Wozzeck, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 14 December 2025 (centenary performance)

Production images: Stephan Rabold

Wozzeck – Simon Keenlyside
Marie – Anja Kampe
Drum-major – Andreas Schager
Andres – Florian Hoffmann
Captain – Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke
Doctor – Stephen Milling
Marie’s child – Jacob Tougas Gigling
First apprentice – Friedrich Hamel
Second apprentice – Dionysios Avgerinos
Idiot – Stephan Rügamer
Soldier – Soongoo Lee

Children’s Choir of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden
Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Dani Juris)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

One hundred years ago to the day, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, the greatest opera of the twentieth century, received its first performance at Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden, conducted by Erich Kleiber. The composer’s proud teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, sent him a telegram the day before wishing ‘every success for the premiere’ and expressing sadness he and his wife Gertrud could not be present. Inevitable far-Right protests notwithstanding, that premiere proved a great success and the work of course went on to transform the history of twentieth-century music in general and opera in particular. That the twentieth century would overflow with great operas owed more to its example than to that of any other single work, Schoenberg’s included. Earlier that same year, one of its greatest interpreters, whose centenary we have been celebrating all year, was born: Pierre Boulez. It therefore seems doubly fitting that the Staatsoper should offer an excellent revival of Andrea Breth’s production (reviewed first here, in 2011) for the climax and culmination of 2025. 

I hope that I might, on this special occasion, be forgiven a personal excursus. (Please skip the following paragraph if not!) Many years later, this opera changed my life. It was the first I saw in the theatre, as a schoolboy who had not yet heard a note of Berg or Webern, and very little (only tonal) of Schoenberg. Travelling to Sheffield for Opera North’s visit in 1993, the experience opened up more vistas even than a Mahler symphony. Opera had not formed part of my childhood. I had only just begun to explore it, entirely from recordings, as a consequence of having fallen head over heels in love with Mozart (as yet, operatically, only Figaro, Don Giovanni, and The Magic Flute); and had still more recently begun my Wagner voyage (Tristan and possibly Meistersinger, the Ring definitely still to come). I had heard and indeed seen nothing like it, in Deborah Warner’s first production, conducted by Paul Daniel. To say that it made a great impression would be an understatement. It grabbed me by the throat and never let me go: one of the very few works one can unhesitatingly place alongside those twin polestars of my operatic life that have never left me and indeed only shone brightrer (Mozart and Wagner). Perhaps if I had not attended that performance, invited by my music teacher, I might never have worked on opera at all; I might also never have grown to love the Second Viennese School as I do, and worked on Schoenberg (or Henze, Dallapiccola, Nono, Kurtág, and others, Boulez included). So to celebrate Wozzeck’s centenary could hardly have been an occasion fuller of meaning for me: whether music-historical or biographical. 

Captain (Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke) and Wozzeck (Simon Keenlyside)

Expectations are set up to be dashed; here they were not. I shall not dwell on memories, notoriously persistent yet notoriously unreliable, of Breth’s staging, which I have written about twice before in any case. (I shall not cheat and look, at least not until after posting.) It was in any case revived here by Caroline Staunton and deserves consideration in 2025 incarnation on its own merits. What I can say Staunton and her team of skilled singing actors brought to it – at the very least I took from it, though I think it was more than that – was a stronger sense than ever of these being real people, with real, human connections between one another. It was an internal as well as an external world that sprang forth before our eyes and ears—and that connection between the two seemed, if different under a new heir to Kleiber, as strong as ever too. 

Marie (Anja Kampe), Drum-major (Andreas Schager)

Breth’s aesthetic is realist up to a point, yet not only that—not unlike Berg and, I should argue Georg Büchner too. A sense of poverty – ‘Wir arme Leut’…’ – and wretchedness was present in enclosed sets, the room in which Wozzeck, Marie, and their child must exist as heartbreakingly abject as one could hope for: a sort of Berlin Alexanderplatz-plus (both Döblin and Fassbinder), if not in period then in something still deeper and recurring. Martin Zehetgruber’s set designs then in turn mirroring and even give the impression of helping to create Berg’s closed musical forms, which yet of course extend—both into other scenes and into the desolation of the ‘open’ lake scene (visually and perhaps also, in its D minor expansiveness, musically). These people, the poor ones anyway, are treated worse than animals and that has consequences, as we see in the joyless fornication of the tavern. And yet there is an interior life: not so banal as being mere projections of the protagonists’ torments, yet in different senses a refuge from and a creation of them. That the child in the final scene is on his own, the children’s choir singing (perhaps in his mind) from the pit does not lessen the realism but expands it with a chill still harsher than that felt by the Captain and Doctor by the lake. 

Marie, her child )Jacob Tougas Gigling), Wozzeck

Thielemann’s way with Berg’s score is strikingly different – again, with that caveat on memory – from that of Daniel Barenboim, who conducted the ever-excellent Staatskapelle Berlin on previous occasions. ‘Romantic’ is a word so stretched and overused as to verge on the meaningless, but if anything, confounding lazy expectations, it was Barenboim who proved the more so: certainly, I think, the more overtly Wagnerian. Thielemann’s approach did not neglect the longer line, but seemed more concerned with the inner characterisation and ‘life’ of those closed forms. The febrile growth and transformation of individual lines, perhaps founded ultimately more on counterpoint than harmony, could be traced in neo-Bachian fashion that was more of the time of Neue Sachlichkeit than of Berg’s youth. It is a matter of degree, of course, and neither neglected the ‘other’ side, but I recognised a tendency heard in certain lines of Thielemann’s summer Schweigsame Frau extended: intriguingly and, again a little surprisingly, closer to Boulez than Barenboim. 

Chorus, Drum-major, Wozzeck

The orchestra itself played superlatively from beginning to end, never sounding Straussian yet at the same time excelling in response to the sort of unpredictable yet ultimately coherent Strauss performances Thielemann has been giving for some time. Their stretching of time, virtuosic yet not for mere virtuosity’s sake, was unquestionably apparent here. What I believe was a swift reading overall ‘on the clock’ never felt rushed and indeed included moments of hallucinatory, post-Mahlerian near-stasis – those vistas again, both physical and metaphysical – in which shimmering colour and harmony alike brought magic to the musicodramatic moment and peered deep into the musical future. I hope we shall hear more Berg from Thielemann.

