Lash, Deutsche Oper, 20 June 2025

Images: © Marcus Lieberenz

A – Anna Prohaska
S - Sarah Maria Sun
N – Noa Frenkel
K – Katja Kolm
Live Camera – Nadja Krüger
Synthesiser, Piano – Christoph Grund, Ernst Surberg
Electric Guitar – Adrian Pereyra
Stage percussion – Thomas Döringer, Florian Glotz, Konstantin Tiersch, Laslo Vierk
Box operators – Nana Ajei Boateng, Zé de Pavia, Lennie Fanslau, Victor Naumov, Paula Schumm

Director – Dead Centre (Bush Moukarzel)
Designs – Nina Wetzel
Lighting – Jörg Schuchardt
Sound design – Arne Vierck
Video – Sébastien Dupouey
Dramaturgy – Sebastian Hanusa

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin

Enno Poppe (conductor)

Having been an avid follower of Rebecca Saunders’s music since my first encounter at the Wigmore Hall in 2012, mostly in Germany (Berlin and Munich in particular) but also in London, I was excited to learn her first opera would be given at the Deutsche Oper—and still more excited to be able to visit for the premiere. Equally interesting and exploratory in vocal and non-vocal music and with an excellent track record in choice of verbal texts, Saunders seemed in many ways an ideal candidate for operatic composition. It would at the very least be interesting to see what that development entailed—and so it was. 

Lash—Acts of Love, to give it its full title, is not a conventional opera. No surprises there, one might say. Yet if it has elements of something more installation-like, more in Ed Atkins’s libretto (if one can call it that, Saunders also credited for conversion of the initial text) and general dramaturgy than in Saunders’s score, it certainly qualifies as an opera. The Deutsche Oper did it proud, with Bush Moukarzel of Dead Centre; video work by Sébastien Dupouey; a cast of three truly outstanding singers, Anna Prohaska, Sarah Maria Sun, and Noa Frankel, plus the equally excellent actor Katja Kolm, all clearly working together and filmed live by Nadja Krüger; and the house orchestra on fine form indeed, conducted by Enno Poppe. Each of the female voices, indeed their bodies more generally, is intended as the foundation of what we hear and largely succeeds in conveying that sense: four parts of the same woman, not only mirroring, often explicitly, but forming—themselves or rather herself, and the images around them. 

What a welcome change, moreover, it was to have so little of the male standpoint (and gaze). Indeed, if that could have been excluded more tightly still – one of many reasons, I fear, to have wished for a different libretto – the work might well have been enhanced. Not that there was any reason to be ungrateful for Enno Poppe’s unfailingly alert, comprehending, dramatically alive conducting, nor for the excellence of the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, male musicians included—and first among equals, those musicians onstage during the third act. Perhaps, though, less might have been more. The excellence of performance, the excellence of the composition also served, perhaps ironically, to point to a lack in Atkins’s text (or whatever we want to call it). 

Sex and death are and always have been inextricably interlinked. This presentation of ‘a woman … suspended in the immediate aftermath of a death,’ recounting ‘fantasies and memories of love and loss and fucking and sickness, kissing, eyeballs, genitals, fingertips, lips, and lashes—each scoured for consoling significance to hold back death’s meaninglessness,’ has a stated idea: ‘through the imminence of her own body, her own mortality, she rediscovers loss as the precondition of experience—of love.’ It is not experienced as a narrative; nor would one expect it to be. But Saunders’s writing, through three acts spanning almost two hours, draws it together, like a great symphonic poem with voices. It grows in intensity – judged, I think, by whatever parameter(s) – and gives the strong impression of binding the work together. It also becomes more instrumental/orchestral, both onstage and around the auditorium, but also in the proportion of writing—or so it seemed to me. ‘Organic’ is doubtless an epithet outdated by at least two centuries for such writing, but perhaps I might be indulged here, if only in the Hegelian sense of a musical owl of Minerva spreading its wings at the performance’s dusk.

That said – and with all the caveats concerning a single hearing/viewing – my expectations were only partly fulfilled. This is owed in no part to the difficulty and particularity of writing opera, even for otherwise excellent composers. With the best will in the world, Schubert, generally recognised to be one of the supreme vocal and instrumental composers in the Western tradition, was not a significant composer of opera, though his operas are far from without interest. I could not help but wonder whether Saunders’s musical and dramatic gifts were not so readily operatic, whether a large-scale concert-work such as YES were more her thing. My problems, though, did not really lie there. At the post-show reception, Intendant Dietmar Schwarz described Atkins’s text as ‘postdramatic’. I suppose so, if, as Hans-Thies Lehmann more or less intended the term, we look at what is held to fall under that umbrella rather than using it to define. Whether it works well, in this context or any other, is another matter. 

Ambiguity is often a good thing. That as to whose the ‘lash’ is – the woman’s, the creator’s (i.e. Atkins’s own private-public monologue), or anything else – has much to be said for it, though it does not really seem to lead anywhere, without that failure to lead anywhere making an evident point. Ultimately, the music and the performances seem to shoulder all the work, hamstrung by a stream of consciousness that is hardly Joyce or Beckett. Constant repetition of ‘fucking’ and so on may not be intended to shock, yet comes across as thinking itself edgier than it really is; hand on heart, I found it more than a little tedious, more akin to a little boy shouting ‘look at me’ than anything that might have been claimed for it (and doubtless will be). 

I felt ambivalent, then, and not a little saddened to do so. The Blue Woman, seen at London’s Linbury Theatre in 2022, struck me as an ultimately more successful example of what postdramatic, feminist opera (as opposed to postdramatic and/or feminist productions of operatic repertoire) might be—at least restricted to words, their dramaturgy, and to a certain extent their further implications, as opposed to musical quality (or performance). By the same token, I certainly felt a desire to revisit the work, to continue, like the woman at its centre, to piece together my experience, although perhaps not immediately. I shall only too happily find myself ashamed concerning initial lack of understanding. In the meantime, a handful of boos (grow up!) and a houseful of rapturous applause told a more straightforward story.

Musikfest Berlin (1) - Prohaska/Aimard: Ives, Stravinsky, and Debussy, 1 September 2024

Kammermusiksaal

Ives: 25 songs from the collections 114 Songs and Eleven Songs
Stravinsky: Four Russian Songs; Three Songs from William Shakespeare: ‘Full Fadom Five’
Debussy: Prose lyriques

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)

Image copyright: Berliner Festspiele, Foto/photo Fabian Schellhorn

My visit to this year’s Musikfest Berlin began with a fascinating, brilliant recital from Anna Prohaska and Pierre-Laurent Aimard, weaving five selections of songs by Charles Ives, like Arnold Schoenberg 150 this year, amongst a set apiece from Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy. There may be about 400 Ives songs to choose from, but the selections were anything but random, whether in themselves or in combination with the other works. I doubt many in the audience will have been familiar with more than a few, but they will surely have won a good few converts: just what an anniversary celebration is for. 

