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Whenever I come to Cambridge, I am astonished by the wealth of music on offer. Bulletin boards and fences of squares are full of posters announcing performances in churches, concert halls and theatres — featuring local ensembles and orchestras, but also visiting artists whose recitals would be hailed in Poland as the event of the season. Not a day goes without a classical music concert; in February there were days when there were as many as a dozen or so. The city has a population of less than 150,000 and yet when it comes to the number of musical initiatives, it beats Warsaw, ten times more populous, hands down.

It also has its own recurring event, the Cambridge Music Festival, founded in 1991 and directed for the past thirteen years by Justin Lee, who previously worked with the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus, the Academy of Ancient Music and the Cambridge University ensembles. The festival is held twice a year. This year’s “spring” edition ended in mid-March, but among those heralding spring were musicians of the excellent Pavel Haas Quartet, the much-loved Jordi Savall and the phenomenal British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor.

And the legendary ensemble Theatre of Voices, conducted by Paul Hillier, with a lineup of four singers — just as at their first concert in 1990, when they premiered Arvo Pärt’s Berliner Messe. Seven years later the composer wrote another version of the piece, for choir and string orchestra. The original version — for four soloists and organ — is a concert rarity these days, which is why I took this unique opportunity to hear it conducted by the same artist who at St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin brought to live life both the new ensemble and Pärt’s new work, and with the same organist, Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, to boot.

Theatre of Voices. Photo: Gerhard Wilting

The concert at Trinity College Chapel was held on the occasion of yet another anniversary — twenty-five years of the Cambridge Music Conference, a series of meetings inaugurated by Elizabeth Carmack at the inspiration of her sister Catherine, who at that time was battling a terminal illness, and focused from the beginning on the idea of healing through music. Quite esoteric at first and carried out in the spirit of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, the programme of the conference has evolved into a venture combining creativity, music therapy, as well as humanitarian and human rights work. Behind it is a complicated and tragic family history: the sisters’ father was the Canadian pianist, composer and teacher Murray Carmack, who, in a country where homosexuality was a criminal offence, escaped his own orientation by marrying a woman; Catherine died of cancer at the age of 46; the stepson of the mother, who after her divorce married the prominent biblical scholar Roger Norman Whybray, fell victim to AIDS at the height of the epidemic. This string of anguish and misery gave rise to something remarkable — a project resulting in a series of composer commissions and concrete outreach initiatives, with past participants including Mark Anthony Turnage and John Tavener, as well as Tavener’s student Judith Weir.

In addition to Berliner Messe, the programme of the Theatre of Voices’ February concert featured compositions by other artists associated with Elizabeth Carmack’s venture. First came the British premiere of The Tree of Life by Nigel Osborne, who, after studying at Oxford, continued his education with Witold Rudziński at Warsaw’s State School of Music and collaborated for some time with the Polish Radio’s Experimental Studio. Since the 1990s he has been using his experience in pioneering methods of working with children marked by the trauma of conflicts: the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Caucasus, the Middle East, East Africa, Myanmar and Ukraine. The Tree of Life is the fruit of his therapeutic work with Syrian refugees in Lebanon — a musical performance consisting of seven stories about objects that accompanied the refugees in their wandering and played an important role in their lives. An olive branch from the father’s orchard; a Muslim misbaha rosary and a Christian rosary from Maaloula, whose inhabitants still speak Aramaic; a red stone the colour of the family house and blood; a casket with two coins minted in the year of the mother’s birth; a yellow balloon and a picture of clouds — in each of these stories, combined by Osborne into a surprisingly light and clear structure, the dominant element is melody oscillating between Western tonality and the microtonality of the Eastern maqam, highlighted by the accompaniment of the Arabic oud lute (Rihab Azar). In the course of the performance it transpired that the sound design of the quartet in its current lineup rested on the foundation of an exceptionally dense bass voice (William Gaunt), gradually thinning out towards the top (tenor Jakob Skjoldborg, alto Laura Lamph, soprano Else Torp). This choice of soloists enabled Hillier to play not only with range, but also with timbre — with excellent results in other works as well.

This is especially true of two arrangements of Callimachus’ beautiful elegy on the death of his friend, the poet Heraclitus — in an English translation by William Johnson Cory, who was expelled from Eton in 1872 for an “inappropriate” letter to one of his students. Murray Carmack used it as a pretext for a kind of musical coming-out, giving his composition a touch of utter sadness and sensual melancholy. The other Heraclitus, by Howard Skempton, was written in 2021, on the 100th anniversary of Carmack’s birth. And it certainly draws on the original, creating a similar mood, although by completely different means — deceptive simplicity of form, consonant harmony, prominence of the melodic element.

Arvo Pärt. Photo: Dorota Kozińska

As an interlude before the Berliner Messe we heard an organ version of Kevin Volans’ Walking Song, performed by Bowers-Broadbent, who gracefully and with ease highlighted the overlapping melodic and rhythmic patterns, which brought to mind irresistible associations with the oeuvre of Steve Reich, who, after all, drew on the same, African sources of inspiration. And then the musical heaven opened.

It would be hard to find a better, more internally diverse example of Pärt’s tintinnabuli technique than the Berlin Mass. The composer named the technique after the Latin term for the bells mounted on pole and placed in Catholic basilicas as a sign of link to the pope. He reduced the material to the form of two voices in a kind of counterpoint: the melodic voice, which wanders around a specific centre, and the “tintinnabular” voice, which highlights the individual components of the harmonic triad. Pärt discovered musical asceticism, a new simplicity, sometimes equated with minimalism. Wrongly, because its essence is not the repetition of a pattern, but the gradual subtraction of the musical material — like the mystical “stillness” practiced by the Orthodox hesychast monks. And this is what happened in the Berliner Messe, which, in Theatre of Voices’ inspired performance, took us into a completely different dimension of feeling reality. The musicians fulfilled Pärt’s will: the first voice of the tintinnabuli sounded like the sum of human iniquities, the second — like a universal redemption of guilt.

After the concert we went out into the courtyard and all looked up, where a parade of planets was just taking place in the night sky. For a moment I thought I heard sounds coming from outer space.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Shakespeare’s Macbeth is not a tragedy about love. Nor is it a play about the mechanisms of power. If anything, it is about the nightmare of power, the fear inherent in it, the recurrence of evil that was once initiated. As Jan Kott wrote in his famous essay “Macbeth or death infected”, “Macbeth  has killed not only to become king. Macbeth has killed to reassert himself. He has chosen between Macbeth who is afraid to kill and Macbeth who has killed. But Macbeth who has killed is a new Macbeth. He knows not only that one can kill, but that one must kill”. In 1961 the essay appeared in a collection modestly entitled in Polish Szkice o Szekspirze [Sketches on Shakespeare]. Five years later the book was reissued in a slightly different form, under a title borrowed from its French translation – Shakespeare, Our Contemporary. In the preface to the first English edition Peter Brook points out that Kott is the only scholar studying the Elizabethan era for whom it is obvious that at some point everyone will be woken by the police in the middle of the night. Brook’s words exuded respect and admiration, but not everyone appreciated the perspicacity of Kott’s analyses, claiming that it was overshadowed by his experiences during the war and the era of Stalin’s regime. Today few doubt the Polish critic’s claim that Shakespeare’s oeuvre fully deserves to be called universal and “suprahistorical”. That his contemporaneity needs to be played out on a far broader plane than that of any concrete element of everyday life.

This was understood very well by Verdi, whose Macbeth is a child of his culture and era, and, at the same time, a work from which there emerges at every turn a deep understanding of the message of the original as well as the coherence between its insights and the music. What makes this all the more incredible is the fact that the composer knew Shakespeare’s tragedy only from reading Italian translations and that he saw it on stage only after the premiere of his own Macbeth. However, he took the trouble to consult with English theatre habitués, mercilessly rebuked Piave for the libretto’s verbiage and made strikingly apt dramaturgical decisions — including that of replacing the three witches with three choruses of witches, while keeping the original nature of the characters (“triviali, ma stravaganti ed originali”). The version presented at the premiere in Florence in 1847 was enthusiastically received by the audience and treated with some reserve by the critics, who expected Macbeth to be another “fantastic” opera in the spirit of Meyerbeer. The reviewers at the time failed to appreciate the coherence of the narrative, based on a juxtaposition of the comic and tragic elements, typical of Shakespeare’s reception at the time, but innovative from the point of view of the compositional craft: full of abrupt changes of mode from major to minor, contrasts of texture, as well as extravagant turns in the vocal parts emphasizing the meaning and message of the text.

Macbeth. The beginning of Act One. Photo: Edyta Dufaj

Today Macbeth is usually staged in its 1865 Paris version, with an added ballet scene, Lady Macbeth’s aria in Act Two and a choral “hymn of victory” in the finale. The creative team of the latest production at the Theater St. Gallen opted for a hybrid version, with Macbeth’s death scene restored from the original version (“Mal per me che m’affidai”). I travelled to Switzerland relieved and convinced that after Warsaw’s bland Simon Boccanegra, in which the director forced onto the libretto a tale of climate catastrophe (presented with such an abundance of resources that the carbon footprint will follow this production for the next century), I would hear and see a Macbeth played with fire, sung with passion, brought to the stage by people who believed in the greatness of this opera at least as much as Verdi believed in the genius of Shakespeare.

My hopes — which were fulfilled to the letter — were aroused by the impressions I had at La Monnaie after the premiere of the pasticcio Rivoluzione e Nostalgia. As many as three artists involved in the St. Gallen Macbeth worked on that production: not only Krystian Lada, the brains behind the Brussels project, but also Carlo Goldstein, who was responsible for its musical side, and the lighting director Aleksandr Prowaliński. Once again Lada appeared in the triple role of director, set designer and author of projections (another artist involved in the preparation of the visual setting was Lars Uten, while Adrian Bärwinkel designed the costumes). And once again Lada demonstrated that a real opera director should not limit himself or herself to just reading a libretto synopsis, but should painstakingly pore over the score, reach for the literary original, search for the meanings encoded in it, ask questions, doubt and listen — to researchers, the artists involved and, above all, to the conductor.

Lada’s productions are marked by simplicity and, at the same time, clarity of the means used. His Macbeth is set in a world of existential and metaphysical darkness, in which the moon, alternately a silvery light in the black firmament or a dark spot in the bright sky, is always the moon of the terrible Shakespearean night after which no day rises. The stage space is enclosed by a curtain of semi-transparent ribbons of thick film, drawing a blurred line between reality and nightmare: someone sneaks behind it, someone extends a hand, someone disappears to emerge as quite someone else. Witches, murderers, ghastly phantoms, visitors and messengers run around within a circle the perimeter of which is sometimes marked only by the glow of fluorescent lights, and sometimes by a platform raised on a low scaffolding — alternately a place of feasting, torture, a shelter for a child hiding from assassins and a place for a hellish dance of witches.

Group scene from Act One. In the middle: Libby Sokolowski (Lady Macbeth). Photo: Edyta Dufaj

There are just as few props, although each one is memorable: a cut of raw meat sliced by Lady Macbeth will turn out to be a harbinger of the first murder; a bunch of red poppies — an allegory of the blood and memory of the victims; earth spilling from the bags of soldiers returning from the war — a figure of death and the grave. Against the background of the sparse sets the language of costumes speaks all the louder, strongly highlighting the obsession with masculinity, which is ever-present in Macbeth. Its vivid, even grotesque sign is the sporran, a pouch worn on the front of the kilt, which in its “full dress” version, decorated with horsehair or made from the fur of wild animals, will become a symbol of power, status and fertility — a symbol coveted by Lady Macbeth, scorned by the witches, sinister on the naked bodies of the spectral kings. A mix of military uniforms, simple everyday clothes and work outfits allows the chorus members to seamlessly switch between the roles of witches, servants, nobles and exiles.