 

Margret (Anna Kissjudit), Wozzeck

In the title role, Simon Keenlyside brought not only a wealth of experience in this role, but something unique to this production. He sounded and even looked the Wozzeck for this moment, more broken than previously, though doubtless building on earlier performances. He seemed stunned, even stunted, by the horrors he endured, yet the flame of humanity never left him, in no small part due to his Lieder-singer’s way with the libretto—which here sounded just as intense as the score. Anja Kampe’s force-of-nature Marie perhaps lacked the last ounce of tenderness in the Bible scene, but there were unquestionable compensations elsewhere. Hers likewise was a human being brutalised yet, until the end, never defeated. Anna Kissjudit’s Margret made for a rich-toned, dramatically layered counterpart, whilst Florian Hoffmann’s Andres complemented and contrasted Wozzeck in somewhat different, yet no less important, ways. Staunton’s keen Personenregie was surely part and parcel of that, as it was in Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke’s Captain, brilliantly quirky yet probably more deeply integrated into the greater company than I have previously heard. So too for Stephen Milling’s disconcerting Doctor, poised between malevolent mystery and mere quack, and Andreas Schager’s vain, frighteningly brutal Drum-major. Stephan Rügamer offered a haunting Fool. The chorus brought the rest of the world indelibly to life.

Here, then, was an opera entering its second century as harrowing, as disturbing, and as ineffably, lyrically magical, even Mozartian, as it began its first. We continue to take our leave from it, not because we have thought of nothing new since, but precisely because we have.

Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Komische Oper, 13 December 2025

Schillertheater

Images: Iko Freese/drama-berlin.de

Leokadja Begbick – Ariana Lucas
Fatty the Bookkeeper – Ivan Turšić
Trinity Moses – Seth Carico
Jenny – Nadja Mchantaf
Jim Mahoney – Gerard Schneider
Jack O’Brien – Caspar Krieger
Bank-Account Bill – Hubert Zapiór
Alaskawolfjoe – Philipp Meierhöfer
Toby Higgins – Thoma Jaron-Wutz
Stage piano – Rui Rodrigues

Director – Barrie Kosky
Revival director – Katharina Fritsch
Set designs and lighting – Klaus Grünberg
Assistant set designer – Anne Kuhn
Costumes – Klaus Bruns
Dramaturgy – Maximilian Hagemeyer

Chorus of the Komische Oper Berlin (director: Jean-Christophe Charron)

Orchestra of the Komische Oper Berlin

Alexander Joel (conductor)

How do you like your Brecht? Or your Weill? Or your Brecht-Weill? Banal questions, doubtless, though that is not to say that nothing can come from them, just as with ‘Aimez-vous Brahms’? There is, though, a particularly strong case to say that however one does, one should not receive what one wants, that to do so, to settle back into ritual, comfortable nostalgia is still more than usually to miss the point. That is certainly nothing so banal as merely ‘épater les bourgeois’, though if we are honest, that will rarely be the worst of things, albeit never enough. 

Berlin, of course, has (had) traditions of its own in this respect, not least from the Berliner Ensemble, founded by Brecht and Helene Weigel: if not quite an anti-Bayreuth, then in something of a dialectical relationship to the Festival. They are not the only traditions; can often be misunderstood; and even where not, have no intrinsic right to be maintained; they will continue in any case to haunt performances, reception, and understanding. If the Theater am Schiffbauerdam, home to the Ensemble for all but the first five years of its existence, is even now most renowned for the 1928 premiere of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, yet also for the 1931 triumph of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, there remains the shadow of the notorious Leipzig premiere of the latter the previous year, disrupted by Nazi thugs who would proceed to ban ‘degenerate’ Brecht and Weill all too soon thereafter. The BE continues to present a broadly Brechtian, if increasingly varied, approach to theatre; indeed, Barrie Kosky’s Threepenny Opera premiered there in 2021, the same pandemic year that his staging of Mahagonny was first given about a mile away at the Komische Oper. It is now revived, during that building’s closure for renovation a little further away, at the Schillertheater—home to a good few spectres of its own. Both theatrically and musically, we inevitably feel some of their haunting, whether that be the intention or no, just as the text of Brecht and Weill (and Elisabeth Hauptmann) invites in and/or fails to repel guests as different as Christ, Luther, Bach, Marx, and, yes, Wagner and Schoenberg—often in tandem with dialectical antagonists—as well as Brecht and Weill themselves in earlier guise. Moreover, if it would make no sense, long after Brecht, Weigel, and indeed Ruth Berghaus and Joachim Herz (director of the Komische Oper’s first, 1977 production), to insist on some outdated Neue Sachlichkeit opposition to Wagner, perhaps even to Wagnerism, such negative, ‘anti’ ghosts will never die completely, nor should they. The present, a different present even from 2021, naturally makes its presence, as it were, felt too—often uneasily, as it should be. 

I do not think it was only on account of my finding eyes and ears, though maybe it was, that performance and production seemed to come a little from the past, real and imagined, in the first half and most strongly to come together, suggesting something new that was yet also a little old, after the interval. Kosky’s production certainly seemed to have its roots most clearly in a Berliner Ensemble lying somewhere between its (mis-?)remembered past and its present earlier on: not in a bad way by any means, but situating itself in a broadly post-Brechtian dramaturgy, knowing cliché and all, that set parameters for our response, all the better for certain surprises – alienating, if you like – to register later on. It took us lightly yet surely, then, on a little walk through imagined Mahagonnys, imagined Berlins, imagined dramatic histories, rather as our three initial protagonists fleeing from their previous home, had taken their leave from their previous city to journey to find their new one. 

If it is clear from the outset who (and what) Widow Begbick is, Trinity Moses and Fatty the Bookkeeper are initially presented, though surely only presented, as Christian and Jew, their dialogue somehow tending a little towards Beckett, whilst remaining the same as it has always been. It had me recall Kosky’s Bayreuth Meistersinger exchanges between Sachs and Beckmesser, especially as realised in the acting of Michael Volle and Johannes Martin Kränzle, that staging for better or worse also preoccupied, rather more controversially, with the 1930s. And indeed, here Seth Carico and Ivan Turšić also worked very well together, their characters coming ever more sharply into focus as the work progressed, whilst maintaining a certain dialectical relationship that also of course encompassed Ariana Lucas, a properly larger-than-life Begbick, at the apex or nadir of its unholy trinity. 

Work and city founded and in (im-)proper working order, a fantastic, typically Kosky ‘show’ experienced following a hurricane both ominous, almost Romantically so, and yet also knowingly, modernistically constructed, the true Weimar Passion (even passion) can emerge—with irony, doubtless, yet also on occasion without. Kosky’s conception of ‘an anti-Tristan und Isolde’ here is interesting, because, inclinations, dramaturgy, performing practices notwithstanding, a little can seep in and arguably must, to be ‘anti-’ in the first place. Ask Nietzsche, Adorno, or Stravinsky. Walls close in and open up, but is it, can it be, any more than an illusion, a delusion, when they do it with mirrors? Descended from Bach’s multivalent chorus as well as the Greeks’, and with all the layers of meaning that might entail, the crowd and thus the city seem larger than they are, but they still, fractious sheep that they be, need to be convinced, corralled, and implicated as individuals. They sing – often surprisingly slowly, echoing the Bach of yesteryear – their chorales but they also act as the Jews of the turba choruses, called upon each in turn to participate in the death sentence visited on Jim Mahoney for his ultimate, unforgivable, Mahagonny-blasphemous crime: buying a round and being unable to pay for it. Stabbing him in turn chills, just as it should, the law – the Law? – acting as it should, in a world without God, let alone humanity.

