Philharmonia/Hrůša - Mahler, 13 November 2025

Royal Festival Hall

Symphony no.7

Philharmonia Orchestra

Jakub Hrúša  (conductor)

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

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

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

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

                               

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

Royal Opera House

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

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

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

 

Image: The Royal Opera / Camilla Greenwell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

BPO/Hrůša - Dvořák, 13 October 2023

Philharmonie

Dvořák: Stabat Mater, op.58

Corinne Winters (soprano)
Marvic Monreal (mezzo-soprano)
David Butt Philip (tenor)
Matthew Rose (bass)

Rundfunkchor Berlin (chorus director: Gijs Leenaars)
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Jakub Hrůša (conductor)

 

© Bettina Stöß / Berliner Philharmoniker

Dvořák’s Stabat Mater is clearly a favourite work for Jakub Hrůša. Six years ago he conducted it in this same hall, Berlin’s Philharmonie, with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra; in 2023, it was the turn of the Berlin Philharmonic. Hrůša has called the piece a ‘wonderful gift’; he, a fine team of soloists, chorus, and orchestra in turn offered a wonderful gift to the audience with this performance. If the work, like many others, is not without unevenness, much of it has the composer firing on all cylinders. At a time when, even by current standards, our world is overwhelmed with grief, it will surely have spoken clearly and directly to many. It certainly did so to me. 

A first movement of quite extraordinary power did so from the outset. Hrůša and the orchestra offered a translucent introduction, elemental without Brucknerising, chromatic descending sequences grief-laden without sentimentality, leading somehow almost magically towards the entry of the chorus, which both emerged from and intensified such feelings, as clear of line as it was full of tone. I cannot imagine the climaxes have ever sounded more shattering. David Butt Philip’s tenor entry similarly grew out of an extended what had gone before. If somewhat operatic, that is the nature of the piece; it became more so with impassioned singing from the full quartet. Hrůša’s formal command was unerring, a crucial matter in a work of this scale. The vocal quartet that followed was naturally more intimate in scale, though no less heartfelt. Splendidly declamatory singing from Corinne Winters had her come into her own, with Matthew Rose an excellent foil, Fasolt-like in sincerity, though building later to quite a fury. 

 ‘Eja mater, fons amoris’ quite properly offered moments where the mood lightened, not least through sheer delightfulness of orchestral playing, though the chorus’s repeated cries of ‘Fac’ were anything but light. There was some much needed choral and woodwind balm in ‘Fac, ut ardeat cor meum’, where it was lovely to hear the organ in softer passages too. But even that came in the shadow of imposing, implacable brass. Harmoniemusik in the following chorus, ‘Tui nati vulnerati’, set the scene for as close as we were come to gambolling lyricism, in Bohemian Brahms fashion, with shades of the darker, mahogany Brahms to come in the opening of the ‘Fac me vere tecum flere’. Butt Philip’s imploring reading and the choral singing shone equally. 

A venerable mainstay of musical crucifixion iconography, sharpened notes made their point in both chorus and orchestra in ‘Virgo virginum praeclara’. One certainly did not need to know or see; piercing could be heard and felt. Likewise in the throbbing pizzicato playing from lower strings, contrasting in almost sadomasochistic fashion with ravishing bowed violins and woodwind, of the duet ‘Fac, ut portem Christi mortem’. Butt Philip and Winters blended and contrasted well as required. In the penultimate number, the only truly solo (without chorus) movement, mezzo-soprano Marvic Monreal offered characterful contrast, especially in her lower range. 

The final movement’s uneasy calm from soloists and orchestra paved the way for some truly radiant choral singing when reprising the opening material. Its ‘Amen’ still seems to me a little unsatisfactory as a conclusion to a setting of this poem; Dvořák’s more typically personal style sits a little awkwardly with its import. Ironically, if Rossini in his Stabat Mater at times adopted a jaunty, well-nigh postmodern dissociation from the poem, his writing here seems to me more congruent. There was no gainsaying the performance’s all-round excellence, though, and there are many worse things than being oneself—whether for Dvořák, Rossini, Schubert, or anyone else.

Salzburg Festival (6) - GMYO/Hrůša: Mahler, 21 August 2023

Felsenreitschule

Mahler: Symphony no.9

Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra

Jakub Hrůša (conductor)

Image: © SF/Marco Borrelli

Time was when I, like many concertgoers, was hearing a great deal of Mahler’s symphonies, probably more so than those of anyone else. That was partly choice, of course: no one compelled me to, and I was very much under Mahler’s spell. (Not that I am necessarily free now.) But it was also a reflection of concert programming and indeed the recording industry. As a student, I was avidly collecting Pierre Boulez’s revelatory Deutsche Grammophon series as it came out. In 2007, I travelled to Berlin for Holy Week and Easter, to hear Boulez and Daniel Barenboim conduct them all (minus the ‘Tenth’), plus the orchestral song-cycles, though sadly no Das klagende Lied. It was a defining moment in my musical life and even in my musical writing, for it had me begin my blog to record my experiences. (At the time, I did not even really know what a blog was.) As the years rolled on, though, increasingly and again like many, I felt that the Mahler craze was getting out of hand. I should always be interested in an outstanding performance of a Mahler symphony, just as I would with a Beethoven symphony, yet most to my ears were anything but, too many conductors and their egos reducing them to the level of ‘orchestral showpieces’. It seemed the best thing for Mahler, for other composers, and for audiences would be a period of silence. Some time before the pandemic, my attendance had tailed off considerably. Since concert life began once more, I realise I have not been to a single performance of a Mahler symphony, unless we include Das Lied von der Erde. Now, for whatever reason, I shall have several over the next month. Will absence have made the heart grow still fonder? We shall see.

