Rinaldo, Royal Academy Opera, 19 March 2026

Susie Sainsbury Theatre, Royal Academy of Music

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

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

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

Royal Academy Sinfonia

David Bates (conductor)

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

Goffredo (Owen Lucas)

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

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

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

Argante (Tom Butler), Almirena

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

Eustazio (Theodore McAlindon)

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

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

Barbican Hall

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

Barbara Hannigan (conductor and soprano)

Matthew Fairclough (live electronics)

Bar Avni (conductor)

London Symphony Orchestra

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kammermusiksaal

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

Antoine Tamestit (viola)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra

(My photograph)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cunning Little Vixen, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 28 February 2026

Vixen – Vera-Lotte Böecker
Forester – Svatopluk Sem
Fox – Magdalena Kožená
Forester’s Wife, Owl – Natalia Skrycka
Schoolmaster, Mosquito – Florian Hoffmann
Priest, Badger – David Oštrek
Harašta – Carles Pachon
Dachsund, Woodpecker – Sandra Laagus
Rooster – Anna Samuil
Innkeeper’s Wife, Hen – Adriane Queiroz
Jay – Sonja Herranen
Innkeeper – Junho Hwang

Frog – Milla Aulibauer
Cricket – Paula Bredt
Grasshopper – Alexander Meieer
Young Vixen – Naz Yilmaz
Frantík – Otto Glass
Pepík – Alia Engel
First fox cub – Paloma Couloumy

Director – Ted Huffman
Assistant director – Sonoko Kamimura
Set designs – Nadja Sofie Eller
Costumes – Astrid Klein
Lighting – Bertrand Couderc
Choreography – Pim Veulings
Dramaturgy – Detlef Giese, Elisabeth Kühne

Children’s Choir of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden (director: Vinzenz Weissenburger)
Staatsopernchor Berlin (director: Dani Juris)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Sir Simon Rattle (conductor)

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Believe it or not, this was the first ever performance at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden of The Cunning Little Vixen, more than a century after its world premiere in Brno. It is not that it has never been performed in Berlin before, of course not. Walter Felsenstein’s 1956 (German-language) Komische Oper production was a landmark in the reception of the work and, more broadly, of Janáček outside the Czech lands. In 1965, Felsenstein’s production was made into a magical film for East German television, conducted by no less than Václav Neumann. Yet the house a few hundred metres away left the opera alone and indeed showed little interest in most of Janáček’s operas, even as they were revived elsewhere, in Europe or beyond. Simon Rattle’s passion for the composer, combined with his now long-term collaboration with the Staatsoper and Daniel Barenboim’s trust in Rattle, has now resulted in a number of Janáček house premieres, of which this must surely be the most surprising. Rattle conducted the opera for the first time almost fifty years ago, at Glyndebourne, in 1977. He has also conducted it with the Royal Opera and the LSO, as well as with the Berlin Philharmonic. So here we had an inviting blend of novelty and experience, mirrored onstage by the combination of adult professionals and child performers (acrobats as well as singers).

How did that work in practice? Rattle certainly conducted it with the knowledge, sympathy, and understanding that would entail. Pacing was such that one did not notice it; it proceeded naturally and, in general, at the rate of a sung play, as Janáček tends to require. The composer’s language had been fully internalised and put to good musicodramatic use, even if the Staatskapelle Berlin – understandably – did not always sound quite so much at home in this music as other opera orchestras (or indeed the LSO, which has taken to it like ducks to water). It was a golden, Straussian Janáček we heard: nothing wrong with that and indeed one might sometimes say the same about the most ‘authentic’ Janáček of all, from Czech orchestras. There is in their Janáček, though, something I did not quite hear in this case: not only ‘tradition’, that slippery, movable, even questionable feast; but also an instinctive feel of how the orchestral music speaks, sings, propels, and even bites, in its own extraordinary language. Playing was on its own terms, though, excellent throughout; I should not exaggerate a relatively minor reservation. 

As has been the case for his Janáček performances in both London and Berlin, Rattle had assembled and/or attracted a fine cast too. Vera-Lotte Böecker’s Vixen was characterful, animated, and sympathetic without being remotely cutesy. This world of Nature should never be sentimentalised. Magdalena Kožená offered a proper, more masculine complement with her Fox; the two matched one another at times as if in a Mozart instrumental serenade. Svatopluk Sem was a distinguished, humane Forester, his final hymn to Nature and its life cycles properly moving. (By now, the Staatskapelle too seemed more fully inside Janáček’s idiom.) Natalia Skrycka, Anna Samuil, David Oštrek, and Carles Pachon particularly stood out to me in their respective roles. Samuil’s Rooster proved a delightful, scene-stealing Rooster. But this was casting in depth too. No one disappointed, right down to the smaller animal roles very well taken by members of the Staatsoper’s International Opera Studio and also of its Children’s Choir. Choral singing in general was of a high standard throughout. 

Unfortunately, Ted Huffman’s production proved a disappointment. It had its moments, a highpoint being the imaginative presentation of the vixen’s running amok in the chicken coup, feathers flying across the stage as hens’ costumes were punctured. At that point, following a slow and disjointed start in stage terms, all seemed to be coming together nicely. It was, alas, difficult to discern much of a line in what followed, ideas briefly floated only to vanish without trace or recur arbitrarily, as in characters’ typing of letters towards Terynka during interludes, which added little other than confusion. All took place ultimately in a white box, Nadja Sofie Eller’s designs offering neither natural wonder nor obvious deracinated contrast. For some reason, great play was made of dressing the chorus in highly individualised human outfits: well designed as such by Astrid Klein, but it was unclear to what end. Lighting seemed to be little more than simple on and off; perhaps a point was being made, but again I am not sure what. There was scope for the children to display their skills, undoubtedly welcome; yet integration into the plot, be it of opera or production, proved elusive.

Insofar as there was an overall idea, it seemed to be to blur the boundaries between animals and humans: fair enough, but the blurring seemed, well, blurred in focus and ultimately arbitrary. This was a different attempt at realism from Felsenstein’s, from that of Peter Sellars too (for Rattle and the BPO in 2017). If preferable to the latter, which was often frankly bizarre, it could surely have learned something from the former, even at this distance, not least in terms of overall coherence and indeed of a sense of what the work, or the production for that matter, might be about. Elsewhere, the accomplishment of that one scene with the chickens threw into relief what came across as a lack of basic, general direction elsewhere. Some scenes more resembled an early stage of rehearsal than a finished staging. 

This is necessarily impressionistic, but I could not help noticing that younger and more international elements, visiting or resident, appeared distinctly less enthusiastic than the older, local core of the audience. If I were to hazard a potential explanation, I might note that it could hardly have been a matter of theatrical style and values. The production had nothing obviously in common with critical German theatre—unless that were why some approved, which I should not discount entirely. But I do not think it was only that; there seemed to be a genuine excitement at encountering the work, notwithstanding those Rattle performances at the Philharmonie in 2017. Those of us who have seen it in multiple stagings may be, according to taste, more critical or more jaded. Yet it is no bad thing to be reminded of the joy of encountering a Janáček opera for the first time; of that there appeared to be much in evidence.