Yet it is not, of course, without God, as the hurricane may or may not have warned us. He may have been watching all along—though the inhabitants have not been watching Him. The children of Mahagonny, lost in the wilderness, have – in striking parallel with Moses und Aron – fashioned their own idols, a fattened calf included, only to dismember it for pleasure, in anticipating of what they will do to Jimmy. In a moment that is somehow both touching and not, Jenny declines to participate, paving the way for God to deliver His judgement. An ape in a machine, a Cabaret-racialised alienation of the traditional deus ex machina, wheels itself around pathetically onstage, in contrast not only with the loudspeaker but also with the groups of ‘character’ and ‘city’ voices, now heard surrounding us in a spatialised Passion. Ours is a world, nowhere more so than in Berlin, fashioned and even staged by National Socialism and the Holocaust. God, morality, or socialism might be right, but is not might right really? So maybe there was no God after all. Jimmy thought it was Nature, after all, and perhaps it was—though that vision might ultimately be worse vision (this side of socialism, anyway). What if Mahagonny does exist, is not a made-up word, and cannot but endure? What if, to quote from a high priestess of neoliberalism, ‘there is no alternative’?

So far, so (mostly) Brecht, but what of Weill—and indeed Brecht-Weill? Kosky’s direction certainly assisted the creation of the latter, attentive musically and in turn granting the impression that ‘musical’ and ‘dramatic’ worlds helped construct one another, even – particularly? – when they might come into conflict. As an opera, Mahagonny presents its own opportunities and difficulties; one cannot simply perform it as if it were The Threepenny Opera or even the Mahagonny Songspiel, even if one wished to, though the kinship remains clear at every turn and can hardly be ignored. Alexander Joel and the Komische Oper orchestra brought a strong sense of that ‘Twenties’ sound to us: hard-edged, band-like, yet also more clearly than ever founded a good deal of the time in the world of Weill’s teacher, Busoni. Some tempi surprised, but not in a bad way: they had one relisten and appreciate why they were as they were. The sense of a monument on which musical as well as other history might be inscribed came through, not despite but through the immediacy of the songs. That went for the excellent chorus too: a mass of individuals when called for, yet equally an implacable single mass as required—dramatically and musically. 

There would be no more point in trying to imitate Lotte Lenya than there would be Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeburg (conductor on the celebrated first recording) or indeed Alexander Zemlinsky (who conducted both Leipzig and Berlin premieres). Nadja Mchantaf, an extraordinarily versatile artists whom I have seen here in roles ranging from Fiordiligi to Rusalka, brought her own, vividly lifelike Jenny to the stage: beautifully sung and very much her own woman. There was some, yet not too much, ‘genuine’ feeling between her and Gerard Schneider’s Jimmy—with whom, likewise, one sympathised enough at times, without the work lapsing into something else. Indeed, our Jim-in-Gethsemane paved the way skilfully and properly for both the judgement of the final scene and its disregard. As ever with the Komische Oper, there was a strong sense of a company performance, many of the roles being drawn from its own principals—as, of course, one might expect at Brecht’s own theatre. Ultimately, message and ‘experience’ were starkly more than the sum of their parts—as they must be in a world such as this.

Image: my own ( Dorotheenstädtische Friedhof)

Carmen, Royal Academy Opera, 19 November 2025

Susie Sainsbury Theatre, Royal Academy of Music

Images: Craig Fuller

Carmen – Charlotte Clapperton
Don José – Woogyeom Kim
Micaëla – Madeleine Perring
Escamillo – Harrison Robb
Zuniga – Theodore McAlindon
Moralès – Alexander Hopkins
Frasquita – Abigail Sinclair
Mercédès – Amy Porter
Remendado – Joseph Hancock
Dancaire – Joel Robson
Lillas Pastia – Joshua Furtado-Mendes

Director – Harry Fehr
Designs – Yannis Thavoris
Lighting – Jake Wilshire
Video – Matt Powell
Movement – Victoria Newlyn

Royal Academy Opera Chorus

Royal Academy Sinfonia

Christopher White (conductor)

A few rays of Andalusian sun would not go amiss right now in the dark, dismal, last half of November. Short of that, Carmen at the Royal Academy offered an alternative: quite an undertaking even for an enterprising conservatoire opera scheme. Given the ways in which voices develop, ‘big’ nineteenth-century repertoire – the description begs questions, yet still holds – tends to be avoided in student performance. Just as young professional voices tend for the most part to steer away from Verdi and Wagner in favour of Mozart, early music, and some modernist repertoire, so do they from Carmen. One can debate whether that is a good thing. Many factors come into play, not least the desire to gain experience in roles for which they might be asked to audition. It made for a nice surprise, then, when the Royal Academy named Carmen as its end-of-term show, all the more so when given with such confidence by all concerned. 

A smaller theatre helped, of course; when does it not? But there was nothing intrinsically small-scale to the performances; rather, they felt suited to the venue. Intimate, perhaps, but only in the sense that the RAM’s Susie Sainsbury Theatre benefits from its size in enabling all to see and hear the performances at relatively close range. Carmen may be an opéra-comique – as we arguably inform ourselves a little too much – but it generally plays to large houses, is performed by large forces, and Bizet was going to write those orchestral recitatives himself anyway for Vienna, death meaning that they instead were composed by his friend Ernest Guiraud. Tragedy need not be large-scale, but this is no piece of froth. Christopher White and the Royal Academy Sinfonia may likewise have been small in scale (strings 4.4.3.3.2) but they did not come across as such, whether in dash, vigour, or a sheen that would have put many a larger (and older) orchestra to shame. White’s pacing of the four acts stressed dramatic immediacy without ever sounding rushed, offering space where needed. This is an opera of the moment, though, and sounded as such. 

Don José (Woogweom Kim) and Carmen (Charlotte Clapperton)

As is generally the case, a mixture of orchestral recitative and dialogue was used, wisely cut, given length and the difficulties of speaking as well as singing in French. Just as in a larger house, some found the language more of a challenge than others, but there was some genuine excellence in that respect and nothing too grievous. If French dialogue was not tenor Woogweom Kim’s greatest strength, it came and went, and vocally he truly came into his own in the second act, a Don José of ardour and vulnerability in tandem. Charlotte Clapperton’s Carmen surely revealed a star in the making: growing like her co-star, fully holding the stage as any Carmen must, through voice and dramatic presence. Madeleine Perring’s sweetly sung Micaëla and Harrison Robb’s already dark Escamillo made much of their roles, as indeed did the rest of the cast, including an enterprising, accomplished chorus depleted by seasonal ailments yet never sounding like it. 

