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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

What do famous stock market investors and investment fund managers do when they retire? Warren Buffett, who will soon turn 94, apparently still enjoys playing the ukulele. Anthony Bolton, twenty years his junior, one of the UK’s most successful investors, retired from big capital management in 2014 and decided to complete his first opera. The premiere of The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko took place in 2021 at Grange Park Opera and received a rather mixed reviews from the critics, although even the fussy reviewers had to admit that the work was by no means inferior to most new British operas. Bolton’s composition received considerable publicity abroad, including in Russia, where Andrei Lugovoy, a deputy to the State Duma and the main suspect in the murder of the former KGB lieutenant-colonel, declared that the opera was the work of Western secret services, and thought that its premiere was a blatant provocation.

I did not make it to that performance due to pandemic-related travel restrictions. And I was really sorry I couldn’t make it, because Anthony Bolton, a graduate of the elite Stowe School and the famous Holy Trinity College Cambridge, studied music more diligently than many a professional composer in Poland. He played the cello and the piano, and his first composition teacher – while he was still at college – was Nicholas Maw, who later composed the opera Sophie’s Choice, based on William Styron’s novel and staged at the ROH in 2002 with Simon Rattle conducting. That same year Bolton returned to his old passion and began taking private lessons, for example with Colin Matthews, the same man who, together with his brother David, collaborated with Deryck Cooke on the reconstruction of Mahler’s Symphony No. 10.

Hugh Cutting (Ariel). Photo: Marc Brenner

This year brought another opportunity to check Bolton’s credentials. I realised that a visit to Grange Park Opera to attend the premiere of his second stage work, Island of Dreams, based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, required that I extend my stay in England by just two days. I decided to use this opportunity to catch up.

Malcontents once again complained that there was no point in attempting to create yet another adaptation of Shakespeare’s masterpiece given that Adès’ The Tempest already existed. Besides, in their opinion, one of the Stratford master’s last plays is not particularly suitable for operatic treatment, which should explain composers’ limited interest in this source of inspiration. This is not entirely true: The Tempest was hugely popular among opera composers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In addition, unlike Adès, Bolton compiled the libretto from excerpts from Shakespeare’s original text, just as the Swiss composer Frank Martin did in 1956, taking Schlegel and Tieck’s classic German translation as the basis for the libretto of his opera Der Sturm.

Brett Polegato (Prospero). Photo: Marc Brenner

A lot suggests that Bolton can afford to engage in experiments, even unsuccessful ones. The cast of his Island of Dreams included Hugh Cutting in the countertenor role of Ariel. Prospero was originally to have been played by Simon Keenlyside, who was eventually replaced by the Canadian baritone Brett Polegato. The opera was directed by David Pountney in collaboration with the Austrian video artist David Haneke, with whom Pountney had tried out the innovative “triptychon” system – consisting of three precisely synchronised sliding projection screens – at the San Francisco Opera a few years earlier.

Musically, I got more or less what I had expected: a technically well-written and accessible opera, clearly inspired in its instrumental layer by the oeuvres of Holst and Britten, at times perhaps taking too sharp a turn towards the soundtrack of a non-existent film (multiple references to traditional English songs and Juventin Rosas’ nineteenth-century Mexican waltz Sobre las olas), though colourfully orchestrated with a great deal of imagination. Bolton fared a bit less well in dealing with vocal parts, giving ample opportunity to shine only to Prospero – in this case in a fine and wise portrayal by Polegato, a singer who possesses a seductive baritone with a beautiful timbre. The duets of the soprano Miranda (Ffion Edwards) and the tenor Ferdinand (Luis Gomes) lacked the passion of real emotion, though this was no fault of the performers, who sang with fresh, well-placed voices and made every effort to breathe some life into their cardboard characters. It is also a pity that the production failed to fully utilise the capabilities of Cutting, whose handsome and technically superb countertenor seems to be the dream voice for “Ariel’s music”, once so accurately contrasted by Jan Kott with “Caliban’s music”. The most memorable of the former for me was the wonderfully sensual song “Where the bee sucks, there suck I”. The latter was performed with great dedication by Andreas Jankowitsch, but his bass-baritone was not very resonant. Of the other soloists I was particularly struck by the baritone William Dazeley as Alonso, impressive because of not only his cultured singing, but also his excellent diction. I feel sorry the most for the overacted roles of Trinculo and Stefano (the tenor Adrian Thompson and the baritone Richard Suart). Compliments are due to the conductor George Jackson for his diligence and precision in preparing the whole thing with the Gascoigne Orchestra. As for Pountney’s concept – wherever any directorial work was in evidence, the overwhelming impression was that of a rehash of several dozen of Sir David’s past productions (an impression compounded by the costumes designed by April Dalton). As for the very colourful projections – I’m not sure that, if I were in Haneke’s place, I would let my name be associated with such an obvious AI work.