In some places Lada departs from the opera’s libretto, coming closer to its literary original and even earlier sources of Shakespeare’s inspiration. However, he does so to the benefit of the drama and in keeping with the message of the text — as in the brilliantly directed scene of the murder of Macduff’s sons, in which Macbeth wavers between tenderness, cruelty and feelings of emptiness over his own non-existent children. What also makes an electrifying impression is the performance by Mohammad Al Haji, a Syrian dancer who wears a prosthesis following loss of leg in a rocket attack. In Act Three he plays the role of the protagonist’s double, a Macbeth “reflected in a mirror” These episodes, formally extremely beautiful and yet ambiguous, evoking different but equally painful associations in each spectator, highlight the “contemporaneity” of Shakespeare’s tragedy and Verdi’s opera the most, as does the majestic chorus in the pallid light at the beginning of Act Four (“Patria opressa”). The only thing I found doubtful was the scene with the Birnam Wood, too similar to a bunch of Scandinavian trolls to achieve the desired horror effect.

Vincenzo Neri (Macbeth). Photo: Edyta Dufaj

Even so, the stage was still brimming with energy — of the singers, chorus members and extras, well-prepared, brilliantly guided by the director, utterly committed to the work. Vincenzo Neri was an outstanding Macbeth, both voice- and character-wise. His baritone is not very big, but it is very charming and expressive. I have trouble judging Lady Macbeth portrayed by Libby Sokolowski, whose voice is very resonant, unusually beautiful and exceptionally dark, even sounding contralto-like in the lower register. In addition, Sokolowski is a fine actress, but what I find jarring in her singing is her uncontrolled vibrato and not always secure intonation. Perhaps she just had a bad day, because I must admit that her surprisingly subtly interpreted madness scene aroused my genuine admiration. An excellent portrayal of Banco came from Brent Michael Smith, a singer with a noble, pitch-black and thick, if a bit nasal bass. Once again I was enthralled by the fervent lyricism of Brian Michael Moore’s as Macduff, especially in the poignant aria “O, la paterna mano” from Act Four. Malcolm was well sung by Sungjune Park, an artist full of youthful vigour, while the Lady-in-waiting (whom Lada turned into Malcolm’s pregnant wife) was finely portrayed by the velvety-voiced Mack Wolz. A separate mention should be made of the demonic bass Jonas Jud, who was excellent in the quadruple role of Doctor, Assasin, Servant and Herald, as well as the baritone David Maze, a veteran of the Theater St. Gallen company, this time in the silent, brilliantly performed role of Duncan, as if taken straight from one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas. Carlo Goldstein conducted the whole thing with an assured hand, impressing with his unerring sense of Verdian style, invaluable in the context of the unique orchestral textures and colours of Macbeth, meticulously conveyed by the musicians of the Sinfonieorchester St. Gallen.

And once again I left the theatre feeling that Shakespeare, and then Verdi after him, had told me more about the modern world than many a front-page expert. But why do I have to go all the way to Switzerland to see that? Especially now, when the world is really stepped in blood?

Translated by: Anna Kijak

As I wait anxiously, but also with hope, for the long-awaited change of the management of Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera, I have been closely following the activities of our southern neighbours. In both Poland and Czechia the advocates of entrusting leadership positions in national institutions to local artists and managers are still going strong. This, however, is where the similarities end. The Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera has long abandoned the model of a repertory theatre with a permanent ensemble of soloists – which, in my opinion, calls into question the legitimacy of referring to the company as the “National Opera”. At the two most important Czech companies – the National in Prague and the National in Brno – everything seems much more coherent. Both operate under the formula of a large organisational machine encompassing all types of theatre, managed by a general director supervising the artistic and administrative directors of the various “divisions”. In both cities the structure of the national theatre contains more than one operatic stage. The repertoire is huge and clearly focused on cultivating national works, but both the managements and permanent ensembles feature individuals from abroad – especially in Prague, where Filip Barankiewicz has been in charge of the Czech National Ballet since 2017 and Per Boye Hansen, the former artistic director of Den Norske Opera in Oslo, has been at the helm of the National Opera since 2019.

Such a national company – fulfilling its aesthetic, social and educational mission, and, at the same time, powered on a daily basis, and not once in a blue moon, by fresh ideas from outstanding artists and creators from around the world – is something I have long dreamed of in Poland. A company that is able to attract foreign visitors with its offerings and arouse the interest of international critics: in short, a “national” theatre in the most modern sense of the word, without complexes, promoting the culture of its country wisely and effectively, primarily in order to make it part of the international scene for good.

We can always dream, although we should be aware of the fact that it takes time and patience to accept such a state of affairs. Also in Prague, where the Norwegian management’s actions continue come up against resistance from audiences and the more conservative among the critics. The same was true of the January premiere of Cherubini’s Medea at the State Theatre, met with a rather cool reception from the audience, whose expectations were clearly at odds with the musical and theatrical reality of the performance.

Medea in Prague. Svetlana Aksenova in the title role, and Arnheiður Eiríksdóttir as Neris. Photo: Petr Neubert

Last year Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera missed an opportunity to present the work in a well-prepared original version. Médée, an opera or, more specifically, opéra comique with a French libretto by François-Benoît Hoffmann based on Euripides’ and Corneille’s tragedies, was written in 1797 and premiered on 13 March that year at the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris. The work, in which sung passages are interspersed with recited alexandrine lines, is classical in form and its musical structure stems from the spirit of Gluck’s reform. Yet when it comes to the way the eponymous character is treated, it is a good hundred years ahead of its day, foreshadowing the great operatic psychological dramas of Verdi, Wagner and even Richard Strauss. The title role, fiendishly difficult and full of technical pitfalls, was written for Julie-Angélique Scio, an outstanding soprano and great actress who put so much heart and enthusiasm into it that her health deteriorated and she soon died. The orchestral layer – rich in recurring motifs, dense, yet fluid in its narrative – was beyond the perceptual capabilities of many listeners at the time.

No wonder, then, that Médée soon disappeared from the reportoire. And, as is often the case, it began to be “improved”. Staged in a German translation in 1800, it was quite favourably received by the Berlin audiences. Two years later it reached Vienna with a libretto translated into Italian. In 1855 Franz Lachner threw out the spoken dialogues and replaced them with veritably Wagnerian recitatives, using an abridged Viennese version, but with a German libretto. In 1909 Carlo Zangarini translated Lachner’s version into Italian with a view to having the work premiered at La Scala. This is the form – most familiar to opera lovers today, yet woefully different from the original – in which Medea was “resurrected” in 1953 by Maria Callas, who, after her 1953 performance in Florence, sang it with variable success until the early 1960s.

This is also the version that was chosen in Prague – the idea was quite risky from the beginning given the inevitable comparisons with the vocal art of the Primadonna Assoluta. I have to admit that I, too, had my doubts about how Svetlana Aksenova would cope with this killer role – I heard her in 2018 in the role of Liza in The Queen of Spades and thought her voice was lovely but exceedingly lyrical, even girlish in expression. Since then it has become somewhat dull and less secure intonation-wise, and failed to develop in the upper range – it sounded relatively stable only in the middle. The singer clearly attempted to sing a role that lay beyond the limit of her abilities, and since she also lacked charisma, admirers of the divine Callas may have felt disappointed indeed. Much more impressive was Jana Sibera (Glauce), whose sensuous, sparkling soprano I was able to admire recently in Zemlinsky’s Kleider machen Leute. It was a mistake to entrust the role of Creonte to Marcell Bakonyi – his bass, undoubtedly well-controlled, proved too bright and not noble enough in tone for this royal part. The brightest points of the cast were Evan LeRoy Johnson, an excellent Giasone with a large, resonant, typical spinto tenor and an admirable ability to dynamically shape a phrase; and Arnheiður Eiríksdóttir as Neris – not only does the Icelandic artist possess a beautiful mezzo-soprano sparkling with harmonics, but she is also an excellent actress. I am not surprised that the audience appreciated the work of the chorus (prepared by Pavel Vaněk), but I do not quite understand why it was so unenthusiastic about the conductor responsible for the whole, Robert Jindra, who made every effort to bring out from this “Italianised” score as many elements as possible to demonstrate the uniqueness of Cherubini’s style – peculiarities of texture, dramatic tension lurking in almost every bar, evocative orchestral images foreshadowing Beethoven’s symphonic music, images in which the classical cohesion of form and sound gives way at times to feverish dialogues of the individual instrumental groups.

Arnheiður Eiríksdóttir, Marcell Bakonyi (Creonte), and Svetlana Aksenova. Photo: Petr Neubert

Nor did the Prague audiences like the staging, prepared by the German director Roland Schwab in collaboration with Paul Zoller (set design), Sabine Blickenstorfer (costumes) and Franck Evin (lighting). Schwab, who saved Bayreuth’s honour during the pandemic with his economical and functional concept of Tristan, approached Medea in a similar fashion – with surprisingly good results, in my opinion. Maintaining the classical unity of time and place, he played the whole thing out on two levels – Creonte’s austere palace, stripped of all ornaments, painted only by the light coming in through the high windows, and the dark world of Medea gnawing at it from below – damp, full of black rubbish bags, reeking of decay that would soon start seeping into the Corinthian residence. With each successive scene the palace gets darker and darker – until the house of the would-be newlyweds bursts into flames and Jason carries Glauce’s charred body out of the fire: so blinded by despair over the loss of his beloved that he completely forgets about his sons and only in the finale does he notice their corpses hanging from the ceiling. There was no intrusive psychologising in this staging, nor any attempt to place the classical tragedy in the current political context – the simple contemporary costume only served to make the message clear.

It will be interesting to see if the production will grow over time and get a more sympathetic audience. It fully deserves it in my opinion – compared to other Regietheater proposals, Schwab’s concepts seem exceptionally clear and singer-friendly. Stagings presented in an equally spare and modern stage language have long been a staple in Brno, where they are much better received by both the audiences and the critics. That is why the day after the Prague premiere I went to the Janáček Divadlo to see one of the most talked-about productions of the current season: Rusalka, directed by David Radok, whose earlier Salome made such an electrifying impression on me.

This time, however, I left the theatre a little confused. First, I was confused by Radok’s insufficiently clear declaration that he brought to Brno not so much a new stage concept for Dvorák’s masterpiece, but a reconstruction of the staging he directed in 2012 in Gothenburg with phenomenally beautiful decorations by Lars-Åke Thessmann that made a reference to paintings by the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi, author of monochromatic interior views filled with intimate light. Radok, who was also listed in the programme of the Brno production as set designer, admitted that he drew inspiration from Thessmann’s work, but what I saw on the stage of the Janáčkovo Divadlo, however, was an almost literal reproduction of the visual setting from Göteborgsoperan, except perhaps for Act II, where Radok expanded the sets depth-wise, making full use of the space of the Brno theatre. The same is true of Zuzana Ježková’s costumes, which draw unambiguously on Ann-Mari Anttila’s designs – true, they sometimes differ from them in details of colour and cut, but I have seen revivals of legendary productions in which the costume designers dared to deviate much further from the original. I do not suspect the creators or the company’s management of bad intentions, but I would have preferred this kind of information to be clearly stated in the programmes and on the website – especially since this is about a production that caused quite a stir and not only in the small operatic world.

