Pelléas et Mélisande, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 3 July 2026

Images: Tatjana Dachsel (from an earlier revival, with a different cast)

Golaud – Simon Keenlyside
Mélisande – Magdalena Kožená
Pelléas – Thomas Blondelle
Geneviève – Anne Sofie von Otter
Arkel – Stephen Milling
Yniold – Henrik Brandstetter
Doctor, Shepherd – David Oštrek

Director – Ruth Berghaus
Revival director – Katharina Lang
Designs – Hartmut Meyer

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Dani Juris)

Staatskapelle Berlin

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

When, all too briefly, I lived in Berlin Mitte, I would regularly take a short walk, often mid-afternoon, to the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof. Taking their place in the firmament of great Berliners buried there, from Fichte and Hegel onwards, are Ruth Berghaus and Paul Dessau, director and composer in a properly Brechtian line. (From the house next to the cemetery, Brecht looked down at the graves of his predecessors, later joining them, and being joined by Helene Weigel.) It is little exaggeration to say that Berghaus saved the Berliner Ensemble from the mortmain of Brecht’s heirs, only to be replaced with their connivance and that of the ruling Socialist Unity Party. Berghaus’s most celebrated or at least most concentrated work in opera followed that period, when she worked with Michael Gielen in the 1980s at the Frankfurt Opera. Sadly, almost nothing of her opera work survives on film, but three or four productions remain in the repertoire: this Berlin Pelléas et Mélisande, her delightful Barber of Seville (also Berlin), Tristan und Isolde (Hamburg), and possibly Elektra (Mannheim).

The Pelléas was seen first in 1991, conducted by none other than Gielen; subsequent conductors have included Daniel Barenboim, Simon Rattle, and now François-Xavier Roth. This was its forty-third appearance performance at the Staatsoper: perhaps less than one might expect for so enduring a staging – compare that with over 350 for the Barber – but then the subtlety, depth, and absolute refusal to play to the gallery of Debussy’s opera have never appealed to sections of the operatic masses. (I once heard someone dismiss it as ‘boring’.) So much the worse for them. If they would not have been converted by this, then I suspect it would ever elude them; after all, we all have blind (deaf?) spots. The only sense in which Berghaus’s staging seems a little dated is perhaps in aspects of Hartmut Meyer’s designs: on reflection, not so much ‘dated’ as not quite of our time. Had I looked at them innocently, I might have guessed early twenty-first century rather than 1991. But they still function with great power as part of a musicodramatic whole, as if Roth and his cast had been involved from the outset: an astonishing achievement, when you think about it.

Like her fellow directors Harry Kupfer (now also in the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof), Götz Friedrich (across the city in Zehlendorf), and Joachim Herz (in Leipzig, as one might expect), Berghaus was a student of that great adoptive Berliner Walter Felsenstein (miles away at Kloser, on the Baltic island of Hiddensee). They may have departed from Felsenstein in post-Brechtian interpretation, but they all built upon his equal concern for musical and dramatic elements (insofar as they may be separated at all). It is perhaps no coincidence that their stagings, where they survive, have often proved especially enduring. Or perhaps it is, for the sell-by-date of a staging stands in a complex relationship to its initial qualities. Nothing, ultimately, is forever—and some wonderful things can prove ultimately ephemeral.

 

Not this, in any case—and there must surely be something in the production, as well as in the intelligence and craft of those reviving it, that enables such integrated results even now. One certainly notices the stark colours, quasi-abstract yet never cold, from the outset, and one soon becomes emotionally and intellectually involved in the Allemonde they create. The lighting, for whom I can find no one directly credited, is at least as important and, if anything, still more powerful. The shadows it creates are terrifying, and all will attest to the dramatic role, literal and metaphorical, of shadow worlds in this opera. The near-stratospherically vertiginuous staircase, representing Mélisande’s tower far more directly than any more realistic attempt I have seen, provides sceno-dramatic focus for so much and offers terror of its own. Much is invested in every walk up and down, every place and occasion to take a seat, and the rest. Likewise Yniold’s ball: a childish toy, an object of motion, and something to follow Mélisande’s ring into the menacing well. Her deliberate, not careless, tossing of that ring early on into those depths offers a rare, momentary instance of lightness, even humour, albeit set within the ever-ominous, increasingly terrifying workings of Fate. 

Costumes and their apparent meaning, or at least amenability to be read, play intriguing balancing acts: a hint, perhaps of the Brechtian commedia dell’arte we know from Berliner Ensemble and Barber alike, but turned both early-French and symbolist. At times, Pelléas and Golaud appear almost interchangeable; at others, characters and situations win through and make their similar costumes irrelevant. The role of letters, their reading, and their consequences, becomes more concrete when they appear in large form, passed from character to character, and at times pinned on the wall (again, perhaps a Brechtian inheritance, but one transformed by another great artist at work). There is a strong feminist element too: Golaud’s rape of Mélisande horrifying, her pregnancy almost intolerably vivid (without male-gaze exploitation); and at least as disturbing as anything else, Arkel’s pursuit and lying with her, founded in the text but extended with well-nigh perfect directorial judgement.

The Staatskapelle Berlin has long experience of Debussy under Barenboim in particular. Roth’s reading brought similar structural virtues and alertness to colour, the later inevitably of a somewhat different nature, founded in his work with period instruments on this work. Wisely, there was no attempt merely to replicate that; we can all do without ever hearing ‘period style on modern instruments’ ever again. But that does not mean music-making, like theatre, cannot, or should not, be in a more intelligent sense ‘historically informed’. Timbre here played as important a structural role as anything else, pointing the way forward to Boulez, as malevolent harmonies, their progression, dramatic implication, and structural role led back to multiple Wagner dramas. Throughout the playing of the Staatskapelle was at least as outstanding as one could hope to hear anywhere.

 

Simon Keenlyside made the transition from Pelléas to Golaud a while ago, and continues to excel in this music and its drama (or should it be the other way around?) His triangle with Thomas Blondelle and Magdalena Kožená was as credible, revealing, and terrifying as any I can recall. Blondelle may have been indisposed, yet his Pelléas was fresh, alert, vivid and, listening between the lines, doomed. Kožená’s typically intelligent artistry, founded in profound communicative gifts, not least in French, proved almost horrifyingly moving. Anne Sofie von Otter’s Geneviève presided with similar intelligence—and perhaps the occasional hint of her youth and its travails. Stephen Milling’s Arkel was subtly yet powerfully sketched: a fascinating, compelling move from Hunding. No wonder Henrik Brandstetter’s Yniold received such warm and vigorous applause; so excellent was this performance from a soloist of the Tölzer Knabenchor, I confess I thought he must have been an adult singer successfully aping a treble. Even the small roles of Doctor and Shepherd were memorably assumed by David Oštrek.

