Tristan und Isolde, Wagner – Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona – 12/1/26

Clay Hilley, Tristan; Brindley Sherratt, King Marke; Isolde, Lise Davidsen;Tomasz Konieczny, Kurwenal; Melot, Roger Padullés; Brangäne, Ekaterina Gubanova; A shepherd / A sailor, Albert Casals; Milan Perišić, A helmsman. Director, Bárbara Lluch; Scenery and lighting, Urs Schönebaum; Costumes, Clara Peluffo; Conductor Susanna Mälkki

I spent a pleasant morning and early afternoon wandering around the centre of Barcelona, seeing the Gaudi-designed house Casa Batllo and having a very good tapas meal, with Eastern connotations, with an old friend also in Barcelona for Tristan,. After a quick rest, then, on to the Liceu Opera House. This has apparently been burnt down three times, the last in 1994 – but it has been finely restored to its original state. It’s a tall theatre (5 tiers) and with a stage that is certainly adequate but not enormous. I was sitting towards the back of the stalls, The sound was warm and resonant – the orchestra in particular sounding gorgeous, and the singers had no difficulty in cutting through the orchestra even at the loudest moments. So – a good theatre, I thought, and with less dampening of sound than Covent Garden.

I have not seen that many performances of Tristan after the 1970’s. I heard two performances at Bayreuth in 2017 and 2024, both musically very good but, in the Bayreuth mode, without surtitles, and with questionable regie-theater interventions, and a Proms/Glyndebourne semi-staged performance in 2021. Because of the English surtitles, and because of the quality of the performance, this Barcelona production was probably the most gripping, engaging account of the work I have seen since those glory days in the 70’s (Kleiber at Bayreuth, Nilsson at ROHCG, and also Vickers).                                                                                    

Taking on the role of Isolde, and subsequently Brunnhilde, is something that many Wagnerians have hoped Lise Davidsen would agree to, and so there was an excited international component to the audience for this performance, of admirers of her singing from many different countries here in Barcelona both to support her and hear her sing the role for the first time. (January 12th was the first night of this run, so her debut in the role, though she has sung Act 2 in public with Simon Rattle before).  All in all, it was an extremely fine performance which showed her to be in very good voice, her time off for child-birth having had no discernible impact on her characteristic sound,  It was – above all – a thought-through performance, where the phrasing of every line seemed to have been considered afresh.  She was commanding in the narrations of Act 1, with top notes securely pinged out, and, while she isn’t always a magnetic stage presence and can seem awkward on stage, here she looked very much the angry and formidable Irish princess, and her actions conveyed her frustration and her contempt of Tristan. Elsewhere she demonstrated the importance of stillness in achieving a credible stage presence. Her diction was excellent and there were many examples of shaded phrasing accentuating critical lines. In the love potion scene, and much more so in the love scene of Act 2, she produced some meltingly soft phrasings (her singing contemplating the word ‘and’, for example), while her vocal power in extinguishing the flame and in the final moments of the love duet were astonishing. It is very difficult in listening to the ‘Liebestod’ not to bring to mind the way many others – Nilsson, Flagstad, Meier – have sung it; the  powerful thing about Lise Davidsen’s performance was that it felt quite fresh – she wasn’t simply repeating how others had sung it, and she sung beautifully some parts which others have glossed over, while in turn not using the same approach as others had to other parts of the text. There was a dream-like wondering quality to her singing of the Liebestod, and this, and the sound of her glorious voice riding over the orchestra at full throttle at the climax, made for a memorable ending, and with a most beautifully floated last top note on ‘lust’ . Ms Davidsen has allowed a brief clip of the opening of the Liebestod, made presumably by the theatre staff, to be attached to her Facebook page – the link is here – https://www.facebook.com/reel/3213889715451005

This was a starry cast and there were no weak links. Clay Hilley is one of the three or so Tristans of choice at present and you can see why. His is not a very powerful voice, but he has the stamina to still sound fresh at the end of the third act, and he delivers the text in an intelligent way, with lots of dynamic variations and colour. He doesn’t have the ardour of Andreas Schager, but, still, he is very good, and parts of his Act 3 monologues were very moving, particularly towards the end. Tomasz Konieczny as Kurwenal is luxury casting – he has been the go-to Wotan at Bayreuth for a number of years. He sung it as well as anyone I have ever heard (though I can’t now remember much about Norman Bailey in the role) and was absolutely believable as Tristan’s bluff comrade.  The Brangäne, Ekaterina Gubanova, is another Bayreuth regular (she sung a very fine Kundry there two years ago which I saw). Hers is not a rich or warm voice, but her vocal style seemed admirably suited to the anxious, doubting character she was playing – even her vibrato felt part of the character. Her warnings in Act 2 were beautifully sung. And Brindley Sherratt was wonderfully sonorous as King Mark – I am sure his was the best account of the long Act 2 lament I have ever heard. I realised that the Melot, Roger Padullés, had been singing the tenor role the previous day in the Messiah at the Palau de la Musica  – his Melot was as suitably thuggish as his Handel singing was bright and clear.