The first in my mini-series was a Salzburg Festival performance of the Ninth Symphony from the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra and Jakub Hrůša: an excellent team on paper and in practice. Doubtless not stinting on rehearsal time, and certainly not on numbers – I counted ten double basses and there must have been closer to forty than thirty violins – this was a performance to fill the Felsenreitschule, quite rightly at least as much in magical moments of quiet stillness, somehow both endless and over in the blinking of an eye, as in climaxes. We can perhaps be too ready to speak of national characteristics in music, especially in so complex a geographical and cultural area as Central Europe, yet momentarily forgetting whom I saw at the podium and listening only, as it were, with my ears, I was in the first movement and beyond put in mind both of the sort of sound I associated both with the Czech Philharmonic and with Rafael Kubelík’s wonderful recordings (studio and live) with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. There are all manner of ways to approach Mahler, but this particular brand of unforced musicality and golden, glowing, never saturated string tone seemed to forge a connection not only with Mahler’s Bohemian origins, but also with a tradition dating back to Mozart, Mysliveček, and indeed beyond.

Programmatic explanations help some listeners and do no great harm, though the claim that Mahler’s faltering heartbeat may be heard in the first movement may be an exception. At any rate, there was neither need nor invitation to think in such terms, Mahler and Hrůša reminding us of Mendelssohn’s oft-quoted observation that music expresses thoughts that are not too indefinite for words, but rather too definite. In many ways, the lack of anguish (and apparent who) was welcome, though occasionally I could not help wishing for a little more edge—doubtless ironically, given what I said earlier. With melody, harmony, and counterpoint in such productive balance, though, and with Hrůša’s unobtrusive shaping of the whole so finely judged, there were no grounds for complaint. This was not an especially modernist Mahler, though not was it backward-looking; other standpoints will have their day. 

Oscillation between string-led material and multiple woodwind voices continued into the second and third movements. The second certainly had its moments of rusticity, perhaps closer to Haydn than often one hears, but there was alienation too: in the very idea of rusticity, of course, but also in the music’s twin embrace of and escape from it. The Rondo-Burleske dug deep, not only on account of the depth of string tone, embracing counterpoint and its vigour in a related and complementary, yet also contrasting, fashion. Perhaps there might have been greater violence, even horror, yet, again not unlike Kubelík, Hrůša reminded us there were other tendencies in the music. I was also reminded at times, and not only here, of Bruno Maderna’s startlingly ‘different’, yes-saying way with the work. Hrůša’s marriage of precision and patience paid off handsomely in the way all would surely have felt the pull of progressive tonality, whether they knew the term or not. Mahler’s path to the finale, here resolute and unsentimental, unhurried yet rarely if ever lingering, made sense both emotionally and intellectually. One cannot say fairer than that. 

Salzburg Festival (5) - Katya Kabanova, 26 August 2022

Felsenreitschule

Katěrina Kabanova – Corinne Winters
Marfa Ignatěvna Kabanova (Kabanicha) – Evelyn Herlitzius
Varvara – Jarmila Balážová
Boris Grigorjevič – David Butt Philip
Váňa Kudrjáš – Benjamin Hulett
Tichon Ivanyč Kabanov – Jaroslav Březina
Savël Prokofjevič Dikoj – Jens Larsen
Kuligin – Michael Mofidian
Glaša – Nicole Chirka
Fekluša – Ann-Kathrin Niemczyk

Barrie Kosky (director)
Rufus Didwiszus (set designs)
Victoria Behr (costumes)
Franck Evin (lighting)

Christian Arseni (dramaturgy)

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus director: Huw Rhys James)
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra,
Jakub Hrůša (conductor)

Images: SF / Monika Rittershaus 

For me, Barrie Kosky has often been at his best when staging more serious operas, which do not lend themselves to his trademark ‘showbiz’ treatment, and for which he has shown a single-mindedness again quite different from what other stagings may have led us to expect. Pelléas, Rusalka, Eugene Onegin, and Iphigénie en Tauride spring immediately to mind. Others differ strongly, I know, so it is probably more a matter of taste as anything else (though not in the case of that breathtakingly dishonest Bayreuth Meistersinger). This new Salzburg production of Katya Kabanova broadly falls, I suppose, into that category. There was certainly nothing to object to, nothing to distract; and yet, I could not help but feel—more feel than think—that something was missing. 