Rusalka in Brno. Peter Berger (Prince). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Secondly, Radok used the same procedure in Brno as he did earlier in Gothenburg: suggesting that Rusalka be read through Jungian archetypes and Freudian psychoanalysis, he decided to remove all folk and fairy tale motifs from the work, which in practice means reducing the cast by throwing out the characters of the Gamekeeper and Kitchen boy, making cuts in the role of Ježibaba and meddling with the rest of the text. Thus, roughly one-fifth of the music and the text was removed from the work. I can understand if the director would have been the first to come up with the idea of a Freudian-Ibsenian Rusalka, but productions staged in this spirit have been seen on the world’s stages for nearly half a century, and the creators of the most successful among them – primarily Pountney and McDonald – have used the “fairy tale element” contained in the opera to great advantage for their concepts. After all, Jaroslav Kvapil’s libretto had its sources of inspiration in both the fairy-tale-naturalistic plays of Hauptmann and the late, symbolist oeuvre of Ibsen. Kvapil tackled the theme of a clash of two world orders in his own plays. He was one of the pioneers of Czech modernist theatre. His Rusalka, masterfully constructed in terms of language and drama, is a masterpiece on its own, betraying an affinity with the oeuvre of Oscar Wilde. Dvořák treated it with almost pious reverence, as is evidenced by his correspondence with Kvapil. Radok, who is a Czech himself, saw only pessimism and decadence in it, completely ignoring the grotesque and black humour, so characteristic of Central European modernism.

Radok’s concept has many advocates, also among the lovers of Rusalka. I – paradoxically – found the narrative dragging on at times; it was monotonous, on one level of emotion, without moments of dramatic counterbalance, which in Kvapil and Dvořák’s work serve not only as interludes, but also as important commentaries that complete the context. Visually, however, it is a truly dazzling staging – a painting-like tale of a thousand shades of loneliness, emptiness and solitude, balancing on the border between two worlds that only seem to intermingle. Harbingers of misfortune are hiding everywhere. The reeds covering the edges of piers linking the indoors to the outdoors are yellowed already in Act I; the room is empty and grey, but in comparison with Act III, where the remains of fallen blades lie around the wet floor, it may indeed seem like cosy shelter. The castle garden is lit by chandeliers hanging under the black sky. Nothing is visible in their light: the weeding guests seem not to notice to Rusalka’s silent despair or Vodnik’s anguish, or what is going on between the Prince and the Foreign Princess. Radok clearly highlights the Wagnerian aspects of the story: the wood sprites’ banter with Vodnik, who is desperate for intimacy, brings to mind the beginning of Das Rheingold and Alberich’s humiliation; the cold and unapproachable Ježibaba has some traits of Erda; the Prince’s death and Rusalka’s return to the world of watery night resembles the finale of Tristan and Isolde.

Jana Šrejma Kačírková (Rusalka). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

The performance I saw was excellent in musical terms as well. With her resonant, sparkling soprano Jana Šrejma Kačírková sang all the hope, pain and resignation of the eponymous heroine. Peter Berger once again demonstrated that in the fiendish role of the Prince – heroic, but requiring a large dose of lyricism and, above all, a very wide range – he has no rivals today. Jan Šťáva was a magnificent Vodnik. He is a typically “Czech” bass, impressive with the depth of his sound, phenomenal diction, lightness of phrasing and insight in creating this ambiguous character. Václava Krejčí, a singer with an assured, well-controlled mezzo-soprano, created a convincing portrayal of a cold and principled Ježibaba. I was slightly less impressed by Eliška Gattringerová as the Foreign Princess. Her soprano has a volume worthy of Brunhilde, but at times is too harsh, especially at the top of the range. Some extraordinary musicality was demonstrated by the other soloists: Doubravka Novotná, Ivana Pavlů and Monika Jägerová as the three Wood Sprites, and Tadeáš Hoza as the Hunter. The whole thing – including the company’s excellent chorus – was conducted by Marko Ivanović. His tempi were too steady for my taste at times, but he showed great attention to detail in this intimate, irresistibly sensual score.

I complained, I enthused and I hereby declare that this is a good sign. A real opera theatre is happening across Poland’s southern border. It is very active, and impresses with the breadth of its repertoire, stable musical level and courage in embarking on ambitious ventures that are not always fully successful. A theatre whose productions do not need to be ignored with embarrassment or praised in advance, because at this stage it can also face criticism. How I miss this every day – fortunately, Czechia is not far away.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Charles Jennens, an erudite nobleman, friend of Handel and author of librettos for several of his oratorios (among them Il Moderato, a stand-alone poem with which he brought together into a unified “morality play” arrangements of Milton’s two poems used in L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato), wrote in a letter that he expected Messiah to be a work superior to the composer’s entire oeuvre just as the Anointed himself towered over everything in power and dignity. He compiled the libretto of Handel’s most famous oratorio from verses of the King James Bible and Coverdale Bible, the first printed translation of all Scriptures into English. He took more than half of the text from the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament. A devout Anglican and enemy of deism, Jennens turned his Messiah into an extended reflection on the mystery of Christ, as it were. Each of the three parts of the oratorio focuses on a different aspect of this mystery. In part one the librettist presents the prophecy and fulfilment of God’s plan for the salvation of mankind. In part two – the story of the Messiah’s passion and resurrection. In part three – thanksgiving for his salvific sacrifice.

Handel received the finished text in July 1741, set about writing the oratorio a month later and completed it in mid-September, which did not please Jennens, who was outraged by the composer’s “careless negligence” and his refusal to accept any of the librettist’s comments. Jennens also made no secret of his disappointment that Handel had accepted an invitation from William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, to organise a series of charity concerts at the Great Music Hall in Dublin – he had hoped that a work of such weight would be heard for the first time in Englad’s capital. The premiere of Messiah in April 1742 was a great success, and proceeds from ticket sales made it possible to release over a hundred wretched debtors from prison.

Presented a year later at the Covent Garden Theatre, the oratorio was received more coldly primarily for religious reasons. Some argued that theatre was not an appropriate venue for works containing quotations from the Scriptures. Messiah came to be appreciated in London only in the 1750s, when a tradition of annual charity concerts was started in the chapel of the newly established Foundling Hospital for children. From that moment on its popularity continued to grow. It returned to Covent Garden once again before the composer’s death – this time it was greeted with a thunderous applause. Unlike Bach’s Matthew Passion, Handel’s oratorio was not forgotten even for a moment. It changed along with the public’s tastes; new arrangements of the work, not always successful, began to be made already in the eighteenth century – they included Mozart’s version, commissioned by Gottfried van Swieten and compared scathingly by some to stucco on marble. It was more or less in this period that Messiah came to be performed by massive forces, expanded to the point of absurdity over the following half-century (an 1857 concert at the Handel Festival in London featured more than two and a half thousand musicians). The custom of leaping to one’s feet before the “Hallelujah” chorus concluding part two – with its characteristic simple motif in the acclamation, its imitated motet-like structure and references to the Lutheran hymn “Wachet auf” – had become established earlier, supported by a probably made-up anecdote that during the London premiere King George II rose from his seat at the first words of the hymn, prompting the rest of his audience to follow suit. The idea to organise concerts featuring Handel’s Messiah during the Advent season was thought up by nineteenth-century American managers, who rightly assumed that the faithful’s beloved oratorio would ensure a box-office hit for the organisers. Initially, only the first part, supplemented with the obligatory “Hallelujah” chorus, was performed, and only with time were all three parts of the oratorio presented, usually in an abbreviated version and without the da capo passages. The custom of presenting Messiah before Christmas eventually became popular also in Europe, gradually pushing the work out of the standard Lenten repertoire.

Laurence Cummings. Photo: Ben Ealovega

The December concert at the Barbican Hall was led by Laurence Cummings, who conducted the soloists, chorus and orchestra of the Academy of Ancient Music – for the second time since taking over the reins of the legendary ensemble (the first performance was in 2022). Competition in London was, as usual, strong, which is by no means surprising for a work with such a rich and varied performance tradition. Cummings’ responsibility is, however, unusual – that of an heir to the legacy of Christopher Hogwood, founder of the AAM, who in 1979 made the first recording of a complete version of the oratorio on period instruments, a version conceived by Handel prior to its 1754 performance at the Foundling Hospital: with five soloists, a similar instrumental ensemble and the Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, composed of men and boys. Although Hogwood was soon followed by others, his interpretation – clean, clear and refreshing – remained a reference point for several generations to come. Also for Cummings, who opted for a slightly earlier London version, limited the number of solo voices to four and headed ensembles roughly half the size of Hogwood’s: an eighteen-strong mixed choir; an orchestra featuring fourteen strings, two oboes, a bassoon, two trumpets and timpani; as well as a continuo (theorbo, two harpsichords and organ).

Nearly half a century after the first AAM recordings under Hogwood, Cummings’ interpretations can seem cautious, seeking a compromise between the restraint of the pioneers of historically informed performance and the irrepressible verve of musicians from the south of the continent. Nothing could be further from the truth: his Messiah is the fruit of a profound internalisation and reworking of previous concepts, music that is more “human”, better balanced, more wisely contrasted – not only in terms of tempo and dynamics, but, above all, in terms of articulation and overall mood. This was already evident in the first part and the conductor’s completely different approach to the overture – played unhurriedly, at times even ceremonially, in line with the theological message of the work – and then in the rocking, “peasant” Pifa from the beginning of the fourth scene of the oratorio. In addition, Cummings pays much more attention to the words and rhetoric of the text, which can be heard especially in the perfectly thought-out choral passages (from the sparkling, melismatic “And he shall purify” to the ecstatic final “Amen”). Nor is the essence of Handel’s message lost in the instrumental parts: in the overture the orchestra gradually and all the more emphatically moved from heavy gloom to the bright light of hope; the trumpet solo in the third part (the brilliant Peter Mankarious) had not yet lifted the dead from their graves, but had already transformed all the living present in the auditorium; the continuo group in the accompagnato recitatives was sensitively supported by Joseph Crouch (cello) and Judith Evans (double bass).

After the performance at the Barbican Hall. Photo: Damaris Laker

The solo singers were somewhat less homogeneous as an ensemble, partly due to the sudden replacement of the indisposed Louise Alder by Anna Devin in the soprano part. Devin’s voice, golden in tone but with too much vibrato, reached full expression only in opening number of part three, the aria “I know that my redeemer liveth”, sung with admirable finesse and serenity. I have to admit that when it comes to the alto part, I definitely prefer women to countertenors, especially those of the English “old school”, represented by Tim Mead – a singer who is highly musical and impresses with his culture of interpretation, but whose voice is less sonorous than that of the other soloists. Nick Pritchard, on the other hand, was excellent with his soft, beautifully rounded tenor, which enchanted me already in first phrase of the “Comfort ye” recitative. The most “operatic” sound came from Cody Quattlebaum, who has a bass of great beauty, but still not sufficiently stable intonation-wise and sometimes uneven across the registers – although, admittedly, he has a great feel for the theatricality of Handel’s music, which he demonstrated in, for example, the beautifully sung yet unsettling beginning of the aria “The people that walked in darkness”.