Susanna Mälkki is a name I have come across but I have never heard her conduct before, and as far as I can make out, from an admittedly cursory review of the web, she’s not had much experience of conducting Wagner in the opera house, though it looks as though she has conducted Tristan, or at least extracts of it. I was very impressed by her reading of the score, for the following reasons:

  • She had clearly been working closely and well with the orchestra and they sounded very fine indeed. There were a few wobbles of ensemble in the first act but after that everything went smoothly. Some of the playing in the love duet was beyond sumptuous
  • Her reading was flexible, and she was careful not to overpower the singers (which admittedly may not be possible with Ms Davidsen). Her pace at the start of the love duet was very fast, her prelude to Act 3 very slow – thus she let the emotional waves of the music ebb and flow, and didn’t impose too tight a framework, so that the audience wasn’t consciously aware that there was a directing mind behind it. Here’s a video clip of her curtain call – https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1C88vhNJyC/

I hadn’t quite appreciated in advance that – though there was an apparently fully serviceable 10 year old production in the Liceu’s repetoire, this was actually a new production – I read in a Spanish newspaper (possibly stirring it) this was because Ms Davidsen wanted her debut to be in a production directed and conducted by women. Fair enough, and the conductor choice worked out brilliantly – the directing etc less so. The production would have gladdened the hearts of those who grumble about regie-theater  . There were no underlying concepts at odds with the music and text, but just a simple telling of the story, and so far so good – this worked very well. King Mark even wore a crown, and there was a love potion! However one felt at times there could have been a bit more personen-regie. The love potion scene seemed clumsily handled – Tristan and Isolde wandering around a bit aimlessly. A few times there was a standard stand-and-bark/two-singers-at-the-front set-up with all eyes on the conductor (though of course musically it was very far from barking). There was little or no set (a la New Bayreuth) – just a stage and a back-screen, and in Act 3 a kind of mirror suspended over the stage. There was some obvious light/dark contrasted lighting, as this is a basic element of the text, but oddly there seemed to be a bright light throughout the Liebestod, which seemed counter-intuitive to me – shouldn’t this be sung to gradually enclosing darkness (like Act 2, which had a lovely starry sky projected on the screen)? When the stage team came on at the end, there was a kind of growl of disapproval, and a certain amount of booing……..

Here’s a clip of all the curtain calls from the Liceu Facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/reel/821117084268049

Anyway, some production oddities aside, which didn’t matter much in the overall scheme of things, this was an outstanding performance. I am so glad I went to Barcelona to see it. Sadly I can’t see Ms Davidsen’s Met performance of Isolde screening on 21 March as I will be at Siegfried at ROHCG that night, but I am hoping to get to a Schubert song recital in late May at the Wigmore Hall

Handel, Messiah (extracts). Palau de la Música, Barcelona. 11/1/26

Irene Mas, soprano; Daniel Folqué, alto; Roger Padullés, tenor; Josep-Ramon Olivé, baritone; Cor de Cambra de Granollers; Vespres d’Arnadí; Xavier Puig, conductor

The principal purpose of my visit to Barcelona was to hear Lise Davidsen singing the role of Isolde for the first time, but I am also taking in this concert of Messiah extracts and doing some sightseeing (I have only ever spent one night in Barcelona before). My trip to Barcelona was smooth apart from the prospect of having to sit next to a very large and furry ginger cat in a basket for 6hrs and 50 mins on a train from Paris to Barcelona. Its owner dearly wanted to cuddle it on her lap but, in my fractured French, I suggested it was not a good idea to let the cat out of the bag (as it were) as my asthma is normally set off by cats after an hour or two. Another seat eventually became available – just in time; I was beginning to wheeze.

After a pleasant 15 minute walk through the Gothic Quarter to the Pallau de la Musica the next morning, I found myself amazed by the building. I hadn’t read up on it and assumed it was some 60’s/70;s concert hall with carefully thought-out acoustics and bland furnishings. In fact, it’s over 100 years old, and stunning. The concert hall was designed by the architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner – alongside Gaudí one of the most important representatives of modernism in Spain.  Construction began in 1905 and the Palace of Music was inaugurated in 1908. The Palau de la Música Catalana has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1997. It is in art nouveau style, I would have said, and remarkably riveting to look at – the photographs below show the concert hall, and the beautiful ceiling, as well as the chunky quite strange outside of the building.

The concert consisted of about 75 minutes of the ‘Messiah’ with an encore of the Hallelujah chorus.  It included most of the big numbers – some of the recitatives I am sure were left out along with the pastoral music for the shepherds. The band was an expert period instrument one, with some very fine natural trumpeters, and all the energetically alert sound you would expect from Baroque strings. The chorus were about 40 in number and all looked like young professional musicians – they made a powerful impression and the different voice parts seemed well-blended. They sung with good attack and were very much together. I was wondering afterwards whether in fact I had ever heard a period instrument band play this live before – I suspect not, or not so you would notice. The only performances I can remember are amateur performances in Cairo and Accra, and in Autumn 2024 at Westminster Abbey, where the Abbey Choir was used, and, although a period band probably was playing, the soggy acoustics of the Abbey meant that it didn’t come across as such, apart from some highly percussive sounding timpani. I was sitting at the side almost on top of the band in the Palau de la musica and, although I do grumble in these pages about the lack of subtlety and finesse sometimes in period band performances, and the speed with which things are taken, as with the Irish Baroque orchestra, the sheer energy and vivacity of this concert was overwhelming. But more than that, it was carefully phrased and characterised, finding physical shape in Xavier Puig’s conducting , which was constantly attentive and demonstrated a thoughtful grading of the dynamics of the piece. The 4 soloists – a soprano, a counter-tenor, tenor and bass, were all very good – from where I was sitting the counter-tenor seemed to project less intensely than the others but that could just be my problem.