Theatre is not, of course, made in a vacuum. Experience of the pandemic—far from over, of course, whatever our overlords may tell us—is still raw and its consequences are still very much with us (he wrote, typing, FFP2-mask-clad, on a train out of Salzburg). No need to worry: this is not a Katya full of masks, Microsoft Teams, and parties chez Johnson and Simmonds, though surely it will come. (My bet is on a Zoom Tristan by 2025.) But rather, the vast stage of the Felsenreitschule seemed strangely underused, as if to allow for social distancing, save—a crucial exception, I grant—for a vast, immobile (boundaries occasionally altered between scenes) crowd, backs turned to us throughout. Extremely realistic, of all shapes and sizes, this wall of puppets could well have been taken for actual human beings, had one not known—or suspected, given the lack of movement. It was an arresting image, walling in the community, Katya’s horizons, and indeed those of everyone else, although Kosky’s interest, not unreasonably, seemed to lie in the heroine. A large stage with nothing else to detain us: on second thoughts, one could readily have had set designs and kept the characters apart as necessary, so perhaps it was not Covid at all. Words from a programme interview lend credence to that view, Kosky saying that he did not want to ‘do Kátá Kabanova as an Ibsen or Strindberg drama – it’s not just about the family.’ He says he and his production team needed ‘to consider how we could represent this village or small town and Kátá’s feeling of isolation within this place, and at the same time concentrate on Kátá and the immediate family around her, without turning it into a chamber piece with walls, doors, tables, chairs and a samovar – which wouldn’t work anyway in the Felsenreitschule.’

So maybe the pandemic and the horrific loneliness it brought for many of us haunts responses rather than intention; or maybe, just maybe, the one does not exclude the other, especially in the work of so experienced a man of the theatre. For whilst Kosky verbally acknowledged the role of the community, and that puppet-wall was ever-present, the impression—present, I think, in much of the Personenregie too—was of a more existentialist drama than either we are accustomed to or those words imply. True, there were at the beginning of each act other, sonic hints of something, whether natural or social, lying beyond. Birdsong preceded the first act, bells the second, and thunder the storm of the third. Beyond a light bit of sado-masochism, as Kabanicha walked Dikoj around on a leash and poured liquid on him, the abiding feeling for me remained loneliness in a vast space.

In the title role, Corinne Winters proved an estimable contributor to this concept, determined to make her own way in the role, never remotely reliant on post-Hardy (at least for an English speaker) cliché. If I observed and was duly repelled by her treatment, only really at the end was I moved. I say this not as adverse criticism; that seemed to be the dramatic strategy, to emphasise the final breakdown. It seemed to be Jakub Hrůša’s conception too, in the pit. Goal-orientation is not only a musical strategy for Beethoven and his followers. There was never an ounce of sentimentality, never a moment to enjoy the excellent, if not to my ears always entirely idiomatic, playing of the Vienna Philharmonic for itself. Sometimes, I may have wished the music, the drama, would linger just a little, but that was surely the point. And surely they were right.

Where I had a few doubts was with some of the Czech language heard. I cannot really say more than that, speaking not a word of the language myself, but I wonder whether it is a coincidence that, without knowing who they were beforehand, I often felt a greater immediacy from those whose first language it was. First and foremost was Jarmila Balážová: an outstanding Varvara, glowing with an infectious zest for life in such sharp contrast with Katya’s fate and, yes, that of the society around them. Presented with considerable vocal beauty and undeniable sincerity, David Butt Philip’s Boris was another fine portrayal—from an artist who seems never to give anything but. Evelyn Herlitzius gave a duly terrifying star turn as Kabanicha, surely one of the most unremittingly evil characters in all opera. As is her wont, this was a powerfully committed performance throughout. Benjamin Hulett’s idea of Kudrjáš and his communication of that idea seemed almost designed to vindicate the description in Ivana Rentsch’s excellent programme essay of his character’s ‘mellow detachment’, as much expressed through sonority as gesture.All contributed, though, to the sharply delineated drama unfolding; there were no exceptions, nor even weak links. And whether the pandemic coloured conception, response, or both, is perhaps unimportant, given the tragic power of the denouement.

 

Lohengrin, Royal Opera, 24 April 2022

Royal Opera House

Henry the Fowler – Gábor Bretz
Lohengrin – Brandon Jovanovich
Elsa – Jennifer Davis
Friedrich von Telramund – Craig Colclough
Ortrud – Anna Smirnova
King’s Herald – Derek Welton
Brabantian Nobles (‘Four Followers of Telramund’) – Elgan Llŷr Thomas, Thando Mjandana, Matthew Durkan, Thomas D. Hopkinson
Pages (‘Four Women at the Wedding’) – Katy Batho, Deborah Peake-Jones, Renata Skarelyte, Louise Armit
Gottfried – Alfie Davis

David Alden (director)
Peter Relton (revival director)
Paul Steinberg (set designs)
Gideon Davey (costumes)
Adam Silverman (lighting)
Tal Rosner (video)
Maxine Braham (movement)