This, then, was a highly moving and thought-provoking night in the theatre: in itself and for the questions it posed about stagings and their aesthetics, lineage, and longevity. I must try to see that Hamburg Tristan before it is too late.

Takács Quartet: Haydn, Assad, and Debussy, 24 March 2026

Wigmore Hall

Haydn: String Quartet in G minor, op.74 no.3, ‘Rider’
Clarice Assad: Nexus (London premiere)
Debussy: String Quartet in G minor, op.10

Edward Dusinberre, Harumi Rhodes (violins)

Richard O’Neill (viola)

András Fejér (cello)

Contrary to some rumours I have seen spread, the Takács Quartet is not about to disband. Instead, at the end of this season, it will say goodbye to András Féjer, the last member of the founding group of players, after fifty-one years as its cellist. There was not the slightest sign of dimming powers at this Wigmore Hall concert; quite the contrary. At times, Féjer seemed almost to rise to first among equals, but then so, at other times, did his colleagues. Indeed, both programming and performance might have been designed to illustrate the many lives, within one greater life, of the string quartet as genre and the Takács Quartet in particular.

It always, of course, comes back to Haydn, here in the guise of his ‘Rider’ Quartet, op.74 no.3. The six opp. 71 and 74 quartets written in 1793 mark a watershed in the idea of quartet performance: the first the ‘father’ of, though not quite the first composer in, the genre composed with the idea of public performance at least partly in mind, as would be the case the following year on his second visit to London, in the Hanover Square Rooms (a very short walk away from the Wigmore Hall). There was no questioning the engagement of this concert audience—as, I suspect, there was not 232 years previously. The sense of musical character(s) increasingly formative and generative in Haydn’s parallel public-symphonic writing was vividly apparent in the Takács’s performance of the first and indeed subsequent movements here, a slightly tipsy, Jahreszeiten-presaging first violin part (Eduard Dusinberre the latest incarnation of the great Johann Peter Salomon) included. Féjer looked as well as sounded very much at home, though never too comfortable. Haydn’s latest play with sonata form proved every inch an intellectual challenge and joy. The slow movement sang and developed in gripping fashion, proto-Beethovenian – it is, of course, the other way around really – violin ‘ornamentation’ ornate, yes, but as fundamental to line as it would be in Bach, Beethoven, or Schoenberg. The concision marking the whole quartet was especially apparent in the minuet and trio, typically Classical play between tonic minor and major a microcosm of the Quartet as a whole. And the finale was all it should be, a thrilling ‘ride’ for the so-called ‘Rider’. 

Debussy’s early String Quartet marks in some ways a further step in the idea of public performance, in that it is very clearly a concert work written by a composer with a deep appreciation for string instruments but not a string player himself (which would have verged on the incomprehensible to Haydn). Debussy was neither the first nor the last composer in that category, but his Quartet is a characteristic work in that development, all the more so if – I repeat ‘if’ – one takes on board Hans Keller’s typically provocative claim that ‘you can come to understand a symphony by listening to it, but you cannot completely understand a string quartet without playing it,’ the string quartet being ‘the esoteric symphony,’ with a ‘more absolute need for … immediate experience’. One might say a string player rather than, say, conductor or orchestral musician would say that, would he not, but let us leave that (and Mandy Rice-Davies) alone for now.

Concision was again a hallmark of the performance, albeit naturally of a different kind, just as its development was. (I do not find the word ‘cyclical’ very helpful here, though many do.) The rich, variegated tone we heard from the outset was never present for its own sake, but as a means of expressing the idea – even the Idea – of the work. Each movement’s form was unerringly communicated, not as a formula, but as the revelation of its musical content in time. For that, detail must be just as clear—and it was, as, for instance, in the thrilling pizzicato of the second movement. The slow movement seemed to speak of the ambiguities to come of Allemonde, on the threshold, as it were, of Pelléas et Mélisande. You think this is malevolence; and surely it is. But is it? At any rate, it moved into a rapturous fourth movement, with more than a little of Tristan to it at times—as well, of course, as a reinvention of that G minor/major tension heard in Haydn too. I honestly did not find the Quartet’s conclusion any more convincing than I have before, but perhaps I am being too German. For the rest, it was a wonderful performance I should readily have heard again immediately. 

Sadly, I could not say the same for the intervening work, Clarice Assad’s Nexus. There was no concision on display here, though I suspect it lasted for roughly the same time as the Haydn and Debussy works. Treated as a conceptual view of what might be involved in chamber music performance, as the ‘search for connection’ signalled in Dusinberre’s significantly more interesting spoken introduction, it offered something, I suppose. I imagine it took its place in this programme on that basis, but I am speculating. The problem was that its three movements, ‘(Dis)connection’, ‘Connection’, and ‘Synchronization’, came across as merely descriptive rather than analytical or exploratory. I gleaned nothing from them I should not have done from a string quartet with more interesting musical material. At best diffuse, the content was mostly gestural: walking on and off stage, stamping of feet, actorly expressions, acts of imitation, and so on. (There lay some mild interest in trying to guess which expressions were ‘natural’ and which were part of the work.) Playing was beyond compare; players seemed to be having fun; much of the audience seemed to be doing so too. If only the music ‘itself’ had not been more akin to a television soundtrack, vaguely modal, and relying on extraneous meta-activities for anything that might approaching interest.

Stefanovich - ‘Labyrinth’: Bach, Kurtág, Debussy, and Liszt, 19 February 2026

 

Milton Court

Bach: Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother, BWV 992
Kurtág: Eight Piano Pieces, op.3; Játékok: ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin – enragée’
Debussy: ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Birthday Elegy for Judit – for the second finger of her left hand’. ‘Apple Blossom’
Liszt: Nuages gris, S 199; Unstern! S 208
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Adoration, Adoration, Accursed Desolation’, ‘Dolna’
Debussy: ‘Des pas sur la neige’, Études: ‘pour les huit doigts’, ‘pour les arpèges composés’
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Objet trouvé’, Twelve microludes, ‘Antiphony in F-sharp’, ‘Les adieux (in Janáčeks Manier)’
Bach: The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080: Contrapunctus I
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Ligatura y’
Bach: The Art of Fugue: Contrapunctus XIV
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Pantomime’

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)  

Images: Ed Maitland Smith

György Kurtág is the last man standing of the 'postwar avant garde': not merely standing, but writing too. Elliott Carter’s late period was unprecedented, a regular source of wonder, but even he did not write two operas in his nineties, the second, Die Stechardin, to be premiered in Budapest on the first full day of his second century. For the centenary itself, cities across the world offered thanks and celebration. London’s response was offered in typically imaginative form by Tamara Stefanovich. 