This was not a Messiah overpowering with might, exuding power to annihilate all enemies. In these Coverdale’s Great BiblCummings offered us a vision of the Anointed who would grow up from the child fed with milk and honey, leading the calf and the young lion, and playing trustingly near the viper’s den. That is why – although the entire audience rose from their seats at the first notes of “Hallelujah” – I was more moved by the finale of the oratorio, in which I genuinely heard heavens roll up and the world come into being in a whole new form.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Idomeneus, one of the suitors of the beautiful Helen, made to pledge by the King of Sparta to rush to the aid of her chosen bridegroom if necessary, commanded a fleet of eighty black Cretan ships at Troy. Fearless and fierce in battle, he returned home happily after the end of the Trojan War. As we read in the Odyssey, all his companions survived as well: “none of his men was devoured by the waves”. It was only in the Aeneid that that we find a reference to Idomeneus being later banished from Crete; Virgil, however, does not specify the circumstances of the hero’s banishment. Over four hundred years later the information provided by the Roman poet was complemented by his commentator Servius, according to whom the Cretan fleet came up against a storm on its way back: in exchange for abating the storm, Idomeneus promised Neptune that he would sacrifice to him the first living thing he saw after coming ashore. As cruel fate would have it, the first living thing he saw was his son. Yet Servius does not say whether the sacrifice was duly performed, and if so, whether this cruel deed resulted in the king’s expulsion from his homeland. Servius even presents another variant of the myth, in which Idomeneus is banished from Crete by an usurper put on the throne after the king has left for the war.

The theme of the “wild” king who made a hasty promise to a deity and just as hastily kept it was used in the late seventeenth century by François Fénelon, tutor to Louis XIV’s grandson and author of the didactic novel The Adventures of Telemachus, in which Idomeneus became an example of a ruler unworthy of imitation, a ruler who fails to act in accordance with law and reason. A side version of the myth, it became a warning to enlightened monarchs and the basis for many subsequent adaptations. The first opera about Idomeneus, with a libretto by Antoine Danchet, based on a tragedy by Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, was written in 1712 by André Campra. An avalanche of more operas, by composers like Baldasare Galuppi and Giovanni Paisiello, among others, was launched by archaeological works around Pompeii and Herculaneum.

In 1778, when Charles Theodore, the new Elector of Bavaria, was transferring the court from Mannheim to Munich, taking with him the Kapellmeister Christian Cannabich and most of his fine orchestra, the twenty-two-year-old Mozart was staying in Paris. He soon returned to Salzburg, but was not particularly surprised when in 1780, on the initiative of his friend Cannabich, he received a commission for a work to open the next opera season in Munich. He decided to entrust the libretto for a new Idomeneus opera to the Salzburg priest Giambattista Varesco, who adapted Danchet’s text, abandoning the tragic finale in favour of a lieto fine, a move that not only weakened the opera’s message, but also disrupted its dramatic logic.

Vasyl Solodkyy (Idomeneo). Photo: Andreas Etter

This, however, did not prevent Mozart from writing a score that sparkles with invention, brilliantly combines Italian, French and German influences, and, at the same time, is extremely demanding for the performers – from the soloists, the chorus singers to the orchestra musicians. The premiere at Munich’s Cuvilliés-Theater, in January 1781, was a huge success, despite the fact that the opera was presented only three times and the announcements did not even include the composer’s name. In any case, Idomeneo, re di Creta has never matched the popularity of Mozart’s later works – its discography is not very impressive, it gets staged sporadically and usually fails to meet the expectations of the critics and the audiences. That is why I decided to see the new staging at the Staatstheater Mainz, expecting a lot of good things from Nadja Stefanoff as Elettra, whose love for Idomeneus’ son is unrequited; and Krystian Adam, who after the September premiere replaced the Ukrainian tenor Vasyl Solodkyy in the title role in several performances.

In fact, there were many more good things, largely thanks to Hermann Bäumer, the music director of the Mainz company since 2011. Bäumer conducted the performance with a great sense of style, in finely chosen tempos, beautifully weighing the proportions between the stage and the orchestra pit. The strings played with a clear, transparent sound, the expanded wind group worked well both in the piled-up dialogues of orchestral colours, contrasted in terms of dynamics and articulation, and in the concertante passages. The singers were provided with a very attentive and supportive accompaniment in the recitatives by Fiona Macleod on the pianoforte. The Staatsheater Mainz chorus – featuring eight coryphaei – was excellent in its fiendishly difficult parts, richly ornamented and full of non-obvious harmonies and spatial effects.

Nadja Stefanoff (Elettra). Photo: Andreas Etter

I was not disappointed by Stefanoff, whose supple and sparkling soprano – combined with impeccable articulation and masterful phrasing – lent not only intensity but also psychological depth to the figure of Elettra (especially in the final aria, “D’Oreste, d’Ajace ho in seno i tormenti”, where the distraught protagonist is on the verge of madness). My expectations were more than met by Krystian Adam, an Idomeneo who was inwardly torn, vacillating between anger and anguish, not losing his royal dignity even in deepest despair. Adam managed to convey this whole range of states and emotions by purely musical means: subtly shaded dynamics, skilfully modulated timbre and great mastery of the coloratura technique, which he showed off in the famous aria “Fuor del mar” from Act II. A fine performance was given by Alexandra Uchlin as Idamante, Idomeneo’s son. Her intonation was spot-on, although her fresh mezzo-soprano proved insufficiently resonant at times. I was much less impressed by Yulietta Alexanyan in the role of Ilia, Idamante’s beloved – a singer endowed with a soprano of great beauty, but produced rather mechanically and often flat. Myungin Lee was rather bland in the tenor role of Arbace. The Oracle of Neptune was voiced by the bass Tim-Lukas Reuter, while the High Priest was sung by the tenor David Jakob Schläger, whom the director additionally gave another highly demanding and substantial role, not included in the original cast.

And here we come to the directorial concept devised by Alexander Nerlich, who decided to show the story of Idomeneus through his war trauma and the hallucinations tormenting him. Not leaving the king for a moment throughout the performance, Schläger is both the dark side of his personality, Neptune controlling his actions, and a sea monster sent by the god. This ghastly shadow, in royal attire but faceless – or, rather, with a face covered in black makeup, which eats into the body like a frayed mask – is, in any case, not the only demon on the Mainz stage. The dramatis personae interact with other faceless figures as well, but these are less aggressive, at times even sympathetic. They bring to mind the Japanese noppera-bō spirits, whose relentless presence torments the living with an illusory resemblance to their beloved dead (the costumes were designed by Zana Bosnjak). The associations with Japanese culture are by no means coincidental. When it comes to the visual layer of the production, Nerlich built his vision on references to the 2011 Fukushima I nuclear power plant disaster caused by an earthquake off the coast of Honshu, an earthquake that was followed by a tsunami. The starting point for Thea Hoffmann-Axthelm’s light and dynamic set design was press material from the destroyed gym at the Ukedo Elementary School, where members of Japanese rescue teams camped out for months in scandalous conditions. In the background we see vivid images of fires, blue skies and the raging sea. Moving walls shape the space of, alternately, the royal residence, palace gardens and the temple of Neptune; in episodes off the coast of Crete, the enclosed scenery gives way to rolling wooden platforms.

Yulietta Alexanyan (Ilia). Photo: Andreas Etter

There is no doubt that Nerlich has extended the chain of the myth’s evolution by adding more links, interpreting Idomeneus’ dilemma through modern threats and disputes over the model of power. However, he has put his vision into practice so discreetly and consistently that the spectators do not feel overwhelmed by the abundance of codes contained in it. The conventional decorations can just as well bring to mind nightmarish memories of the siege of Troy, the storm causes similar terror on the shores of Crete and Honshu, the stylised costumes combine elements of very diverse cultures. Most importantly, Mozart’s Idomeneo returns home happily – welcomed with open arms on successive European stages, listened to carefully, and prompting quite fresh reflection on the experience of war, violence and long separation.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

May Janáček forgive me that once again I could go to Brno for just a few days of his Bienniale and, consequently, once again I faced the difficult decision what to choose from among the festival’s offerings. Two years ago I couldn’t help marvelling how so many musical events could be packed into the festival programme spread over less than three weeks. The organisers winked knowingly, said, “Hold our beer”, and extended this year’s Bienniale by six days, increasing the number of concerts and performances accordingly. And just in case – lest anyone think it’s a one-off excess, associated with the Year of Czech Music celebrations – they announced a tentative schedule for the next festival, which will last more than a month.

Janáček Brno 2024, with the motto “No limits!”, has just come to an end. As many as seven productions were presented in its main operatic strand: a new staging of The Excursions of Mr. Brouček directed by Robert Carsen, with the excellent Nicky Spence in the title role, co-produced with Teatro Real in Madrid and Berlin’s Staatsoper; two productions of The Cunning Little Vixen – one from Ostrava, the other from Brno, both to celebrate the centennial of the Brno premiere at the theatre now called Mahenovo divadlo; Věc Makropulos from Berlin’s Staatsoper (Claus Guth’s 2022 production); a staging of Jenůfa prepared especially for the festival in its original 1904 version, conducted by Anna Novotna Pešková and directed by Veronika Kos Loulová; as well as this year’s Brno production of Dvořák’s Rusalka, directed by David Radok, and the first Czech staging of The Charlatan, Pavel Haas’ only opera, since its 1938 premiere. The festival guests this year included two foreign orchestras, the Bamberger Symphoniker and the Staatskapelle Berlin, conducted during concerts at the Janáček Theatre by Jakub Hrůša, who is just finishing his tenure in Bamberg and next season will be taking over the musical direction of London’s Royal Opera House (he led the Berlin ensemble instead of Christian Thielemann, who had to cancel for health reasons). A novelty in the Bienniale programme came in the form of a series of recitals at Brno’s famous villas: the Art Nouveau Villa Löw-Beer and two icons of modernism, Villa Tugendhat and Villa Stiassni.

Like last year, I decided to organise my four-day stay in Brno around a forgotten opera, in this case Haas’ The Charlatan. Pavel Haas is an exceptionally tragic figure, even in comparison with other modernists whose work has been recently presented in the Czech Republic and Germany as part of the huge “Musica non grata” project, which restores the memory of artists eradicated from musical life after the Nazis’ rise to power. Born in 1899 in Brno, in a family of a Jewish shoemaker and owner of a thriving shoe workshop, Haas began his education with private piano lessons. At the age of fourteen he enrolled in the music school in the Besední dům and after the Great War continued his studies at the newly established Conservatoire. In 1920 he became a student at the master school of Leoš Janáček, who would have a huge influence on his later oeuvre, although, according to Haas, his pedagogical methods left much to be desired.

After completing his studies Haas became a partner in his father’s business, while pursuing a parallel career as a composer and critic. At that time he wrote a lot of music for the theatre and was increasingly toying with the idea of composing his own opera. The first attempts, for various reasons, failed (among the ideas that never materialised was The Dybbuk based on the dramatic legend by S. An-sky). Haas got a second wind only in the 1930s, having established his reputation as a composer of film music. This time his choice was Josef Winckler’s novel Doctor Eisenbart, published in 1929, about an itinerant Bavarian barber from the turn of the eighteenth century, a real-life figure who made a fortune from shows featuring cataract removal and setting of broken bones, staged with a large troupe of musicians, acrobats and mimes.

The Charlatan. Pavol Kubáň as Pustrpalk. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Seeking to have the novel adapted into a libretto, in 1933 Haas approached the author himself, who treated him kindly but with some reserve, aware of what cooperation with a Jewish composer could mean for both sides. Two years later, when the Nuremberg Race Laws came into force, Haas decided to cover up the source of his inspiration and draft the libretto himself, allegedly drawing on the medieval farce Mastičkář (Ointment Seller), from which he took the name of the main character, Pustrpalk. He set the action during the Thirty Years’ War and prudently removed all references to the German reality from the text.