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

Considering the first night of David Alden’s (then) new production of Lohengrin in 2018, I found ‘a conceptual weakness at ... [its] heart. I suspect it can be remedied: if a shell, it is a fine shell. It will not, however, remedy itself.’ Rather to my surprise, I found this first revival, notably under a new director, Peter Relton, much stronger. It is not always easy to be sure what has actually changed, and what one is viewing differently for oneself. I shall not try; the earlier review remains for anyone who wishes to read it. In at least partial recantation, then, I am happy to say this made for a far more satisfying evening, dramatically and musically, than that experienced four years ago. Moreover, for Wagner to have returned so emphatically to one of the city’s main houses marked a step-change in London’s operatic recovery. However much one wished it to succeed, ENO’s autumn Walküre proved a bitter disappointment. If Lohengrin did not quite match the success of Covent Garden’s astonishing recent Peter Grimes, it stood closer to that than to November’s dispiriting evening at the Coliseum. 

An interwar fascist regime, on the verge at least of further war, is the setting (albeit with certain irritating Alden anachronisms of the sort that conceive postmodernism as style rather than philosophy). The aftermath of war, presumably the Great War, that haunts the first act in particular, every character seemingly damaged, mentally and often physically too. The charge of war and of preparations for another has obvious resonances to spring 2022; they could hardly fail to speak. If King Henry cowers like a question mark—in his throne, with crown, he seems an all-too-obvious rip off from Hans Neuenfels at Bayreuth—and the Herald wears his injuries anything but lightly, others struggle to stand too. Telramund and Elsa act and react in caricatured expressionist style. Even Lohengrin adopts a foetal position of comfort with Elsa, presumably seeking a mother figure lacking in the Grail brotherhood. (As Nietzsche did not say, let us not go there.) 

Only Ortrud, doubtless significantly, operates as normal. Perhaps it is her ‘magic’, or perhaps that magic is a metaphor for something broader; that is really up to us. A fine touch, at the close of the second act, is her apparition in a box, toasting (cursing) with champagne the unhappy couple. Hemmed in by Paul Steinberg’s sets, their crossings and their disjunctures a striking visualisation of catastrophe, the action is never likely to end happily. This, after all, is a tragedy, probably the purest in Wagner; a signal strength here is that we do not forget that. That is not, of course, to say that it always need be played exclusively as such, but there is an ultimate trajectory here less in evidence than last time, which certainly strengthens the drama in this context. 

So too did Jakub Hrůša’s conducting of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House—and the golden orchestral playing itself. Hrůša is not afraid to take his time, the first act feeling especially broad, though never merely slow. Careful attention to detail and to its place in the whole had Wagner’s score veritably glow with inner life. The old operatic forms on which much of Wagner’s conception is ultimately based were clear. In Mein Leben, Wagner recalls Schumann’s puzzlement at a Dresden reading of the poem; he ‘liked it, yet couldn’t figure out the musical form I had in mind for it, as he couldn’t find any passages suitable for traditional musical numbers. I then had some fun reading him different parts of my poem just as if they were in aria and cavatina form, so that in the end he smilingly conceded the point.’ Full performance can heighten that sense further—yet also more dialectically. For equally clear were the development of those forms and the forces energising that development: harmony (especially that of Ortrud), of course, but also an energised conception of Gluckian accompagnato arising from Wagner’s work as conductor, editor, and director. 

At any rate, not only did Hrůša show a fine Wagnerian’s ability to hear vast structures—acts, at least—in a single breath, but he inspired the finest playing from all sections of the orchestra throughout. Each act had its own way of unfolding; no one-size-fits-all approach, but rather a patient, powerful strategic ear and mind. Moreover, he often favoured—unfashionably—long, quasi-vocal orchestral lines: not so much Straussian as with kinship to the Wagner of a conductor such as Karajan. The vertical was not ignored, but experience suggested ultimately a more horizontal conception of Wagner’s—‘endless melody’, perhaps—and convincingly so. 

Brandon Jovanovich offered a finely judged portrayal of Lohengrin, as acute in verbal as musical terms, its clarion heroism shielding—and sometimes not—a vulnerable and decidedly ambiguous inner core. Craig Colclough’s Telramund, tragically in thrall to Anna Smirnova’s sensational Ortrud, presented similar ambiguities, those similarities engaging sympathy and our appreciation of dramatic complexity. If there was something winningly ‘old-school’ to Smirnova’s vocal delivery and sheer star presence, that was not at the cost of more ‘modern’ engagement with directorial concept, far from it. Jennifer Davis’s movingly human Elsa grew in stature throughout a committed performance. Gábor Bretz vividly captured the King’s instability. Derek Welton made for an uncommonly vivid Herald, hinting intriguingly at psychological complications from a wartime past. 

Last but far from least, William Spaulding’s Royal Opera Chorus sounded on as fine form as I can recall for some time. How welcome, moreover, it was to have a large chorus seemingly unrestricted—reality may have been different—by pandemic restrictions in what it could do and, above all, how it could sing. Ultimately, then, it was that crucial, yet often elusive, sense of a dramatic whole that served to distinguish revival from first incarnation.