The first Ives set, running into Stravinsky, offered songs of remembrance and autumn, the latter often being a time when minds turn to the former. Yet, just as memories are not always what one might expect, nor was the opening ‘Memories’, written when Ives was still a student at Yale. In two sections – what appear to all intents and purposes to be two separate songs – the first offered a seamless transition from pre-concert hubbub into recital, Aimard arriving on stage to put his music on the piano, declining applause, suddenly joined on the piano stool in a little coup de théâtre by Prohaska. The two then launched into ‘We’re sitting in the opera house, the opera house, the opera house…’. Aimard’s own delivery of the line ‘Curtain!’ brought proceedings, as beautifully acted as sung by Prohaska, to a close, swiftly to be followed by a distinctly New England languor for the second section, ‘Rather Sad’. Just when one thinks one might have begun to get to grips with Ives, if hardly to pin him down, he throws everything up in the air again, whether through the absorbing piano writing – very much Aimard’s thing – of ‘A Farewell to Land’, one line seemingly multiplying in a radical alternative to Schoenberg; the bracing, disquieting liberty of the night in ‘The “Incantation”’; or the tricky, jaunty, yet unerringly ‘true’ speech rhythm, captured by Prohaska to a tee, of ‘September’. Indeed, that sense of ‘truth’, ponderous, even portentous though it might sound, seemed to ring, well, true throughout, in Ives’s harmonies, the obstinacies of his rhythms, and much else. 

It is perhaps more usual to hear Stravinsky’s Four Russian Songs for voice and instrumental ensemble, although frankly one is lucky ever to hear them in any form. I am not sure I have had the opportunity before in concert, likewise with ‘Full Fadom Five’ from the Three Songs from William Shakespeare. In the former, the voice in particular captured once more to a tee this world of Les Noces in miniature. The ease with which Prohaska summoned up the right ‘voice’ for each section of the recital made it all seem so easy, art concealing art, Aimard’s command of metre and its transformation equally fundamental to the performance’s success. A whole new world was brought into life with great personality, alongside and indeed dependent on accuracy and musicality. The late, serial Stravinsky, time-travelling as widely and wildly as ever, was represented by the Shakespeare song: another jewel combining Webern-like process with ghosts of another past, in this case that of English music. Intervallic and harmonic flashes of that world beguiled yet also warned, prior to the celebrated Tempest tolling: ‘Ding dong bell’. 

That song was followed by Ives’s Shakespeare setting of the same text, ‘A Sea Dirge’ richly post-Romantic, for want of a better word, yet still admirably concise. Prohaska’s ‘Hark now’ haunted like a siren, recording an earlier recital and album of hers. Not for the first time, traces of Schoenberg also haunted proceedings, but it was Ives and no one else who set us truly along the path of contrasts between town and nature. ‘The Swimmers’ evoked worlds physical and metaphysical, culminating in a strikingly declamatory declaration that the protagonist was the sea’s master, not its slave. ‘Soliloquy’ proved increasingly expressionist, continuing that at least intermittent Schoenbergian thread. Modern life and its contrasts – alienation is more Mahler’s world – was the stuff in performance as well as text for ‘the New River’, followed by a poignant account of the Matthew Arnold setting, ‘West London’, unusually expansive in this company. The wry ‘Ann Street’ and ‘In the Alley’, the latter’s musical and verbal twist nicely – or naughtily – relished led us to a circus band full of surprises in the song of that name, seemingly aching to be staged and responding well to the soprano’s natural scenic gifts. 

Following the interval, a more impressionist or at least Debussyan Ives evoked ‘Evening’, ‘Mists’ and, in between, the ‘Evidence’ of his own words, preparing the way for spellbinding performances of Debussy’s Proses lyriques. The post-Wagnerian harmonies of ‘De rêve’ breathed a different air, leading us by the hand into a kaleiodoscopic dream world that emerged all the better for its clear-sightedness. The crepuscular tumult of ‘De grève’ and the Yniold-like shift (apparently without Pelléas’s catch) in the final ‘De soir’ offered further instances, as did ‘De fleurs’ in between, of subtle, imperceptible shaping, songs growing out of words and harmony, which in turn seemed to grow out of the shifting light they had themselves engendered. 

Ives’s ‘Berceuse’ made for a nice bridge to the final set, its lack of perfume and striking straightforwardness – which is certainly not to say simplicity – announcing a different voice and path, one leading perhaps from childhood, through battle, and ultimately to the strange heaven of General Booth. ‘Tom Sails Away’ suggested a world somewhere, aptly, between the whimsical and the visionary, that sense of liminality carried through into the next-but-one ‘Slow March’, its quotation of the ‘Dead March’ from Handel’s Saul both comforting and jarring. The closing ‘General Booth Enters into Heaven’ one might call a scena in itself, were such Italianate ways not so alien to Ives. It seemed to capture the composer’s brazen individuality and individualism: complex and straightforward, familiar and strange, old and new. Like a Mahler symphony, it seemed to embrace everything, to be like as well as of the world. Aimard gave the last of his own vocal interjections here, ‘Hallelujah!’ Yet it was Prohaska’s question that lingered, unsettlingly: ‘Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?’ It was quite a climax, to be followed only by a taste of the soprano’s upcoming Musikfest concert with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, in which she will sing more Ives songs, this time orchestrated by Eberhard Kloke. ‘The Cage’ left us asking, quite properly: ‘Is life anything like that?’ If only it were.

Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (3) – ‘Songs and Fragments’: Eight Songs for a Mad King and Kafka-Fragmente, 10 July 2024

Théâtre du Jeu de Paume

Man – Johannes Martin Kränzle
Woman – Anna Prohaska
Violinist – Patricia Kopatchinskaja

Director – Barrie Kosky

Design and lighting – Urs Schönebaum  

Ensemble Intercontemporain

Pierre Bleuse (conductor)

Images: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence 2024 © Monika Rittershaus

Virtuosity of the highest degree, entirely at the service of musical drama, characterised this Aix production under Barrie Kosky’s direction. Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King and György Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente formed a staged double bill, given without a break, at that eighteenth-century jewel among theatres, the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume. The ghost of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire haunted proceedings, audibly in the Davies’s music theatre monodrama, written for the composer’s own, Schoenberg-inspired Fires of London (here, Schoenberg’s ensemble plus percussion), and more scenically in the Kurtág fragments, not of course intended to be staged, but here given an intriguing new slant through the mediation of expressionist cabaret.   