Harry Fehr’s production updated the action and made the occasional nod to contemporary mores. Micaëla’s bag made it clear she was no fun of bull-fighting, which seemed very much in character. It told the story straightforwardly, highlighting in interesting fashion the crucial role of fate, alternative paths portrayed on video, without distracting from the principal action. Once again, then, an excellent evening of opera at the Royal Academy.

Le nozze di Figaro, Opéra national de Paris, 15 November 2025

Palais Garnier

Images: Franck Ferville - OnP
Figaro (Gordon Bintner), Susanna (Sabine Devieilhe), Count Almaviva (Christian Gerhaher)

Figaro – Gordon Bintner
Susanna – Sabine Devieilhe
Count Almaviva – Christian Gerhaher
Countess Almaviva – Hanna-Elisabeth Müller
Cherubino – Lea Desandre
Marcellina – Monica Bacelli
Dr Bartolo – James Creswell
Don Basilio – Leonardo Cortelazzi
Don Curzio – Nicholas Jones
Barbarina – Ilanah Lobel-Torres
Antonio – Franck Leguérinel
Two Bridesmaids – Sima Ouahaman, Daria Akulova

Director, designs, video – Netia Jones
Lighting – Lucy Carter
Choreography – Sophie Laplane
Dramaturgy – Solène Souriau

  
Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris (chorus master: Alessandro Di Stefano)  

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris

Antonello Manacorda (conductor)

Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro took a while to come to the stage. Completed in more or less the form we know it by 1778, it was accepted, little more than a stone’s throw away from the Palais Garnier for performance by the Comédie-Française in 1781, but its reading before the French court had Louis XVI personally intervene to prevent it. Following revisions, including the action’s transposition from France to Spain, Louis was persuaded by the Queen and his brother the Comte d’Artois (the future, notoriously reactionary Charles X) to permit a private performance in 1783 at Gennevilliers including members of the French royal family. Overruling the censor, Louis thereafter permitted its Paris public premiere the following year at the Théâtre Français on the opposite side of the river. Royal prevarication could be seen as symbolic of Louis’s reign as a whole, encapsulating in its way one of many themes in the history that led only five years later to the outbreak of the Revolution. (So too, of course, did the play itself, Napoleon’s celebrated description – ‘C’est dejà la Révolution en action!’ – serving even today to frame many a review, whether of Beaumarchais or Da Ponte and Mozart. Box-office receipts were the highest France had yet seen; the controversy ultimately did it no harm, quite the contrary. Given the place it holds in French history – not only French literary and dramatic history – the play continues to hold the stage in Paris and France more generally, though Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera has largely, if not entirely, eclipsed it elsewhere. It somehow therefore seemed a little strange – alternatively, a glimpse into reception and transformation – to hear it in Italian rather than French, for what I realised must be my first Nozze di Figaro in France, its billing as Les Noces di Figaro (rather than Beaumarchais’s Mariage) both clue and complication. The Paris Opéra would give it in French between 1793, in Beaumarchais’s own re-adaptation, and 1973, when Giorgio Strehler’s new staging, conducted by Georg Solti, would be the first to employ Da Ponte’s original Italian. 

Dr Bartolo (James Creswell), Marcellina (Monica Bacelli)

Netia Jones’s production takes its leave from that history; from a decision in some, though not all, ways to eschew it; and from the MeToo movement, less distant in 2022 than it now seems during the Trump Restoration. (Come back Charles X, all is forgiven?) The setting is backstage at the Palais Garnier, playing with the idea that opera houses in general and this one in particular come close to an eighteenth-century estate. Not having been backstage there, I learned only from Jones’s programme note that set designs, including ‘the celebrated armchair’, were reproductions of their counterparts there, dressing rooms the focus of the action—as they will in houses prove the focus and locus of dressing (and undressing). Indeed, at the close, we see a glimpse, back of ‘backstage’, and thus theatrically in front of it, of the auditorium itself. I do not think it especially matters; the framing’s the play’s the thing, and this clearly has more general reference. Staircase and all, this house has after all particular resonance in the popular imagination as an archetype, the institution itself having a longer ‘representative’ history we can take back almost as far as we like, even beyond the age of Meyerbeer, Scribe, et al. (and Wagner). Not for nothing do descriptions of changing operatic tastes more often than not use the building’s survey of celebrated lyric composers (and others) as an illustrative case in point. 

House hierarchies can, like their landed ancien régime counterparts, prove ‘challenging’, as contemporary HR-speak would have it. Indeed, outside politics and big business – I recall a splendid Guildhall School production transposing the action to a US election campaign – there may be few better equivalents. This can be portrayed lovingly, as in Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos, although there is no reason why that should not be challenged a little more, love the work though many of us may. (We love Figaro too, after all.) But that has never been the point of either opera or play, the former here sometimes supplemented by projections of Beaumarchais, for whom the cliché tends to be that his play is more ‘political’ than Mozart-Da Ponte. (It is not always so simple as that, but such is the way with generalisations. That does not make them entirely without worth.) We can reasonably be sure, though, that reports we have of abusive behaviour are only the tip of the iceberg and casting, let alone treatment, of singers has long offered an unusually egregious instance. Artistic collaboration rests even more than many other forms on personal, often highly unequal relationships: not quite a society of orders, but with several points in common. There has clearly been a ‘scandal’ at the house we see, in which the characters prepare for a performance of the opera they are previously creating; at least, the costumes they occasionally don suggest that it may be. Cherubino’s costume being several sizes too big for him, the Count’s too small – it would doubtless once have fit – offer straws in the wind for the future as well as the present. Play and opera have always done that too. 

Cherubino (Lea Desandre), Count Almaviva

But to return to the implied preceding scandal, it is clear that, as in the Count’s reassurance to all that he has foregone his feudal right, sexual harassment and worse will not be tolerated; or rather, it is clear that that is the line, shown in red to us all as Figaro cannily papers – aided by Jones’s rapid video multiplication – the walls during the Act I chorus with posters unambiguously saying ‘NO’ to such behaviour. That, however, is the easy part. Actual behaviour generally lags behind, and certainly does here, from the Overture onwards, the Count patting a ballerina on the bottom before closing the dressing room door. During the opening scene, we can also see him, next door (of course) to Figaro and Susanna, being interviewed, doubtless dispensing the public, enlightened house line, just as our Enlightenment honnête homme would have done as governor of Andalusia.

