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.

Festival d'Aix-en-Provence (2) - Don Giovanni, 8 July 2025

Grand Théâtre de Provence

Images: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence 2025 © Monika Rittershaus

Don Giovanni – Andrè Schuen
Leporello – Krzysztof Bączyk
Donna Anna – Golda Schultz
Donna Elvira – Magdalena Kožená
Don Ottavio – Amitai Pati
Commendatore – Clive Bayley
Zerlina – Madison Nonoa
Masetto – Paweł Horodyski

Director – Robert Icke
Set designs – Hildegard Bechtler
Costumes – Annemarie Woods
Lighting – James Farncombe
Choreography – Ann Yee
Video – Tal Yarden
Sound – Mathis Nitschke
Dramaturgy – Klaus Bertisch

Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir (choirmaster: Aarne Talvik)

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Simon Rattle (conductor)

If I remember correctly, that splendidly grumpy old man Johannes Brahms averred that he would much rather stay at home and read the score than suffer yet another Don Giovanni disappointment in the opera house. Often, one sympathises—and more generally with Mozart, especially nowadays. It is, notoriously, a director’s graveyard; it has for a while also seemed to be a conductor’s graveyard too. In both cases, the Commendatore regularly calls time on all manner of easy perversities that too often masquerade in place of understanding, hard work, and genuine imagination and invention. I was nonetheless keen to see this new Aix production, the festival’s eighth and my first there. That was above all to see what Robert Icke, an almost universally admired figure of British spoken theatre – this season alone, I saw Oedipus and Manhunt (which Icke wrote as well as directed) – might accomplish in his first foray into opera. 

Having entered the theatre and quickly skimmed a page or two of the programme, I felt my heart sink when I read some of Simon Rattle’s words in the programme, regardless of the good sense many others made. ‘The “Mozart” [!] I grew up with as a child – the style of interpretation I once admired – has, for most of us, become unlistenable. We’ve all evolved without realising it.’ Perhaps, then, this would be a classic instance of one element working and one distracting, with the stage performances themselves as yet undetermined. For once, alas, my inner Brahms proved wrong. There was much to admire and to consider on all fronts. Not only was this to be a serious piece of theatre; it was, certain, despite inevitable reservations, to be the best Mozart and indeed to my taste probably the best performance of music before Wagner I had heard from Rattle. This, I think, was testament not only to his thoughtful, keen-eared approach, dismissal of Furtwängler, Böhm, Klemperer, Giulini, Davis, et al. (and their admirers) notwithstanding, but also to willingness to learn from his still relatively new orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony, and to theirs from him. 

Interviewed in 2015, Icke declared his responsibility ‘always’ to be ‘to the impulse of the original play, to clear away the accumulated dust of its performance history. So much of great drama was profoundly troubling when it was first done. They rioted at Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, for goodness’ sake. Audiences shouldn’t be allowed to feel nothing.’ A ‘period’ approach similar to Rattle’s (at least in theory, if not in practice)? Hardly, as anyone familiar with his work would attest. That is, in part, the problem: such notions mean such different things to people in different contexts that misunderstanding – doubtless including mine concerning Rattle’s words – is rife. Enough, anyway, of this preamble. It may have been better to plunge straight into the action as Mozart does, if arguably to withdraw a little thereafter. I wanted, though, to try to give an impression or at least a self-assessment of my own accumulated dust, if only to help explain my own admiration – some anticipated, some less so – for what I saw and heard. 