Brett Polegato and Ffion Edwards (Miranda). Photo: Marc Brenner

Despite all the reservations, I left the theatre satisfied. In England not every new opera has to be a masterpiece. Sometimes it can be the equivalent of a competently written easy read or a slick but unmemorable film adaptation of a classic. After all, there are sounds that give delight and hurt not.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

I arrived in Longborough for the last of the four June performances of Das Rheingold in 2019 from the scorching heat of Warsaw straight into pouring rain and bitter cold. I joked later that I expected a snowstorm before Act I of Die Walküre, planned for the following season, and that I preferred not to scare anyone by trying to guess what weather anomalies would accompany the performances of Götterdämmerung. What I did not foresee, however, was the pandemic, which slammed the United Kingdom shut in lockdown and put a question mark over the production of the second complete Ring des Nibelungen at LFO. The situation began to improve a bit in 2021, but I was unable to see Die Walküre. Foreign observers decided not to take the risk of getting stuck in either self-isolation or quarantine, especially as most B and Bs and hotels were closed. In any case, the production was semi-staged and featured an orchestra of just thirty-strong. Fortunately, the delayed premieres of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung took place as planned, in 2022 and 2023, respectively, and this season, after five years of preparation, the complete Ring, directed by Amy Lane and conducted by Anthony Negus, was presented in Longborough three times.

I can’t remember ever waiting more eagerly for accreditation. The tickets were not on open sale at all: they sold out in a flash among donors and patrons six months before the beginning of the festival. The small theatre in the Cotswolds, affectionately referred to, albeit with a degree of irony, as the “English Bayreuth”, finally provided a legitimate basis for comparisons with the festival house on the Green Hill. It is not and probably never will be a match for it. It is certainly already a counterbalance – a pilgrimage destination for Wagnerites from all over the world, for lovers and connoisseurs who do not feel the need to deconstruct or “rediscover” Wagner’s oeuvre, sufficiently aware as they are of the cultural determinants and interpretive traditions to believe in its immanent potential.

Das Rheingold. Mark Le Brocq (Loge). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

Longborough productions have never been at odds with the work, but did not always dazzle with richness of imagination. Amy Lane’s concept, which I have been following in stages since 2019, rarely refers the spectator to the sphere of the symbolic (lighting: Charlie Morgan Jones; set and props: Rhiannon Newman Brown; costume designer: Emma Ryott). The director focuses more on storytelling, at times resorting to solutions that are too literal and exaggerated, reaching for superfluous and unnecessarily “familiar” props, not taking full advantage, on the other hand, of the possibilities offered by projections and stage lights. I have already written about this when reviewing the previous, individually staged parts of the cycle, and I feel even more sorry that Lane lacked the time or energy to correct the shortcomings pointed out earlier. This is because this year’s Die Walküre turned out to be unquestionably the best part of the cycle in theatrical terms. Set on a gloomy looking stage, amidst flashes of moonlight emerging from graphite blackness, amidst the blue of the night sky, toned down with a brown hue, and the cool green of a spectral forest, it perfectly matched the intention of Wagner himself, who emphasised in his stage directions – which were ahead of his time –  to leave the rest to the imagination. This painting-like purity – bringing to mind the symbolic meaning of Friedrich’s works and the poetry of Lessing’s forest landscapes – was lacking especially in the overloaded staging of Siegfried. I must admit, however, that it was only after watching the entire Ring within a short period of time that I became aware of the homogeneity of the concept developed by the director, who decided to link all the parts of the tetralogy with a clear compositional idea, like in a true epic. Lane introduces individual characters and motifs with unrelenting consistency, making them more and more easily recognisable and closer to the spectators as the stage action progresses. In the background of all the productions run loose thoughts, reminiscences and forward-looking visions, presented in an old-fashioned picture frame. The key to interpreting the whole thing is a mysterious leather-bound notebook – perhaps Wotan’s diary – passed from one person to another, and helping the participants in the drama return to previously suspended threads and slowly close the tale, the finale of which Wagner had suggested already in Das Rheingold.