The whole 75 minutes – the work, with its extraordinary fertility of invention and melody, the performance, the setting – felt like a great wave of joy, with the bright winter sunlight shining through the extraordinary windows of the concert hall. This, already, must be on my longlist of top performances for 2026

An English Song Winterreise  Wigmore Hall, 9/1/26

Roderick Williams baritone; Christopher Glynn piano. Songs by Vaughan Williams, Quilter, Dring, Finzi, Bridge, Parry, Gurney, Boyle,  Britten, Williams, Weir, Tippett, Maconchy, Carwithen, Procter-Gregg, Wallen.  

I hadn’t appreciated that the reference in the programme to Winterreise wasn’t just a slightly fluffed up way of describing a gloomy set of English songs with a wintery theme, but very precisely described a set of songs established by Roddy Williams to not only to have the same number of lyrics as the Schubert cycle but also for each English song to be an equivalent in some way or other to the Schubert song at the same position in the cycle. Thus the last song in this cycle – Errolyn Wallen’s Peace on Earth – in its eerie stillness and wide open-eyed brightness (it’s a fine song) elegantly matches Schubert’s Der Leiermann. Mr Williams explained that he first had the idea of putting songs together in this way when he was learning the Schubert cycle in German.  I guess some of the songs you’d choose are fairly obvious – gloomy Hardy poems comprise 7 out of the 24, and Vaughan Williams Songs of Travel are another predictable choice, but there’s also RL Stevenson, Shakespeare Yeats, de la Mare and others. And although the likes of RVW, Finzi, Gurney, Quilter etc provide 14 of the songs, there are also contemporary / non-cowpat songs by the likes of Machonchy, Weir, Wallen and Williams himself. And some composers I’ve never heard of – Ina Boyle, Humphrey Procter-Gregg…… So what’s notable  – as you can see from the list of composers – is the sheer variety of works Roddy Williams is drawing from, and that he includes some well-known pieces  – the Britten Winter Words song, for example –  alongside works completely unknown to me.

All the songs were superbly delivered by Mr Williams, each song well characterised, and with both clear diction and sensitive phrasing. He has a very easy manner on stage, fairly still, expressive hands,  which helps you to focus on the music. His voice has just the right volume range for the Wigmore Hall.

Songs I found I enjoyed particularly, in addition to the Wallen ending, were Williams’ setting of Blake’s The Angel, Ina Boyle’ A Song of Enchantment, RVW’s Linden Lea (parallel to Der Lindenbaum) and two Finzi/Hardy settings – In a Churchyard and Waiting Both.

There was a brief encore – a Schubert setting of Goethe, with a sense of final peace. This was a very fine evening  – a great musical start to the New Year….It was a full and very enthusiastic house, too. Williams always has lots of very vocal fans!

Thalassa Piano Trio, Regent Hall, 9/1/26

Thalassa Piano Trio. Beethoven, Piano Trio Op 70, no 2; Babajamian, Piano Trio  in F# minor

As often has been the case over the past few years, I have found myself planning to be at a Wigmore Hall recital – because there’s always something interesting happening there – the night before setting off on the Eurostar the following morning for another European opera/concert trip. The trip this time is to Barcelona – see above for posts next week – but the Wigmore Hal recital by Roddy Williams was a programme that looked very well worthwhile listening to in its own right, and I might have come down for it even if I wasn’t going on to Paris the next morning.

However, this time planning went slightly awry, and the force of Storm Goretti, which closed all railway lines near my home from 6pm on 8/1 to Saturday 10/1,  meant that I had to come down a day earlier to London than planned. That had various negative consequences financially, but one pleasant result was being able to go to this lunchtime concert.

I had never been in the Regent Hall before – it is a fine building, run by the Salvation Army with a café and advice centre as well as a large auditorium which the SA use for Sunday worship but which has extremely good acoustics – lots of wood around – and is excellent for recitals, holding maybe 300-400 people. Curiously it is right in the middle of Oxford Street, on the other side of the road from John Lewis.

The Thalassa Trio is multi-national (hence the title – people coming from both sides of the Atlantic) but formed at the RAM. To my surprise I discovered beforehand I only had a recording of the Beethoven ‘Ghost; and ‘Archduke’ piano trios and had never heard the Op 70 no 2 piece before. In 4 movements, it is a very attractive work – with a slow haunting introduction  (poco sostenuto) almost offering a glimpse of the world of the late quartets and some very fine broad striding Beethovenian melodies, particularly in the third and fourth movements. The players gave it lots of energy – which is right – though from where I was sitting the violin was occasionally a bit over-powered by the cello. But I enjoyed this enough to listen to it again on Youtube when I got back to my hotel in the afternoon. A nice find!