Icke opens with the Commendatore, in a sense master of ceremonies, initiating his own private performance—on record, like so many of us, one might even say in neo-Brahmsian fashion. The sounds of an old, crackly performance will be heard again for Giovanni’s Tafelmusik as we approach the denouement and the Commendatore’s return. (In reality, he has never been away, conceptually or physically, as stage appearances make clear.) For there is here a strong relationship, probably identity, between the two. Does Giovanni’s murder of his nemesis thereby suggest the master of his own fate is indeed his own nemesis? Is the action that unfolds, whether from the standpoint of an old man sipping wine to a gramophone record of his youth or from hospital bed and a fatally wounded young man, drip-attached, staggering with increasing difficulty across the stage (n the second act), the Commendatore/Giovanni narrating his own story? How reliable a narrator might he be? And how reliable might live and recorded video images be? The work, even? These are not necessarily questions to be answered definitively, though nor are they trivially raised then neglected. This is – at least was for me – a call to active participation from the spectator and listener. That may be why some evidently did not care for it. 

The concept takes its leave, I think, from Leporello’s line, ‘Chi è morto, voi, o il vecchio?’ To ask his master who is dead, him or the old man, is generally taken not only to be (theatre of the) absurd – clearly it is – but as merely silly. (Thank goodness this was not a Don Giovanni played ‘for laughs’, a dramaturgical misunderstanding of the highest or rather the lowest order. The ever-irksome Glyndebourne guffaw was at least avoided.) If we lose the intrinsic master-servant dialectic, highly eroticised by Giovanni’s clothes- and partner-swapping libertinism, we gain an intriguing consideration of what relationship there might be between Giovanni and the Commendatore and what their secret(s) might be. Occasional sharing of lines between characters, not only them, speaks and sings of other connections, born of theatrical experience – they work to the extent one might not even notice – and possibility. It is a standpoint; no one would claim it to be the only standpoint, but it is a fruitful one. 

For we rarely ask who the Commendatore is. We arguably do not even ask who Giovanni is, though we think we do. His kinetic energy deludes, seduces us—as well as those onstage. There are neither masquerade nor masqueraders here, which is surely part of the point. Instead, the old man – or is it the young man – has summoned characters from the medical staff. Donna Elvira, the young man’s fellow inhabitant of the chameleon-realm between seria and buffo, di mezzo caraterre, is notably precisely who she says she is, her words generally disregarded: his wife. In the final reckoning, she returns to his bedside. Perhaps he is not dead after all, then: not in a banal, realistic way so much, but rather to reckon with the circularity of an abuse that is born of and returns to the family, a little girl who sees it all the counterpart, perhaps more than that, to Donna Anna. As survivors do – are we all, ‘in a very real sense’, survivors? – she teaches other women, onstage and on film. She should not have to, of course, but what choice does she and do they have? 

The idea of standing between life and death – in limbo perhaps or hell, even heaven – can be considered and expressed in many ways. Giovanni’s initial, disconcerting beatific gaze suggests one way, perhaps not taken—or is it? At any rate, the idea is one arguably explored in the work or at least one it might encourage us to explore. Claus Guth’s Salzburg production was admired by many, though it struck me as in many ways problematical—not least since it took the cowardly, decidedly non-Giovanni path of omitting the scena ultima. When I think about it again, though, it certainly occupied itself with this notion. Here, the heartbeat that punctuates the action – filmic yet theatrical, auditory yet visual – brings it home arrestingly, in more than once. 

Use of surtitles to convey concept rather than the text is by now a common dramaturgical device. Here, I admit I felt unease: was too much being skated over? Might not the conflict have been better brought out into the open? Did the ‘new’ words for the scena ultima threaten ironically to turn what we saw into too much of a conventional morality play? Perhaps that was the point; if so, it seemed a pity, also a little too much ‘leading’ for what we ought to have been able to grasp without. At least, though, I was led to ask the question, and it may have been my misunderstanding or simply a case of my preference/preconception not according with a valid alternative. 

Rattle’s musical dramaturgy surprised me: not only from what he had said, but from what I had been told. A friend who had attended an earlier performance informed me of swift tempi. Once past a shockingly fast alla breve, even by current standards, what I heard was anything but. Who knows? Maybe I too am an ‘authenticist’ without having known it. The point was not of course speed or even tempi as such, but rather a variegated approach, giving each number its due whilst attempting to situate it within a greater whole. I did not find everything entirely convincing; when does one ever? More often than not I did, though. I also found a welcome collaborative approach not only to the production but to the cast, without ever falling into the messy trap of having them all do their own thing. This work needs a musical as well as a stage director—and it received one: one, moreover, who was as alert as any I have heard, perhaps even more so, to the array of timbral possibilities, some historically derived, some less so. The Munich wind in particular must have thanked their lucky stars. 