The sense of consistency and stage truth was also reinforced by Negus’ decision to entrust the roles of characters returning in the successive parts of the tetralogy to the same singers – an idea that had proved impossible to fully implement in previous seasons and that is rarely reflected in casts of Der Ring des Nibelungen at other theatres. The artist who deserves a special mention is the tireless Bradley Daley, whose technically assured, yet rough sounding and a bit “rough-hewn” tenor perfectly suits the character of Siegfried – a kind of anti-hero of this tragedy, a thoughtless and sometimes cruel boy, whom fate has not allowed to mature, except perhaps in the last flash of his agony. One of the brightest points of the cast was Paul Carey Jones (Wotan/Wanderer), who has a sonorous and very focused bass-baritone with a distinctive honeyed tone. He gave a memorable performance especially in Die Walküre, poignantly torn between a desperately kept up semblance of authority and voice of the heart. I found him slightly less convincing in Das Rheingold and Siegfried, where an unquestionable display of vocal skill sometimes took the better of the subtlety of interpretation. Of the two Nibelungs I was definitely more impressed by Adrian Dwyer, a singer with a meaty and flexible tenor, in the role of Mime. Mark Stone did not repeat his success of five years previously: his portrayal of Alberich, blinded by hatred and lust for power, brilliant in terms of acting, did not find sufficient support this time in his vocal performance, given in a voice that was loud, but dull and no longer seducing with a wide colour palette. On the other hand, Madeleine Shaw’s rounded, luscious soprano took on even greater clarity in the role of the intransigent Fricka, haughty to the point of caricature.

Die Walküre. Foreground: Paul Carey Jones (Wotan). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

Two singers took on dual roles, which deserves particular mention especially in the case of Mark Le Brocq, a versatile artist with a resonant, clear, well-trained tenor. Opera regulars associate him primarily with Mozart and Britten (he has recently received excellent reviews for his portrayal of Aschenbach in WNO’s new staging of Death in Venice), although Le Brocq does not shy away from lighter and supporting roles in Wagner’s operas (last year I could not praise him enough after Tristan at Grange Park Opera, where the director cast him in a role that merges the characters of Melot and the Young Sailor into one). In Longborough he accomplished what seemed impossible: sang Loge and Siegmund three times on consecutive days. In his showpiece part from Das Rheingold he played with phrasing and caressed every word with the same flexibility and ease with which he schemed against the Nibelungs. He approached Siegmund in Die Walküre quite differently, with a darker, more focused voice, coloured alternately by shades of misery and love ecstasy. Although Le Brocq’s singing lacked a denser, truly heroic tone, the artist made up for this shortcoming with his ability to “narrate” his role, to build it as nineteenth-century theatre actors did. In the first two acts of Die Walküre he was accompanied on stage by one of the best Hundings I have ever encountered live. I found Julian Close’s bass – cavernous and black as night – combined with a chilling interpretation of the character more memorable than his take on Hagen in Götterdämmerung, less convincing, at times even overdone, in comparison with last year.

I delayed my assessment of Lee Bisset, who once again portrayed Brünnhilde, until the last moment. The Scottish singer has a beautiful, rich, golden-coloured soprano, a splendid stage presence that seems perfect for the role, and outstanding acting skills. Unfortunately, there is an increasingly intrusive vibrato in her voice, over which the artist completely loses control in dynamics above mezzo forte. Perhaps this is due to fatigue, perhaps to insufficient breath support, which is also suggested by forcibly attacked notes at the top of the scale. But what can I say, I would have followed her Brünnhilde into the fire that consumed Walhalla anyway – there is so much wisdom in her singing, such a fusion with the character portrayed, so much truth derived straight from the pages of the score. I find it hard to extricate myself from this paradox, especially since in every part of the Ring sparks were literally flying across the LFO stage, kindled by the characters present on it. They included the phenomenal Sieglinde of Emma Bell, whose warm, luscious soprano brought to my mind irresistible associations with the voice of young Régine Crespin; the magnificent, slightly baritonal Froh portrayed by Charne Rochford; the velvety-voiced Fasolt (Pauls Putnins); the exquisitely matched Gibichung siblings (Laure Meloy and Benedict Nelson) and the fiery Waltraute (Claire Barnett-Jones). Not to mention the twenty-two-strong male chorus in Götterdämmerung, which would outclass many larger ensembles with its power and clarity of sound.

Siegfried. Bradley Daley in the title role. Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

There would have been no such marvels, if it had not been for Anthony Negus – an absolutely uncompromising man, a conductor who came to the fore only when he knew far more about Wagner’s music and its contexts than most of his colleagues making their debuts on the Green Hill today. I have written many times that he is a master at deciphering and exploiting the dramatic potential of the music to the full. Just as often I have compared his interpretations to living beings – undulating to the rhythm of their collective breathing, teeming in the depths of the orchestra pit, wailing like sea birds and rustling like leaves. Negus is a natural-born narrator, who can attract and focus the listener’s attention for hours without missing a single detail of the musical tale.