Bach’s music has proved a lodestar for Kurtág’s creative life, whether in his piano transcriptions or deeper intellectual and emotional influence upon his own ‘original’ compositions. It was fitting, therefore, that he should feature so prominently in this finely constructed programme. The first piece, the early Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother, might have seemed a strange choice, but its uncharacteristic aspects reminded us quite how adventurous, even avant-gardist Bach was, how broad his terms of reference were, and how he could confound as much as any other composer. Stefanovich played up its character, especially at the outset, not least in the instrumental – in more than one sense – role of ornaments. It might almost have been a work by a French. Navigating a fine line between harpsichord terraced dynamics and piano shading, she showed not only how one need not choose, but how the interaction both on a local and a more sectional level could contribute to form and, in this unusual case, programmatic narrative. As it progressed, its chromaticism truly told: melting yet directed, in almost Mozartian fashion. Bachian joy in extravert, major mode was just as apparent and felt. Bells pealed, horns called, the labyrinth that gave its name to the recital as a whole deepened: here was a mini-recital in itself as well as a curtain-raiser of blazing originality. 

Taken attacca, Kurtág’s bagatelle-like Eight Piano Pieces, op.3, now sixty years old, emerged in similarly declamatory, expressive, and original fashion. They formed a coherent whole, whilst exuding individual character of their own, contrast, complement, and dialectical mediation between what had passed before a guiding thread through this section of the labyrinth. Given the authority of the piano playing, one could readily take its virtuosity for granted, but of course one should not; not only was it laudable in itself, it is a key aspect to Kurtág’s exploration of his instrument, just as would be the case in Bach, Debussy or Liszt. Though Kurtág could not have known them at this time, Boulez’s Notations sounded as if a reference point, albeit distilled into still more starkly concentrated form. Webern was doubtless a crucial mediator here. 

Pairing of Debussy and Kurtág’s ‘Fille aux cheveux de lin’ pieces likewise ensued with the inevitability – and initial serendipity – of a fine pairing of food and wine. A barrage of coughing from all quarters was unfortunate, to put it mildly, but the emergence of Debussy’s understated radicalism, through Stefanovich’s endlessly variegated piano line, from within the world of Kurtág suggested a performance very much for this programme; had the programming been otherwise so would the programming, which is just as it should be. Kurtág in turn seemed to prepare the way in musical transformation for the more overtly world of late Liszt. The Venetian haze of Nuages gris was now tinged with further shadows cast and faintly dappled light shed by Kurtág and Debussy. So much twentieth- and even twentieth-first-century music is rooted in this strange, twilit world, yet that should not lead us to overlook its more formal, generative legacy. There was little chance of doing so here, no more than in a post-Mephistophelian performance of Unstern! Collective rhetoric harnessed to musical ends, the notes seemed to extend in all directions, Liszt the seer momentarily elevated. 

Returning to the world of Játékok, or perhaps better that world renewed, Kurtág very much created his own world in a few notes from those ashes, Webern again the principal, though far from the only, ghost at the feast. The combination of insistence and fantasy in, say, ‘Dolna’ suggesting distillation of Bach’s Capriccio into a fleeting yet unmistakeably tangible essence. Falling back into Debussy in an archlike form reminiscent of Kurtág’s beloved Bartók, the recital brought us steps in the snow without hammers followed by a pair of Études to remind us that ‘technique’, both as composition and performance, can and should be just as ‘poetic’ and thrilling as anything else. A succession of further Kurtág miniatures seemed, like the music of his forebears, to extend the piano keyboard and its capabilities before our eyes and ears. Every twist of the kaleidoscope brought a statement both consequent and new, the spectre of Ligeti listening, nodding, and, I think, smiling. 

Then to Bach’s Art of Fugue, perhaps as far removed in character as well as chronology from the opening Capriccio. The relationship between freedom and organisation is always complex, whether in Bach, Kurtág, Debussy, Liszt, or others—or indeed in performance. Yet the absolute ‘rightness’ of what we heard here, even if it could readily be heard otherwise, seemed perfectly suited to Bach’s testament, its first Contrapunctus both prepared by all that had preceded it and a cleansing, nourishing sorbet. Dignified and directed, its harmony and counterpoint were in excellent balance. Kurtág’s ‘Ligatura y’ seemed in its way to mirror Bach by way of Webern and Messiaen, in turn preparing the way for the crowning glory of the unfinished Contrapunctus XIV, symmetry and development indivisible—until the labyrinthine thread broke off: silence! Kurtág’s ‘Pantomime’ proved the perfect, Beckettian response in near-silence of its own. As Simon Rattle remarked of the composer’s Stele, it is ‘a gravestone on which the entire history of European music is written’. Yet Kurtág, this recital reminded us, is alive—and writing.

Tally of concerts attended 2025

 

No question whatsoever whose year 2025 was: both in his first placing by a country mile and even in the composers who followed him, many with strong associations to him. That latter point must in itself say something about Boulez's influence both on musical life and thinking in general and on my interests in particular. The other major centenary, that of Berio, fared substantially less well: not, I think, what we should have been likely to expecr even 20 years ago. Why that might be is not immediately obvious, at least to me, but it is surely worth considering.

(As ever, one composer appearance in a concert scores; no further performances in that concert do.)

13 Boulez

5 Debussy, Mahler

4 Bach, Ravel, Stravinsky

3 Beethoven, Chopin, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert

2 Berg, Cage, Carter, Dvořák, Mendelssohn, Liszt

1 John Adams, Eduardo Aguilar, Julian Anderson, Benjamin Attahir, Bartók, Orlando Bass, Georg Anton Benda, Berio, Birtwistle, Brahms, Britten, Bruckner, John Casken, Layale Chaker, Anthony Cheung, Peter Maxwell Davies, Anthony Davis, James Dillon, Marcel Dupré, Giovanni Gabrieli, Helen Grime, John Harbison, Hasse, Henze, Simon Holt, Eva-Maria Houben, Dorothy Howell, Janáček, Golfam Khayam, Kurtág, Lachenmann, Ligeti, Ursula Mamlok, Philippe Manoury, Colin Matthews, Cassandra Miller,  Messiaen, Farnaz Modarresifar, Karl von Ordonnez, Purcell, Daniel Purcell, Respighi, Roussel, Kareem Roustom, Saariaho, Schoeck, Schoenberg, Schumann, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Stockhausen, Strauss, Varèse, Claude Vivier, Weber, Webern, Weill, Austin Wulliman