Arno Babajamian was a completely new name to me – a Soviet-era Armenian composer, a bit younger than Khachaturian, and writing in a variety of styles – popular music, film scores but also ‘serious’ music. He apparently often uses Armenian folk tunes (as a good Soviet composer would have been expected to do). The work is frankly not that interesting –  some Rachmaninov touches, occasional hints of Shostakovich. It had a particular problem in knowing when to stop in the first and third movements, where things seemed to judder to an abrupt halt rather than emerging from an organic process. The second movement was lovely, though.

Live concert and opera highlights I have been to in 2025

It’s been another extraordinary year for high quality classical music performances I’ve attended. These are my top ten performance highlights, in no particular order:

1.           Mahler Symphony No 2: Wong, Halle, Bridgewater Hall

2.           R.Strauss, Arabella:  Runnicles, Deutsche Oper Berlin

3.           Wagner, Die Walkure: Pappano,. ROHCG

4.           R.Strauss, Die Liebe der Danae: Bayern Staatsoper, Schager/Bystrom/Maltman

5.           Mozart, String Quintets K515/516: Takacs Quartet, Wigmore Hall

6.           Puccini, Suor Angelica, Pappano, LSO, RAH Proms

7.           Turnage, Festen: Gardner,  ROHCG

8.           Adams, Harmonium:  Adams, Halle, Bridgewater Hall

9.           Strauss, Salome, Grigorian, Pappano,  LSO, Barbican

10.         Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro, ENO

It was difficult to choose these ten. There were so many others I could have chosen – a powerful Brahms 4 with Rattle, and LSO, in January along with Janacek’s Jenufa at ROHCG conducted by Hrusa. I loved the Beethoven 9 the Halle performed with their talented chief conductor Kahchun Wong in February, along with the excellent Regents Opera performance of Walkure in Bethnal Green. March saw some superb performances – the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, with the Berlin Phil and Hrusa, alongside Strauss’ Intermezzo, at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. It was very good indeed to hear another live Mahler 8 after 5 years, conducted by Ed Gardner with the LPO in April.  There were a number of excellent Handel opera productions, notably Semele, at ROHCG and Partenope, at ENO. At the Proms, there was one of the best Beethoven 7’s I’ve ever heard (Budapest Festival Orchestra / Ivan Fischer) and a jagged exciting Sibelius 2, with the Leipzig GO, and Andris Nelsons, while Anna Netrebko was unforgettable in December’s Turandot, and there was an excellent performance of Die Schweigsame Frau in Berlin, with Thielemann conducting, in July

Turandot, Puccini – ROHCG – 18/12/25

Director, Andrei Șerban; Designer, Sally Jacobs; Lighting designer, F. Mitchell Dana; Conductor, Daniel Oren. Cast: Princess Turandot, Anna Netrebko; Calaf, Yusif Eyvazov; Liù, Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha; Timur, Rafał Siwek; Ping, Simone Del Savio; Pang, Emmanuel Fonoti-Fuimaono; Pong, James Kryshak; Emperor Altoum, Raúl Giménez; Mandarin, Ossian Huskinson

I spent my day in London partly at my laptop, partly doing some shopping, before going to Choral Evensong (some very fine Palestrina) at St Paul’s Cathedral and then on to Covent Garden for Turandot. I’ve seen this production once before, in 2017. It is one of Covent Garden’s most venerable ones – at least 40 years ago – but it still looks very good., and much less silly than the equally venerable Met Zeffirelli offering I saw on screen a few years ago. I thought at that time that I had probably had enough of live Turandot performances for the foreseeable future, but I reckoned without the return of Anna Netrebko to the Covent Garden stage. I have heard her only once live before – as Tatiana in Eugene Onegin in Vienna in 2015 – and I was fascinated to see how she would perform Turandot and whether her voice was right for the role.