Anderszewski/Philharmonia/Hrůša - Beethoven and Mahler, 15 February 2018

Royal Festival Hall

Beethoven: Piano Concerto no.1 in C major, op.15

Mahler: Symphony no.5


Piotr Anderszewski (piano)
Philharmonia Orchestra
Jakub  Hrůša (conductor)
 

A frustrating yet far from uninteresting concert, this, the interest lying mostly in moments, corners, even in performative difference. The Festival Hall audience erupted at the end of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, but then London and indeed most other audiences do at the end of any Mahler performance, irrespective of what has actually been heard. Jakub Hrůša is a fine conductor, yet proved uneven here in Mahler. The Fifth Symphony is a very difficult work indeed to bring off; I have heard many conductors come quite unstuck here, not least, in their very different ways, Simon Rattle and Daniel Barenboim. Probably the best performance I have heard was with the same orchestra as this evening, the Philharmonia, under Daniele Gatti. Comparisons are odious, no doubt, yet Hrůša’s account here seemed very much a work-in-progress: fascinating moments, interspersed with merely loud, fast, even vulgar passages, whose structural role seemed at best unclear.

 

That said, the first movement opened promisingly, with great sadness to the phrasing in particular, although even here the balances were often brass-heavy. The Philharmonia’s string sound was cultivated to a degree, although something a little closer to the sound Rafael Kubelík drew from orchestras – he came to mind not least on account of the Beethoven concerto, on which more below – would not have gone amiss. As I was drawn in, though, there was something more sepulchral, more sinister to be heard and to be felt, almost as if through the harmonic cracks. Hrůša’s Bernstein-like hysteria I liked less, partly because it did not seem to have been born of a Bernstein-like conception of the work; it sounded more arbitrary than anything else. Ultimately, though, this, like much of the symphony, came across as something of a patchwork, not necessarily more than the sum of its parts. There was a keen sense of dualism(s) to the second movement; what I missed here was might mediate between them. Or was I trying to find something that was not there? That I asked the question spoke of a reading to take seriously. And if the music teetered sometimes on the brink of collapse, there is certainly a case to be made for such an approach.

 

The scherzo and thus the second part of the symphony proved nicely enigmatic, if just a little too episodic. It opened in intriguingly materialist fashion, without ever sounding too much like Strauss, at least until the pizzicato marionettes, who surely spoke of something beyond. The impotence of the Meistersinger-ish counterpoint really told too. The close, quite rightly, told us everything and nothing.

 

It was in the third part that doubts really set in – again, despite some thought-provoking moments. Hrůša made a bit of a meal of the Adagietto, not so much in terms of tempo as in succumbing a little too much to the temptation to pull it around. The light shone on its darker corners was, however, well directed. The final movement ideally needed a stronger sense of a whole: easier said than done, I know, yet still necessary. That its mood fell somewhere between gentle humour and mockery was certainly to be applauded, as was the impression of an object of enigmatic fascination.

 

Hrůša seemed on surer ground with Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, and the Philharmonia – somewhat scaled back, yet not unduly – proved quite outstanding here. The problem lay more with Piotr Anderszewski, who seemed unsure quite what he thought of the work. He was quite capable of yielding on occasion, sometimes magically so; by the same token, there was something bracingly modernistic to gleaming, almost Bauhaus-like passages. Others, however, sounded merely brutal. Perhaps it was indicative of a lack of a meeting of minds that Anderszewski seemed at his keenest and most coherent in the first movement cadenza. Hrůša and the Philharmonia might almost have been Kubelík and his Bavarian Radio orchestra, whether in tone or in melodic and harmonic understanding. I should have loved to hear them play Beethoven with another pianist, or with Anderszewski in a different mood – or, indeed, in one of the symphonies.

Carmen, Royal Opera, 6 February 2018

Royal Opera House

Carmen (Anna Goryachova)
Images: Bill Cooper

Moralès – Gyula Nagy

Micaëla – Kristina Mkhitaryan
Don José – Francesco Meli
Zuniga – David Soar
Carmen – Anna Goryachova
Frasquita – Jacquelyn Stucker
Mercédès – Aigul Akhmetshina
Escamillo – Kostas Smoriginas
Dancaïro – Pierre Doyen
Remendada – Jean-Paul Fouchécourt
Voice of Carmen – Claude de Demo
 

Barrie Kosky (director)

Katrin Lea Tag (designs)
Joachim Klein (lighting)
Otto Pichler (choreography)
Zsolt Horpácsy (dramaturgy)
Alan Barnes (assistant director)


Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Jakub Hrůsá (conductor)

At least Francesca Zambello and her donkey are gone. The Royal Opera’s previous production of Carmen worked in its way – not entirely unlike Meyerbeer at less than his best – yet it offered neither ambition nor insight; indeed, it appeared not even to try. Barrie Kosky rarely lacks ambition; insight is often more hit or miss, though. Kosky is a frustratingly inconsistent director: he is capable of outstanding work and something not far from its opposite. This Carmen is neither. First seen in Frankfurt in 2016, it offers an apparently arbitrary mixture of abstract grand opéra – surely the Intendant of Berlin’s Komische Oper should have a little more respect for, or at least understanding of opéra comique – and the irritating silliness of ‘look at us’ variety show routines. A few visually arresting moments, courtesy of Katrin Lea Tag’s designs, notwithstanding, it amounts to substantially less than the sum of its parts, not least on account of its perverse apparent lack of interest in characterisation.