Johannes Martin Kränzle’s assumption of the mad king – referred to in the cast list simply as ‘Un homme’, though it is of course George III – was something never to be forgotten. Quite how much was his, how much was Kosky’s, we shall never know—and why should we particular care? Theatre is collaborative, even in what might seem to be a one-man-show. With a single spotlight, a single unsparing spotlight, this poor (rich) man, clad only in sagging underpants, bared his soul to the birds, the audience, and indeed the musicians of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, incisively conducted by Pierre Bleuse, who in turn offered us their own, related musical tour of whimsy, parody, and brutal violence. From an early promenade, through the haunting of an imaginary yet ever-so-real queen ‘Esther’, via the king’s beloved Handel – with biting irony, ‘Comfort ye…’, to the final, shocking smashing of the violin, this was a psychological study, which in a sense revealed nothing other than itself, and thus in another sense proved all the more revealing. Through the countless ways he marshalled his voice and his entire body, Kränzle touched, amused, and horrified us. It was gripping, concentrated theatre, which one might well have wished to experience again, but knew one could not, even if the attempt had immediately been made. 

Anna Prohaska and Patricia Kopatchinskaja, minus the EIC, were our guides for Kurtág’s extraordinary set of miniatures. The violin provided, as it were the bridge: destroyed and now resurrected as a one-woman orchestra who was also a protagonist—and by her double-companion. Equality here, between two more consummate musicians and communicators seemed, by virtue of staging and performance, the former still astutely straightforward yet minutely observed, to be both immediately, immanently manifest and yet also maintained through ever-shifting dramatic power relationships: one conducting the other, one pulling the other’s strings, one inciting and consoling, and so on. Where Davies’s expressionist nightmare had stunned us into submission, here a different ghost of Pierrot – perhaps surprisingly given the more ‘abstract’ nature of the work – proved more founded in re-gendered harlequin character. We turned inwards, Kurtág’s Webern-like miniatures commanding and receiving absolute concentration, in more than one sense. Prohaska’s spellbinding performance – imagine having to sing that by heart, and engage in minutely planned physical performance too – was impossible to dissociate from Kopatchinskaja’s. The two musicians seemed almost to emerge as two emanations of the same soul. A response to their male counterpart in the first half, or something subtly yet, in that subtlety, defiantly different? Why choose? Again, there was so much one could not possibly have taken in, which cried out for another chance to do so, yet which was tantalisingly lost in the passage of concentrated time. Above all, though, and this may be the ultimate ‘lesson’, we learned a little better to listen to one another.

RIAS Choir/Kammerakademie Potsdam/Doyle - Mendelssohn, Hensel, and Bach, 14 March 2024

Kammermusiksaal

Mendelssohn: Psalm 115, ‘Nicht unserm Namen, Herr’, MWV A 9
Fanny Hensel: Hiob
Mendelssohn: Ave Maria, op.23 no.2, MWV B 19
Mendelssohn: Hör mein Bitten, MWV B 49
Bach: Cantata, ‘Die Elenden sollen essen’, BWV 75: Sinfonia to the second part
Mendelssohn: Psalm 114, ‘Da Israel aus Ägypten zog,’ op.51

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Benjamin Bruns (tenor)

Ludwig Mittelhammer (bass)

RIAS Chamber Choir

Kammerakademie Potsdam

Justin Doyle (conductor)

A delightful and enlightening concert from the RIAS Chamber Choir, Kammerakademie Potsdam, Justin Doyle, and an excellent trio of vocal soloists: focusing on Mendelssohn, but also including a cantata by his sister Fanny Hensel and a sinfonia by the family’s musical house god, Johann Sebastian Bach. Mendelssohn’s setting of verses from the 115^th Psalm was the first of five such large-scale settings he made for soloists, chorus, and orchestra between 1829 and 1844. It revealed almost equally strong influence from Bach and Handel, the latter in particular occasionally Mozartified. Here, as throughout, the RIAS Chamber Choir proved admirable in every respect: warm, clear, faultless in pitch and diction. The second of its three movements, a duet with chorus, whilst not un-Handelian in its way of duetting, was less obviously ‘Baroque’ on the surface. Anna Prohaska and Benjamin Bruns offered a mellifluous performance, bassoons and more generally orchestral wind pleasingly audible. The ensuing bass arioso was, similarly, beautifully taken by Ludwig Mittelhammer, with a closing chorus, its opening a cappella, confirming all preceding choral and orchestral virtues. 

Hensel’s 1831 cantata Hiob (‘Job’) sets three pairs of verses from the Book of Job. Three trumpets, timpani, and an excellent mezzo from the choir joined the orchestra and soloists on stage. Here, especially in the opening chorus, Bach’s influence was still stronger: in woodwind writing, figuration, harmony, chromatic lines, and more. It is not pastiche: there were pleasing instances to be heard of nineteenth-century colour and, again, Mozartian mediation (perhaps, in the final chorus, the Haydn of The Creation too). But Hensel had certainly learned her Bachian lessons well, as well indeed as her brother. The central arioso, ‘Warum verbirgest du dein Anlitz’ employs all four soloists, the mezzo’s opening question responded to by the other three, followed by a brief reprise of the former. A third, choral movement once again revealed highly accomplished harmony and counterpoint, the assembled forces under Doyle’s wise leadership performing this – and the rest – with relish and understanding. 

Mendelssohn’s responsorial Ave Maria for tenor, chorus, and orchestra (here two clarinets, two bassoons, three cellos, and two double basses) from 1827 seems to me less inspired. I am not sure Marian devotion was really his thing, though this is of course also a very early work (if later than the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture and the Octet). Its central, choral section struck me as more interesting, nimble cello pizzicato offering an uncanny presentiment of the second movement processional from the Italian Symphony. It was, in any case, interesting to hear the piece. 

In the second half, we were in different territory altogether, with far more characteristic Mendelssohn. In the 1844 Hör mein Bitten (or ‘Hear my Prayer’, as most English-speaking listeners will know it), Prohaska brought a welcome sense of drama: not ‘operatic’, but certainly drawing on her rich and varied operatic experience. There were some truly magical passages, not least her sinuous duet with clarinet (partly set against cello pizzicato). With a larger choir and orchestra than one generally hears, as well as increasingly dramatic delivery – overall conception well-shaped indeed – this was worlds away from English cathedral music; it certainly evinced more biting consonants and accompanying verbal meaning. Both have their place, of course, but, closer to a miniature Lobgesang and even to Wagner, here was a splendidly Romantic Mendelssohn, the composer of Elijah and St Paul. 

The Sinfonia to the second part of Bach’s Cantata ‘Die Elenden sollen essen’ received what struck me as a near-ideal performance: warm, cultivated, and welcoming, My only regret was that that was all we heard of the piece. No matter: in Mendelssohn’s 1839 setting of verses from the 114^th Psalm, we had a perfect crown to the concert, surveying in each of its four stanzas a different aspect to the composer’s craft. The integration of Handelian antecedents and the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the second proved a joy, but then so did the simpler questioning homophony of the third, and the glorious jubilation (and struggles) of the fourth. ‘Da Israel aus Ägypten zog’ was always likely to bring echoes of Handel’s Israel in Egypt, but Bach remained as strong a guide. Doyle once again led a fine performance, colourful and directed, in which every word as well as every note told.