He submitted the score of Šarlatán, completed in June 1937, to the management of the Zemské divadlo in Brno (another name for today’s Mahen Theatre), which staged the opera – with great success – the following April. And then everything began to crumble. In March 1939 the Third Reich seized Czechoslovakia. Two years later Haas found himself in the Terezin concentration camp. In October 1944 he was transferred to Auschwitz along with another transport of prisoners and died in the gas chamber the same day. The family learned about the story of his death from Karel Ančerl, who was miraculously escaped extermination. Yet the memory of Haas did not begin to be revived until the 1990s, after The Charlatan was staged at the Wexford Festival.

This year’s staging from the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre in Ostrava subtly draws on František Muzika’s 1938 sets and highlights all the best features of the directorial craft of Ondřej Havelka, who skilfully weaves his way between the Czech avant-garde and bourgeois theatre, expressionism and folk tradition. The simple, multifunctional sets (Jakub Kopecký) and colourful costumes, referring to various eras and conventions (Kateřina Štefková), effectively outline the space of the drama and emphasise the nature of individual characters. They are the material of vulgar gags, at times turning into an effective tool of illusion (evocative shadow play behind a wooden structure covered by a semi-transparent screen). Havelka masterfully juggles elements of plebeian theatre – with all its coarseness and exaggerated acting gestures. Acrobats doing somersaults, cloth entrails pulled from the bodies of the quack’s clients, two-legged horses without harnesses pulling an alcove transformed into a carriage – the dizzying pile-up of the absurd and the grotesque makes the tragedy of the finale, coming as suddenly as the Nazi darkness that was soon to envelop all of Europe, all the more powerful.

The Charlatan is an opera of crowds, a feature that was perfectly captured by Jakub Klecker, a conductor with vast choral experience, who was in charge of the musical side of things. He sensed the inherent theatricality of Haas’ score, composed – as in Janáček’s works – of short musical ideas combined into coherent, larger systems, rhythmically expressive, with a melody based largely on modal material. Particularly worthy of note in the large solo cast were Pavol Kubáň, singing the title role, an artist possessing a resonant baritone beautifully developed in the upper end of the scale; Soňa Godarská as Amarantha, a singer with excellent acting skills and a rather sharp sounding but very expressive mezzo-soprano; and the bass-baritone Josef Škarka as the wistful old man Pavučina. A separate round of applause should be given to the chorus of the Ostrava company, superbly prepared by Jurij Galatenko.

The Cunning Little Vixen. Doubravka Novotná in the title role. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

The infectious enthusiasm of the Ostrava ensembles was also shared by the audience of The Cunning Little Vixen, under the baton of the young Prague conductor Marek Šedivý, who has held the musical directorship of the Moravian-Silesian Theatre for four seasons. The director of the new production is the Israeli-Dutch choreographer Itzik Galili, known for his witty and inventive, and yet compellingly lyrical, dance routines. His distinctive style – underpinned by Daniel Dvořák’s clear, very sparse sets and Simona Rybáková’s gorgeous costumes – worked well in Janáček’s “forest idyll”. Despite the addition of a dozen or so dancers to the cast, stage movement did not dominate the other elements of the production. On the contrary: in the almost empty space illuminated by soft light Galili created an even more emphatic illusion of the magical atmosphere of the forest. Nor did his concept hamper the singers, who clearly enjoyed entering the world of this dancing tale. It’s been a long time since heard such a fresh and sparkling interpretation of the title role – Doubravka Novotná is undoubtedly one of the most talented Czech sopranos of the younger generation, an artist who is versatile and, at the same time, has a rare ability to choose her repertoire wisely. I was a little bit disappointed by Martin Gurbal’ as the Forester. Either he was out of shape that day or his bass is not quite open enough at the top for this essentially baritone part. On the other hand the baritone Boris Prýgl was excellent in the bass role of Harašta. But even so – also thanks to his superb acting – the show was stolen by Jan Šťáva in the dual role of the Badger and the Parson: as the latter he rode around the stage on a kick scooter with a blue headlight in the shape of a large cross. It is also impossible not to mention the excellent child soloists, led by Roman Patrik Baroš in the role of Young Frog, a character that always moves me to tears in the finale, when he explains to the Forester that he has mistaken him for his grandfather. This time the circle of seasons closed more evocatively than usual – this was thanks to the Old Butterfly (Michal Bublík) dying on the proscenium, slowly slipping away throughout the performance.

I arrived in Brno on the eve of the performance of The Charlatan to finally hear Martinů’s Field Mass live. And hear it I did: in a very good performance by the baritone Tadeáš Hoza, the male part of the Gaudeamus Brno choir and Ensemble Opera Diversa conducted by Tomáš Krejčí. However, the biggest discovery of the evening at the Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was for me Haas’ Psalm 29 for organ, baritone, female choir and small orchestra – a dense and dark piece, combining inspirations from Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass and Honegger’s “polyphonically complex” counterpoint to references to early Baroque art of the fugue. Fifteen minutes of music that helped me delve deeper into the musical fabric of Haas’ Charlatan the following day.

Martinů’s Field Mass at the Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Tomáš Krejčí and Tadeáš Hoza). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

And then understand that all of the festival concerts – including those seemingly less important – were programmed in a way that would place the patron’s legacy in a broader context. An afternoon with the Brno Contemporary Orchestra, conducted by Pavel Šnajdr, devoted to the music of local composers (primarily those from the generation born in the first decade of independence) made me aware not only of their complicated relationship with Janáček’s legend, but also of their overwhelming influence on the artists of later generations. It is good to know that before Martin Smolka’s 2004 Nagano, a wickedly funny opera about Czech hockey players, came less elaborate but equally brilliant parodies of old musical conventions, like Josef Berg’s absurdist micro-opera Snídaně na hradě Šlankenvaldě, with the composer’s own libretto based on a play by Matěj Kopecký, a famous Czech puppeteer from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Once again I must praise Jan Šťáva, the only singer among the actors in this gem, singing the role of the Villager, which Berg – to enhance the comic effect – composed in the classical Haydn style and to a German text at that.

What turned out to be a magnificent musical lecture on the diversity of approaches to arrangements of folk music in song was a recital by the soprano Simona Šaturová accompanied by Marek Kozák at the piano – in the Tugendhat Villa designed by Mies van der Rohe, a dream venue for a performance of works by modernists (in addition to Janáček, Eugen Suchon, Béla Bartók and Klement Slavický, among others). I am glad I went to the Reduta Theatre for a staged concert of folk music from the Moravian-Slovakian borderlands – performed by instrumentalists and singers from Březová, Strání and Lopeník, with commentary in the form of essays by Janáček read by Vladimír Doskočil, an actor born in those parts. In fact, the only item on the programme that did not quite fit in for me with the perfectly thought-out concept of the festival was a recital by the bass-baritone Adam Plachetka and David Švec (piano), promoting their album Evening Songs for the Pentatone label. The songs by Smetana, Dvořák, Suk and Fibich to poems from Vítězslav Hálek’s collection Večerní písně, included in the album, were supplemented by the artists with Dvořák’s Gypsy Melodies, Op. 55, and – pushing it somewhat – a selection from Janáček’s cycle On an Overgrown Path. This, however, is a minor complaint. I was more worried by the fact that both artists failed to grasp the intimate acoustics of the Mahen Theatre and performed the whole thing in a manner more suited to, I would say, a concert or opera: Plachetka with the full volume of his healthy and booming voice, Švec on the piano with the lid open. I left after their recital deafened by the excess of sound, but I fully understand the enthusiasm of the audience, who rarely has an opportunity to see in Brno one of the most highly regarded and internationally recognised Czech singers.

However, in the context of everything I heard and saw over just four days of the Biennial, it would be inappropriate to complain. I am already looking forward to another festival. And I still can’t believe that so much was packed into this joyful, unassuming event without generating a sense of overkill.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Two operatic stories of transformation – of Actaeon “in the form of a stag”, who would prefer to see his prey rather than feel the teeth of his hounds on his own skin; and Pygmalion, who “once carved a statue of great beauty out of snow-white marble” and the stone became flesh – are separated by nearly three generations. Marc-Antoine Charpentier composed his hunting opera Actéon most likely in the spring of 1684; the exact circumstances of its first performance, however, are unclear. It is highly unlikely that the premiere took place at the Hôtel de Guise, the Parisian residence of Princess Marie of Lorraine, the composer’s patron – the line-up of the instrumental ensemble suggests that it was an outside commission, perhaps from the Jesuit Collège Clermont. It is also difficult to tell whether the eponymous Actéon was played by the composer himself, who apparently had a well-trained haute-contre, a tenor peculiar to the French Baroque with an upwardly extended tessitura. Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Pigmalion is from a different era and represents a completely different style – that of a typical acte de ballet, a short stage form that combines singing, music and dance within a well-structured drama based on a concise, often mythological anecdote. This is undoubtedly the most successful of the eight works of this genre in the composer’s oeuvre, written in the late 1740s and early 1750s. The piece, first staged at the Académie Royale de Musique in August 1748, was rather coldly received. A real success came with a revival three years later and from that moment it was – despite its brevity – second in popularity only to the musical tragedy Castor et Pollux, running for nearly three decades. It was also one of Rameau’s first masterpieces to come back in grace today and now remains one of his most frequently performed compositions. To what extent it is performed stylishly and convincingly is quite another matter.

Strangely enough, Pigmalion opened the gates of Baroque opera to me when I was still a teenager – and in a non-obvious way at that, through Carlos Saura’s ambiguous film Elisa, vida mía. It was only recently that I understood that the Spanish director invoked in it a peculiar variation of the self-fulfilling prophecy, known as the Pygmalion effect. What has stayed with me until now, however, is the aria he used, “Fatal Amour, cruel vainqueur”, performed by the now-forgotten French tenor Eric Marion, whose unique, androgynous, yet still modal voice made me aware of the existence of vocal Fächer, the specificity of which I was to learn many years later.

Laurence Cummings and Bojan Čičić. Photo: Mark Allan

Perhaps that is why I did not hesitate for a moment to go to the West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge for the first of two concerts by the Academy of Ancient Music conducted by Laurence Cummings, featuring the two “Ovidian” one-act works, in which the title roles were performed by Thomas Walker: a genuine haute-contre with a very broad range, dark, meaty and even, not resorting to falsetto even at the highest notes of the scale. His voice must be similar to that of Pierre Jélyotte, Pigmalion at the Paris premiere of the work and Rameau’s favourite singer, who triumphed not only as a heroic romantic lead, but also in en travesti roles, led by Platée, the swamp froggy nymph, to whom the composer entrusted perhaps the most fiendishly difficult role for this specifically French tenor type. Suffice it to say that Walker’s repertoire includes both Platée, Zoroastre and Pigmalion from Rameau’s operas, as well as Pelléas in Debussy’s musical drama, a role intended for a high baritone.

