never heard give anything other than an excellent performance. Degout joined the quartet for what must count almost as ‘early music’ for them: two rarities, both entirely new to me, by Ottorino Respighi and Othmar Schoeck. First, however, we heard the Diotima on its own, in what is, by comparison, almost a repertoire work – it certainly is in the particular field of twentieth-century quartet writing – the first of György Ligeti’s two string quartets. 

Written in 1953-4, two years before Ligeti departed Hungary for Vienna in the dread year of 1956, the First Quartet emerged here very much out of Bartók’s soundworld, the first of its twelve short movements sharing and extending clearly recognisable – yet not reducible – melodic impulse and unease, its scalic writing unnervingly strange. From those seeds, the rest of the quartet seemed to spring, as if on a coil. Expressive intensity; riotous invention; humour in the tipsy waltz, captivatingly swung; and many other hallmarks of the ‘mature’ Ligeti were all present and thrillingly correct, a little string swarming too. The disconcerting nature of the composer’s Bartókian inheritance continued to make itself manifest, though, not least in unearthly harmonics and a final movement that threatened at least to transcend. Such a Romantic notion, however, was never going to proceed unchallenged, the Diotima players brining us back to earth, if we had ever left it, at the close.   

1914 has inevitable connotations of war for European and indeed world history. I am not sure one could hear much of that in Respighi’s Il tramonto, nor is there any reason one should. Many fancy we hear presentiments at least as far back as Mahler’s Sixth Symphony; yet. Essen, Krupp, and Kaiser notwithstanding, what does that actually mean? It concerns a sunset, of course, in translation from Shelley, but in some ways it seems more forward-looking – no value judgement – than, say, the ‘Ausklang’ from Strauss’s Alpine Symphony (1911-5), though there is what sounds to be, at least in retrospect, an obvious kinship with Strauss. Ripe, not over-ripe, it offers quartet writing as rich as that for voice, instruments here speaking as much as baritone or poet, in performances that took nothing for granted. Tristan und Isolde was, perhaps unsurprisingly, present for much of it, Puccini too, Respighi showing that his scenic gift need rely neither on large orchestras nor on obvious word-painting. It naturally helps to enjoy a performance of such distinction, Degout’s colouristic transformation on the exclamation ‘Pace!’ so much more than mere diminuendo. 

1933 is likewise a year so laden with doom for European history one can forget it did not necessarily seem so at the time—even to many in Germany, however much it should. Switzerland was of course a longstanding haven for refugees and exiles from there and elsewhere, Wagner and Busoni in Zurich included. It could prove a haven for modernist music too, Berg’s Lulu receiving its first performance in 1937, also in Zurich. Othmar Schoeck, who owed much to his sometime mentor Busoni, did not exactly cover himself with glory in the years to come. No Nazi himself, he nonetheless had his Eichendorff opera Das Schloß Dürande – to a libretto by an undisputed Nazi (before that, a longstanding member of the extremist DNVP), Hermann Burte – premiered at the Berlin State Opera in 1943. It was a decision that not unreasonably enraged many Swiss. Ten years earlier, though, that was some way off. 

Schoeck’s Notturno from that year, later championed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, proved quite a discovery (at least for those of us for whom it was), one could well understand being admired, at least in part, by Berg, not least in the long first movement. It was a very different soundworld, as one would expect, offered by Schoeck to Nikolaus Lenau and Gottfried Keller, and by the Quatuor Diotima and Degout to them all (and each other). Again, clarity of words, line, and harmonic motion was matched by palpable emotional commitment and ‘atmosphere’. Voice and instrument – for instance, Alexis Descharmes’s eloquent cello – duetted as well as other combinations in what often seemed as much quasi-symphony as song cycle. Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony came to my mind more than once, not least encircling words such as ‘So ganz, wie unsre Liebe, zu Tränen nur gemacht’. It is a work of assured mastery, and sounded so, which never did quite what one expected without ever seeming to court surprise, rhythm in the second movement a case in point. If not quite Bergian, the third movement, ‘Es weht der Wind so kühl’, ushered in a wind of riches, if one can imagine such a thing, not so distant. The musicians’ musical and dramatic shaping were rightly as one. It felt like the emotional centre as well as simply being the third of five movements. Likewise, the fifth felt like a finale from the outset. A finale can take many forms – in more than one sense – but this was one of them. The path was never obvious, yet made good sense: sometimes more direct than one expected, sometimes less so. It put me a little in mind of late Schreker. Perhaps more to the point – my point, anyway – it made me keen to hear Degout in Wagner.