Yet it is not enough to come up with an apt interpretation. It still needs to be exacted from the musicians. Or in other words: the conductor needs to win them over to his vision, to make them recognise it as their own and speak with one voice in rapture. I spent my childhood and early youth behind the Iron Curtain, briefly raised in the 1970s, which enabled me to experience my first live tetralogy – in Warsaw, in a production featuring Berit Lidholm and Helge Brilioth, among others. I had to wait nearly half a century for a Ring that would be as coherent and equally thrilling – albeit immersed in an earlier tradition, closer to the original contexts – until my visit to Longborough. And I fear that the world of Wagnerian mythology will never again emerge as vividly from nothingness as in the prelude to Das Rheingold under Negus. That I will not live to see a future Siegfried reforge his father’s sword at the pace indicated by the composer, “Kräftig, doch nicht zu schnell”. That in no finale of Götterdämmerung will the Rhine flow so widely, having returned to its former bed.

Götterdämmerung. Lee Bisset (Brünnhilde) and Bradley Daley (Siegfried disguised as Gunther). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

Whatever happens, I will certainly not forget the introduction to Act I of Die Walküre, conducted and played in such a way: with the violins’ and violas’ tremolando persistently and yet powerfully contrasted dynamically – sometimes within a single bar – with references to the Wotan’s spear motif in the cellos and double basses tearing into it as if into living flesh, with later flashes of Donner’s thunderbolts in the brass. And when the storm began to subside, all you had to do was “nudge the branch with your hand to still be able to smell the phosphorus of the lightning”, as in Nowak’s poetry. And it is still possible to smell this phosphorus. May it smell as long as possible.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

It is hard to believe that it has been over half a century. This may be because the Academy Ancient Music, established in 1973, has had only three music directors to date: its founder Christopher Hogwood, who spent thirty-three years with it; Richard Egarr, who headed it for fifteen seasons; and Laurence Cummings, who took the helm in 2021, after ten years as the artistic director of the Internationale Händel-Festspiele Göttingen. The name of the ensemble is an allusion to the elite group of musicians operating from 1726 at London’s Crown and Anchor Tavern near Strand and then the Freemasons Hall in Covent Garden. Although in the eighteenth century time flew more slowly than it does today, the term “ancient music” was used to refer not only to pre-Reformation works, but also to rarely heard old works by English and foreign composers. This included the music of George Frederick Handel, who has been one of the pillars of the “new” Academy.

The most important events in the celebrations of the AAM’s fiftieth anniversary included the launch of Richard Bratby’s book Refiner’s Fire – in which the author tells the story of the ensemble against the background of the twentieth-century revolution in period performance of early music – as well as the first-ever complete recording of Mozart’s keyboard pieces. In the flurry of other engagements I had to miss most of the orchestra’s ambitious ventures in the concert halls of London and Cambridge. I could not, however, resist the temptation to hear Orlando at the finale of the anniversary celebrations at the Barbican Centre, especially given the fact that I encountered Handel’s last opera written for Senesino and staged at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, in my youth in the AAM’s 1990 recording, conducted by Hogwood and featuring James Bowman in the title role. Another “magic” opera by Handel and, at the same time, the first based on Ariosto’s Orlando furioso – and compared later by musicologists with Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte – is ostensibly an opera seria, but with fantastic elements, full of unexpected twists and turns, watched as if from a distance and sometimes clearly with tongue in cheek. The anonymous libretto (perhaps by the composer himself) draws on an earlier text by Carlo Sigismondo Capece, the court poet of the queen consort of Poland Marie Casimire Sobieska. In Ariosto’s work the mad Orlando flies across the world and travels to the moon; among the multitude of characters we find Saracens, brave knights and sorcerers; and there is also room for a sea monster and a winged hippogriff. Handel’s version is slightly simpler, which does not change the fact that the brave knight falls in love with a Cathayan princess, who in turn has given her heart to an African prince, of whom a simple shepherdess is enamoured. The figure pulling the strings is the magician Zoroastro, who makes sure that the protagonists guide the plot towards a relatively happy ending.

Iestyn Davies (Orlando) and Laurence Cummings. Photo: Mark Allan

The opera is full of peculiarities, from the sinfonia in the disquieting key of F sharp minor, used by Handel probably once before (in the harpsichord suite HWV 431), Zoroastro’s first elaborate showpiece – a magnificent bass aria, Italian in style, at a point where listeners of the day would have expected instead a bravura aria of the main protagonist, all the way to one of the most famous mad scenes in the history of the form, with Orlando’s supposed descent into the underworld, in which Handel changes the soloist’s tempo seven times and metre five times, resorting, for example, to the “indecent” measure of 5/8, and, in addition, giving Senesino a tempo di gavotta aria, interrupted in the middle by a despairing larghetto, where pathos competes with the grotesque. What is also peculiar are the relationships between the protagonists – with the shepherdess Dorinda being unexpectedly put on a par with Orlando, able to draw far wiser conclusions from her unrequited love for Medoro than the King of the Franks’ paladin in love with the unattainable Angelica. If we add to this Orlando’s sleep scene from Act III – accompanied by two longing violette marine and cello pizzicato – we will see a masterpiece that broke with the convention of the period enough for the composer to fall out with the first performer of the title role, and for the opera to disappear from the stage after only eleven performances, only to return nearly two hundred years after its 1733 London premiere.