Musikfest Berlin (3) - Prohaska/Ensemble Modern/Benjamin - Chin, Ogonek, Filidei, Benjamin, and Ammann, 3 September 2023

Philharmonie

Unsuk Chin: SPIRA
Elizabeth Ogonek: Cloudline
Francesco Filidei: Cantico delle Creature (world premiere)

Benjamin: A Mind of Winter
Dieter Ammann: glut

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Ensemble Modern

George Benjamin (conductor)

© Fabian Schellhorn / Berliner Festspiele

The second of George Benjamin’s Ensemble Modern concerts, again with Anna Prohaska, offered four pieces from the last decade, one a world premiere, together with an early work of Benjamin’s own. Unsuk Chin’s SPIRA (2019) was the first of three works from composers born within a couple of years of each other, the other two being Dieter Ammann and Benjamin himself. Having just noticed SPIRA is officially described as a concerto for orchestra, I am patting myself on the back just a little, though it should probably be the composer (and performers) I am acknowledging, for it came across in that vein, albeit, as one might expect, reinvented, different instruments seemingly presenting their own standpoint on the orchestra. Indeed, the idea of a standpoint or perspective seemed to me key both to work and performance. Whether the opening were a matter of the rest of the orchestra responding, via a series of shocks, to gradual opening out from tuned (bowed) percussion, or the two vibraphones, xylophone, and others responding to those shocks is perhaps in itself a matter of perspective—or a pointless question: ‘why either-or?’ Massed violin swarming perhaps inevitably brought Chin’s teacher Ligeti to mind, but there was no question that here were her own voice and her own world. Indeed, the piece seemed to convey an interest, doubtless born of Jakob Bernouill’s logarithmic spiral (whence the title), in defining limits and direction of that world. What were its edges, and where was it heading? A mystery remained at its heart, at least for this listener, and that was all to the good. 

Elizabeth Ogonek’s Cloudline was premiered at the 2021 Proms, but this was the first time I had heard it. (I think the same is true of all five works, Benjamin’s included.) It certainly shared a keen sense of fantasy and indeed virtuosity with Chin’s work, and opening slithering of pitch (quartertones, I think) offered another variety of swarming, not only from strings; otherwise, though, the work offered more contrast than complement. There was here something close to representation, at least at one level. ‘Liminal’ is a word I probably overuse at the moment, but it is difficult to avoid here, given the piece’s fascinating preoccupation with clouds, their edges (again) and the lack of definition to those edges. A contrast between definition and vagueness, or at least something more frayed, sounds Debussyan, but I never experienced this as anything other than itself, not least in a feeling of outright joy that is perhaps rarer in contemporary orchestral music (or our responses) than it might be. 

I felt less sure about Francesco Filidei’s Cantico delle Creature, or perhaps it is fairer to say it did not necessarily adhere to my expectations (and why should it?) There was no questioning, here or elsewhere, the excellence of the performances, to which now must be added Anna Prohaska’s committed advocacy. A setting of St Francis’s celebrated canticle joins illustrious company, not least that of Liszt, but Filidei certainly made his own way, responding, it seemed to me, to St Francis’s Umbrian dialect in a way so as to harness something old as well as something new, as revealed in Prohaska’s sometimes almost folklike delivery. Clear, bell-like, it was not trying to be anything it was not, far from it, but rather its terms of reference, moving from a wide-eyed naïveté to something more demonstrative, resonated both with words and orchestra. For this was another highly ‘atmospheric’ piece, a lengthy orchestral opening offering scene-setting pictorial and dramatic. When a vibrato-less cello (later in the piece, a viola too) entered, it suggested mediaeval intervention, a voice from a past not merely imagined. Sudden changes of metre and delivery, birdcall whistles, and more provided colour as well as formal staging posts. This was not necessarily a subtle work, but instead often highly gestural; in any case, subtlety was hardly called for. 

Benjamin’s The Snow Man, from 1981, after Wallace Stevens, proved an astonishingly accomplished piece from the word go, its orchestral sound world, icy yet full of life, immediately, as it were, ‘created’ and immanent. The composer’s use of the voice, and his soloist’s use of hers, were both unquestionably vocal and daringly instrumental: two sides, we realised, of the same coin. Wind echoes made that point still clearer. Somewhere between a scena and a tone poem, it was in reality only ever ‘itself’, over too soon, which is always a good sign. Word-setting always told, always added something; this was never merely ‘setting’ the text. It was always, moreover, a response to English words, in an emphatic sense. Prohaska’s animated, even possessed performance gave a sense that this too might have been written for. It was not, of course, but what greater compliment can be offered—in either direction? ‘For the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.’ 

Ammann’s glut (2014-16) opened in immediate, indeed urgent fashion. Uniquely, among the pieces heard here, it employed full orchestra at the start, thus setting up very expectations and contrasts. Indeed, it proved remarkably relentless – not in a bad way –something of a riot, with swagger to match. Ammann seemed readier to include tonal voices, or more interested in doing so, though probably more from a spectralist standpoint than anything neoromantic (which was not suggested). Diversity of material and (again) standpoints, of texture and direction, contributed to a sense of a huge mass, not only of sound but of musicians, moving forward, slowly but surely, though one could perhaps perceive that only after the event. At the time, one enjoyed the ride, without necessary thought, less alone knowledge, as to where it might take one.

Musikfest Berlin (2) - Varèse, Haddad, Ravel, Bach-Benjamin, and Schoenberg, 2 September 2023

Kammermusiksaal, Philharmonie

Varèse: Octandre
Saed Haddad: Mirage, Mémoire, Mystère, for string quartet
Ravel: Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé
Bach, arr. Benjamin: Canon & Fugue
Schoenberg: Chamber Symphony no.1, op.9

Anna Prohaska (soprano)
Ensemble Modern
George Benjamin (conductor)

Image: © Fabian Schellhorn / Berliner Festspiele

The first of two Musikfest Berlin Proms from Anna Prohaska, Ensemble Modern, and George Benjamin offered music on a small ensemble scale that proved anything but ‘small’ in terms of ambition and intensity, nor of course achievement. A hallmark of all we heard was concentration, for this was highly concentrated, often richly textured music, which also called for – and seemed to receive – a high level of concentration from the audience in Berlin’s Kammermusiksaal, the smaller of the two halls in its Philharmonie.

 

In Varèse’s Octandre, Christian Hommel’s oboe initially appeared to be searching—but searching for what? Ultimately for something piercing, impervious, something that gave the impression of always having been there, however recently discovered. Stravinskian echoes, above all of the Rite, yet also of Symphonies of Wind Instruments, did battle, though they were so familiar, so integrated, they were barely ghosts, more guests. Delphine Roche’s piccolo solo, when it came, suggested something more playful, yet ensemble response was implacable as ever, akin to seeing or rather hearing the same object from another standpoint, both of angle and distance. Yet there was difference in what we heard, for instance the duet between double bass and bassoon, spreading to the ensemble as a whole. Brass rightly took no prisoners. Varèse, not unlike Stravinsky himself, remained. 