In both one-act operas Walker highlighted the qualities of his voice with beautiful phrasing, stylish ornamentation and sensitive character interpretation – devoid of the hysteria and pathos so common in performers struggling in these roles with the inexorable resistance of the vocal matter. He found an excellent partner in Anna Dennis, as always expressive, captivating with her ease of singing and exceptionally beautiful soprano: especially in the role of Diane in Actéon, although she more than made up for the small size of the “statue animée” role in Pigmalion with graceful acting. Of the other two soloists I was more impressed by the soprano Rachel Redmond (Aréthuze and L’Amour, respectively), who has a voice as luminous as a ray of sunshine, indefatigable energy and a great sense of humour. I last heard Katie Bray (Junon and Hyale in Actéon, Céphise in Pigmalion) live seven years ago – since then her mezzo-soprano has lost a bit of her brilliance and precision of intonation, although some of the shortcomings can certainly be explained by the excessively high tessitura of the roles entrusted to her. There was a magnificent “chorus” of four young singers (Ana Beard Fernández, Ciara Hendrick, Rory Carver and Jon Stainsby), whose soloist ambitions clearly do not stand in the way of splendid ensemble music making.

Thomas Walker. Photo: Robert Workman

The whole was overseen from the harpsichord by Laurence Cummings, who guided the instrumentalists and singers with his usual panache, insight and sense of idiom – both in the modest Actéon, an opera that can be viewed as a kind of practice run to Charpentier’s later stage works, but undoubtedly one that has charm and dramatic nerve; as well as in Pigmalion, a true masterpiece of the genre, full of contrasts and sudden twists and turns, with a level of condensation of material truly on a par with Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Outstanding performances in the small instrumental ensemble – twenty players in Pigmalion and about half as many in Actéon – came from the AAM concertmaster Bojan Čičić (especially in the glorious duet with Simone Gibbs, concertmistress of the second violins, in Charpentier’s opera, where Čičić played the instrument held against his breast below the collarbone, in accordance with the practice of the time); the excellent percussionist Jordan Murray; and the dependable continuo group made up of Reiko Ichise (viola da gamba), William Carter (theorbo) and Cummings at the harpsichord. It is also worth mentioning that what contributed to the success of both performances was not only discreet stage action, but also an excellent “didascalie” prepared by Alistair Baumann, set in a period Antiqua italic font and displayed legibly in the background, without any additional embellishments.

Having found my dream Pigmalion after so many years, I returned to Poland with a sense of complete fulfilment. It was not until a few days later that I came to regret that I had missed the sensation at the concert the following day, at the Milton Court Concert Hall in London, when Walkers, who had lost his voice just before the final, virtuosic aria “Règne, Amour, fais briller tes flammes”, was replaced, much to the surprise of the dumbstruck audience, by Cummings himself. Then, jaded as I am, I realized that he would not have surprised me: during the last Handel Festival in Göttingen under his direction, at the height of the pandemic, Cummings gave a webcast concert in which he played the harpsichord and sang an abbreviated version of the pasticcio Muzio Scevola. And yes, he did that brilliantly. It remains for me to wish all soloists in future AAM ventures good health, while assuring them that Cummings can stand in for anyone, from soprano to bass, if necessary. I do not think anyone doubts any more that one of the best early music ensembles in the world is finally in good hands after years of stagnation.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

I generally tend to avoid quoting overused bons mots, but in the case of Bayreuth Baroque I really cannot think of anything other than Hitchcock’s famous recipe for a good film. Max Emanuel Cenčić’s festival began four years ago with a veritable earthquake and tension has been steadily rising ever since. Cenčić is both the artistic director of the festival, and the director and performer of one of the leading roles in the stagings of forgotten Baroque operas prepared year after year, which on the surface seems like a perfect recipe for disaster. Yet the opposite is, in fact, true: Cenčić’s ambitious and visionary concepts are proving to be not only the highlights of the festival programme, but also the starting point for subsequent festival ventures featuring the stars of past performances, as well as an arena for new experiments in historically informed performance.

I dread to think what will happen next. After last year’s premiere of Handel’s Flavio I expected a temporary loss of form. I told myself that it was not possible to treat the audience every season to a production that would be so musically excellent and theatrically thoughtful. Especially given that all of Cenčić’s productions to date – in addition to their many other assets – have been marked by a light, almost burlesque sense of humour, which I hastily concluded was the most important feature of his directing. This year Cenčić reminded us of Ifigenia in Aulide, one of Nicola Porpora’s least known operas – despite its conventional lieto fine, a deadly serious thing, exposing humanity’s deepest moral dilemmas, explored at length by authors from Euripides, Racine, Schiller and Hauptmann, to Yorgos Lanthimos with his harrowing film The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

Ifigenia in Aulide. Photo: Clemens Manser

Ifigenia comes from the middle period of the composer’s career, when a group of aristocrats hostile to Handel, led by Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, invited Porpora to London to throw down the gauntlet to the revived Royal Academy of Music. The Opera of the Nobility was inaugurated in December 1733 with the premiere of Porpora’s Arianna in Nasso at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, a month before the premiere of Handel’s Arianna in Creta, which was being prepared at the Haymarket theatre. After two not very successful seasons, the Opera of the Nobility moved to the King’s Theatre in Covent Garden and began regularly using underhand tactics against the rival company. The rivalry brought both sides to the brink of bankruptcy, but Handel won in the end. The Opera of the Nobility went out of business in 1737, having been ruined in large by demands of ever-higher salaries from the singers, including the contralto Francesca Bertolli, the castrati Senesino and Farinelli, and the bass Antonio Montagnana. Discouraged, Porpora left England, tried in vain to obtain a position at the imperial court in Vienna and eventually returned to Naples, where he rebuilt his reputation for a time with a new, revised version of Semiramide riconosciuta.

If you don’t count Festa d’Imeneo, his last London opera – or, in fact, a serenata – the 1735 Ifigenia received the frostiest reception from King’s Theatre regulars. Its run ended after only five performances, overshadowed by the much more popular Polifemo. The main culprit for the failure was probably Porpora’s regular collaborator, the librettist Paolo Antonio Rolli, who made the decision – misguided, as it turned out – to stick faithfully to the myth in Euripides’ version and focused too much on the relationships between the characters at the expense of effective dramaturgy. Yet musically, it is an extraordinary work, challenging the established stereotype of Porpora’s “old-fashioned” style. Despite its rather conventional structure – with plenty of virtuoso da capo arias alternating with secco recitatives – Ifigenia delights with its lyricism and beauty of melodic lines, variety of colour effects, as well as the composer’s method of constructing harmonic structures, already heralding classicism.

Aware that Rolli’s “Euripidean” libretto may, paradoxically, better appeal to the sensibilities of modern audiences, Max Emanuel Cenčić this time departed from the aesthetics of theatrical pastiche, creating a production that is clear, and, at the same time, marked by deep symbolism and a plethora of references to the myth’s “imagined” reality, which has changed over the centuries. I have already praised the set designer Giorgina Germanou’s talent for shaping space and mood with the help of simple, brilliantly lit decorations and expressive costumes (also by her this time) in connection with the pasticcio Sarrasine at this year’s Göttingen Handel Festival. The lighting director Romain de Lagarde bathed the sets in evocative shades of red, symbolising bloody sacrifice; idyllic blues; white, suggesting Iphigenia’s innocence; and the fathomless black of Diana/Artemis, in Greek mythology the goddess of hunting, but also of the moon and death. The nakedness of Agamemnon’s soldiers, bringing to my mind scenes from classical red-figure vases, and the war colours of the Myrmidons, Achilles’ cruel and uncouth companions, are contrasted with the ominous purple of the seer Calchas’ robes, the heroes’ costumes suspended outside time and the Baroque splendour of the Atreides’ clothing. However, what turned out to be Cenčić’s most interesting idea was the division of the role of Iphigenia between a young, silent actress (Marina Diakoumakou) and black-clad Diana sporting deer antlers on her head, who accompanies Iphigenia like a shadow – this highlighted the passivity of the eponymous heroine in the face of divine will and, at the same time, provided the tragedy with an expressive narrative frame: from the anger of Diana demanding a human sacrifice for the death of the deer, through her growing decision to save the unfortunate girl, to the inevitably emerging bond between the goddess and her future priestess on Taurida.

Ifigenia in Aulide. Jasmin Delfs (Iphigenia/Diana). Photo: Falk von Traubenberg.

The sophisticated staging made the extraordinary qualities of the musical interpretation all the more powerful. Who knows, this may have been the first time in my life that I witnessed a contemporary performance of a Baroque opera that verged on absolute perfection. I will not grumble that the role of Ulysses, intended for a female soprano, was entrusted to a man (Nicolò Balducci), while Farinelli’s successor in the role of Achilles was a singer with a voice less resonant than that of the famous castrato from Apulia (Maayan Licht). Both soloists demonstrated that a well-trained soprano countertenor can be a true heroic voice, comfortable across all registers, agile in coloraturas, secure intonation-wise in huge intervallic leaps, and fluent in the style of Neapolitan bel canto. In the role of Agamemnon Cenčić once again faced the legend of Senesino and once again emerged victorious from the ordeal, both as a technically sensational singer and a superb actor. A convincing character of Clytemnestra was created by Marie-Ellen Nesi, a singer with an unusually expressive dark mezzo-soprano. Riccardo Novaro’s resonant and supple baritone was flawless in the role of Calchas. However, the most impressive performance may have come from the young Jasmin Delfs in the dual role of Iphigenia and Diana – because of not only her beautiful, luminous soprano, but also her extraordinary ease and lightness of singing.

Aroma di Roma, a candlelight concert at Ordenskirche St. Georgen. Photo: Clemens Manser

All these wonders would not have happened without Christophe Rousset, leading the soloists and the orchestra of Les Talents Lyriques from the harpsichord with an uncommon sense of the idiom and the richness of the colours contained in the score, with an assured and decisive hand, usually at rather sharp tempi, but with such discipline that nothing was lost from the calibre of this music. The following day the French harpsichordist performed with a dozen or so of the ensemble musicians at a candlelight concert at Ordenskirche St. Georgen, accompanying the excellent Sandrine Piau in a programme comprising two secular cantatas on “Roman” themes, Montéclair’s La morte di Lucretia and Handel’s Agrippina condotta a morire, and Domenico Scarlatti’s cantata Tinte a note di sangue, a letter written in blood to an unfaithful lover, interspersed with instrumental pieces by Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti. I was very moved by the evening: a display of the most tender collaboration between the musicians and the legendary singer, who more than made up for the now dull sound of her beautiful soprano with phenomenal technique and incredible maturity of interpretation.

Lucile Richardot. Photo: Clemens Manser

It is a pity that there was no such wisdom in Lucile Richardot’s concert the day before at the Schlosskirche with an attractive programme consisting of arias of the “Baroque sorceresses” – Medea, Armida and Circe – with the very capable Jean-Luc Ho at the harpsichord. Her extraordinary, almost tenor-like contralto is still deeply radiant. Her interpretations are getting increasingly mannered – to the detriment of both her voice and the music. It is possible, however, that I am too harsh on Richardot, still unable to recover from the delight of two evenings that transported me to a completely different dimension of historically informed performance.

This year I went to Bayreuth Baroque for a very brief visit – to experience an earthquake and a series of aftershocks. In future seasons I expect tsunamis, landslides and musical fires. Cenčić has already managed to surpass Hitchcock in the art of tension building.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Veterans of the Polish period instrument performance wax emotional about Innsbruck. In the turbulent 1990s, when they came to the Tyrolean capital – full of hope and poor as church mice – to study with the greatest masters, they would sometimes slip in without a ticket to concerts at the Hofburg, the Spanish Hall of the Ambras Castle or St. James’ Cathedral. Since then dozens of early music festivals have sprouted up across Europe. The dreamers of those days no longer have a sense of being excluded. The time of legends and pioneers is no more: the oeuvre of past eras has escaped its niche and entered the mainstream. The odds have evened out, but, on the other hand, the public’s expectations have changed. In order be able to face up to the growing competition, artists must reassure the listeners that the existing formula is working or must reinvent themselves.