Festival d'Aix-en-Provence (3) - Quatuor Diotima: Saariaho, Boulez, and Debussy, 9 July 2025

Villa Lily-Pastré

Saariaho: Terra memoria
Boulez: Livre pour quatuor, Ia, Ib, V
Debussy: String Quartet in G minor, op.10

Yun-Peng Zhao

Léo Marillier (violins)

Franck Chevalier, Alexis Descharmes (cello)

(picture: my own, taken from audience)

  

Whilst a concert of string quartet music on a balmy evening in the garden of a Provençal villa might sound idyllic, many would add that there is good reason for outdoor music being largely given by wind rather than string instruments. The Hôtel Maynier d’Oppède having become unavailable, this substitute venue nonetheless offered an excellent setting, the Quatuor Diotima seemingly unfazed by the acoustical and tuning challenges that must have confronted it. The screen placed at the back of the stage doubtless played a part, but so surely did the skill and sangfroid of this ever-excellent ensemble. 

Programming was canny, two composers strongly influenced in rather different ways by Debussy, one of whom we lost recently, the other whose centenary we celebrate this year, preceding Debussy’s sole string quartet, for which we are all thankful whilst understanding that the genre was not necessarily for him. Who knows what might have emerged from his ‘late’ style, had it not been abruptly curtailed by death? But then we can say that of so many. Here, on all three counts, we were grateful for what we heard. 

Kaija Saariaho’s 2007 Terra memoria marked her second work for quartet, not so much taking up where she had left off with Nymphéa of twenty years earlier as doing something quite different, whilst affirming her love for the expression born of intimacy that characterises so much writing for these forces. If conversation is a quality we attribute above all to the Classical heyday of the quartet, it re-emerged in different guises in all three works, here in comprehending performances that seemed to shape that conversation not only between players but between us and the ‘departed’ to whom the work is dedicated, and also the earth (terra) and memory (memoria) of the title, encapsulating both the composer’s shaping of material – always surprising, yet always apt – and the performers’ shaping of what she in turn offered them. Flashes, memories haunted and perhaps consoled us too. It was difficult not to think of Derridian hauntology, not least in figures flying off the bows that seemed both to owe their being to what we might think of both as spectralism and its spectres and yet confidently also to progress beyond them. 

Pierre Boulez was a regular visitor to the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and led, as cellist Alexis Descharmes reminded us in his spoken introduction to the concert the creation of its Académie. Alas, I never heard him lead conduct here, though I did hear a splendid Berlin Philharmonic concert of Bartók, Ravel, and Boulez in 2009. If Boulez’s presence – haunting in the best sense – continues to mark various aspects of the Festival, it is surely right that in his centenary year we should hear his own music: in this case parts – or, as he preferred, feuillets, (leaves) – of the Livre pour quatuor, an essential Boulezian work-in-progress that, once withdrawn, is now experiencing a welcome renaissance in performance. I long to hear it all – whatever ‘all’ might mean in this context – one day, but in the meantime it would be beyond churlish to complain at the fragments given in scintillating performances such as this. Here, perhaps inevitably, I thought of Webern first, yet also, perversely or otherwise, the late Beethovenian inheritance one might have thought shaken off by the Second Piano Sonata, but which to my ears here endured in that connection, in fragility as well as in fury, of fragments that characterised both work and performance.   

Debussy’s ghost might have warned Boulez against such a path, yet he too could not quite escape such a reckoning in his Quartet. It is often slyly bypassed; it would, moreover, be absurd to fail to acknowledge both the charm and method of French, Russian, and other string quartet forebears in composition. Yet in a performance of often astonishing concision, sonata and other ‘old’/’German’ forms worked Debussyan magic not only in their haunting but also in their ambiguity. One could identify them, yet so what? What did they – or better, work and performance – express? For a Festival strongly yet far from exclusively devoted to the lyric arts, it was the melodic lines, their intertwining, and their corrosion of expectations that proved most immediate and, in retrospect, so prophetic of the Saariaho and Boulez works heard first that yet remained, in one sense, yet to come.