Saed Haddad, a Benjamin pupil, was represented by his Mirage, Mémoire, Mystère (2011-12), for string quartet, described as being for violin and string trio. That interests me, since I did not really make that distinction when listening. Perhaps I will next time, for I hope there will be a next time. A richly turbulent opening put me in mind right away of Schoenberg’s developing variation. Indeed, there were a few striking coincidences of pitch and harmony, though I suspect that is more that I was listening with Schoenberg in mind than intent or reference. Certainly, there was an emotional intensity to this single-movement work I can imagine that composer admiring. Its development, or transformation, was rhythmic too, through a kaleidoscope of related moods that, in retrospect, seemed to convey the broad overall progression of the title.

Prohaska joined the Ensemble, and Benjamin returned, for Ravel’s Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, the work in which he most clearly approaches Schoenberg (Pierrot, though not only Pierrot), without ever sounding, nor indeed writing, ‘like’ him: not even in the extraordinary opening string harmonics of ‘Soupir’, here perfectly realised in performance. Ravel, at its most characteristic, seems perhaps more the destination than the starting-point, both instrumentally and vocally, yet a floated languor heard and felt, too precise for Debussy, and indeed quite unlike him in other ways too, could only ever have been Ravel’s. It was as if a Japanese engraving, with apologies for the orientalism, had come to life. ‘Placet futile’ proved, doubtless with similar danger on my part, a garden of delights, at times more animated, more heated even, though cooling beautifully too. Prohaska proved a vividly communicative soloists, really using the French words to shape and colour her line. ‘Surgi de la coupe et du bond’ presented flight and descent, movement and stasis, all art of a journey that chilled in timbre and harmony, yet also invited, whilst holding us at an almost sacral distance. ‘A rien expirer annonçant/Une rose dans les ténèbres.’ Some mysteries are both for us and not.

Benjamin’s 2007 Canon & Fugue arranges the ‘Canon alla Ottava’ and ‘Contrapunctus VII’ from Bach’s Art of Fugue for an unusual ensemble: flute (silent in the first movement), two horns, and string quartet (which can be expanded to smallish string orchestra). This is unquestionably modernist Bach, not necessarily in the line of, though surely with kinship to that of Schoenberg, Webern, Berio, and others. That sense of concentration was again apparent, indeed alive, in both movements, the sustaining power of horns (and other particular qualities) employed to excellent effect in the former. The Fugue was less frenetic and furious, though no less concentrated, early use of stopped horns and string pizzicato not only arresting but also seemingly aiding that transformation of tempo. There were many timbral delights and surprises, not least the way a combination of horn, violin, and viola sounded uncannily like an organ, yet this was always a way of hearing Bach.

So too, albeit at a greater distance, is much of Schoenberg. It was fitting, then, to end with his First Chamber Symphony, although this was the performance about which I had a few doubts. A little more than fifteen years ago, I heard Pierre Boulez conduct this same work in the same hall, with the Scharoun Ensemble of players drawn from the Berlin Philharmonic. That struck me as an ideal performance, but perhaps I was simply more used to the underlying assumptions and aesthetic. Benjamin, I think, took the opening, once past the short introduction, not only faster but at a speed at least to rival the earlier Boulez, of Domaine musical vintage. One expects a bias towards wind in this version (as opposed to Schoenberg’s two arrangements for full orchestra, where strings will tend to dominate) yet, to begin with, that balance seemed somewhat exaggerated, even harsh. The performance settled, yet Benjamin’s approach had the merit of reminding us just what difficult music this can, and arguably should, be. Perhaps we have allowed Schoenberg to mellow a little too much, in post-Siegfried-Idyll-manner. When the music slowed, moreover, it really slowed. The scherzo section was urgent, yet in character, that is not merely fast; character seemed to grow out of Schoenberg’s instrumentation and use of those instruments, almost as much as his harmony. This was Schoenberg on a coiled spring, which could nonetheless relax in the ‘slow movement’. Moreover, the internal and external role played by fourths was certainly to be heard, as if this were a matter of casing and inner mechanism. It was another performance of concentrated riches, then, even if not always the riches I had expected.

Idomeneo, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 30 March 2023

Idomeneo – Andrew Staples
Idamante – Magdalena Kožená
Ilia – Anna Prohaska
Elettra – Olga Peretyatko
Arbace – Linard Vrielink
High Priest of Neptune – Florian Hoffmann
Oracle – Jan Martiník
Cretans, Trojans – Marie Sofie Jacob, Ekaterina Chayka-Rubinstein, Johan Krogius, Friedrich Hamel

David McVicar (director)
Caroline Staunton, Colm Seery (assistant directors)
Vicki Mortimer (set designs)
Gabrielle Dalton (costumes)
Paule Constable (lighting)
Colm Seery (choreography)
Benjamin Wäntig, Elisabeth Kühne (dramaturgy)

Movement Group

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Simon Rattle (conductor)

Images: Bernd Uhlig

David McVicar’s disdain for theatre that might lie more on the critical-ideological side is well known and well documented. This fawning newspaper interview is doubtless not his fault; the journalist clearly knows nothing about opera and seems more interested in admiring and detailing his physique: ‘I'm distracted by the arms. They are bursting out of a tight T-shirt full of artful rips. They're the kind of arms that have you thinking of Glasgow shipyards, or perhaps gay nightclubs. They're not the kind of arms that have you thinking of arias.’ Much to unpack there, in the unlikely event one is particularly interested in reasons for the interviewer’s ‘distraction’. We nonetheless proceed to read the interviewee roundly disparage German theatre: ‘“There'll be combat physiques,” he says, “and balaclava helmets, and machine guns, and there'll be neon strip-lighting, and everything will be antiseptic and everyone will over-react madly and the audience will sit there, taking it all incredibly seriously, and I'll be sitting there stuffing my fist in my mouth, because I'm trying so hard not to laugh.”’ It is perhaps not surprising then, that Germany has not proved a typical base for the director’s career, and it did come as a surprise to see him listed to stage Idomeneo for the Berlin State Opera back in 2020, just before the world ground to a halt. That never happened, of course, though rehearsals took place. McVicar’s Berlin Idomeneo has finally seen the light of day three years later, in a house that has seen its fair share of changes in the meantime, not least the retirement of its long-term music director, Daniel Barenboim.