The godparents of the Innsbrucker Festwochen der Alten Musik were two enthusiasts: the bassoonist Otto Ulf, a teacher at the local secondary school, and the poet and translator Lilly von Sauter, who in 1962 became the curator of Archduke Ferdinand II’s impressive collection at the Ambras Castle. The following year the two organised the first castle concert – on the 600th anniversary of the handover of Tyrol to the Habsburgs. The idea caught on.  Since then the Ambraser Schlosskonzerte have attracted a growing number of music lovers and curious tourists. In 1972 the Summer Academy of Early Music was launched thanks to Ulf’s efforts. The first “real” festival, under the artistic direction of its founder, was held in 1976. It was Ulf who shaped the Festwochen’s profile, which was unusual for the time and which elevated the event to the rank one of the most important festivals in Europe. Since the 1977 staging of Handel’s Acis and Galatea the programmes of successive Festwochen have featured stagings and semi-staged performances of old, often forgotten operas and oratorios. We can safely venture to say that Innsbruck is the cradle of the modern revival of Baroque opera.

The most fruitful years of the festival were those during the directorship of Ulf and his successor Howard Arman. The Festwochen became a breeding ground for new talent, a stepping stone in the great careers of future masters of historically informed performance, a model for the founders of new festivals and an encouragement to include early music in the programmes of other prestigious events. Something started to go wrong during the reign of René Jacobs, who treated Innsbruck somewhat dispassionately, as a sideline to his international activity, which was developing more dynamically outside Austria. The crisis worsened during the tenure of Alessandro De Marchi, an alumnus of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and one-time assistant to Jacobs, who failed to revive the festival’s tried-and-tested but a bit outdated formula. De Marchi undoubtedly deserves praise for inaugurating the Cesti-Wettbewerb, a competition in honour of the Italian composer Pietro Antonio Cesti, who served for some time as the Kapellmeister at the court of Archduke Ferdinand Charles in Innsbruck. Prizewinners from previous years, including Emöke Baráth, Rupert Charlesworth, Sreten Manojlović and the Polish mezzo-soprano Natalia Kawałek, are developing beautifully, building careers not only in the Baroque repertoire. However, sceptics grumbled that De Marchi was making misguided programming choices and put his own ambitions above the patience of listeners, who were treated to hours-long performances of not always interesting rarities. The critics also raised concerns about De Marchi’s striking but increasingly mannered interpretations.

Graupner’s Dido. Jone Martínez as Menalippe and Andreas Wolf (Hiarbas). Photo: Birgit Gufler

One thing is certain: the festival began to lose the interest of audiences and foreign critics. It was time for reforms. The change of the guard in 2023, after the last season programmed by De Marchi, brought with it a change in the structure of the entire Festwochen management. Markus Lutz, the previous Managing Director, became Executive Commercial Director; Eva-Maria Sens was appointed Artistic Director; while the harpsichordist, conductor and researcher Ottavio Dantone, well-known to Polish audiences as well, was made the new Musical Director.

The motto of this year’s Festwochen was “Where do we come from? Where are we going?” I have already answered the first question above. If, as I suspect, the organisers were referring to the title of Gauguin’s famous painting, the motto was missing the question “Who are we?” Which is not entirely clear in the case of Eva-Maria Sens, a graduate in history and German studies, who has been collaborating with the festival since 2015, previously in the much less prominent position of head of artistic administration, and has no particularly impressive track record. For the moment her vision is not much different from the declarations of most newly appointed directors, trying to lure the audience with an open dialogue between the past and the present. It will be possible to answer the question “Where are we going?” in a few years, although it is already worrying that the festival’s musical directors will serve no more than three to five seasons. In my opinion this is too short a time to give the festival an identity and leave a clear mark of artistic individuality on it. It’s a pity, because Dantone and his Accademia Bizantina, the festival’s resident orchestra, represent the commendable trend of communicating with listeners in a purely musical language, without unnecessary fireworks, with a deep sense that the content and the emotions of compositions written centuries ago will prove intelligible also to a modern, well-prepared audience. Yet it takes time and determination to develop a new audience. Let’s hope both Dantone and his successors will not lack either.

In evaluating the entire festival, the programme of which, spread over more than five weeks, included stagings of three operas, the Cesti Competition, over twenty concerts and as many fringe events, I have to rely on the opinions of the local critics for obvious reasons. I arrived Innsbruck for the last few days of the Festwochen, consciously – albeit regretfully – forgoing Giacomelli’s Cesare in Egitto under Dantone and a concert performance of Handel’s Arianna in Creta featuring the winners of last year’s competition. I chose Christoph Graupner’s Dido, Königin von Carthago, conducted by Andrea Marcon – the operatic debut of the twenty-four-year-old composer, who not long before that got a job as a harpsichordist at Hamburg’s Oper am Gänsemarkt. The building in the square where, contrary to its name, poultry was never traded, with the name most likely referring to the estate of the landowner Ambrosius Gosen, was the first public opera house in Germany, opening in 1678, just over forty years after the inauguration of Venice’s Teatro San Cassiano. It was a stage where no castrati were hired, but where audiences nevertheless expected the same thing as in Venice: elaborate arias full of intricate embellishments and complicated librettos with lots of subplots.

Graupner wrote Dido after the departure of his younger colleague Handel, a violinist and harpsichordist at the Hamburg theatre, who before traveling to Italy had managed to present the well-received Almira and the now-lost Nero at the Gänsemarkt. Of the scores of Handel’s later “Hamburg” operas, Florindo and Daphne, only fragments have survived and they are insufficient to warrant a reliable reconstruction. The operas of Johann Mattheson – the same to whom Händel refused to give way at the harpsichord for a performance of Die unglückselige Cleopatra and was very nearly killed by the enraged composer, an event that turned out to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship between the two men – are yet to see their renaissance. The first performance in our time of Mattheson’s Boris Goudenow, which premiered in Hamburg in 1710, three years after Graupner’s operatic debut, did not take place until 2005. Of the three composers, whose oeuvres from that period perfectly reflect the “programme line” of Oper am Gänsemarkt during the house’s first heyday under the direction of Reinhard Keiser, one, Mattheson, was Hamburg-born, while the other two received their first musical training in two Saxon cities: Halle (Handel) and Leipzig (Graupner). Despite the undoubted stylistic differences, their works from the period represent German opera of the transitional phase between the mature and late Baroque, that is, according to Piotr Kamiński, “an intoxicating mixture of Venetian opera, French choreography, German heartiness and universal bad taste”.

Robin Johanssen (Dido), Jacob Lawrence (Aeneas), and Jorge Franco (Achates). Photo: Birgit Gufler

The occasional stagings of Almira aside, this eclectic genre is still a terra incognita for most Baroque opera lovers. Dido – like Almira, which does not resemble any of Handel’s later operas – surprises with its huge size, mixing of German arias and recitatives with Italian arias, typical of Hamburg opera, a range of improbable subplots and an extraordinary sensuality of sound. It also reveals the composer’s Leipzig training, especially his mastery of the art of counterpoint and fugue. The orchestration is dense and dark, combinations of instruments  not obvious, changes of mood abrupt, play of modes and keys deeply thought out and linked to the character of the protagonists (most of the title role is in minor keys). Worthy of note are the elaborate ensembles and choruses, in part inspired by French composers, and in part even featuring literal references to Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas – which would confirm musicologists’ most recent theories that the father of English opera’s oeuvre had a much bigger influence on the music of continental composers than previously thought. Graupner also made several significant corrections to Heinrich Hinsch’s libretto, demonstrating an unerring sense of drama – corrections sometimes as subtle as changing the order of the chorus’ words at the beginning of Act III from “Dido lebe” (long live Dido) to “Lebe, Dido” to make the link to the following ominous duet between Aeneas and Achates, “Lebe, Dido, lebe wohl” (Farewell, Dido, farewell), all the stronger.

It’s a pity that Marcon took the accusations against De Marchi too much to his heart and opted for rather serious cuts to the score. Many arias were removed from the opera, as was the entire role of Iras, Dido’s confidante in love with Achates, with secco recitatives being drastically trimmed as well, sometimes to the detriment of the musical dramaturgy. Perhaps, however, the audience at the Tiroler Landestheater indeed was not ready yet to sit through the complete work that would have taken at least four and a half hours to perform without the cuts. In the truncated version it did hold the audience’s attention, a lot of credit for which is due to the Italian production team: the dancer and choreographer Deda Cristina Colonna who was in charge of directing (in 2017, shortly after Stefan Sutkowski’s death, her production of Lully’s Armida, presented in Innsbruck two years earlier, was brought to the Warsaw Chamber Opera), and the set designer Domenico Franchi. A sensible compromise between the sumptuousness of the historicising costumes and props, and the minimalism of the geometric, sliding decorations – magnificently lit by Cesare Agoni, who bathed the stage in vivid, saturated shades of blue, red, black, white and, above all, gold – provided space for the singers and ample room for manoeuvre for the director, who patched up the gaps in the libretto with elaborate acting gestures alluding to both Baroque dance and modern forms of dance and pantomime.

The biggest hero of the evening was, however, Andrea Marcon, leading the soloists, NovoCanto vocal ensemble and La Cetra orchestra with an energy that proved infectious to all the performers, but at the same time with precision and without falling into irritating mannerisms. He beautifully spun tuneful, expressive melodic lines, intricately weaving them into the dense, shimmering texture, only to occasionally pull out a single thread from it. He placed the accents brilliantly, played with timbre skilfully and, above all, perfectly balanced the proportions between the stage and the orchestra pit, which, given the rather uneven vocal cast, was not an easy task.

I was a little disappointed by the eponymous Dido portrayed by Robin Johanssen, a singer endowed with a sensual and fresh soprano with a charmingly silvery timbre, which to my ear is more appropriate for the classical repertoire, however. Her singing, smooth, even across the registers and confident in the coloraturas, lacked primarily specifically Baroque ornamentation. In addition, Johanssen took a long time to warm up and achieved her full expression only in Act III (especially in the harrowing aria “Komm doch, komm, gewünschter Teil”, in which she was accompanied with uncommon sensitivity by Eva Saladin, the ensemble’s concert mistress). Alicia Amo, cast in two roles – Anna, Dido’s sister, and the goddess Venus – has a soprano that is bright and rather harsh in tone, marked by a persistent, uncontrolled vibrato, which the singer tried to cover with expressive delivery of the musical text, not always succeeding. I was definitely more impressed by the velvety-voiced, very technically proficient Jone Martínez in the soprano roles of Juno and the Egyptian princess Menalippe, whose love for the Numidian prince Hiarbas, head over heels in love with Dido, would find fulfilment only after the death of the Carthaginian queen. The weakest links in the male cast were the tenors: Jacob Lawrence (Aeneas), handsome-voiced but unconvincing as a character, and the clearly still inexperienced Jorge Franco as Achates. On the other hand excellent performances came from the unfortunate suitors: Andreas Wolf, who impressed with his sonorous, well-placed bass-baritone and stylish ornamentation in the role of Hiarbas; and José Antonio López, whose noble, mature baritone was perfect for the role of Juba, Prince of Tyras infatuated with Anna.