I realised that apart from possibly in the 70s (did I see Nilsson in this role? – I seem to remember the Cecil Beaton sets but think it was probably Amy Shuard in 1973), I have only seen Turandot live that once, in 2017. And I also realised that, while I know the famous parts of the music from recordings, I don’t know the details of the plot and what the characters are doing in any detail. I found this performance gripping throughout until after the death of Liu. It may be 40 years old but it is a tremendous show, with its dancers, masks, carts and chariots, red ribbons flying down, huge cut-off heads,  the emperor coming down from Heaven, the floating moon and the towering sets. It is never over the top in the Met manner and the masks, the emphasis on the blood and cruelty, made the setting sinister, not just a tawdry bit of early 20th century Orientalism. The agony of the Chinese people under the terrible regime of Turandot is emphasised – I had never really picked up on the desperate choruses before. Although I suppose cultural appropriation is involved, the production seemed less disrespectful than the Met one. In fact, at the end of the 2nd act, I was in a state of high excitement – this must really be, I thought, one of the best things I’ve been to this year. However, as I guess in every production of Turandot, you cannot hide the fact that what happens after .the death of Liu in Act 3 – which was where in completed full score Puccini left the work when he died – is a bit of a mess, musically and dramatically. The Wikipedia article on Turandot suggests there is still Mahler 10/Elgar 3 type work to be done on Puccini’s sketches, beyond what Alfano reconstructed; there are also bits Alfano did complete which Toscanini (?) cut and aren’t always heard in modern performances. Whatever further work might be done, the ending is dramatically unconvincing and musically seems to tread water. Perhaps the fault lies with the librettists – I think Puccini was on the 4th version of the text when he died, but he had spent months trying to wrestle with the issue of how Turandot changes from ice-princess to a more normal human being. Perhaps it should have been Turandot who dies and not Liu……? Until the death of Liu, I was constantly amazed by the colour of the score and how attuned it was to the work of Puccini’s contemporaries – there’s flecks of Debussy, Stravinsky and Mahler to be heard, but all recast into something immediately recognisable as Puccini. After the death of Liu I found my enthusiasm flagging and felt increasingly disengaged.

Anna Netrebko was simply tremendous as Turandot. She has the classic operatic superstar ability to make you focus on her every move and she commands the stage whenever she is on it. Martin Kettle in his Guardian review puts her in the Callas/Sutherland league. I never saw either of them, so can’t comment, but certainly she has that same magic that some singers I have seen – Janet Baker, Boris Christoff, Birgit Nilsson – possessed. Her voice was much more powerful than I was expecting, pinging out the top notes, and with an impressive lower register. I heard little of the Slavonic vibrato I was also anticipating. What I did hear was acute attention to words, to phrasing, to line, so that everything she sings sounds freshly minted. Her rendition of the riddles was astonishingly detailed and imaginatively sung, and In questia reggia was overwhelming. This was, simply, a great performance. 

Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha is no great actor, but her Liu was beautifully and thoughtfully  sung, she was sensibly costumed and was a worthy counterpart to Netrebko on stage. About Yusif Eyvazov (Netrebko’s ex….) as Calaf, I had mixed feelings. He’s a thorough professional and Nessun Dorma was sung with all the heft it needs; he’s also quite a competent actor, and can use face and stance intelligently to emphasise what he’s singing. His voice is un-Italianate (fair enough, he’s Russian) and decidedly gravelly – there wasn’t much lyricism in his singing, but, I guess, if you have to balance heft against lyricism for this role, heft probably wins out. Ping, Pang and Pong made more sense than they did to me 8 and a half years ago, and I thought the way the trio worked together and got their lines across was very effective – it helped that one of them could do somersaults……Timur and the Emperor were well sung, and I should mention also the dancers, who have a lot to do in this production and have a major role in making it imposing, were tremendous.

Reviews of Daniel Oren’s conducting on the first night were universally negative – it was said he made the orchestra play too loudly and too insensitively. For me, it was good enough – the Lower Slips inevitably highlights the orchestra’s role (you’re almost sitting on top of them, though from a distance) and the voices didn’t seem overpowered by how the orchestra played this wonderful score.

Here’s a short trailer which gives a further sense of what the production looks like – Turandot

Ariodante, Handel – ROHCG – 17/12/25

Director, Jetske Mijnssen; Set designer, Etienne Pluss; Costume designer, Uta Meenen; Lighting designer, Fabrice Kebour; Conductor,  Stefano Montanari. Cast: Ariodante, (Grace Durham replaced Emily D’Angelo); Ginevra, Jacquelyn Stucker; Dalinda, Elena Villalón; Polinesso, Christophe Dumaux; Lurcanio, Ed Lyon; King of Scotland, Peter Kellner; Odoardo, Emyr Lloyd Jones

Yet another Handel opera I’ve (I think) not seen before (although ‘Doppo notte’ was more or less the first Handel opera aria I ever heard as a teenager – there was a wonderful Janet Baker version of it I possessed in a 60’s recital disc [and Baker gave the first performance in the UK of the work in the early 60’s for over 200 years]) …….Ariodante was written for the same season (1735) as Alcina as part of the Italian opera season at Covent Garden which was then riding on a wave of public enthusiasm, despite the existence of the newly formed rival company supported by the Prince of Wales (Handel’s company had the support of the King). Tre story is preposterously based in medieval Scotland and is conventional opera seria material – man and woman love each other, bad suitor tries to entice her away from her lover, using another woman in disguise, father disowns the daughter, there is a duel where the man challenges the bad suitor and everything comes back to the beginning by the end (here with a directorial tweak). It’s a long work – over 4 hours with two intervals -and makes huge demands on singers, on their acting abilities and on the creative energies of a director and designer.