Barenboim, always surprisingly selective in the Mozart opera he conducted – the Da Ponte operas, and long ago, never to be repeated, The Magic Flute – was not due to conduct. A very different kind of Mozartian from Barenboim, Simon Rattle, was—and did three years later. It is probably the Mozart opera with which Rattle is most strongly associated, having conducted at least two staged productions previously (at Glyndebourne) as well as giving it in concert. The length of his association with the work shows; one can see as well as hear that he knows it intimately. Sometimes that can be a danger with Rattle in classical and romantic repertoire; he can seem eager to impose ideas on music, disregarding its line as if for the sake of doing something new. Whilst there was a degree of moulding the score, certainly in ways one would never have heard from Karl Böhm or Colin Davis, they were not disruptive and, crucially, always bore a rationale. I may not always have liked the post-Harnoncourt rhetoric, but Rattle’s job – theatre’s job – is not necessarily to provide me with what I like. I tried to approach it on its own terms, and found a generous way with the music, especially convincing in the transitions, of which here there are many, between recitative, arioso, and arias, ensembles, and choruses. Rattle’s experience, highly unusual for a conductor of his standing, in music of the French Baroque stood him in excellent stead here; this was worlds away from the metronomic stiffness of many English, ‘period’-inclined conductors. There were times, I admit, when a stronger sense of direction, less lingering, would not have gone amiss; the third act, even shorn of its ballet music, sounded somewhat sprawling. Yet Rattle’s concern for detail, surely admirable in itself, never extended to losing the word for the trees.

It was fascinating, moreover, to hear the Staatskapelle Berlin respond to a way with Mozart so different from Barenboim’s. If the strings sometimes sounded as if they might have appreciated being let loose more – and not only concerning vibrato – they were nonetheless willing, perhaps even happy, to follow different thinking, as they will need to in the post-Barenboim era (whether listeners such as yours truly like it or not). The timpanist seemed delighted by the opportunity to use hard sticks, underlining and punctuating the action with great flair. If I cannot say I cared for the rasping sound demanded from the trumpets, the orchestra’s woodwind sounded simply ravishing, Rattle’s keen, somewhat ‘French’ ear for colour liberating them as soloists (and ensemble players with the cast). For all the difference between Barenboim and Rattle, that is certainly a characteristic they hold in common—and one to which no one is likely to object. Colourless Mozart would be a peculiar goal indeed.

   

Singing was generally excellent. Magdalena Kožená also has a long history with this work, not least with Rattle. She seemed very much in her element here as Idamante, as stylish as she was characterful and committed. Her chemistry with Anna Prohaska’s Ilia was notable, that chemistry as musical as it was gestural, their lines entwining (with or without woodwind) as if twin coloured strands in a fine tapestry. Prohaska’s performance offered a near-perfect balance between words, musical line, and stage presence. A few strange vowels notwithstanding – and goodness knows what much ‘Western’ singing of Russian roles must sound like to native ears -- Olga Peretyatko’s Elettra fizzed with musico-dramatic commitment, only hamstrung by McVicar’s production (to which, of course, I must shortly return). In possession of both his arias, Linard Vrielink’s Arbace had ample room to impress and to rise above the generic assumptions that often underlie this role; this opportunity he took wholeheartedly, sharing with most of the cast a keen understanding of the dramatic role of coloratura. Andrew Staples, a Rattle favourite, did not always seem ideally suited to the title role. One need not go full-Pavarotti, to feel something a little more Italianate is ideal here. However, so long as one could take a more English sound – Peter Pears sang the role for Britten – one was rewarded by a detailed and conscientious performance.

What, then, of McVicar’s production? It has a few important, related ideas going for it, namely that of the end of Idomeneo’s rule – ‘regime change’ if you will, in line with Martin Kušej’s largely misunderstood production for Covent Garden – and that of love, in this case between Idamante and Ilia, conquering all. Both have eminent warrant in the work, indeed are arguably embedded within it. It is the classical dilemma of AMOR versus ROMA. The sinister role played by Arbace as chief ideologue is worth noting; indeed character and role are surely rendered sinister with an interventionism McVicar has decried elsewhere. At the close, Idamante and Ilia seem unaware of anything but each other, enabling Arbace to dispose, for reasons presumably of religion and state, of the former king as surplus to requirements. By the time Idamante realises, it is too late. Life, and Crete, must go on.

I just wish there had been more of this—or of something, almost anything. Elsewhere, McVicar seems so reluctant to ‘say’ anything, that it makes for a strangely inert dramatic experience. Dancers, as so often in his staging, do their thing, yet to what end is at best unclear. Portrayal of the sea monster on stage is, admittedly, a tricky thing at best; some may have been more convinced by graceful waving around of hands than I was. Nods to Japanese Noh, often concerning Elettra and her attendants, might have led somewhere, yet seem strangely unconnected with a highly ‘traditional’ everything else.  Indeed, they come uncomfortably close to suggesting all-purpose orientalism. There are no combat physiques, machine guns, neon strip-lighting, and the rest, but there is not much of anything else either. For a new production, bar its strong finish, it seems a curiously wasted opportunity that often borders on the tedious. Musical performances more consistently had one think about as well as enjoy them.‘

Prohaska/Gerhaher/Bushakevitz - Wolf, Mörike-Lieder, 30 June 2022

 

Wigmore Hall

Verborgenheit; Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchen; Das verlassene Mägdlein; Lied eines Verliebten; Bei einer Trauung; Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag; Zitronenfalter im April; In der Frühe; Er ist’s; An den Schlaf; Im Frühling; Auf einer Wanderung; Um Mitternacht; Peregrina I; An eine Aölsharfe; Peregrina II; Begegnung; Denk’ es, o Seele!; Auf ein altes Bild; Auf eine Christblume I; Schlafendes Jesuskind; Auf eine Christblume II; Karwoche; Seufzer; Wo find ich Trost?; An die Geliebte; Gesang Weylas; Der Tambour; Die Geister am Mummelsee; Der Jäger; Nixe Binsefuss; Der Feuerreiter; Lied vom Winde. 

Anna Prohaska (soprano)
Christian Gerhaher (baritone)
Ammiel Bushakevitz (piano)

A decidedly superior Liederabend, in terms of verse, musical setting, and performance. Hugo Wolf remains a connoisseur’s composer: slightly perplexing, perhaps, but then there is no playing to the gallery, no folkish dalliance, nothing that might strain toward the evidently popular. This is song born above all in verse and perhaps, especially for a non-German audience, that will never vie with the more obvious, which is not to say lesser, charms of Schubert or even Schumann. Be that as it may, it is difficult not to imagine Wolf—and Eduard Mörike—gaining a few converts among audience members who may initially have been attracted by the starry pairing of Anna Prohaska and Christian Gerhaher. Many, the present writer included, will have been equally impressed by the performances of the sensitive, comprehending pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz. 