I am not at all opposed to the idea of something adventurous being done with, even to, Carmen. It will always survive. Dmitri Tcherniakov’s recent, superlative Aix staging showed what can be done with a fundamental rethinking of the work. Not the least of its interesting insights was how, if we decentre Carmen, look at the action, in this case already very much in the realm of metatheatre, from the standpoint of, say, Don José, Carmen might actually become a far more interesting character. Kosky seems at times to inch towards the metatheatrical. ‘Don’t we all?’ one might well ask. However, it is only, ultimately, with the insight, if one can call it that, that Carmen is a show, all singing, all dancing – except when, occasionally, it is not. And so, the steps, certainly a fine edifice in themselves, and suggestive both of an amphitheatre and a bullring – are they not often the same thing in any case? – offer a way for the action to look at us, and for the characters not to look at each other. That is pretty much it, though. The loss, moreover, in never really knowing who anyone is – or rather knowing, but not on account of anything the production is showing or suggesting – is great. One can imagine the pseudish Christof Loy doing something like this; indeed, he did in his dreadful Lulu. Kosky is capable of much better than that, though.

 

The lack of realism – as an æsthetic: I am certainly not insisting that one ‘must’ see a romanticised Seville – inevitably hampers the musical performances too. In this weird abstraction, especially when punctuated by lengthy, breathy, soft-porn-style readings from the ‘Voice of Carmen’, over loudspeakers, we lose sight, aural sight too, of connections in the score as much as on stage. Again, it is not that I have a problem in principle with attempting an alternative to the dialogue, ‘edited by Barrie Kosky’ or not. However, the loss of a true sense, whether ‘then’ or ‘now’, of opéra comique, is not compensated for by any other gain. Further misguided performing choices, ‘after the critical edition by Michael Rot, adapted by Constantinos Carydis for Frankfurt Opera, 2016)’, conspire to the general ‘effect without cause’ of making heavy weather indeed out of so ‘Mediterranean’ a work.

 

I have never heard a poor performance from Jakub Hrůsá, a conductor I admire greatly. Here he certainly proved suggestive, in an admirably anti-Nietzschean way, of a ‘symphonic’ Carmen, Beethoven and even Wagner often coming to mind. Whether that really might be what Carmen needs, let us leave on one side; I had my doubts, but there are possibilities here worth exploring. In this context, however, it seemed more another confusing strand. Whilst Hrůsá often drew fine playing from the orchestra, in terms of colour, precision, even harmonic motion, there were perhaps a few too many slips, not least from the brass. Likewise, whilst choral singing was generally good, there were also passages in which stage and pit fell noticeably, disconcertingly out of sync. Such problems I can well imagine being ironed out in subsequent performances.

 

Escamillo (Kostas Smoriginas)

Anna Goryachova sang well enough in the title role, with clean command of line. I could often make little sense of her French, however, without the titles. Moreover, I had the strong sense she would have made more of an impression, if not in a smaller theatre, then at least in a more intimate production. The same could be said of most of the cast: hardly their fault. Francesco Meli’s all-purpose Italianate style had its moments, and in some senses might have been better suited to the staging. One surely wants something a little more idiomatic for Don José, though, and surely less coarse on top. Kristina Mkhitaryan’s Micaëla sounded curiously undifferentiated from Carmen, but again that was not necessarily the fault of either singer. The production offered her little opportunity to show who she was, but again she sang well enough. Quite why Escamillo was turned into a figure of mere camp is anyone’s guess; Kostas Smoriginas did what he could in the circumstances, and yes, you have guess it, did that well enough. Indeed, there were no causes for complaint amongst any of the cast. Ultimately, however, for all the production’s increasingly attempts, somehow both desperate and smug, to ‘entertain’, proceedings quickly became more tedious than anything else. That is an achievement of sorts for Carmen, but a sad one. Carmen’s shrug at the end – it had all been just a very protracted game – said it all really.

RSB/Hrůša - Dvořák, 17 November 2017

Philharmonie

Stabat Mater, op.58

Simona Šaturová (soprano)

Elisabeth Kulman (contralto)

Steve Davislim (tenor)

Jan Martiník (bass)

Berlin Radio Choir (chorus master: Rustam Samedov)

Schola of the Berlin Radio Choir (chorus master: Benjamin Goodson)

Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra

Jakub Hrůša (conductor)

For whatever reason – I could speculate on a few, but shall not do so here – many, if not all, large-scale choral works from the nineteenth century seem to have fallen out of fashion, perhaps especially in Britain. Brahms’s German Requiem will surely always have a following, and rightly so; but I have managed to hear Elijah – formerly, at least to the Victorians, ‘“the” Elijah’ – precisely once, and St Paul never. Nor had I ever heard Dvořák’s Stabat Mater before in concert. (As for the following Verdi’s Requiem has, it can only be accounted for by the following mysteriously acquired by the rest of his regrettable œuvre.) It was a delight, then, to hear such a fine performance from the Berlin Radio Choir and its ‘Schola’, the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra (RSB), and Jakub Hrůša. Even if I had my doubts about some of the solo contributions, they were largely on matters of taste rather than anything more fundamental.