Salzburg Festival (4) - Stefanovich, Lečić, Widmann, SWR: Debussy, Boulez, and Stravinsky, 20 August 2025

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Debussy, arr. Bavouzet: Jeux. Poème dansé
Boulez: Dialogue de l’ombre double
Stravinsky: Concerto for two pianos
Boulez: Piano Sonata no.2

Tamara Stefanovich, Nenad Lečić (pianos)

Jörg Widmann (clarinet)

SWR Experimentalstudio

Michael Acker, Maurice Oeser (sound direction)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

The most radical of Debussy’s orchestral works, perhaps the most radical of all Debussy’s works, Jeux held a special place in Boulez’s conducting repertory. He even served as Myriam Chimènes’s co-editor for this instalment in the critical edition, incorporating several of the revisions Debussy made following the 1913 premiere. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s transcription for two pianos, published in 2005 and taking up the memory of a lost version Debussy mentioned in a letter to his publisher, was given here with further modifications from the performers, Tamara Stefanovich and Nenad Lečić. One piano (Lečić), then the other, then two pianos, quickly dissolving into the sound of one, equally swift in sonic reinstatement as two: this brought different, at least equal challenges to the performers as the magically elusive orchestral score. At times, pitch seemed to gain a certain priority among parameters (as Boulez’s generation would know them) but other substitutes, complements, and contrasts vied for position too, not least the fascinating distinction between piano touch and orchestral timbre. It flickered in different ways, inevitably sounding closer to the piano works, both solo and En blanc et noir, in some ways akin to a continuous suite of études. The narrative was there too, though, both in detail and mood, often insouciant, sometimes languorous, infinitely malleable, always unhurried, yet precise and directed (if neither in a Boulezian nor a Beethovenian way). Seemingly as overflowing with melody as a work by Schoenberg, the piece and its harmonies could barely have registered more irresistibly in a performance both responsive and responsorial (to borrow from the Boulezian future). Sly, ineffable seduction led to a nonchalant closing shrug as perfectly prepared as it was delivered. 

Dialogue de l’ombre double was dedicated to Berio for his 60^th birthday, coinciding precisely with that of Boulez, in 1985, thus neatly combining this year’s two great musical centenaries. Although the most recent performance will well-nigh inevitably stand freshest in one’s mind, I think I can safely say I have never heard a better performance than that from Jörg Widmann, doubling with his recorded self, courtesy of Michael Acker and Maurice Oeser of the SWR Experimentalstudio (another important Boulez link). In some ways – it can probably only ever be some – it may also have been the most faithful to Boulez’s conception, originating in Paul Claudel’s Le Soulier de satin in which a double shadow of the central pair Rodrigue and Prouhèze is projected onto a wall, yet surely also inspired by Antonin Artaud’s idea of the glimpse of uncorrupted reality afforded by theatre’s ‘double’, and indeed to the ‘double’ variation form of the French eighteenth century, as well. as the doubling and shadowing in the relationships of work/composer and performance/performer characteristic of all notated music. All were certainly present, from the lighting that created Widmann’s silhouette on the wall to the continuation of Jeux’s responsorial two-piano elements with new means, transforming in the hall around us, more than hinting at the work’s relationship to Boulez’s own Répons. There were surprises too, such as the plunge into darkness at the beginning, the first notes we heard being the double rather than Widmann, who must have come onstage during those magical first arabesques. Perhaps one could see him, perhaps not; my mind’s eye and ear where rightly elsewhere. Unending melody, punctuated and structured in highly visible as well as audible form, created a form of music theatre that yet remained above all music. 

Stefanovich and Lečić returned to the stage after the interval for another outstanding two-piano performance, this time of Stravinsky’s Concerto for two pianos: not the most Boulez-friendly Stravinsky, and thus arguably all the more welcome in this context. Scènes de ballet might have been provocative; this, the more one listened, was thoughtful and productive, complementing as well as contrasting, whatever the two composers might have thought (or said). It would make a fascinating companion piece to Structures one day, perhaps alongside Stockhausen’s Mantra—Mozart or Schubert too. Its quietly ferocious regularity – ‘who me? igniting a debate?’ – made for an opening contrast of equal intelligence and beauty, not least in the chiaroscuro of this performance. The first movement’s surprising yet undeniable approaches to Shostakovich registered with startling clarity, and then Stravinsky pulled another rabbit out of the hat, then another… Much could be learned – in my case, was – from simple observance of the pianists’ body language and again that responsorial quality. The hollowed-out quality of Stravinsky’s tonality shone keenly, even brazenly in the second movement. At the same time, so did its undeniably ‘Russian’ roots, for instance in Petrushka. The final two movements, increasingly involved, offered ever more radical complement and development the more closely one listened. There was play too, of course, categories slyly undermined as soon as they were established. Perhaps this was not so distant from Boulez, even from his Second Piano Sonata, as we might have imagined. 

Thus to Stefanovich’s thrilling, astounding climax. I have heard fine performances of this work but none finer. Indeed, I think it may well have been the most all-encompassing, red in tooth and claw, white in heat, and both desolate and bracing in numerous aftershocks, I have heard, whether live or on record. The work’s beauty and violence were dialectically present from the opening of the first movement. How Stefanovich had the piano yield, melodically and still more harmonically, brought a surprising yet welcome touch of Brahms (perhaps via the unstable ‘model’ of Beethoven). Phrasing too was just as crucial—and revealing, every bit as much so as in Mozart or Beethoven. Artaud was more palpably, viscerally to the fore than in the Dialogue: ‘organised delirium’ (the title both for Caroline Potter’s recent study for Boydell and for Stefanovich’s still newer Pentatone CD tribute: grab both!) As Messiaen recalled his young pupil, ‘like a lion that had been flayed alive’, so not only was the work, not only was the performance, but so were we in audience response. There was a quasi-religious fervour to a fire that also signalled Beethovenian concision (the Fifth Symphony’s first movement, for instance). It was over before we knew, yet remained with us. 