During its final concert of the season the AAM – led by Cummings standing at the harpsichord – also confirmed its dramatic qualities, thanks especially to the extraordinarily lucid and disciplined playing of the twenty-strong orchestra. Particularly worthy of note in it were Bojan Čičić (who together with William Thorpe put aside his violin to lull Orlando to sleep in “Già l’ebro mia ciglio” with the soft sound of two violas d’amore, in lieu of the mysterious violette marine); the remarkable oboists Leo Duarte and Robert de Bree, who also played the recorders; as well as Ursula Paludan Monberg and David Bentley, who complemented the colour of Act I with the pure and full sound of two natural horns, held high with the bells facing upwards. The strings were magnificent with their luscious sound and masterfully nuanced narrative, while Alastair Ross (harpsichord) and William Carter (theorbo) impressed with their stylish ornamentation in the continuo.

Iestyn Davies and Anna Dennis (Angelica). Photo: Mark Allan

The Academy of Ancient Music’s line-up was twice as small as that of the ensemble which accompanied the first performers of the opera and which was described – admiringly, it must be said – by the Scottish politician and composer Sir John Clerk as so powerful that it occasionally drowned out the singers. The voices of the five soloists reached the Barbican Hall auditorium with no problems whatsoever, although the supple and colourful bass of Matthew Brook (Zoroastro) carried over the orchestra much better in dazzling coloraturas than in the sometimes dull notes in the lower register. In the title role Iestyn Davies was certainly no much for the legendary Senesino in terms of volume, but he made up for his lack of powerful sound with the nobility of his countertenor voice, immaculate technique and exceptional musicality (excellent “Fammi combattere” from Act I). The role of Medoro – entrusted to a female singer as the composer intended – was sung well by Sophie Rennert, a singer endowed with an agile mezzo-soprano, spot-on intonation-wise, but perhaps just a bit too bright for this en travesti alto part. It would be hard, however, to direct any criticism at Rachel Redmond, whose clear, “dancing” soprano was perfect for Dorinda, while her fiery temperament and exceptional sense of comedy would surely have won praise from Celeste Gismondi, who played the beautiful shepherdess during the premiere of the work. Yet the highlight of the entire cast was Anna Dennis (Angelica), who, as she had done two months earlier in Göttingen, was impressive in her freedom of phrasing, her wonderfully open top register and her ability to paint a mood with an appropriate voice colour – in her “Verdi piante” the grass really swayed and the leaves were reflected in the river as if in a mirror.

Thus, there is no need for sumptuous sets and elaborate gestures to learn from Handel’s perverse sentimental education, to reflect on Orlando’s madness, Angelica and Medoro’s happiness, and Dorinda’s surprisingly mature wisdom. All that is needed is a belief in the magic power of one the greatest masterpieces of Baroque opera – a belief fuelled by Laurence Cummings’ infectious enthusiasm. The Academy of Ancient Music will have more jubilees to celebrate: since its very beginning it has been looked after by some genuine wizards.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

The beginning of June marked precisely seventy years since the first attempt to perform L’Orfeo on period instruments: at the Wiener Festwochen, under the baton of Paul Hindemith, officially with the Wiener Symphoniker, in fact – with musicians recruited from that orchestra, who were part of the still “nameless” ensemble, Concentus Musicus Wien, founded a year earlier by the Harnoncourts. In the long journey of Monteverdi’s masterpiece to operatic stages, Swiss tropes were already present: the performers used material prepared by Hindemith, who took up a professorship at the University of Zürich after the war. The modest staging on the Konzerthaus stage was by Leopold Lindtberg, who had left Vienna in 1933, fleeing the brownshirt revolution, and reached Switzerland by a circuitous route through Paris, Warsaw and Tel Aviv.

The sound recording of the 1954 event was released just over a decade ago, too late for L’Orfeo aficionados – even the oldest ones, who grew up with the famous recordings featuring Layos Kozma or Nigel Rogers – to treat it as something else than a mere period curiosity. What did go down in history, however, was the Opernhaus Zürich’s venture, initiated shortly after the composer’s four-hundredth birthday and launched with a staging of La favola d’Orfeo that proved to be a real breakthrough in the history of the work. Firstly, because of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s theatrical concept, which defined the canon of staging Baroque operas for many years to come. Secondly, by commemorating this production in a television film, later released on DVD, thanks to which we gained access to the chronologically oldest video recording of L’Orfeo. Thirdly and most importantly, because of the musical direction of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who decided to create a separate ensemble at the Zürich company for the Monteverdian cycle and to assemble the cast primarily from among local artists (the eponymous Thracian singer was portrayed by Philippe Huttenlocher, perhaps the first baritone performer of the role in the history of period instrument performance).