To ascribe grief – and ultimately, consolation – in such a musical setting straightforwardly to personal circumstances will usually be to sentimentalise; artistic creation is never, thank God, quite so straightforward as that. Nevertheless, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that the sequential loss of his three children may have had some connection with what Dvořák wrote, even though it goes far beyond that, to what we might at a pinch – before deconstruction sets in – still consider a (more) universal message. His setting is certainly an unusually powerful, focused work for a composer whose unevenness and, sometimes, formal inadequacy are often skated over by apologists of nationalist and other hues. (That hapless Seventh Symphony, for instance, whatever its incidental pleasures!) At his best, Dvořák is excellent indeed; all too often, however, he is not at his best. He comes at least close to that best here, I think, and often indeed reaches it.

Its opening sadness – first, those extraordinary repeated F-sharps, the sharp sign a longstanding piece of musical crucifixion iconography, then a crucial, as it were, descending figure – registered not only powerfully, but, in a dynamic sense, dramatically. Icy or, better, cold – since it is certainly human – that descending orchestral figure grew ever more intense with every sequential or developmental reliving of its pain. Here, as often in this work, Dvořák proves more ‘symphonic’ than in any of his symphonies, or at least more consistently so – with, as ever, the great exception of the deservedly popular Ninth. Or maybe, I began to wonder, given the distinction of the performance, it was just that I had not heard Hrůša conduct them. The music seeped into, formed the foundation, motivic and dramatic, for the first movement (choral and soloists): soft at first, building to beautifully shaped climaxes, without merely determining it. Indeed such was the distinction of the choral singing, words and notes equally well projected, that one had the retrospective sense that the words of the poem had determined the music of the introduction too.

Alas, soprano Simona Šaturová’s first entry was, quite frankly, weak, and both the tenor (Steve Davislim) and bass (Jan Martiník) proved rather ‘operatic’, in an almost Verdian way, for me. Only Elisabeth Kulman’s predictably excellent way, rich of tone, thoughtful of words, seemed in keeping with the rest of the performance. Davislim and Martiník sang very well on their own terms, though, and I can only presume that Hrůša had no problem with those terms either. It does one no harm, in any case, to listen to performances of high quality that do not correspond to how one instinctively, or indeed otherwise, hears a work in one’s head. In that sense, only Šaturová was disappointing, and she improved as the work proceeded. If her vowels were odd, and her consonants often indistinct, in her later duet (‘Fac, ut portem Christi mortem), her line was much cleaner by then.

A great strength to Hrůša’s reading was that there was always a strong sense of the work as a whole, just as in a symphony. Individual movements, or numbers, or whatever we want to call them, were sections of the poem, not poems in themselves. And so, the second movement Quartet followed on, related to, intensifying, certainly not repeating the mood of its predecessor. Even if I did not always care for the style of the solo singing, the RSB’s playing was second to none, not least the sweetness and warmth of the strings. (Czech music is no better served by ascribing some birth right to ‘national’ orchestras, than English music is. Who, after all, is better with Elgar today than Daniel Barenboim?) Fundamentals, in the harmonic and a more general sense, were always well taken care of: generative, again just as they would be in a symphony. The following chorus continued in similar vein: which, again, is to stress ‘continued’, with the kinship and difference that implies. The cries of ‘fac’ were every bit as ‘dramatic’ as one could have hoped for, not least since they were presented in context, no mere ‘effect’.

Different characters were to be heard in the following movements: never unnecessarily contrasted, but likewise never quite drawn from the same colours. Brahms, for instance, haunted the tenor solo and chorus, ‘Fac me vere tecum flere’, but in the orchestral sound itself, orchestral and textures themselves simpler, yet undeniably radiant. As the work progressed, transformation, even perhaps transfiguration, crept upon us. It was difficult to say precisely where or when: doubtless as it should be. Hrůša’s control of large-scale structures proved just as un-showily impressive as it had earlier this year when I heard him conduct – magnificently – the Beethoven Violin Concerto.

The neo-Baroque character of the penultimate movement, the solo contralto ‘Inflammatus’ was for me very much a highpoint – both of work and performance. Compassion here seemed very much to the fore, both for Kulman and the orchestra. Perhaps unsurprisingly by now, but certainly not to be taken for granted, Hrůša proved masterly in binding together the work in its final quartet and chorus. It was not merely a recognition of reappearance of earlier material, but of its developmental quality; contextual difference spoke just as strongly as similarity. There was ambiguity, quite rightly, at the close: exultant, yet not unalloyed. That one could – and this listener, at least, did – read back into what we had heard before. This, then, was an excellent concert; I was sad only to have had to miss the bonus concert of a cappella works scheduled immediately afterwards.