If the first movement in some sense prepared us for the second – the first moment of aftershock – it also could not, given the new paths taken. Given the enormous challenges of communication, Stefanovich’s command of line proved close to incredible. It built on unerring power and a sense of ‘rightness’, that it could not be otherwise. Doubtless it could be; there are always alternatives. In the moment, though, one should (generally) feel otherwise. The third movement, unsurprisingly given its earlier origin, connected most obviously with Boulez’s earlier piano music, yet only as a starting point. Once again, the clarity and direction of what we heard, work and performance, was striking. Reconstruction and annihilation on seemingly endless, yet soon ended, repeat were the hallmark of the fourth movement, at least its beginning, all at once—and yet with Mozartian clarity. Ever transforming, ever bewitching, it stretched mind and ears, inviting them to repay the compliment. It scalded, it froze, liquid extremes imparting simultaneous life and death. The final, undeniable aftershock offered, if not peace, then a sense of human spirit in varied abundance.

 

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

Villa Lily-Pastré

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

Yun-Peng Zhao

Léo Marillier (violins)

Franck Chevalier, Alexis Descharmes (cello)

(picture: my own, taken from audience)

  

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

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

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

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

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

Bevan/BBC SO/Wigglesworth - Berg and Debussy, 4 April 2025

Barbican Hall

Berg: Three Pieces from the Lyric Suite
Debussy, arr. John Adams: Le Livre de Baudelaire
Berg: Der Wein
Debussy: Nocturnes

Sophie Bevan (soprano)

BBC Symphony Chorus (chorus master: Neil Ferris)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

Not the least of Pierre Boulez’s legacies, in London and across the world, is programming such as this. It may be difficult for us now to realise – given the disappointing size of the Barbican audience, less difficult than we might have hoped – but a concert of Berg and Debussy would not so long ago have seemed daring, even reckless. Boulez, one might say, created the ‘modern’ orchestral repertoire. There is some exaggeration in that. He did not do so alone, even in his generation: musicians such as Michael Gielen played crucial roles too. They had forerunners too, conductors such as Hans Rosbaud and Hermann Scherchen, as well as successors. Boulez’s time at the BBC was nonetheless pivotal for London musical life; his more general example was of incalculable significance. Hearing this concert just a few days after the Barbican and BBC’s Total Immersion event for Boulez’s centenary extended the celebration—and the homage. 

Boulez would surely have appreciated the clarity of the BBC SO strings in the three movements from Berg’s Lyric Suite, and indeed throughout, under Ryan Wigglesworth’s leadership. The ‘Andante amoroso’ started polished, directed, and cool, though not cold, its temperature rising without ever sounding Romantic. Whilst string orchestra versions of quartet music have a tendency to sound smoothed over, less radical, in their new, orchestral guise, the second movement here was an exception, especially in its scurrying, heard with impressive unanimity. One was drawn in to listen, in a manner not dissimilar to Webern or Nono. Wigglesworth and the orchestra fashioned a fine interplay between texture and harmony. The ‘Adagio appassionata’ dug more overtly deep, emanating from the world of Wozzeck and Lulu—as if a staging post between them, which in a way it is. The Zemlinsky quotation (‘Du bist mein Eigen’) was poignant, meaningful, and generative: far more than mere quotation. 

John Adams’s 1994 orchestration of Debussy’s Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire (minus the fifth, ‘La Mort des amants’) varied in its proximity to what the composer might have done. There is nothing wrong with that; it was always skilful and inventive on its own terms. The opening ‘Le Balcon’ did not sound especially Debussyan in that respect. Hearing it after Berg, its twists and turns sounded more Germanic than one might have expected. At any rate, Sophie Bevan communicated Baudelaire’s words with great clarity, shaping them, as Wigglesworth did the orchestra’s, unobtrusively yet to excellent effect. There was languor, but not too much, motion and overall shape well balanced. ‘Harmonie du soir’ was similarly evocative; it seemed at times to move closer to a Debussyan, as well as a Wagnerian (above all Tristan) orchestral and particularly string sound. Pelléas hovered in the wings vocally for the final two, the charged language another connection in ‘Le Jet d’eau’. The opening scoring of ‘Recueillement’ seemed again to come from a Wagnerian world, violas, cellos, and harps, paving the way for woodwind and voice to combine in flesh and desire for its transcendence.     

Baudelaire spanned the interval, twinned in the second half with Berg for Der Wein, which many will know from Boulez’s recording with Jessye Norman. Pelléas-malevolence persisted and mutated in the first poem, ‘Die Seele des Weines’, all the more so given Wigglesworth’s deliberate tempo. The opening, wandering bass line sounded as if Fafner had made his way onto the stage as Lulu’s new amant. (There is an idea for an opera—or perhaps not.) This was a rich vinous soul indeed, redolent of the French Wagnerism of a subsequent generation to the poet: the Revue wagnérienne, perhaps. Bevan once more span the line and worked the text with alchemy inherent in a fine vantage, matched note for note by the BBC SO. A riotous opening to the central ‘Der Wein der Liebenden’ subsided to suggest a world, as it is, very much post-Das Lied von der Erde, which persisted to a dark, yet ambiguous climax in ‘Der Wein des Einsamen’. 

Back to Debussy to close, for Nocturnes, colours variegated to permit, if not quite every shade between rare primaries, then a good few nevertheless. Enchantment and ambiguity characterised ‘Nuages’, its musical parameters kept in fruitful, shifting balance. Allemonde malevolence gave way, at least momentarily, to fluted rays of sun. Colour was well and truly switched on for ‘Fêtes’, over which a celebrated maître had left an unforgettable visual and musical BBC performance to haunt memories and even proceedings. Wigglesworth was not inflexible, by any means, but rather ensured that relative flexibility was always directed towards a goal. Even in the Barbican, whose acoustic can hardly be accused of accentuating the mysterious, ‘Sirènes’ offered a more distant form of seduction than Der Wein. It flowed beautifully, and not without a little menace, in a full-blooded account from orchestra and voices alike. This was not a Debussy painted in pastel shades; it sounded all the better for that.

LSO/Hannigan - Khayam, Haydn, Vivier, Debussy, Sibelius, and Bartók, 20 March 2025

Barbican Hall

Golfam Khayam: Je ne suis pas une fable à conter (UK premiere)

Haydn: Symphony no.39 in G minor

Claude Vivier: Orion

Debussy: Syrinx

Sibelius: Luonnotar

Bartók: The Miraculous Mandarin: Suite

Gareth Davies (flute)
London Symphony Orchestra
Barbara Hannigan (soprano/conductor)

The second of Barbara Hannigan’s two March LSO concerts opened with a UK premiere: Golfam Khayam’s Je ne suis pas une fable à conter, which Hannigan commissioned and has already performed with the Iceland Symphony, Radio France Philharmonic, and Gothenburg Symphony orchestras. Khayam being unable to travel to after hearing hearing her speak on Iranian music, receiving a reply and offer a collaboration within two hours of sending her message. They settled on a poem by Ahmed Shamlou. There are, it seems, elements of improvisation, though without knowing the work it is impossible to know how much. Opening with cellos and double basses, joined by other, deep-pile LSO strings, the piece effects, especially after voice and flute entry, an ‘east-west’ encounter in vocal and instrumental arabesques, and in combination of tonal and modal (at least to my ears) writing. It seemed to suggest eventual passage from mourning to light, or perhaps better, to glimpse it almost Janáček-like, at the end of our current tunnel. Not that it sounded in any way like Janáček, but perhaps there something in that sensibility was held in common. Perhaps it was no coincidence that here the words turned from French to Farsi. 