José Maria Lo Monaco (La Musica) and Krystian Adam (Orfeo). Photo: Monika Rittershaus

Thus it would not be an exaggeration to say that L’Orfeo began its modern stage life in Zürich. And however we judge Ponnelle’s stagings today – long outdated according to malcontents, still treated as an important point of reference by no less numerous enthusiasts – it is impossible to avoid comparisons between the memorable initiative of the 1970s and the new productions of Monteverdi operas, which have appeared regularly on the local stage since Andreas Homoki took over as director of Opernhaus Zürich. After Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria directed by Willy Decker and L’incoronazione di Poppea by Calixto Bieito it was time for Orfeo.  The latest premiere was prepared by Evgeny Titov, a relatively young graduate of the St. Petersburg Theatre Arts Academy, who, after a brief acting career in Russia, went on to study at the Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna and has since directed mostly drama. His experience in opera is limited to just a handful of productions, of which last year’s Poppea at the Opéra national du Rhin was unanimously criticised for being incompatible with Raphaël Pichon’s musical concept.

The Zürich Orfeo fared even worse in that it diverged from the concept of Monteverdi himself. Titov places the whole thing in a uniformly dark setting (set design by Chloe Lamford and Naomi Daboczi, costumes by Annemarie Woods), only occasionally illuminated by the cold flash of steel, the pallid light of fluorescent tubes and the bluish glow of slow-motion projections, bringing to mind irresistible associations with ectoplasm floating in the dark. Orpheus digs a grave already in the Prologue, Eurydice will rise from a coffin before the wedding, and will return to it often enough to make the spectators doubt whether they are really dealing with a flesh-and-blood being. The phrenetic energy of the first act and the beginning of the second act – until the words “dopo il mal vie più felice”, after which the Messenger arrives and Orpheus sees for himself in the cruelest possible manner that the sleeping dogs should be left lying – is not reflected at all on stage. The joyful dances of the shepherds take the form of grotesque pre-nuptial rituals – in the barren blackness of basalt rocks, with faded flowers in men’s boutonnieres and large artificial fruits in place of the lushness of Thracian meadows. It gets brighter – paradoxically – only after the descent into Tartarus. Death, however, lurks everywhere. Having lost Eurydice again – though she may have been dead from the very beginning – Orpheus finds himself back in the same setting with a white coffin and a dug up grave. Summoned by Apollo to heaven, he lingers a bit too long. A loud shot is heard in the darkness of the stage.

Krystian Adam. Photo: Monika Rittershaus

There was some discussion in the lobby about whether the director wanted to turn Monteverdi’s tale of Orpheus into a suicide’s nightmarish dream, an equally nightmarish journey into the depths of emotions that accompany loss, or a universal parable about the disastrous consequences of an excess of feelings. I dare to formulate yet another hypothesis: that Titov made an unsuccessful, though at times visually appealing, attempt to tell the story of Orpheus through Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Hence the strange resemblance of scenes in the first act to the grand ball at Satan’s. Hence the ubiquitous darkness of the staging, for the Master does not deserve light, only peace and quiet. Hence the suspiciously Mephistophelean appearance of Apollo in the finale. Hence the suggestion that both Orpheus and Eurydice must die in order to depart for another world. That’s all very well, but there is no connection to Striggio’s libretto and sometimes there is blatant contradiction with the music.

The music, which resounded in Zürich with sufficient brilliance to make up for any shortcomings of Titov’s staging. The artists who stood out in particular among the carefully selected cast were the male singers: the bass Mirco Palazzi with his noble and perfectly supported voice in the dual roles of Caronte and Plutone; the experienced British tenor Mark Milhofer as Apollo, singing with a voice that was clear and even across registers; and Massimo Altieri as 1. Pastore, captivating with his flexibility and freedom of phrasing. Particularly striking among the female voices was Simone McIntosh, whose rounded and rich mezzo-soprano was just as convincing in the role of La Speranza as in the expressively extremely different role of Proserpina. Miriam Kutrowatz was slightly disappointing, singing Euridice as if from a distance, as a result of which she failed to fully show the qualities of her silvery soprano. José Maria Lo Monaco (La Musica/Messagera/Eco) sometimes had trouble restraining her excessive vibrato, but otherwise her interpretations stood out by virtue of their considerable musicality and sense of style.