Zimmermann/VSO/Hrůša - Beethoven and Franck, 6 June 2017

Grosser Saal, Konzerthaus

Beethoven – Violin Concerto in D major, op.61

Franck – Symphony in D minor

Frank Peter Zimmermann (violin)

Vienna Symphony Orchestra

Jakub Hrůša (director)

What a wonderful surprise! It was not that I had not expected something good; I should hardly have dragged myself to another Beethoven Violin Concerto if not, still less to a performance of a symphony about which I felt decidedly ambivalent (if not nearly so hostile as many seem to). Frank Peter Zimmermann had given, with Bernard Haitink and the LSO, what had been probably the best performance I had ever heard in concert. Moreover, Jakob Hrůša had impressed me last year in Glyndebourne’s Cunning Little Vixen, and I had heard good things about him from others too. Nevertheless, to hear a performance that exceeded my memories of the Haitink, not least on account of a truly astonishing contribution from the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, and an account of Franck’s D minor Symphony that had me wondering, at least until the finale, whether all my doubts concerning the work had been misplaced, came as significantly more than I might dared have hope.

The first movement of the Beethoven was taken swiftly, but never harried (not unlike, indeed, Zimmermann’s performance with Haitink, so I presume this must be his concept). What struck me immediately was the cultivated sound Hrůša drew from the VSO; I really do not think I am merely lapsing into some sort of ‘national’ stereotype when I say that the sound reminded me of the Czech Philharmonic in its heyday, or indeed one of Rafael Kubelík’s bands. There was something Bohemian, to be sure, about the character of the orchestral playing, at least as I heard it; it was certainly not sweetly Viennese, to resort to another caricature. The other striking, indeed surprising, thing about the opening ritornello was Zimmermann’s playing along for parts of it; I am not quite sure why, but it did not detract from his official entry, since one never heard him individually. When that did come, his playing offered a combination of the best of ‘old school’ tone with a variegation that one does not always, rightly or wrongly, associate with some of those hallowed performances of old. A simple – or not so simple – scale could encompass great musical variety, with the emphasis on ‘musical’; this was not variety, nor was it difference, for the sake of it. And all the time, Hrůša emphasised, subtly yet unquestionably, the dynamic process of Beethoven’s motivic working, its generative quality. Woodland woodwind sounded heartbreakingly beautiful; one could almost see Beethoven on one of his countryside walks, hear what he heard, transmuted into gold. Zimmermann’s cadenza did more or less what one would have expected it to do, if not quite always in the way one would have expected: different again, then, without that difference being for its own sake. A coda as autumnal as Brahms offered one brief, final blaze; as so often, at the close, Beethoven says just enough, no more than that.

The slow movement proved the most tender of songs, with multiple soloists, the VSO wind singing with just as great distinction as Zimmermann, bassoon and horns as ravishingly beautiful as any of those instruments more accustomed to the soloistic limelight. If anything, I think these instrumentalists incited Zimmermann to still greater heights. ‘Rapt’ is doubtless a word overused, not least by me, but it seems apt, as it were, here. A masterly transition to the finale was Zimmermann’s doing, of course, but the broader character of the finale was again as much Hrůša’s and the orchestra’s doing as Zimmermann’s. Impish, exhilarating playing had one’s ears on tenterhooks, in the best way. Once again, Hrůša’s subtle yet sure tracing of Beethoven’s motivic dynamism provided the basis for everything else that ensued.

The opening figure of Franck’s D minor Symphony sounded full of Lisztian promise, with lower string tone simply to die for. The violins’ response proved to be of equal distinction, as indeed soon was that of the entire orchestra. Once again, the playing of the VSO, and Hrůša’s conducting sounded – however lame this might sound on the page – as if it were imbued with the very spirit of music. Even when the first movement were driven hard, as sometimes it was, it grew out of what had gone before; indeed, it made me wonder what Wagner from these forces might sound like (not something I say lightly). Even the frankly vulgar passages in Franck’s score made me smile, even shiver a little, rather than frown. This was certainly a superior performance in every way to the over-praised recordings from Leonard Bernstein (which may have done a great deal to put me off the work). For there was delicacy, even tenderness, to be heard too, in a performance that at the very least seemed to reach for Lisztian heights. I do not think, indeed, that I have heard a performance, whether in the concert hall or even on record, in which the music had so clearly been internalised by conductor and orchestra (well, perhaps, Klemperer, but otherwise…)

The Allegretto was inexorable, yes, but charming too, with a wealth of orchestral colour that had me think several times of Berlioz. I was able by now simply to sit back and enjoy, quite convinced that any previous fault had lain with me, not with the work. If I still did not feel that the finale quite came off, it came closer than I could recall, uniting tendencies, not just material, from both previous movements. It wore its workings on its sleeve, of course, but does not Berg’s music, or Stravinsky’s, for that matter, too? There was much, then, for me to think about after the event, even more for me to relish in the moment. This was, in summary, a quite outstanding concert.