Coming down on the, as usual, disrupted train journey (sadly, suicides on the Sheffield to London route seem now almost a weekly occurrence) I saw I’d received an email saying that Emily D’Angelo was ill and that her cover, Grace Durham, would be taking over the role of Ariodante. That meant that, apart from Ed Lyon, I’d not come across any of the singers before, to my knowledge. Durham herself was in fact in the ENO Cenerentola I saw two months ago, in a minor role, and she has taken on roles at Glyndebourne, Garsington, Toulouse and Zurich. In fact, though not a notably starry cast, the singing was undoubtedly excellent throughout the evening, with no weak links, and shows again that in many ways, despite all the looming financial problems for opera (which there have always been) we do live, as a friend of mine often says, in a golden age of singing.

Whether we live in a golden age of opera directing is another matter……. The director, Jetske Mijnssen, was the director of the Glyndebourne Parsifal this summer and her Ariodante curiously had some thematic connections with it – an old country house, its owner in a wheel chair, and serried ranks of well-disciplined maids, cooks and butlers.  There’s also, as with her Parsifal, a flash back sequence to the characters’ childhood in the opening prelude. Ariodante, as I’ve said, is a long evening and I wondered whether in the first two acts the director had taken too staid an approach. Perhaps it’s the work itself – in the version we heard, there is relatively little recitative, and we often move from one slow da capo aria, after a couple of connecting lines of music, to another. The director had clearly worked closely with the singers to make their individual arias as interesting as possible – pillows were thrown around, dresses danced with, the interpolation of a few grunts and screams were there, but somehow the work plodded a little (and maybe that’s just how it is, and there’s not much that can be done). There is more activity in the final act and this was a lot more engaging. Rather like the production of Jephtha recently at ROHCG, there’s a twist at the end – Ginevra, whose head has been thoroughly messed about with during the action, runs away from the long awaited wedding with Ariodante – very rightly, one felt. In the first two acts the action wasn’t, I thought, helped by the set. This was a box-like construction that deliberately didn’t use much of the large Covent Garden stage, and in Act 1 was simply a drawing room of a large country house. It was much the same in Act 2, with 2 openings to the larger stage left and right of the drawing room, to allow characters to overhear and comment what was going on. In the last act, the stage opened up, and the box=like structure fragmented, as you can see in the photos. For no particular reason, the costumes hovered between tweedy 1950’s and contemporary. All in all, I think more use of the wider stage, more props, more extraneous happening, more colours could have been brought in to enliven the staging. Also, dance – as with Alcina, Handel worked with a famous dancer, Maria Salle, and a troupe of dancers for Ariodante, but all the ballet music he wrote for the work had been cut for these performances. On the positive side, the director’s approach was relatively straight-forward and presented the work without too many annoying interventions. The ROHCG video trailer gives a little more insight into the production approach – https://www.rbo.org.uk/tickets-and-events/ariodante-jetske-mijnssen-details#about

Grace Durham, although cutting a somewhat comic Oscar-Wilde-like figure on stage, was very, very good as Ariodante – I cannot imagine Emily D’Angelo singing much better than this. The delivery of Doppo Notte was, frankly, more precise, more detailed, than Janet Baker’s version and as exciting as it should be. Her Scherza infida was stunningly beautiful – Durham has a warm, rich and powerful voice that did full justice to one of Handel’s most beautiful arias. Her voice blended beautifully with Stucker’s in the duet for her with Ariodante, “Prendi, prendi da questa mano”. Stucker as Ginevra was thoroughly believable in the role – she looked the part and had a lovely and, again, powerful soprano voice. Her aria Il mio crudel martoro was memorable (in fact Ariodante is up there with the very best of Handel’s operas in the number of great arias) and she delivered some spectacular coloratura runs. The Polinesso, Christophe Dumaux, is no Hugh Cutting but a rough edge to the voice is probably fair enough for this very unpleasant character, which he portrayed well. All the other roles were very well sung. The ROHCG orchestra sounded energetic, fluent and with a fully thought-through Baroque style, aided by the conductor who intermittently picked up his violin to play with the strings (perhaps rather flamboyantly).

Partenope, Handel – ENO, 3/12/25

William Cole, Conductor; Christopher Alden, Director; Andrew Lieberman, Set Designer; Jon Morrell, Costume Designer; Adam Silverman, Lighting Designer. Nardus Williams, Partenope; Hugh Cutting, Arsace; Ru Charlesworth, Emilio; Jake Ingbar, Armindo; Katie Bray, Rosmira; William Thomas, Ormonte

This Christopher Alden ENO production dates back to 2008 in a co-production with Opera Australia.. The production, set in a 1920s context and inspired by the surrealist images of Man Ray, was revived in 2017, and this 2025 set of performances was its third outing. The work was originally shown in London in February 1730 at the King’s Theatre, revived in December of that year and shown again in 1737. After that, there was the usual two and a third centuries of being completely forgotten before it began to be revived in the 1960’s and 70‘s. Needless to say, I’ve never heard a note of it before.

The story involves Partenope and her three suitors – Arsace, Armindo and Emilio. Arsace has dumped his previous love Rosmira, and the latter has dressed up as a an to chase and harass Arsace,  pretending to be a fourth suitor to Partenope. In the end, Armindo and Partenope, Arsace and Rosmira pair off and Emilio is left laconic and resigned to his fate.