Countess Almaviva (Hanna-Elisabeth Müller), Susanna,
Figaro, Antonio (Franck Leguérinel), Count Almaviva

Presented as a more rounded character than is often the case, Don Basilio is here very much in on the act: a self-regarding and entitled music-master whose conducting of the chorus is full of exaggerated gesture and absent of musical substance, in sharp contrast to Figaro when he leads them in. The latter’s presence clearly irks his alleged musical (and social) superior who, in a nice touch, carries with him a score of Così fan tutte, ready for ‘that’ line. He later emerges from the bathroom in nothing more than a towel to harass an auditioning singer. So much for things having changed, as the Count will show at greater length. 

That Figaro’s role is as a hairdresser offers a welcome reminder of the barber of Seville’s origins, though his skills are clearly multifarious. Susanna (like Barbarina) steps forward from the corps de ballet to remind us not only of the sexism and objectification dancers face, but of their particular role in French lyric theatre. The particular treatment of female dancers by historical patrons (the Jockey Club, for instance) comes to mind, but what of the present? And not only there: who, in Britain, could forget the Johnson government’s notorious invention of ‘Fatima’, a ballerina whose ‘next job could be in cyber (she just doesn’t know it yet). Rethink. Reskill. Reboot’? An opera house requires diversity in every sense, or it simply cannot function. 

Don Basilio (Leonardo Cortelazzi), Susanna 

The treatment of Marcellina is also interesting, not least given the particular brand of misogyny levelled at ‘older’ women. (No one refers to the Count as an ‘older’ man.) Beaumarchais’s Marceline, inveighing against male exploitation of women, is partly restored via projection, and in a wonderful closing touch she dispenses with the Count’s services (that is the Count playing the Count, as it were). Rather than a woman, he has, in that unlovely phrase, been traded in for a younger model. Will the house see a new regime, under Marcellina? It is a nice thought, though we probably no more believe it any more than we believe the Count will never stray or abuse his social standing again. It was a pity, then, that we lost her aria—as so often we do. Might not restitution have begun there? 

On the other hand, if Revolution, or at least revolution, is just around the corner, who knows? In an alternative history of the Opéra, the 1960s proposals of Jean Vilar and Pierre Boulez might have been accepted, a ‘new’ Opéra would have opened in a series including the latter conducting the French premiere of Moses und Aron, a new work by Berio, and the Monteverdi Vespers—and the Solti/Strehler Figaro: who knows? We cannot change the past, but we can strain to change the future. Characterisation, including a reassessment of characters that draws upon their authorial past as well as their reception, can have consequences. Even Don Curzio, whom often one hardly notices, was given a helping hand by an additional, second-act appearance, collecting signatures for the trial to come. This was repaid that with a freshly sung performance one did note, not least in the recognition sextet, from Nicholas Jones. 

Count Almaviva

The production, then, was fortunate to have a fine cast of singing actors to bring this to life. Susannas, notoriously, have much to do—and are not necessarily the highest credited for doing so: a point with gendered as well as other social implications. Sabine Devieilhe certainly did a fine job both in her own right and as source of so many dramatic connections, her portrayal as finely sung as it was acted. Gordon Bintner’s performance as Figaro at times suggested a few first-night nerves: nothing grievous, but a sense that all would come together very soon. There was no doubting the broader brush of his portrayal, though, nor its contribution to the greater whole. Christian Gerhaher presented a moving descent into something approaching age and infirmity, his plea for forgiveness showing a man quite broken. He had been figuratively wounded earlier, at least as early as his audibly hurt ‘ma far burla simile / è poi crudeltà’ in the second act: not a hint of exaggeration, but a seasoned use of language. Hanna-Elisabeth Müller’s Countess offered a dignified yet spirited, beautifully sung Countess, equally at home in the serenity of her arias as in busy ensembles. Lea Desandre’s livewire Cherubino and Monica Bacelli’s impressive, take-no-prisoners Marcellina, and Ilanah Lobel-Torres’s unusually ‘present’ Barbarina, proved proper foils, at least on this folle journée, for the likes of Leonardo Cortelazzi’s similarly present Basilio and James Creswell’s sharply drawn, predatory Dr Bartolo. 

If Antonello Manacorda’s conducting did not plumb the depths, nor did it maintain an initially hard driven approach that might have tended unduly down either Rossinian or ‘period’ paths. To my ears, it would have done better to pay greater attention to harmony, but then who amongst our conductors really understands or at least conveys its role in Mozart, and Beethoven, now that Daniel Barenboim is semi-retired? There were no ‘period’ mannerisms, for which one must nowadays be grateful, but it ventured beyond the pleasant less often than one would have liked—and Mozart demands. Taken purely as orchestral playing, the Orchestre de l’Opéra national de Paris shone as so often it does in this repertoire. Few, if any, opera performances are perfect; how can they be when they stem from a society so imperfect? If the opera shows ‘la Révolution en action’, it is a revolution whose coming we, like so many before us, still await.

Philharmonia/Hrůša - Mahler, 13 November 2025

Royal Festival Hall

Symphony no.7

Philharmonia Orchestra

Jakub Hrúša  (conductor)

A little light relief here for Jakub Hrúša, in between Covent Garden performances of The Makropulos Case. That Mahler and Janáček should sound very different will hardly surprise, though the distance between Kalischt and Hukvaldy is not necessarily so great, even in compositional terms. There has long been something – have been some things, for let us not essentialise – special about the ears many Czech musicians bring to Mahler; one has only to think of Rafael Kubelík, let alone the Czech Philharmonic. Hrúša’s way with Mahler is different, indeed different from any I can recall hearing, yet full of interest and created with a collaborative determination that knows not only what it wants but how to get it. The Philharmonia must also, of course, be credited with that accomplishment. Most successful readings of the Seventh Symphony, at least in my experience, tend to rest on bringing coherence to what, rightly or wrongly, many find a tendency that pulls in the opposite direction. Highly contrasting examples would be Daniel Barenboim’s surprising – and surprisingly successful – treatment of the work in dark, post-Brahms fashion and Pierre Boulez’s more brazenly modernist, yet no less steely command of line, timbre on equal terms with rhythm and harmony. A reading that was merely incoherent would be little more than that. One that revelled in rather than attempted to solve its enigmas, perhaps with more than one might expect of Boulez’s musical hindsight, yet imbued with other varieties of its own, was what we heard here: crazier than Barenboim, arguably more so than Boulez too, and more theological to my mind’s ear than, say, the quite different house-of-horrors readings of Leonard Bernstein. 