There is all manner of ways to programme such a selection, most with something to recommend them. This was intelligently ordered to provide coherence and contrast without didacticism. Gerhaher’s opening Verborgenheit came recognisably from the Wolfram we know and love, albeit definitely song rather than opera, even in the more dramatic second stanza. Wolf’s Lisztian harmonies were relished by Bushakevitz, again setting up expectations and prospects for subsequent development. A breathless (in mood, not technique!) Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens introduced Prohaska in impetuous contrast, her subsequent Das verlassene Mägdlein offering piano (and pianist) the opportunity for something more Wagnerian, whilst the Lied eines Verliebten that followed gave Gerhaher a counterpart to that Liebesleid, in neo-Schubertian vein. Moving from a love-song to a wedding, Prohaska was able to ‘tell it as it is’ in a sardonic Bei einer Trauung: ‘Denn leider freilich, freilich, keine Lieb’ ist nicht dabei’. Whether there were a note of bitterness here remained fruitfully ambiguous.

Ambiguities arising from the text, be that verbal, musical, or both were frequent, whether in the complex, ambiguous peace with which Gerhaher and Bushakevitz left us at the close of Um Mitternacht, the day now ended, the springs murmuring on. We heard—and felt—eery darkness, progressing to relative light (Gerhaher, In der Frühe), which led in turn to a spring-like Er ist’s (Prohaska), full of life, even hope. Though commendably detailed, as Wolf performances must surely be, there was no missing the wood for the trees; this was a pictorialism of the spirit rather than mere tone-painting. Wolf—and his interpreters—could be ardent too: take Gerhaher’s ecstatic climax in Peregrina I, the invitation to ‘consume us both in fire’ and to partake of the ‘chalice of sin’ followed by a splendid pianistic afterglow. Haunted, rich in potential meaning, Gerhaher’s Auf ein altes Bild, which opened the second half, was nicely open to interpretation, as if ‘reading’ that old painting itself. 

Shaping of individual songs, whether short or ballad-like (e.g. Prohaska’s Der Tambour and Die Geister am Mummelsee) was a particular strength; likewise their integration into a greater recital whole. Phrasing, such as that of Prohaska and Bushakevitz, in a beautiful Zitronenfalter im April, told without exaggeration. Variety within unity was certainly present between, but in many respects also within, songs. Bushakevitz knew where to lean into dissonances, for instance in the extraordinary, brief Seufzer (‘Sighs’). Harp-music, verbally explicit in An eine Äolsharfe, and implicit in Gesang Weylas, offered another set of strings to the pianist’s bow. A final trio that brought other-worldliness (a post-Mendelssohn Nixe Binsefuss, Prohaska), urgent vehemence and much else (Gerhaher), and windswept virtuosity (Lied vom Winde, Prohaska) was shaped at least as much by Bushakevitz as his partners: truly collaborative music-making.

Beat Furrer, Violetter Schnee, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 10 January 2020

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Silvia – Anna Prohaska

Natascha – Elsa Dreisig

Jan – Gyula Orendt

Peter – Georg Nigl

Jacques – Otto Katzameier

Tanja – Martina Gedeck

Dancers – Uri Burger, Alexander Fend, Gernot Frischling, Annekatrin Kiesel, Victoria McConnell, Filippo Serra

Claus Guth (director)

Étienne Pluss (set designs)

Ursula Kudrna (costumes)

Arian Andiel (video)

Olaf Freese (lighting)

Vocalconsort Berlin

Staatskapelle Berlin

Matthias Pintscher (conductor)

Silvia (Anna Prohaska), Tanja (Martina Gedeck)

The word Gesamtkunstwerk should probably be retired – especially with respect to Wagner, who, not that one would know from 99%+ of the ‘literature’, barely used it. Or perhaps it should not, so long as we separate it from Wagner and acknowledge a broader context and understanding, both preceding and following the Master of Bayreuth (or, better, the ‘artwork of the future’). For Gesamtkunstwerk retains a certain ‘ideal’ force in many respects, just as do, say, ‘epic’ and ‘postdramatic’ theatre, both of which will generally be understood partly as reactions to it. In 2020, any serious consideration of one, be it theoretical, practical, or both, will almost certainly entail consideration of the others. This evening, the first of two revival performances of Beat Furrer’s 2019 opera, Violetter Schnee, elicited such thoughts of quasi-Adornian Rettung in that I found it difficult as well as undesirable to try to separate Claus Guth’s production from either work or performance. Whether you call that a Gesamtkunstwerk matters little; however, depending on your standpoint, perhaps the idea’s modernist heritage will. At any rate, I shall not attempt to dissect, but rather to give an impression of the whole, illusory or otherwise.

Those of us who spend a good deal of time in museums and art galleries will have been familiar, perhaps too familiar, with the scene of the opening. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Die Jäger im Schnee enjoys – and suffers – a painting’s usual fate, at least when not snowed under by visitors. However, one visitor, Tanja (played in distinctive, declamatory fashion by actress Martina Gedeck), takes more notice, becomes immersed, affording the starting point for something, like snow, difficult and undesirable to pin down: an aesthetic, but perhaps also a dramatic, odyssey. That, at least is how it might seem; or does the world that emerges from the painting, breathtakingly constructed from enlargement and development of its detail by Guth’s team (Étienne Pluss, Ursula Kudrna, Arian Andiel, and Olaf Freese), actually exist first, and give rise to her visit, perhaps to the painting too? Apocalypse deferred or frozen in both soon seems neither to have been deferred nor frozen at all.

Winter snow may be an object of aesthetic contemplation for us: more so than ever in an age of ecological catastrophe in which we rightly fear that soon we may never see it again, or we may see little else. It is too for the cast, led by spellbinding performances from sopranos Anna Prohaska and Elsa Dreisig, pure, seductive, and dangerous as the falling and driven snow. Yet it is also for them the key to catastrophe; any attempt to distinguish seems once again to miss the point. Where some characters, if one may call them that, acknowledge that - Otto Katzameier's Jacques most consistently – others seem, or is that just us as spectators, more partial. A house in which characters are trapped, from which they continually escape to the rooftop to experience the snow that will claim them soon enough, offers form, visual, dramatic, even musical; or so we imagine. At any rate, its confines, like those of the score, those of the stage, those of the opera house, both permit and prevent our eyes and ears zooming in on detail – as in (imaginary outsider?) Tanja’s (imaginary?) gallery. 

Furrer’s word-setting acknowledges and extends partiality and wholeness of experience, yet also calls them into question. Its metrical intricacies do not merely mirror the snow; do they perhaps in some aesthetic, even aestheticising sense, incite or create it? Shifting orchestral timbres, Klangfarbenmelodien for an age in which snow might eventually turn violet, seem at times to form the basis for pitch, rhythm, and other parameters, at other times to carry on regardless: like snow, like humans lost therein. What about the meantime? Those humans might ask each other that, but do they, and what would be the point? Maybe there is no meantime, for the end is soon upon us. Guided by Matthias Pintscher’s typically expert direction of the superlative Staatskapelle Berlin, we know and yet do not know that the magic of a Gesamtkunstwerk, of nature, of art, of aesthetic contemplation, of activism, have passed before us and yet also have not. Sun will come, will vanquish – and it does. Viole(n)t snow and life? Certainly. Why? Who knows and who cares? Frame and stage remain: faithful reflection, artifice, or both? 