Haydn’s Symphony no.39 received a fine reading, Hannigan revelling in its quirks and surprises—considerably more so, it seemed to me, than her slightly disappointing way with the so-called ‘London’ Symphony no.104 last week (an altogether more Classical concern). From the off, she and the LSO relished its Sturm und Drang energy, silence as much part of its activity as sound in the first movement. It developed and returned, almost in a flash, yet certainly not without our knowing that it had. Here and in the ensuing Andante, there was nothing generic to form and process, deeply rooted as they were in Haydn’s particularities. And what a joy it was to hear the LSO in such music, unburdened by ‘period’ affectation. In her programme note, Kate Hopkins described the minuet as stately. It might have done with being a little statelier here, or at least sterner. Still, in its more flowing though not rushed way, it ‘spoke’ clearly, just as its delectable trio sang. The finale, full of incident, might in some ways sound ‘theatrical’ but proved, quite rightly, above all symphonic. 

Claude Vivier’s Orion followed, essentially a theme and five variations. Throughout, it was characterised by a strong sense of liminality, doubtless born, as Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s helpful note pointed out, of Vivier’s preceding opera on death and the afterlife, Kopernikus, and its foretelling; ‘You will hear the music of Orion and the mystical seven sages.’ Distinct echoes of various music – the Stravinsky of the early ballets, Messiaen, Grisey (or was that the Wagner of the Rheingold Prelude) – sounded both too close not to be intentional, yet also too fully integrated to be the point. Above all, it seemed to refer only to itself and, in the two percussionist cries of ‘hé-o’ to the mystery of human subjectivity set against something implacably cosmic. 

The second half opened with a solo from above (at least in the Stalls), Gareth Davies in a beautifully free yet coherent performance of Debussy’s flute Syrinx. Hannigan again led for Sibelius’s Luonnotar. But of course she can sing Finnish whilst conducting… It made for a fascinating combination, the Sibelius possessed of a keen narrative thrust born of words and music alike, all the drama of the ballad rooted in febrile LSO strings. It emerged as a kindred spirit to Mahler’s Das klagende Lied, albeit in (relative) miniature. 

Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin Suite rounded off an eclectic programme. For me, it is one of those cases in which I always regret the loss of material. Habits of early encounters with Boulez doubtless die hard. Nonetheless, on its own terms, there was much to ‘enjoy’, if that be the right word. Hannigan and the LSO seemed more focused on the harder edged elements to the score: a steely frame that seemed to invite comparisons with more or less contemporary Prokofiev (Le Pas d’acier and even the later Fiery Angel). Occasionally ear-splitting in the Barbican’s awkward acoustic, it danced its way to a final, ever wilder climax.

Horton - Debussy and Chopin, 11 December 2024

Wigmore Hall

Debussy: Préludes, Book II
Chopin: 24 Preludes, op.28

Tim Horton (piano)

With this recital of Debussy and Chopin, Tim Horton opened a Wigmore Hall series in which he will present various works by Chopin with music that influenced him and on which he in turn came to influence. It would always be a fitting thing to do, so long as well done, yet somehow it seems all the more so as the musical world continues to mourn the loss of Maurizio Pollini. ‘At seven,’ Horton writes in an intelligent, engaging introduction to the series, ‘my parents bought me Maurizio Pollini’s astonishing account of the Études. I could not believe that the piano could be played, or written for, like this. My obsession with music, the piano, and Chopin has lasted to this day.’ Indeed, with a series encompassing Bach, Mozart, Schumann, Debussy, Ravel, Szymanowski and Stockhausen, Pollini’s ghost might seem more than usually apparent. Once, he spoke of recording Gaspard de la nuit – imagine! – and Szymanowski was said to be a composer he played in private, though never, I think, in public. The others, Chopin too, featured alongside other composers in the five-concert Royal Festival Hall Pollini Project of 2011. Yet this recital in no sense imitated, nor even evidently paid homage: it announced a major voice in its own right, one with interesting and instructive things to say about and with this music, which I hope to follow in subsequent instalments.

Debussy came first, in the guise of the second book of Préludes, whose sense of a whole, tonal centres notwithstanding, was uncommonly apparent, as if the heir to an early keyboard suite. ‘Brouillards’ announced a number of oppositions and relationships that would persist and transform throughout the set and arguably the recital as a whole. Melting and muscular, the performance showed that atmosphere and precision were far from opposed, but rather mutually dependent. Clarity of thought was paramount and rightly so. Harmonic rhythm and rhythm more generally, sprung yet with telling rubato, played a guiding role in ‘Feuilles mortes’. ‘La puerta del Vino’ intrigued: darker and more dangerous than I recalled, at times verging on the brutal, yet certainly not without charm. Escamillo turned ‘impressionist’, one might say, not unlike the later ‘Général Lavine – eccentric’. There was likewise nothing fey to the fairies in ‘Les fées sont d'exquises danseuses’. Their light shone brought and colourful rather than flickering. I liked the way Horton’s performance of ‘Bruyères’ drew us in to greater intimacy at its heart, again without sacrifice to colour. 

Moonlight pervaded, as surely it must, ‘La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune’, yet there was great musical clarity in and beneath its rays. The same might be said for the waves of ‘Ondine’ and the being they enveloped. Grandiloquent yet affectionate, Debussy’s homage to Mr Pickwick, was admirable here in its clarity, harmonic progressions clearly generative. In some ways, it seemed to prefigure greater abstraction not only to the opening of ‘Les tierces alternées’, but also ‘Canope’ in between. Any false opposition between ‘poetry’ and ‘construction’ was rendered redundant; indeed, the former might well have had a more ‘poetic’ title of its own. The closing ‘Feux d’artifice’, music lying between as in the notes, painted a resplendent picture and climax. 