 This was an exceptionally fine evening, though long and with two intervals. The production is consistently inventive and entertaining – the original director Christopher Alden returned to supervise this revival, and it showed in the degree of energy with which the singers engaged with their roles, and the snappiness of the action.  The feel of the production was quite varied — at times sophisticated references to 1920’s Surrealist/Dada iconography, but then combining this with slapstick, and pantomime-like gags and routines (which you feel Handel himself might have found amusing in a Swift-like way) – although maybe the Dada-ist context is itself conducive to slapstick comedy. To give some sense of the variety of what’s going on on stage, the soldier Emilio is a Man Ray-type photographer and artist, walking around at times with a frame to capture arbitrary images; Armindo gives a tap dance routine to his last aria, complete with spotlight and top hat; Armindo is also often seen tumbling downstairs; there’s a self- propelling top hat, and a lot of jokes about toilets, toilets flushing, and toilet rolls, with various characters stuck in the loo at points ((the famous 1917 exhibition entry of a toilet bowl by Marcel Duchamp might have been an influence here). A great contribution was made by the translation which captured both a sense of 18th century rhymed verse, and sudden darts into contemporary vernacular (including ‘Oh Fxxk’ at one point, as well as a few lurches into 1920’s slang.

This opera has no chorus – only a succession of brilliant and memorable da capo arias, getting off to a fizzing start with Partenope’s opening coloratura aria “L’amor ed il destin”. There are two superb arias in Act 1 – Partenope’s call to arms (while allowing someone to command her heart) is very haunting and Rosmira’s  jolly aria with the horns is equally memorable. There’s a lovely aria for Partenope in Act 2 and also Arsace’s slow aria with theorbo and strings is memorable. (in fact probably the stand out music of the whole opera). By mid-way through Act 3 I lost mental track of all the varied and moving arias i had been hearing, all for the first time.  There is a huge amount of wonderful music to explore.

The set and costumes as above are 1920’s with a huge spiral staircase stage right and an upper ledge giving access to the staircase. There is also a back wall and an exit upstage. In Act 1, we have a card table and chairs off to stage left. In the other two acts the set has revolved so that we see variants of a large hall , with various rooms off and an upstairs area partly screened. In Act 2 there is a lot of play with cameras, early 1920’s filming and film lights. The trailer here gives some further sense of the visuals –  Partenope | Buy Opera Tickets for 2025 | ENO

The undoubted star of the performance was Hugh Cutting, whose counter-tenor singing of Arsace was exquisite and moving – another counter tenor who doesn’t have me regretting the absence of a female voice. Ru Charlesworth as Emilio had excellent diction, and handled the coloratura aspects of his role brilliantly .  Jake Ingbar as Armindo was almost as good as Cutting. Nardus Williams as Partenope handled beautifully the slow arias, with a lovely long-breathed line, though sometimes the coloratura aspects sounded a bit laboured (though always accurate). Katie Bray as Rosmira always sung warmly though perhaps her voice was a little small for the Coliseum. William Thomasas as Oronte, in this production a general artistic layabout sung resonantly.

Sadly the advertised conductor Christopher Curmyn was ill, but the ENO music staff conductor William Cole did an excellent job of pacing the music and keeping it altogether. The ENO orchestra sounded remarkably idiomatic, with some very colourful playing

Reich, BBCPO, Currie – Bridgewater Hall, 29/11/25

BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, Colin Currie conductor. Steve Reich Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards; John Adams Frenzy (2023); Gabriella Smith f(x)=sin²x-1/x; Steve Reich The Four Sections

I had missed two concerts focusing on Steve Reich in Manchester in recent years, one because of a train strike, another because of bad weather cancelling trains. So, I was determined to get to this one – and I did, albeit with a grossly delayed homeward journey. As it happens, I was much more struck by the Adams piece than the two Reich ones in the programnme. The problem with the more trance-like slow moving minimalist pieces is that they send me to sleep after about 10 mins. I get the point – a sort of Zen-like meditation rather than the forward thrust and ‘meaning’ of more traditional works, but they are nonetheless soporific…..With the Reich Variations, I began by really enjoying the woodwind sounds it starts with, and the slow yet constant changes of harmony, as well as the swell and decline of the strings, and the gradual metamorphoses which were taking place – and then I slept.

The Adams piece, ‘Frenzy’. a newish piece (2023) first conducted by Simon Rattle, on the other hand is strangely traditional in its constant development of two motifs – what Adams describes as “a punctuated tattoo in the winds and the brass, and an urgent muscular theme in the upper strings’. Here the slow meditative gradually shifting sounds of Reich are replaced by manic, dense and forceful activity as these motifs are developed. In the midst of all the rushing around is a rather beautiful quasi-slow movement, rather haunting, which emphasises that there seems to be some sort of personal story suggested here, ‘frenzy’ against an inner calm. Occasionally the tools of minimalism are used but to very different ends.  I liked this a lot and will try to listen to it again when the BBC broadcast it (as they will, it being the BBC Phil).

You don’t get music titles much more pretentious than ‘f(x)=sin²x-1/x’, which is something about measuring mathematically the progress of this piece of music, with a horizontal axis of time and a vertical axis of energy and dynamics. It has some interesting sounds and certainly didn’t outstay its welcome.