Miriam Kutrowatz (Euridice), Simone McIntosh (Proserpina), and Mirco Palazzi (Plutone). Photo: Monika Rittershaus

The revelation of the Zürich production, however, was Krystian Adam as Orfeo. His ardent tenor is getting an increasingly beautiful baritonal tinge at the lower end of the scale with each passing season, without losing the purity of the high notes or the ability to make smooth transitions between registers. Most importantly, the singer impresses with his superb Italian diction, understanding of the text and technical ease, thanks to which the immeasurable wealth of the Monteverdian ornamenti and abbellimenti loses all marks of empty showmanship and serves only what it is supposed to serve, that is to highlight the affects contained in the music. The absence of L’Orfeo from the repertoires of Polish opera companies is a growing mystery to me: surely we can no longer make excuses, saying we lack a worthy performer of the title role.

The beautiful overall picture was made complete by the superbly prepared chorus of the Zürcher Sing-Akademie and La Scintilla orchestra, which has continued the tradition started at Opernhaus Zürich by Harnoncourt for more than two decades. The whole thing was conducted by Ottavio Dantone, who for the second time used a new edition by Bernardo Ticci, prepared for an earlier production in Lausanne, which premiered in 2016. This time it got more sensitive and competent performers, which was apparent already in the famous Toccata, enriched by the bright, soft sound of Baroque cornettos. It’s a pity that the director did not let himself be inspired by this musical energy. However, I do not lose hope that one day the words of Bulgakov’s Margarita will come true and everything will be as it should be.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Agatha Christie once said that the books we read would return to us in an extraordinary manner. Sometimes music does too. Last year I arrived in Göttingen straight from Venice, after a performance of Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno at Teatro Malibran – and I did not expect that arias from this oratorio would come back to me not only at the Handel Festival, but also several months later at Bayreuth Baroque. This season I planned to arrive for the finale of the Göttingen festival, but I had to change my plans and came for the first three days of the event – which was launched by a performance of Il trionfo by the soloists and the FestspielOrchester conducted by George Petrou. “Lascia la spina” returned to me again the following day. And not just once. In a manner as extraordinary as it was unexpected.

This year’s inauguration took place in the newly restored Stadthalle on the outskirts of the Old Town. Until recently, the future of the huge building, erected in the early 1960s on the basis of Rainer Schell’s design, hung in the balance. The building was in a poor technical condition. Some residents still have not got used to its modernist aesthetics: primarily its unusual facade made of iridescent ceramic slabs, to which the Stadthalle owes its derisive nickname “tiled stove”. Doubts were raised as to whether the structural elements made of asbestos and exposed during the renovation might not pose a health risk to the public. The renovation works were prolonged due to the pandemic and in the end cost more than double the planned amount. Critics did not go silent even after the grand opening of the Stadthalle in January 2024. Specialists complained about, for example, the concert hall’s acoustic defects, which, despite costly treatments, could not be eliminated in a space restored in accordance with the original architectural design.

There is no denying it, it is no Musikverein, and lovers of nineteenth-century symphonic music certainly have a right to feel disappointed. However, Handel’s oratorio, featuring a small orchestra and four soloists, sounded sufficiently selective and transparent in the Stadthalle for listeners to be able to fully appreciate the pulse, emotion and drama of this youthful masterpiece. The production was discreetly directed by Ilka Seifert, Sasha Waltz’s assistant for the Warsaw production of Hosokawa’s Matsukaze, supported by other collaborators of the German choreographer: Folkert Uhde, author of symbolic, non-distracting video projections, and Jörg Bittner, responsible for the lighting. However, their efforts would have been of no use, if it had not been for the thoughtful interpretation of Petrou, who opted for a highly difficult – and masterfully implemented by the musicians – idea of gradually, almost imperceptibly slowing down the narrative until finally “stopping the time”. The FestspielOrchester Göttingen, founded in 2006 by Nicholas McGegan, who added instrumentalists with long-standing ties to the festival to its line-up, is on a par with Europe’s best baroque ensembles. Petrou knows not only how to make it sound as a unified organism, but also how to give showcase the individual virtuosos (led by the phenomenal oboist Susanne Regel; Fernando Aguado, an organist with an exceptional sense of style; and the concertmistress, about whom more in a moment). He also works brilliantly with singers, who created a convincing quartet of “living” allegories – despite an unexpected cast change in the role of Bellezza.

Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno. Anna Dennis (Bellezza) and Elizabeth Blumenstock (violin). Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

Or maybe it was because of this change, as the indisposed Louise Kemény was replaced by the phenomenal singer actress Anna Dennis, an artist with an expressive soprano, whose colour she can shade, as if she were mixing pigments on a palette. I was very impressed by Emöke Barath as Piacere. Hers is a rich, dark soprano with superb support, which she demonstrated in the aria “Lascia la spina”, sung in an exceptionally slow, “languid” tempo. Xavier Sabata did a surprisingly fine job as Disinganno, making up for some shortcomings of his now fading countertenor with a wise interpretation. The young Emanuel Tomljenović, an artist endowed with a full, handsome and perfectly placed tenor, effortlessly overcame all the difficulties of the role of Tempo, although in his case I did miss a deeper reflection on the text.