The opening of the first movement already signalled something intriguingly different. Slow in tempo yet febrile, it drew one in, brass vibrato somewhat Slavic, and more generally dark in orchestral tone (definitely more Barenboim than Boulez—or Bernstein, for that matter). Here, it seemed was an extended fin-de-siècle orchestra experiencing twentieth-century hallucinations that, over the course of the symphony as a whole, would increasingly wrest control from a fast-vanishing past. Basic tempo firmly established, deviation, be it early flexibility or later abrupt change, registered in relation to that; much the same could be said for the whole symphony. The performance’s spirit compelled too: marionettes from the earlier ‘Rückert’ symphonies danced, yet abstracted, even automated, harbingers of a future that might not be desired, but could not be averted. The ‘world’ of a Mahler symphony – think of his celebrated exchange with Sibelius – has many mansions, historical, geographical, and otherwise. Unusually prominent at times, to my ears anyway, were premonitions not of the over-invoked Shostakovich, but of his more interesting compatriot, Prokofiev, lying in a future somewhere between The Fiery Angel and Cinderella. Wind tattoos functioned likewise, provoking if anything still greater unease. In more ‘traditional’ vein, vistas I might foolishly have imagined might no longer astonish me still did, the aural lens stretched a little or more than a little at times, testing yet never abandoning overall coherence, whether in rapt, near-suspended animation at the close of the development or something more furious in a recapitulation of depth and breadth. 

The first Nachtmusik’s opening horn calls have been delivered more flawlessly, but so what? The sense was there. (I mention this only because Beckmessers may otherwise assume I did not notice.) More to the point, they initiated a sardonic, Nietzschean serenade on the cusp of the nihilist and the diabolical, subjectively ambiguous and the more powerful for it. Lyrical cellos suggested a world all the more alienated as a result. Cowbells on- and offstage sounded a desiccated memory of their presence in the Sixth Symphony. Dances were swung, yet with knowledge of what was to come: a Weill future already, disturbingly present. The Second Symphony’s faithful were despatched to purgatory, or worse. Aufersteh’n? If you say so, but not only Klopstock was dead. The Scherzo seemed firmly rooted in that other place. It snarled in defiantly post-Nietzsche fashion, even as it (aptly) danced. Zarathustra’s realm, hell, purgatory, or somewhere else? Why choose? Except it did, the Devil’s lair increasingly apparent: no monolith, but all the more frightening for its variegation. Perhaps – shudder – this hell was our earth. There was to be heard a distinctly Schoenbergian rage, disciplined by remnants of Prokofiev’s motor-rhythms, particularly when one peered between the cracks. 

More strange bedfellows were encountered in the second Nachtmusik, Adagietto strings taking a walk on the wild side, joined by guitar, mandolin, and the rest, to pass the Eighth Symphony, even Pierrot, to the unmistakeable world of Schoenberg’s Serenade and contemporary Webern. An orchestra (in large part, or so it sounded) of soloists tended to parody, in a world that had nothing left to parody, that strong initial grounding of the symphony’s opening as crucial as ever. Music appeared to pose a theological conundrum Mahler’s St Anthony might have blanched at: one for the fish, perhaps. And so, to the finale, to ask further unanswered, unanswerable questions. It blared and blazed, sang and danced, tracing a path between old and new that transformed before our ears. It was not the last word, nor did it try to be; indeed, its modernity lay in its provisionality, exhausted and exhausting, yet exhilarating in a restored radicalism whose nods to Mozart and Wagner did anything but clarify. It ate itself as it laughed (or mocked). Nietzsche or nihilist? Again, why choose? Angels on acid or devils on ambrosia? Perhaps they were instead on horseback. The Wunderhorn St Martha may not be the cook after all.               

                               

The Makropulos Case, Royal Opera and Ballet, 10 November 2025

Royal Opera House

Emilia Marty – Ausrine Stundyte
Krista – Heather Engebretson
Albert Gregor – Sean Panikkar
Baron Jaroslav Prus – Johan Reuter
Dr Kolenatý – Henry Waddington
Vítek – Peter Hoare
Count Hauk-Šendorf – Alan Oke
Janek – Daniel Matoušek
Stage Door Woman – Susan Bickley
Security Guard – Jeremy White
Hotel Maid – Jingwen Cai

Katie Mitchell (director)
Vicki Mortimer (set designs)
Sussie Juhlin-Wallén (costumes)
James Farncombe (lighting)
Sasha Balmazi-Owen (video)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Jakub Hrůsá (conductor)

 

Image: The Royal Opera / Camilla Greenwell

If the Royal Opera and Ballet’s new Makropulos Case does indeed prove to be Katie Mitchell’s final opera production, we should think of it more as a culmination than a farewell. If the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk, the outlines of Mitchell’s operatic work – part, to be sure, of her broader theatrical work, but a distinctive part – may now seem clearer to us all. Rightly or wrongly, for I can lay no claim to oracular status on this or any other question, they certainly do to me following this superlative evening, dramatically and musically, in the theatre, a splendid addition to the company’s Janáček series? May we hope for a Mr Brouček, even a Šárka or an Osud? Hope dies last, as the ambiguous, even oracular, saying has it. 

And death lies at the heart of this work, as does life—as does their cyclical relationship both in Janáček’s work as a whole and this production, in turn both in its overt presentation and in its broader, metatheatrical, even symbolic frame. One might say the same of women, their role in society, and their role in opera, Mr Brouček’s Excursions the great exception, for even From the House of the Dead has one feel their absence. The Makropulos Case is centred, of course, around a great female singer, a great survivor, a woman seemingly infinitely blessed, but in reality, if not infinitely, then gravely cursed. She is literally the creation of men, in some ways figuratively too. I say ‘a woman’ and of course she is, but as such and as a human, she deserves to be named: Emilia Marty, Elena Makropulos, and the rest. (We may, if we wish, recall Kundry’s many names and incarnations. Wagner was not a feminist; to claim so would be anachronistic nonsense. But his works are not without feminist themes and, more to the point, opportunities—as well as themes and opportunities that are anything but. The same, of course, may be said of Janáček.) Mitchell takes a further step: this woman is queer, standing in no need of men, whatever the history with which she has been furnished (by them) may claim. She has fond memories; she has produced numerous ‘bastards’ with them, but now does not care for them (men or children). 

Now forty-plus = or so she claims and appears – EM seeks women on ‘dating’ apps. With a technological bent very much of our time, the opera begins, app and text message communications, courtesy of Sasha Balmazi-Owen, running parallel to, interacting with, and sometimes undercutting the work ‘itself’. Krista and Janek intend to rob her, the former (‘they/them’) ensnaring her prey 200 metres distant and securing an invitation to her hotel room. The proceeds, whose net worth Janek instantly checks online as Krista photographs them, include an eighteenth-century medallion and a rare, early twentieth-century playbill. Yet ultimately, Krista falls for EM, mesmerised as her male admirers, yet apparently feeling and sharing something deeper. Rather than absconding to Berlin with her (former) lover, she shoots him: shades of Lulu, perhaps, yet with the crucial distance that this is no blank canvas onto which male fantasies are projected. This is women in love, by women, for women.