Hearing Chopin’s twenty-four Preludes after the interval retrospectively brought influence and affinity to bear on our experience. Again, there was great clarity throughout, not only in presentation of the notes but in demonstrating why they were where they were and how. In general, they were possessed with singularity of idea, not so very different from some of the Etudes, whether in the lightly worn yet expressive virtuosity of one sequence of minor-key pieces, or the sadness of some of its predecessors (E minor and B minor, for instance, the latter sharing elements of character with some of the sadder Mazurkas). Expressive qualities arose from the material rather than being imposed on it, the tumult of the E-flat minor Prelude seeming to be summoned by the piano keys themselves. The serene charm of the ‘Raindrop’, in D-flat, and its A-flat companion had them emerge as miniature tone poems, as with all the pieces heard and expressed as if in a single, variegated breath. The simple nobility of the C minor Prelude, movingly shaded, contrasted with an almost Brahmsian, dark-hued passion to the next-but-one in G minor, which in turn immediately contrasted with a leggiero F major, and finally Romantic turbulence and aristocratic pride in D minor. As in all the finest accounts of this book, Pollini’s included, tonal and expressive journeys were as one.

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.

Munich Opera Festival (3) - Pelléas et Mélisande, 22 July 2024

Prinzregententheater

Images: © Wilfried Hösl

Pelléas – Ben Bliss
Mélisande – Sabine Devieilhe
Golaud – Christian Gerhaher
Arkel – Franz-Josef Selig
Geneviève – Sophie Koch
Yniold – Felix Hofbauer
Doctor – Martin Snell
Shepherd – Pawel Horodyski

Director – Jetske Mijnssen
Set design – Ben Baur
Lighting – Bernd Purkrabek
Choreography – Dustin Klein
Dramaturgy – Ariane Bliss

Projektchor der Bayerischen Staatsoper (director: Franz Obermair)
Bayerisches Staatsorchester
Hannu Lintu (conductor)

Nine years ago, in this same theatre at this same festival, I saw Munich’s previous Pelléas et Mélisande: a staging by Christiane Pohle which I greatly admired, but  everyone else seemed to loathe. I am tempted to say ‘failed to understand’, but let us move on—to its successor, directed by Jetske Mijnssen. Perhaps it was not the best time to see this, only a fortnight after encountering Katie Mitchell’s feminist rethinking of the work in Aix, in its first revival. For me, there is nothing especially wrong with Mijnssen’s staging. It does pretty much what one would expect of a Pelléas, save perhaps for presenting a greater realism in place of its Symbolism.

In that lay my doubts. Not that there is anything wrong with that in principle; far from it. Yet without a change of perspective, or some other such idea, the point remained elusive: not in the sense that Pelléas can, must remain elusive, but rather suggesting an extended bourgeois parody of Tristan und Isolde, with which it of course has much in common. That would be a point of view, though not necessarily one I should be inclined to pursue (imagining nonetheless with a wry smile what Nietzsche, in Case of Wagner mode, would have made of Pelléas). What I think Mijnssen is getting at, suggested by her final act – in which the castle, whose rooms whether in the forest, by the stagnant pool, or elsewhere have provided the setting for all that has gone before, is stripped to its foundations – is a psychological claim that we are all ultimately like Mélisande, not least in our inability to know one another. Presumably the wooden boards relate also to the forest we never really see.

Following a realistic if sparing portrayal of early-twentieth-century costumes, furniture, and so on, Arkel’s words ‘C’est un pauvre petit être mystérieux comme tout le monde’ offer the backdrop for the entirety of this act. Having moved from a (beautifully danced) ball for the first scene, to this hospital bed for the close, often viewing Pelléas’s sick father in his bed, the tragedy encompasses all of us in a metaphysical sense far from untrue to the work. The observation – and execution – of Golaud’s chess game with his son Yniold, and Yniold’s resort to playing with his toys, perhaps as a way of trying to understanding what is happening, including a similar sweeping of the board and pieces, are suggestive and accomplished. Golaud’s striking of Yniold likewise offers a powerful moment.

Much else, especially with water – seen as rainfall as we enter the theatre, yet otherwise relegated until the close to a long, thin ‘pool’ at the front of the stage – seems to sit a little awkwardly between two stools. That the pools are more evident in the final scene, presumably closing in on the very foundations – in more than one sense – of castle and family is another good idea. But Pelléas’s reappearance – a ghost, a dream, or an actual reappearance? – to show Mélisande her child seems to come less from an alternative dimension than from an alternative production or concept. Perhaps I am missing something, given what seems in many ways an intelligent attempt to construct a whole from what is viewed, curtain falling after every scene, as a quasi-filmic succession of dramatic fragments.

An effort to construct a greater whole in theatrical time from quasi-modernist fragments, as opposed to starting with a whole and carving detail from it, seemed also to characterise Hannu Lintu’s way with Debussy’s score. At its best, Lintu’s direction conjured a wonderful translucency from the Munich orchestra; it did not want for dark malevolence when called for, either. My principal reservation related to what seemed – I am unsure whether it actually was – for scenes, perhaps acts too, to slow during their course. No one wants to rush through Pelléas, of course, quite the contrary; yet there were occasions when I felt momentum was in danger of being lost. This may, however, have been as much a matter of pauses between scenes on account of scene rearrangement, especially before the fifth and final act. By the same token, losing oneself in the forest is surely part of the musical experience, perhaps all the more so when we never really see it.

There are doubtless many ways to sing Mélisande, yet during her performance, Sabine Devieilhe had me convinced hers was, if not quite the only one, then the best. Her ease of communication, not only in the French language but in Debussy’s musical style, was effortlessly communicated for all to hear; it was simply as if she were speaking, and as clear as if that were the case too. Moreover, Devieilhe’s delivery of the text seemed indivisible from dramatic situation and imperative. French is a notoriously difficult language to sing; it would be difficult, unsurprisingly, to claim that all in the cast managed with such ease. Sophie Koch’s excellent Geneviève was of course an exception, leaving us to long for more.

That said, no one made a bad job of it either, and an age of ‘international casts’ brings advantages and disadvantages. Christian Gerhaher’s Golaud was unquestionably a fine, brutal character study. Some will doubtless have taken more to his hectoring way (at times), but it was rooted in his conception of Golaud’s sadism. Gerhaher showed the courage not to try to endear his character to anyone, without in any sense rendering him one-dimensional. To that, Ben Bliss’s boyish, mellifluous Pelléas proved an excellent foil, vocal and scenic communication offering ample justification for Mélisande’s preference. The dark ambiguity of Franz-Josef Selig’s Arkel cast due shadow over all. Last but far from least, Felix Hofbauer gave an outstanding performance as Yniold: not ‘for a boy’, but for anyone. As impressively acted as it was sung, this treble’s performance offered yet another feather in the cap for the ever-lauded Tölz Boys’ Choir. So in many respects, the fragments did add up to more.