The other Reich piece (The Four Sections, as in the sections of the orchestra) moves from slow to moderate to fast, with gradually changing melodic material and some thunderous climaxes (rather reminiscent of the Rite of Spring). I didn’t fall asleep this time, but I did feel the Adams piece was the more rewarding one to listen to.

The BBC Phil played it all with great skill and enthusiasm, making a huge noise, particularly in the Four Sections

Arabella, R.Strauss – Met Opera relay – Sheffield Curzon Cinema, 22/11/25

Conductor,  Nicholas Carter; Director, Otto Schenk; Designer, Günther Schneider Siemssen; Costumes,  Milena Canonero; Lighting, Gil Wechsler. Arabella, Rachel Willis-Sørensen;  Zdenka, Louise Alder;  Fiakermilli,  Julie Roset;  Countess Adelaide Waldner,  Karen Cargill;  Matteo,  Pavol Breslik;  Mandryka,  Tomasz Konieczny;  Count Waldner,  Brindley Sherratt

This production looks like something from another era (and indeed it is – first seen in 1983) and may be, for some, as much a sentimental journey back to a period of operatic history long before the advent of regie-theater, as the work was for Strauss and Hofmannsthal in the evocation of a long-gone mid-19th century Vienna in the context of the 1920’s / early 30’s. How long is it since you heard a Covent Garden audience clap at the opening of the curtains on an act? – the Met audience was doing it ecstatically at the beginning of each act in this screening. Here is an idea of what the general mis-en-scene looks like and there’s also a clip of Arabella singing ‘Aber der Richtige’. Arabella: Live in HD ;  Strauss’s Arabella: “Aber der Richtige” (Rachel Willis-Sørensen)

As I have said before in this blog, a cinema screening is a different experience from a live performance on stage as far as the audience is concerned. Things which would go undetected in what you’d see on stage in a live performance can be mercilessly shown up on the screen. While the slightly dilapidated sense of the scenery in the first and third acts could be reasonably explained away as demonstrating the kind of downmarket hotel the Waldners now have to stay in when in Vienna, owing to their penurious state, the second act also looked dingy, and as though it had seen better days, and this, I guess, is a reflection that all the scenery is now over 40 years old…….The other thing which cinema is bound to show up is any noticeable difference between the age of the performer and that of the character they’re playing, and here I have to say that Rachel Willis-Sorensen, to me, looked just too mature on screen to be a credible Arabella, even though she sung it wonderfully (while Louise Alder, by contrast, only 3 years younger, was a highly believable Zdenka(o)). Such is the way of the big-screen.

But apart from the set and the maturity of Arabella, this was a highly satisfying performance (and also from a purely chauvinist perspective, it was highly satisfying to see that three of the 5 main roles were taken by Brits – plus with Susan Bickley playing a support role).  Rachel Willis-Sorensen was commanding in her singing, with a beautiful sense of line and some lovely soft singing and floating of high notes. Vocally she had the heft as well to soar over the orchestra, and also that intangible ability to connect with her audience through her voice (difficult to say what this is, but you know it when you see and hear it). Her facial acting was very good – always alert and meaningful – no staring out front trying to work out the conductor’s beat……Willis-Sorensen was interesting, during an interval interview, on the feminism of the opera (not an often-expressed view). She felt that, apart from one or two phrases from a past perspective (‘I am a subject and you are a ruler’, she says at one point to Mandryka), Arabella is a forthright character who knows what she wants and is clear when she has found it – she doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Louise Alder was a sympathetic Zdenka, again with some beautiful phrasing, an always alert stage presence, and excellent acting. Mandryka was sung by Tomasz Konieczny, whose performance, I thought, was outstanding, though it was unclear how loud his voice would have sounded live at the Met. He was a thoroughly sympathetic presence, he acted very well and credibly, and didn’t overdo the wild man of the woods aspect – he just came across as a man of strong emotions, in many ways the counterpart of Arabella, and at the mercy of his temper. His voice was able to encompass both the high register aspects and low notes of parts of the role, and his singing, particularly in the early part of Act 2, where he is singing about the lands he owns and what he can offer Arabella, was glorious. Brindley Sherratt and Karen Cargill both clearly enjoyed themselves hamming up aspects of their roles, while retaining their stage credibility.

The name of Nicholas Carter, who was conducting, is new to me, but it’s clear from a brief Google search that he is a rising star – an Australian, he was appointed General Music Director of the Stuttgart Opera recently, and this was his Met debut. He was interviewed in one of the intervals about how he went about preparing the orchestra for this work, and he was very interesting on how important clarity was for him in delivering the score – he said something like “the different sections of the orchestra were wanting to play everything very full-on. But there are so many different strands in the music that you have to hold back, to play everything at less than 100% intensity, and then you will be able to create both the sound Strauss wanted and not drown the singers”. And indeed the orchestral playing did have a sort of transparency and delicacy about it which added to the whole experience.

I loved hearing this work again, after listening to it live for the first time in over 50 years when I was in Berlin last March. I hope it’s done somewhere in the UK soon