Surtitles are contemporary English in tone, without becoming paraphrase. Additional communications fly across the ether: ‘Berlin or bust’, popular abbreviations, emojis, and so on. Like anything else, use of text messages – also here telephone calls, audio and video – can be a cliché, a gimmick, and too often is. Here, unlike in, say, Simon Stone’s tedious, extravagant, and tediously extravagant Cherubini Médée – if ever there were an opera crying out for the Mitchell touch… - or Kirill Serebrennikov’s silly Marriage of Figaro, it serves a useful dramatic purpose, both straightforwardly and more metatheatrically in its extension of live cinema to new realms in successful pursuit of Mitchell’s longstanding and, in this case, unapologetically queer subversion of the male gaze both generally and in specifically operatic guise. For when the diva comes at long last to die, she is not so much a creature of opera, but opera itself. Has the director killed the genre or let it die? More significantly, has it in its death, which may yet permit of rebirth though not artificial prolongation, at last been liberated of the male gaze. On an optimistic reading: yes, at least in part. The elixir is bequeathed to Krista as a gift of what appears to be love, but does it remain a poisoned chalice; can it be cleansed?

Janácek’s score naturally invites some degree of optimism, its increasingly rapt lyricism, orchestral motifs coalescing, combining, and expanding into something greater, brought home in wondrous, golden immediacy by Jakub Hrůsá at the helm of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. That Hrůsá is the real thing no one who has heard him will doubt, but this proved a significant achievement even by his standards, as intellectually as it was emotionally involving. The same must be said of Ausrine Stundyte’s all-encompassing assumption of the title role, rightly permitting of various readings whilst ever sure of its direction. No wonder the rest of her world lay in her thrall. All contributed something to the greater whole, showing what the world of opera can and should be. I shall note Sean Panikkar’s typically ardent, lyrical Albert Gregor, Peter Hoare’s sharply characterised Vitek, Heather Engebretson’s sparky Krista, and, in another tribute, conscious or otherwise, to the best of an opera company and its progress of time, Johan Reuter ‘moving up’ from, say, Orest and Birtwistle’s Theseus to Baron Prus, and Susan Bickley from numerous Covent Garden roles (and her ENO Dido with Mitchell) to the cameo of the Stage Door Woman. It was, though, a collaborative effort, as production, conductor, work, and any future for the genre demand.

From that ENO After Dido, Purcell’s jewel forming part of a greater theatre piece, through a Salzburg Al gran sole carico d’amore I imagine I might understand better now than I did in 2009, live cinema again offering a feminist corrective or at least enhancement to Luigi Nono’s project of telling European revolutionary experience from the standpoint of female revolutionaries,  the woman’s revenge of Written on Skin and queer love of Lessons in Love and Violence, the postdramatic feminism of The Blue Woman, and important reassessments such as her Aix Ariadne auf Naxos and Pelléas and Covent Garden Theodora, a path becomes traceable towards this Makropulos Case. Is it the end of the line? That should not really even be the question; it is certainly an important, musicotheatrically riveting contribution, one I am keen to see again, should I be able. 

Cathérine Clément notoriously described opera as the ‘undoing of women’. Perhaps, if one is extremely selective—and one treats it only in terms of libretti. Go back to Monteverdi’s Poppea or forward to Rebecca Saunders’s recent operatic debut and it seems anything but. Nevertheless, that book or at least its title remains, whether we like it or no, part of operatic discourse. Carolyn Abbate’s review said most, perhaps all, of what need be said about it. And here, as it must, that theory is realised in practice, without in any sense jettisoning necessary critique. Actually existing opera houses and their ways are, or can be, another thing. This is not in any sense intended to refer to the Royal Opera House in particular; indeed, its relatively recent, highly publicised appointment of an intimacy coordinator marked an important step forward in one respect. I know no details of the opera-world misogyny Mitchell has endured – her recent interview lies behind a Murdoch paywall – and I do not intend to speculate. What I can say is that operatic works, historical and contemporary, and performances offer greater scope for critique and, dare I say it, redemption than the day-to-day activities of any company will. This year’s greatest musical centenary, that of Pierre Boulez, reminds us of the necessary utopianism of his celebrated 1967 interview with Der Spiegel.

New German opera houses certainly look very modern—from the outside; on the inside, they have remained extremely old-fashioned. To a theatre in which mostly repertory pieces are performed one can only with the greatest difficulty bring a modern opera—it is unthinkable. The most expensive solution would be to blow the opera houses into the air. But do you not think that that might also be the most elegant solution? 

In turn, that echoes a Wagner’s diary entry from 1849.

8 May (Monday) Morning once again by roundabout route via barricades to Town Hall. At S. Anne Barricade guard shouts “Well, Mr Conductor, joy’s beautiful divine spark’s made a blaze.” (3rd perf. 9th Symphony at previous Palm Sunday concert; Opera House now burnt down. Strange feeling of comfort.

 

This latest death  will not destroy our opera houses and companies, nor even leave them peacefully to die, but should at least ask us whether that would be advisable. Is this, rather than opera as the undoing of women, then, women as the undoing and possible rebirth of opera? It might, considered in utopian fashion, constitute an act of operatic reform or revolution to be compared with the work composers such as Wagner, conductors such as Boulez, directors such as Stefan Herheim, and singers such as Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, noting ruefully and purposefully the gender balance of historical examples, whilst recalling Boulez’s own caution that, although Wagner’s Bayreuth project was in almost every respect right and necessary, it has not had the slightest effect on the day-to-day life of our benighted operatic culture. And yet, it has, for our revolutionary-reformers continue to offer a critique of patriarchy, of heteronormativity, and of capitalism many of us continue to heed. To do more than criticise, we must all play our part. The Royal Opera and Ballet has done so too, staging Janáček’s opera (incredibly) for the first time and supporting a new way forward. The Royal Opera and Ballet has done so too, staging Janáček’s opera (incredibly) for the first time and supporting, among many other things in its necessarily mixed economy, some seeds of a new way forward. 

Horton - Chopin and Bach, 29 October 2025

Wigmore Hall

Chopin: Prelude in C-sharp minor, op.45
Bach: English Suite no.2 in A minor, BWV 807
Chopin: Waltz in A minor, op.34 no.2; Fantasy in F minor, op.49; Polonaise in C-sharp minor, op.26 no.1; Polonaise in E-flat minor, op.26 no.2; Mazurka in B major, op.63 no.1; Mazurka in F minor, op.63 no.2; Mazurka in C-sharp minor, op.63 no.3; Polonaise-fantaisie in A-flat major, op.61

Tim Horton (piano)

Tim Horton’s Wigmore Hall residency, in which he presents Chopin’s music alongside important predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, has reached Bach, offering the second English Suite and an illuminating Chopin selection. The C-sharp minor Prelude – Chopin’s, not Bach’s – opened and proceeded in a way that set the tone for the entire recital: both muscular and melting, clarity and direction likewise two sides to the same musical coin. The notes mattered, and one felt that; so too did Chopin’s harmonic surprises. Not for the last time here, without necessarily sounding Lisztian, the playing made one keen to hear Horton’s Liszt. At the opposite end of the first half, the A minor Waltz, op.34 no.2, explored its tonality with a sadness emerging from its material, rather than applied to it, and thus all the stronger for it. Rubato here, as elsewhere, was unexaggerated yet telling. Chopin’s harmonic transformations and much else stood in Bach’s line, whilst remaining ineffably the composer’s own. 