Neuburger/Boulez Ensemble/Roth - Debussy and Manoury, 29 October 2023

Pierre Boulez Saal

Debussy: Sonata for flute, viola, and harp
Manoury: Passacaille pour Tokyo
Debussy: Sonata for cello and piano
Manoury: Grammaires du sonore

Jean-Frédéric Neuburger (piano)

Boulez Ensemble

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

Images: Jakob Tillmann

Intelligent and revealing programming is always a joy. François-Xavier Roth ranks highly among those conductors regularly offering it. When married to equally intelligent and revealing performances it becomes all the more a joy, such as in this concert from the Boulez Ensemble, founded by Daniel Barenboim to include members of the Staatskapelle Berlin and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Two ensemble pieces by Philippe Manoury were prefaced by two late Debussy sonatas, the formal implications of which were highly suggestive and felt to be such for the Manoury works. 

First, we heard Debussy’s Sonata for flute, viola, and harp, an extraordinary work I do not think I have ever heard live before. The combination may be unusual, but surely is not that difficult to assemble; even if it were, it would be well worth the effort. Hélène Freyburger (flute), Yulia Deyneka (viola), and Aline Khouri (harp) struck an ideal balance from the outset between solo and ensemble. The first movement in particular was possessed of a magical inscrutability through which secrets were gradually revealed, first among them the quiet radicalism of Debussy’s reinvention of the sonata, quite without resort to what would become (arguably was just becoming) neoclassicism. For Debussy’s treatment of material already began to peer forward to Boulez and even to Manoury. The Interlude, somehow both darker and brighter, registered with proper contrast. Debussy’s use of the harp fascinated all the more in performance, as it encouraged the viola and, perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, the harp to expand their means, and initiated transformations of material and mood. Likewise in the finale, beginning in almost ‘classical’ style before taking other paths, not necessarily sequential: another anticipation of the future, bringing Birtwistle as well as Boulez to my mind.

 

The piano moved centre-stage to Manoury’s 1994 Passacaille pour Tokyo, for piano and seventeen instruments. A similar reinvention of an old form, albeit with more overt éclat, is here founded upon repetition of a note, first E-flat, to which we feel a need to return and indeed continue to hear even when the actual note of repetition has changed. It offers proliferation in a way that recalls Boulez, as it were, from the other end, without the slightest sense of mere imitation. Jean-Frédéric Neuburger’s insistence on the initial E-flat, varying duration and attack, set the scene for an excellent performance of the whole. Manoury’s music glittered and glistened, never glowering, in a fantastical realm of invention. I had a sense of constant transformation even when, on a single hearing, I could not always tell you how, but the relation of this new passacaglia-idea to the old piano device of a pedal-point (or more than one) became clearer as time progressed, all the while as material was thrilling passed between instruments, like high-speed Webern, though in many more directions. The advent of ‘shadow piano’, played offstage by Kyoko Nojima, was arresting in more than a merely spatial sense. Inevitably, perhaps, it died away on a single pitch, on Neuburger’s piano, but the abiding memory was as much of the delightful friction between repetition, even varying repetition, and persistent transformation above.

 

Neuburger was joined by cellist Alexander Kovalev for Debussy’s Cello Sonata, a dark, declamatory piano opening both picked up and transformed by cello playing (and writing) combining strength and elegy. Here was another different conception of the sonata, as if to remind us that Liszt’s declaration that new wine demanded new bottles was the afternoon’s motto; in many ways indeed it was. The variety of expressive articulation offered by both players, even within a single phrase, encapsulated not only a marriage of detail and greater sweep but also the concert’s conception of form springing from material. Pierrot-like whimsy and invention characterised the opening of the ‘Sérénade et Finale’. The mutual approach of instruments, for instance through piano marcato and cello pizzicato, prepared the way for a sense of controlled intoxication; that is, there were certainly limits, yet within those limits, a great deal could and did happen. Not unlike Manoury’s Passacaille, one might say.

 

Barenboim arrived after the interval, with what I assume was the score of the next piece, which he proceeded to follow assiduously seated next to the composer. Manoury’s Grammaires du sonore was premiered by Roth and the Ensemble Intercontemporain last December in Paris. It made a huge impression on me here in Berlin—and, so far as I could tell, on the audience assembled at the Pierre Boulez Saal. A fuller ensemble here seemed not only to reinvent the modern ensemble’s reinvention of the symphony orchestra, but also, more radically, not only to question but magically to cast away its hierarchies in a riot of what went beyond Debussy’s controlled intoxication to post-Boulezian controlled delirium. Here, it seemed, there was a place for all to shine, democratically if you will, one of the first being Nina Janßen-Deinzer on contrabass clarinet, the piece seeming to fulfil or at least to renew a promise serialism had never quite been able to realise. Precision and fantasy were dialectically related, as in Boulez. Particular to the piece rather than a universal (was tonality ever really that in any case?), Manoury’s ‘grammar’ both demonstrated and enabled every note, like every word in a poem, truly to count. The fascination of that idea and the excitement of its putting in practice turned our attention back where it should always have been, to musical notes, their performance, their connection, and our listening. For the expression of musical imagination was both highly dramatic and readily perceptible.

Tuned percussion also brought Boulez, perhaps inevitably, a little to mind, yet Manoury’s writing was quite different: less elliptical, perhaps also freer in its exchanged with untuned fellow citizens. Piano writing and Nojima’s performance were perhaps a little closer to ‘traditional’ expectations than what we had heard in the Passacaille, but that was no failing, no retreat, perhaps rather a sign of confidence in the instrument and its place in the ensemble. Brass, save the Wagner tuba, left the floor and went up to the balconies, ricocheting of notes in a layered spatiality expanding dimensions of the relationship between repeated notes and invention in the earlier work. Strings too seemed liberated by their new role, not as first among equals but simply as equals, scintillating, soulful, and much in between, sometimes merging into other sections in an aesthetic and perhaps not entirely apolitical utopia of sound. One chord seemed almost to approach ‘that’ chord in the Adagio of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. It was probably just my fancy, to be refuted were I to look at the score or listen again; yet, in the construction of a grammar to what Mahler might have considered a new world in itself, perhaps it was not entirely so. Debussy’s rethinking of form was honoured and extended, but above all this world dazzled and exhilarated. Crucially for us all now, it held out the promise of life, of a future, of the reinvention, reimagining, and rebuilding we desperately need: not through a didactic manifesto, but through music's delight in itself.