The whole orchestra was on outstanding form, truly able to ‘speak’ dramatically: a quality Rattle associates with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and which I do with Mozart’s position between Gluck and Mozart. Again, maybe we are not so far apart after all; maybe we are ready at long last to put such ‘debates’ behind us. There were times when tension sagged a little, Rattle perhaps savouring, even loving, the score more than is ideal, however understandable. As ever, the familiar conflation of Prague and Vienna versions did not help. (For once, given aspects of the production, inclusion of the Leporello-Zerlina duet might have been an advantage.) But none of my reservations was grievous and I learned much from what I heard too. 

Andrè Schuen proved an outstanding Giovanni: properly adaptive to every situation, his very core shifting as necessary; suave and strong; yet troubled and tortured. Clive Bayley’s Commendatore, unusually and necessarily more acted than sung, imparted equal conviction in the concept. If (the mature) Donna Anna seemed somewhat sidelined by that concept, Golda Schultz’s vocal palette and sparkle left nothing to be desired. Krzysztof Bączyk was likewise faced with a production in which Leporello seemed less central than otherwise, but his performance remained estimable, a proper foil to his master’s (in either incarnation). Magdalena Kožená fully captured the world of a different Elvira, words and music harnessed with insight. Madison Nono and Paweł Horodyski presented a spirited, finely sung Zerlina and Masetto with an apt taste for light sadomasochism that was not confined to them. Amitai Pati seemed at times a little out of sorts vocally as Don Ottavio, but everyone is entitled to a (relative) off-night, especially in such cruelly exposed music. All the cast, small chorus included, contributed to the realisation of the greater whole: Icke’s, Rattle’s, and the broad intersection of the two.

Festival d'Aix-en-Provence (1) - La Calisto, 7 July 2025

Théâtre de l’Archevêché

Images: Festival d’Aix-en-Provence 2025 © Monika Rittershaus

 
Calisto – Lauranne Oliva
Giove – Alex Rosen
Diana – Giuseppina Bridelli
Endimione – Paul-Antoine Bénos-Dijan
Giunone, L’Eternità – Anna Bonitatibus
Linfea – Zachary Wilder
La Natura, Pane, Furia – David Portillo
Mercurio – Dominic Sedgwick
Destino, Satirino, Furia – Théo Imart
Silvano, Furia – José Coca Loza

Director – Jetske Mijnssen
Set designs – Julia Katharina Berndt
Costumes – Hannah Clark
Lighting – Matthew Richardson
Choreography – Dustin Klein

Dramaturgy – Kathrin Brunner  

Ensemble Correspondances

Sébastien Daucé (conductor)

Opera’s relationship to broader social and political movements is, like that of all cultural phenomena, complex, though sometimes clearer than in other cases. This holds at least as much for performance as for creation. Chance – the right person or persons at the right time, or indeed the wrong person(s) at the wrong time – can always play a role, albeit usually in combination with other factors. The world of seventeenth-century Venetian opera, of late Monteverdi and his pupil Francesco Cavalli, doubtless held a particular appeal for the Europe (and United States) of the Sixties and Seventies and changing social mores: women’s and gay liberation, repudiation of monogamy, and so on—just as the increasingly popular Così fan tutte did. Yet so did the singular figure of Raymond Leppard. Without him, it is difficult to imagine Cavalli having reached Glyndebourne when he did: first L’Ormindo (1967-8, on the back of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, and receiving a subsequent guest visit to Munich in 1969) and then La Calisto (1970, 1971, and 1974, with guest appearances in the UK and continental Europe in the meantime). We should probably have approached Cavalli’s music at some point otherwise, yet this was the path taken. Leppard’s landmark recordings of those two operas, combined with editions and performances of other works, did much to establish them in a public consciousness that itself seemed ready for their decidedly un-Victorian (indeed un-1950s) morality. The final duet of Poppea is a locus classicus of ‘amoral’ conclusion, or rather elevation of ‘love’, desire, whatever you wish to call it, over all else; it was of course almost certainly not composed by Monteverdi and may indeed have been the work of Cavalli. At any rate, it sets the scene nicely for works such as La Calisto, given an intriguing, feminist directorial twist at its close here by Jestke Mijnssen. 