In between came the English Suite, its A minor presaging the Waltz. This was not Chopinesque Bach as such; it had its own validity. It was, though, a validity that drew connections and created a properly satisfying musical programme, reminding us that Bach’s may be the greatest piano music of all (with absolutely no apology to devotees of other keyboard instruments). The Prelude, rhythms tightly sprung, offered a fine framework for melodic and harmonic exploration and expression, striking an excellent balance between dynamic contrasts that were of the moment and structurally conceived, in fact showing the distinction ultimately to be illusory. Following its relative extraversion, the Allemande turned inwards, again relatively speaking, leading to a Courante that was both robust and subtle, its lineage unmistakeably French, albeit with equally unmistakeable German colouring and grounding. A beautifully dignified, even luxuriant Sarabande led us into the harmonic labyrinth, but also guided us through it. The Bourrées and Gigue offered both intensification and release, just as they should. 

The F minor Fantasy, op.49, opened the second half, inheriting and extending the recital’s preceding virtues, whilst delineating this piece’s decidedly particular character and form. Echoes of Schumann, however fleeting, registered clearly in a musical kaleidoscope that again, if not exactly Lisztian, was not exactly un-Lisztian either. This music can readily fall apart when presented according to pre-conceived structural ideas that are not Chopin’s; not so here, quite the contrary. The two op.26 Polonaises and the were eloquently presented in relation to one another, harmonic foundations key to that conception. The anger and grief of the latter, in E-flat minor, spoke with a sensibility it was difficult not to think tragic, albeit finely differentiated. (But then, is not Hamlet?) I found it deeply moving. 

So too were the three op.63 Mazurkas, similarly conceived as a set, yet ever alert to individual qualities. A particularly Chopinesque sadness to the second contrasted with and in its way confirmed both the well-sprung first and the syncretic, unifying qualities of the third. Counterpoint and harmony, as with Bach, were indivisible. The Polonaise-fantaisie is not my favourite Chopin, but this attentively painted performance had me listen and, I fancied, understand its structure as rarely before. Unfailingly eloquent, it unfolded both on its own terms and in light of what had gone before. As Jim Samson points out in his typically excellent programme note, examination of Chopin’s sketches shows that Chopin was ‘really composing a Fantasy, similar in conception and even in tonal organisation to the other Fantasy performed thius evening, and that he added the polonaise rhythm … to the principal melody as an afterthought.’ Compositional origins sounded here with musical immanence. As an encore, we heard a characteristic op.9 no.2 Nocturne, direct and sensitive in equal measure. Once again, I look forward to future instalments in this fascinating series.

Takács Quartet/Ridout - Mozart, 20 October 2025

Wigmore Hall

String Quintet in C major, KV 515; String Quintet in G minor, KV 516

Edward Dusinberre

Harumi Rhodes (violins)

Richard O’Neill, Timothy Ridout (violas)

András Fejér (cello)
 

Visits from the Takács Quartet are always a highlight, for me, of a Wigmore Hall season. To be joined by Timothy Ridout for two Mozart string quintets made this one, if anything, still more so. Both works from spring 1787, falling between Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, they breathe the air of those operas. It was difficult not to think of them from time to time during these performances—and why would one try? Also characteristic of both was a sense of ‘rightness’ to tempo. Rarely, if ever, will there be a ‘correct’ answer in absolute terms, though there may sometimes be something closer to that in proportionality; but this spoke of knowledge of and ease with the works, as a springboard to further exploration. It was clear that the players relished the fuller texture of a viola quintet, equally clear that this was shared by a receptive audience. 

In any case, the C major Quintet opened as one sensed it ‘should’, cello and first violin duet presaging many other such passages, shared between the entire quintet, other entries propelling the first movement’s opening rhythmically and harmonically and its development thereafter. Mozart’s developing variation of the opening arpeggio figure was neither more nor less prominent than balance and motivic coherence and consequence required. Formal expectations and surprises were, similarly, equally fulfilled, simplicity and complexity shown to be not only in balance but two sides to the same coin. Pairs of instruments again came to the fore delightfully in the minuet, the two violas perhaps a special joy. Its trio threw everything up into the air, music resettling in magically restored order. Echoes of orchestral dances, both passed and to come, resounded. Taken third as it usually though not always is, the Andante benefited from judicious balance between space and momentum, harmony and counterpoint. Instrumental drama played out as if this were a scene from Figaro. Above all, the finale smiled: not in spite of the cares and tears, but on their account. As light as it was rich as it was deep, it again permitted all to fall into place, however much that were a case of art concealing art. 

The turn from major to minor in the guise of the G minor Quintet was less a turn from happy to sad – Mozart is rarely without sadness – than from comedy to tragedy, at least to begin with. A Shakespearean realm, or perhaps better a different such realm, had been entered, inevitably foreshadowing the great G minor Symphony, though this particular tonality has much wider resonance than that with Mozart. Pamina too, came to mind in a first movement both light yet involved, seemingly effortlessly generative. If the performance occasionally approached Beethoven, as indeed did that of its counterpart in the C major Quintet, that is only because Mozart does. The development was full of surprises, even – especially? – when they were expected. There have been more vehement returns, but there are many ways to accomplish this, and relative lightness of touch was not to be confused with lightness of attitude. The radicalism of the minuet was furthered rather than effaced by the ambiguity of its consolations. Its trio emerged as a dramatic necessity, instrumental necessities ‘speaking’, or perhaps better singing, as if dramatic asides. If Beethoven came to mind again in the slow movement, the contrasts were as striking as any similarities, both in any case a matter of substance rather than mere ‘style’. Its veiled quality – literally muted – seemed to hark back to older consorts, only for an inner sigh to change everything, prophetic as much of a Schubert song as of opera. There was likewise a far from inappropriate hint of Schubert to the mysteries of the finale’s introduction, before new vistas both delighted and chilled. If transition to the Allegro partly suggested Haydn, the emergence of the first subject ‘proper’ attested to twin fragility and strength that could be none other than Mozart’s, both born of and liberated by the very texture of the viola quintet.