Musica hispanica. Los Elementos, Alberto Miguélez Rouco. Photo: Mona Wibmer

I stayed in Innsbruck for two more days. The following day, at the Jesuit church, I was able to enjoy rarely heard music by two eighteenth-century composers, José de Nebra and Francesco Corselli, fragments of which – arranged in a vocal-instrumental mass typical of Madrid’s Capilla Real at the time – were performed passionately and unpretentiously by the Los Elementos ensemble conducted by the Spanish countertenor and harpsichordist Alberto Miguélez Rouco. The day after that, as part of the new “Ottavio Plus” series, Dantone and Alessandro Tampieri, concert master and soloist of the Accademia Bizantina, gave a concert at the Spanish Hall, presenting a sophisticated programme featuring works for solo harpsichord and harpsichord in dialogue with violin, viola and viola d’amore: from the “proto-Baroque” Frescobaldi, through Attilio Ariosti, Domenico Scarlatti and Johann Sebastian Bach, to the heralds of Classicism, Johann Gottlieb Graun and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

Ottavio Plus. Ottavio Dantone and Alessandro Tampieri. Photo: Mona Wibmer

The venues were packed, but pilgrimages of music lovers from abroad are yet to materialise. There are new faces among the performers, the repertoire is already a bit different, the festival is slowly changing course and setting off into the unknown. “All remains different”, the new directors announced, alluding to the hit song by the German actor and singer Herbert Grönemeyer. I hope they will keep their word. The refrain of Grönemeyer’s song begins with the words “there’s so much to lose, you can only win”.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Well, I have been taught once again to never say never. I didn’t make it to the premiere of Valentin Schwarz’s production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, as I still had other some Bayreuth stagings from previous years to catch up on. Last year I gave the new tetralogy a miss as well – discouraged by the generally scathing reviews of the director’s vision, the uneven, in a few cases even ill-judged cast and the return to the podium of the young, undoubtedly talented, but not very experienced Finnish conductor Pietari Inkinen, who in 2021 deprived me of any vestiges of pleasure in experiencing my beloved Die Walküre. This season I ran out of arguments – after Cornelius Meister and then after Inkinen, the baton was taken over by Simone Young, to whose debut on the Green Hill we had been looking forward for years. The other sensational announcement was that Michael Spyres would sing Siegmund, an announcement all the more sensational given that this was a double debut – the American tenor had never sung the role on stage before. Professional curiosity prevailed, although I must confess remorsefully that I got myself accredited only for Das Rheingold and Die Walküre. After what I saw and heard, I do not rule out that next year I might take one last opportunity to get to know the whole thing – if only to verify some of the interpretive tropes I spotted when analysing the first two parts of the Ring.

Schwarz arrived in Bayreuth with a hard-earned reputation of an iconoclast and a rebel. He announced that he intended to direct the Ring as if it were a four-part saga on Netflix – a story about the problems and dilemmas of a modern family, adapted to the sensibilities of today’s audiences, with all the resulting dramatic consequences of this decision. Fully aware that Wagner had drawn on dozens of sources to create his own mythology, Schwarz felt himself a myth-maker as well and, as he put it, “with consistent disrespect” for the libretto, made fundamental changes in it: not in the textual but in the interpretive layer. He made the conflict between the two twin brothers, Alberich and Wotan, the dramatic axis of the whole. He replaced the Rhine gold physically present in the Ring with a multiple symbol of power. He turned Sieglinde – pregnant even before the arrival of Siegmund – into a victim of Wotan’s rape, completely turning the relationship between the protagonists of Die Walküre upside down. As Schwarz resorted to comparisons with cinematic attempts to demythologise established myths, let me point out that in Netflix’s nearly thirty-year history no one has made an adaptation so far removed from the original that the viewer – in order to understand anything about it – has to use the director’s extensive commentary. Such commentary was not necessary even in the case of the mad Norwegian series Ragnarok, whose creators took a merciless approach not only to Norse mythology, but also to Der Ring des Nibelungen – and yet the narrative remained clear, above all for the production’s main target audience, that is pimply teenagers who didn’t always have a clue why a certain nursing home resident in the fictional town of Edda wore a black eye patch and was called Wotan Wagner.

Das Rheingold. Tomasz Konieczny (Wotan), Ólafur Sigurdarson (Alberich), and John Daszak (Loge). Photo: Enrico Nawrath

Thus, from a conceptual point of view Schwarz’s Ring is a complete disaster, but visually a perversely attractive disaster, mainly due to Andrea Cozzi’s excellent set design, Andy Besuch’s fine costumes, Nicola Hungsberg’s efficient lighting direction, prepared this year on the basis of Reinhard Traub’s original concept, and – last but not least – the extraordinary qualities of the Festspielhaus stage, the depth of which enhances every detail and brightens every colour. However, Schwarz doesn’t know how to use this brilliantly arranged space, which evokes only superficial associations with a movie set. The narrative unfolds in too many places at once, becomes distracting owing to the impossibility of using close-ups and long camera zoom-ins and, as a result, gets bogged down in the tangled, disjointed side plots.

And yet it is possible to discern in all this a desperate attempt to lure the audience with the promise of a mystery. There is no gold, no ring, no Nothung in this staging, but there are symbols that are yet to be fully explained – perhaps their meaning will be unveiled in the subsequent parts of the cycle. Could it be that gold is the ghastly, cruel boy in a yellow shirt, whom Alberich kidnaps from the custody of the Rhinemaidens? Or perhaps it’s just an illusion, perhaps the real metaphor for the primordial order of nature is the two children in Die Walküre sprinkled with golden glitter – embodied visions of the original state of innocence of Sieglinde and Siegmund? What does the pyramid, shown in various forms, mean? Could it be that in all its manifestations – from a polyhedral variation of Rubik’s cube that Wotan gives the infernal boy to play with, to the luminous space that Brünnhilde heads for in the finale of Die Walküre – it is an ambiguous symbol of power and violence, the ring, Tarnhelm and Wotan’s spear in one?

We don’t get an answer to these questions and I doubt – I may be wrong, though – that we will get it at the end of the Ring. Schwarz has some decent directorial skills, and from time to time he enlivens this incoherent tale of a toxic family with finely played episodes and charming acting scenes that, instead of developing into a coherent narrative, burst like soap bubbles. Like the brilliant, if a bit over-the-top, scene in which Erda impetuously hurls a tray full of champagne glasses against the floor before “Weiche, Wotan, weiche”. Like the beginning of Act I of Die Walküre, in which Hunding, amidst the flashes of a thunderstorm, struggles with a panel of blown electrical fuses. Like the well-captured essence of Siegmund’s disappointment, when, hearing that he will not be reunited with Sieglinde in Valhalla, he abandons his suitcase packed for the journey to the palace of the fallen. Yet most of Schwarz’s ideas come from nowhere and lead nowhere, and this includes the spectacular Non-Ride of the Valkyries: shrouded in bandages and recuperating in a plastic surgery clinic.

Das Rheingold. Tobias Kehrer (Fafner), Jens-Erik Aasbø (Fasolt), Nicholas Brownlee (Donner), Christina Nilsson (Freia), and Mirko Roschkowski (Froh). Photo: Enrico Nawrath

I wonder to what extent this pandemonium of post-dramatic theatre influenced casting choices and style of performance of the various vocal parts. In Das Rheingold, in line with Schwarz’s concept, we got the twins Alberich and Wotan in the form of two repulsive shady-looking characters, whose singing – far from any canons of beauty and subtlety – carried only a powerful charge of contempt, frustration and hatred (Ólafur Sigurdarson and Tomasz Konieczny, respectively). An emotionless and prematurely aged Fricka found a convincing performer in Christa Mayer, who possesses an already tired mezzo-soprano with an excessive vibrato. Freia, terrified and almost in catatonia, was heard in Christina Nilsson’s lovely but at times seemingly frozen voice. Ya-Chung Huang’s technically assured tenor had to cope with an extremely one-dimensional, even caricatural vision of Mime. The same applies to John Daszak, whose interpretation of Loge came as if straight from English vaudeville – which is not surprising, given that Schwarz imagined him as Wotan’s family lawyer. Okka von der Damerau as Erda successfully made up for her technical shortcomings with her expressiveness. Of the two giant brothers the one I found more memorable was Fafner, sung by Tobias Kehrer with a fairly small and at times unstable, but very charming bass. Mirko Roschkowski (Froh) paled in comparison with the excellent Nicholas Brownlee as Donner (I looked up the cast of Das Rheingold to be presented at the Bayerische Staatsoper in the autumn and discovered with satisfaction that I wasn’t the only person to hear more of a Wotan in him). I found softness and lyricism only in the singing of the Rhinemaidens – this makes me all the happier to note a fine performance by the Polish mezzo-soprano Natalia Skrycka as Wellgunde. In the second instalment of the Ring characters familiar from the prologue were joined by Wotan’s traditionally screaming daughters, in comparison with whom Catherine Foster did surprisingly well in the role of Brünnhilde, sung musically, with great commitment and at times an indispensable sense of humour, although the English singer, who has an undoubtedly handsome soprano, as usual did not avoid problems with intonation and excessive vibrato.

Die Walküre. Michael Spyres (Siegmund) and Vida Miknevičiūtė (Sieglinde). Photo: Enrico Nawrath

Only the first act of Die Walküre fulfilled my dream of the truth of the most humane of Wagner’s musical dramas – thanks to two phenomenal Bayreuth debutants: Vida Miknevičiūtė, who conveyed all the anxiety, ecstasy and anguish of Sieglinde with a soprano that was quite sharp, but at the same time agile, spontaneous, sparkling with colour, impeccable in terms of both intonation and articulation; and Michael Spyres, who took Bayreuth by storm and immediately presented himself as one of the best Siegmunds in the festival’s post-war history. I admire the extraordinary intelligence of this singer, who perfectly senses the moment when a change of repertoire should be made without damaging the voice and, at the same time, in full harmony with the aesthetics and performance tradition of the newly mastered roles. His German still leaves a bit to be desired (this also applies to the production of certain vowels, which continue to bring to mind associations with the French grand opera), but in terms of vividness of his voice, his uniquely baritonal sound, beautifully open top and rounded notes at the bottom of the range, and above all the sensitive, truly song-like phrasing – I think Spyres would have delighted Wagner himself. The singing of this Sieglinde and this Siegmund could move a rock: it certainly moved the ever-dependable Georg Zeppenfeld, who complemented the artistry of the two singers with an astonishingly sensitive portrayal of the unloved, frustrated Hunding.

Die Walküre. Tomasz Konieczny (Wotan). Photo: Enrico Nawrath

It was worth coming to Bayreuth for this one act, for this hour of wonderful music making under Simone Young’s tender baton. The Australian conductor tried to brighten the score of the whole Ring, to extract hitherto neglected details from its texture, to emphasise the tragedy of gods, people and in-between beings with an almost impressionistic play of lights and shadows. She fully achieved this goal in the orchestral layer. When it came to singing, she often had to fight against recalcitrant matter, especially in Das Rheingold, when the soloists sometimes managed to drown out, shout down and stomp down the subtly and wisely playing orchestra. How much of this was Schwarz’s fault, how much was contributed by the booming singing manner, so beloved on the Green Hill, how much was contributed by the conductor herself, defending her vision against all odds – I might find out next year. I already know that the festival should let go of neither Miknevičiūtė, Young nor Spyres. Wagner’s masterpieces deserve the return of sensitive interpreters.

Translated by: Anna Kijak