If the route has taken inevitable detours, Cavalli may now be heard regularly across the world. The Festival d’Aix-en-Provence gave L’Erismena in 2017, a welcome opportunity, though La Calisto is to my mind the more interesting and involving opera (and here received a considerably superior production and performance). That Glyndebourne Calisto was of course one of Janet Baker’s great triumphs, in the role of Diana. mercifully captured for the rest of us on record with Leppard, the London Philharmonic, and a generally splendid cast. We can hear there an absorbing conception of what Cavalli might sound like and once did, yet we should generally resist nostalgia and concentrate on what we might do today, a task rendered easier by what may well be the finest performance of an opera on period instruments I have experienced in the flesh. It also takes its place in that fraught yet fascinating history of why Cavalli’s works in general and this in particular might hold appeal to audiences at certain times, offering a far more erotic experience than any other I can recall, whilst still inevitably pointing to historical difference. The world of La Calisto is not ours, whether in morality or conceptions of gender, though it probably comes closer than it does to the worlds of La traviata or Tosca. 

Consciously or otherwise (it does not really matter), that tension came through in Mijnssen’s staging. Initially I wondered, without especially minding, why it had been updated to a sumptuous eighteenth-century, to a world of a decadent nobility redolent of Les Liaisons dangereuses, yet it became clear that this was intended to invoke – and did – a world of experimentation in sexual attraction as well as luxury and decadence almost for their own sake. Bored, cruel gods become bored, cruel aristocrats, perhaps thereby awaiting their comeuppance. With a set from Julia Katharina Berndt, whose impression of wood panelling conveys foundations of more than a century earlier, more general distance from and roots in that earlier period are readily apparent. Social differentiation is clear in the case of Endimione, a commedia dell’arte singer performing for the pleasure of his divine audience: at their mercy (or not). It seems, however, less clear in the case of Calisto, whose dress suggested equality with the gods. Perhaps that is the point, yet if that were the case, I am not sure why it not so across the board. It is nonetheless clear in her punishment by Giunone, transformed not into a bear, it seems, but a pauper in sackcloth: perhaps the ultimate disgrace, whether in lack of wealth or implied penitence. Hers, it seems, might actually be a Christian presence in a world ruled by depraved paganism.

Otherwise, games, disguises, transformation, and violence extend from beginning to end, especially at the hands of the shepherd Endimione’s sylvan persecutors: bookended by a prophetic funeral, gods in mourning, and a closing scene in which, to our shock and the gods’, Calisto turns on Giove and kills him. The scene frozen, funeral music sounds. Is this the death of Giove in human form – it seems more than that – or a fuller death enabled by his transformation into human form? If the chief of the gods dies – can die – what might the future hold? More awkward are questions of gender transformation. A production cannot be held entirely responsible for audience reaction, of course, and there was a certain element that would probably have found male assumption of female roles, let alone a male god assuming his daughter’s form, intrinsically hilarious, no matter what; I fear some such people might even have felt and reacted similarly to any suggestion of lesbianism. That said, especially in the case of gender fluidity, the production was not entirely innocent of encouragement. That may have roots in the work; it certainly has roots in the story of Cavalli’s Venetian operas. If, though, we could have a feminist twist, a broader gender twist might also have helped. Another plus, though: we had dancing, even when comedic, that listened to and responded to the music rather than merely inflicting itself upon it. Many thanks to choreographer Dustin Klein for that rarer-than-it-should be boon. 