Die lustigen Weiben von Windsor, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 3 October 2019

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Frau Fluth (Mandy Friedrich) and Frau Reich (Michaela Schuster)

Sir John Falstaff – René Pape

Herr Fluth – Michael Volle

Herr Reich – Wilhelm Schwinghammer

Fenton – Pavol Breslik

Junker Spärlich – Linard Vrielink

Dr Cajus – David Oštrek

Frau Fluth – Mandy Friedrich

Frau Reich – Michaela Schuster

Jungfer Anna Reich – Anna Prohaska

First Citizen – Javier Bernando

David Bösch (director)

Patrick Bannwart (set designs)

Falko Herold (costumes)

Michael Bauer (lighting)

Detlef Giese (dramaturgy)

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus master: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

René Pape (Sir John Falstaff) and Chorus

No one would seriously claim Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor to be a masterpiece; the only question, it seems, is whether one might occasionally bear it. In that sense – and probably a few others – it is riper for conversion into opera than a play that stands in no ‘need’ of it. Verdi’s Falstaff has its devotees; if you like that sort of thing, then that is doubtless the sort of thing you will like. Otto Nicolai’s opera, for better or worse, stands closer to the play, for better, and is rarely seen on stage. All credit, then, to the Staatsoper Unter den Linden for resurrecting it for the first new production of the season, with a cast that can rarely have been matched, let alone bettered, and with Daniel Barenboim, no less, in the pit.

Barenboim’s direction prove sure and loving, the warmth of the Staatskapelle Berlin’s response, both to him and Nicolai’s score, exemplary. I cannot imagine that he or (m)any members of the orchestra had performed it before. (Its last outing on Unter den Linden had been three decades previously, in 1989: an apt anniversary, given that the new premiere took place, as seems now to have become customary, on the Day of German Unity.) There was certainly a sense of fresh discovery, but also, equally important, one of grounding in the fertile musical soil from which it had sprung. From the (relatively) celebrated overture onwards, the strings offered a lighter, more golden tone than one often one hears from this band: more Vienna than Berlin, one might say, and not inappropriately so for a composer formerly based in the Austrian capital and who somewhat reluctantly departed for its Prussian counterpart, at Frederick William IV’s invitation, only in order to have his new Singspiel, Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor performed. As one of Nicolai’s many illustrious successors at the Linden house, Barenboim seemed to relish equally the composer’s debts to Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Weber, and Rossini, among others. Indeed, the correspondences with early Wagner – we might, perhaps, think this more convincing than Das Liebesverbot, if unquestionably less so than Die Feen – had me wish Barenboim would at last conduct one of the pre-Dutchman operas. Orchestral detail from the early German Romantics, form from the acknowledged masters of opera buffa – if tending more towards Rossini’s formalism than Mozart’s dynamism – and occasional hints of Fidelio and perhaps even Beethoven’s orchestral writing: there are worse mixes, far worse.

If you were expecting a ‘but’, you were not wrong. Nicolai, following ETA Hoffmann, described his work as a ‘comical, fantastical opera’. I suppose it is, if not of uniform success. Ultimately, it is difficult to say that the score, or indeed the opera as a whole, progresses beyond that. Its dramaturgy is somewhat weak, without much or anything in the way of characterisation. Mozart casts a heavy shadow, of course, but the action and humour, such as it is, remain situational and formalistic. Salomon Hermann’s libretto might profitably have distanced itself further from Shakespeare. Still, there are plenty of operas with unsatisfactory libretti and/or dramaturgy. We are not speaking of catastrophes such as Euryanthe or Oberon; nor, however, are we speaking of such scores. This, perhaps, is where a radical production might save the day – except, alas, it did not.

Junker Spärlich (Lienard Vrielink), Jungfer Anna Reich (Anna Prohaska), Fenton (Pavol Breslik), Dr Cajus (David Oštrek)

Save for updating, David Bösch’s production probably does too little. Some might say it does too much, not least with respect to the dialogue. Whatever the truth of that, this does not seem a happy medium. It is difficult to see what is gained, other than avoidance of folksiness – thank goodness for that – from the transposition of the action to what seems to be social housing with a swimming pool (!) Transformations are effected where required. The final scene, in Windsor Park, offers genuine fairy magic, alongside knowing awareness of that transformation. More of that, read back into the frankly laboured earlier comedy, would have been welcome. Bösch picks up on the verbal motif of Sekt and drunkenness, but surely most directors would. Otherwise, we are left with the ‘jokes’ of René Pape in a fat suit, two of the men, Junker Spärlich and Dr Cajus, donning tutus and falling for each other, and women getting the better of their menfolk. The latter victory is of course, a mainstay of comedy, but something more of a critical stance is surely needed at this stage. Or perhaps not: much of the audience seemed to love it. There are worse outcomes than that, far worse.

Dr Cajus, Frau Fluth, Sir John Falstaff

Given the quality of vocal and stage performances, they could be forgiven for that. Pape’s Sir John Falstaff is not nearly so central a role as some might expect, Nicolai and his librettist remaining true to the opera’s title. That said, he and Michael Volle, as Herr Fluth (Ford), offered a winning combination of vocal excellence and lightness of touch, Volle the more natural comedic actor. (If you want to see Pape draped in a shapeless white dress and bonnet, impersonating the old woman of Brentford, now is nevertheless your opportunity.) The greater interest, though, is surely allotted the womenfolk and Fenton. None of them disappointed; indeed, all excelled. Mandy Friedrich and Michaela Schuster’s fine match of stage presence, coloratura, and vocal security proved just the thing, in every respect. Insofar as one could be moved by the drama of characters, it would surely have been by the delightful duo of Anna Prohaska and Pavol Breslik, the former – speaking, uniquely, in German and English – presenting a performance of typical acuity and musicality, the latter ardent even beyond expectations. In their high-spirited, yet ultimately touching, parody of Romeo and Juliet, work, performances, and production surely reached their high point. All singers, however, deserved thanks for fine performances, so too the chorus.

As for Nicolai, it would be of interest to hear more of his music, not least to gain a broader impression. Reputations resting on a single work can often mislead. Ulrich Konrad’s New Grove article on the composer mentions, for instance, an 1832 ‘Baroque style’ Te Deum, which sounds, on the face of that description, rather different from this opera, a work of no mean historical importance. Its overture is charming, and deserves to be heard more often than is the case nowadays. A production willing to press further, to interrogate the work and its possibilities, indeed to create possibilities beyond those immanent, may yet provide us with a more compelling piece of theatre. It certainly offered opportunities, well taken, for fine singing: well appreciated, it seemed, by the audience and the singers themselves. I cannot help but think, however, that Nicolai’s ultimate legacy will remain his founding of the Vienna Philharmonic concerts a few years earlier. There are worse legacies than that, far worse.