Sébastien Daucé led the Ensemble Correspondances with flexibility, a keen sense of dramatic narrative, and an equally fine sense of sensuality: just what was called for—and without a hint of dogmatism. A splendidly varied – always with discernible reason – continuo group proved the foundation on which much else rested, including what may well be the sweetest toned ‘period’ strings I have heard whilst retaining capacity for delicacy, and cornetts that managed both to affect and to hold their tuning in the outdoor theatre of Aix’s archepiscopal palace. I only read this afterwards, but how refreshing to hear an early-music conductor take into account just what needs to be in performance: ‘On that basis – i.e. all these different scenarios that remain open in the score – we will come up with a theoretical line-up, an adaptation of the counterpoint, of the intermediate parts, etc., but without ever touching what already exists.’ 

That latter point may be thought conservative by some standards, yet it is far from absurdly so. More important, ‘this adaptation means that our version will sound less like the one performed in Venice in 1651 than the one that might have been performed instead of Ercole amante in Paris in 1661 [1662, but no matter],’ commissioned by Cardinal Mazarin in celebration of Louis XIV’s marriage to Maria Theresa of Spain.

The idea is to have a five-part score that makes greater use of the instrumentalists and is suitable for an outdoor venue with a capacity of around 1300. When it was premiered, there were an average of 100 people per evening. While we cannot simply apply a coefficient based on the number of spectators, because the acoustics also play a role in how the music is heard [Amen to that!], it is safe to say that there will be at least ten times as many instrumentalists, i.e. an orchestra of 60 musicians. We are not quite there yet, but that is the idea! …until we have tested them at the Archevêché, we won’t know if we have too many or too few of this or that instrument. 

It is refreshing not only to read those words, but also and all the more so refreshing, stimulating, and frankly overdue to hear their musical results in a world that still mostly insists on pitifully small forces quite unmatched to performing spaces, let alone to twenty-first-century ears. I hope to hear more from Daucé and his ensemble, who whilst not in any meaningful way sounding ‘like’ Leppard and his, seem more attuned to his and to the work’s creators’ creative, more properly historical anti-puritanism than the greater part of what we have heard over the intervening half-century. 'Inauthentic' yet atmospherically Mediterranean percussion leading us into the interval would surely have surprised Leppard, yet made him smile. Cavalli too, I should like to think.

A good number of the cast will be familiar to those who have seen earlier instalments of seventeenth-century Venetian opera, Monteverdi and Cavalli, in Aix, so much so that one can almost speak of an Aix Venetian ensemble with a mutable core, rather as once one could for Salzburg and Mozart. That experience tells, I think, as does its developmental nature. All singers seemed fully at home in Giovanni Faustini’s libretto, Cavalli’s response, and that of their twenty-first production and musical team too. Lauranne Oliva gave a touching performance of the title role, growing in steel, yet ultimately true to the character’s innocence, well supported as elsewhere by Hannah Clark’s costumes. Alex Rosen’s necessarily multifaceted Giove took in not only counter-tenor assumption of Diana’s form, but increasingly strong hints of something deeper than his fellow deities might have understood. Diana herself benefited from a comprehending, flexible assumption, divine yet what we know as human, from Giuseppina Bridelli, notwithstanding loss of opportunity to act as Giove. Anna Bonitatibus offered an imperious star-turn as Giunone, lifting every scene in which she appeared insofar as that were possible. Dominic Sedgwick’s Mercurio was quite the energising presence, indeed properly mercurial. My pick of the rest would have to include Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian’s truly human, lovelorn Endimione and a strutting, peacock Satirino from his fellow countertenor Théo Imart. This premiere, however, showed that however clichéd the expression may be by now, this was a company performance, very much more than the sum of its appreciable parts from 1651 onwards.