Regardless of the musical qualities of the performance, the audience was certainly impressed by the director’s beautiful yet simple decision to have Bellezza take the first violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock by the hand in the finale, bring her out of the orchestra, seat her in a chair at the front of the stage and sing “Tu del Ciel ministro eletto” in such an intimate duet with the concertmistress that the audience became oblivious to the whole world. Who knows, perhaps what moved me more than the singing was the stylish playing of the veteran of the historically informed performance practice moving the bow across the strings of an instrument that was already “grown up” when Handel was born.

The day after the dazzling inauguration we moved to the Deutsches Theater, where a new staging of one of the festival patron’s operas is premiered each year. This time the organisers surprised some regulars by joining the growing campaign to resurrect the pasticcio genre. I have written about it many times, especially in the context of Rivoluzione e Nostalgia at La Monnaie, so I don’t need to convince anybody how fervently I am supporting it. Nor do I need to say that it takes a great deal of knowledge, and not just musicological knowledge, to create a good pasticcio; that it takes painstaking work and angelic patience; and, above all, that it requires a true belief in the durability and power of the operatic form.

Krystian Lada demonstrated that it was possible to assemble a coherent story about the 1968 revolt and its far-reaching consequences from fragments of Verdi’s operas. George Petrou and Laurence Dale – a fine British tenor who took up directing and conducting after a triumphant career – opted for a seemingly more conservative approach, creating a Handelian pasticcio on the basis of Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine”. Few people remember, however, that the second life of this 1830 literary miniature began precisely in 1968, with a seminar devoted to it by Roland Barthes, who published the transcript of his lectures at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris in his famous book S/Z. In it he carried out a brilliant deconstruction of the “logic of the plot”, the axis of which is the story of a young, rebellious sculptor and his obsessive love for the beautiful singer Zambinella – unwilling to make a closer acquaintance with the artist, who has no idea that the object of his yearning is, in fact, a beautiful castrato.

The weakness of Barthes’ new theory of meanings was pointed out by, among others, Ewa Bieńkowska, who wrote that when reading S/Z she got the impression she was dealing with a man for whom “reading is a delight and who would like to share this subtle pleasure with us”. However, the book caused quite a stir across the world and attracted a wave of interest in Balzac’s forgotten piece, for obvious reasons also among musicians and theatre people. The story of Sarrasine and Zambinella was told by, for example, Neil Bartlett in a once famous operatic vaudeville with music by Nicolas Bloomfield.

Sarrasine. Myrsini Margariti (Madame de Rochefide) and Sreten Manojlović (Balzac). Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

Petrou and Dale approached Sarrasine the way Bieńkowska once imagined Barthes engrossed in Balzac, “savouring every word, summoning to his aid … all his learning, all the knowledge and associations provided by a solid and wide-ranging education”. Petrou compiled the musical material of the two-act pasticcio exclusively from works by Handel – fragments from operas, cantatas and oratorios (often in alternative versions or those rejected by the composer), as well as excerpts from his concerti grossi – with a recurring sarabande motif, which manifests itself in various forms, from the instrumental fragment from Almira, the aria “Lascia la spina” from Il trionfo, to the sarabande from Suite in D minor HWV 437, so memorably used in Barry Lyndon. Dale added French and Italian dialogues to the libretto.

The artists remained faithful to Balzac’s “story within a story”, highlighting the two parallel love plots – the courtship of the Narrator, identified here with Balzac, of Madame de Rochefide, and Sarrasine’s infatuation with the castrato Zambinella – as well as the clash of opposites present in the literary original: darkness and glamour, youth and old age, beauty and ugliness. This was facilitated by Giorgina Germanou’s sparse sets, well lit by John Bishop, against backdrop of which the set designer was all the more effective in building a multifaceted narrative structure using evocative costumes. She did that in very good collaboration with the director, who directed the soloists – as well three Deutsches Theater actors accompanying them in minor roles – with truly British precision.

The main burden rested with the four singers, the most memorable among whom was Samuel Mariño as Zambinella. It is a role as if made for him: the Venezuelan soprano is distinguished not only by his unusual voice, but also by his intriguing androgynous looks, which, in combination with very decent acting skills, enabled him to create a convincing portrayal of an unhappy castrato. However, I do not share most of my colleagues’ admiration for the vocal side of his performance. Mariño is endowed with a soprano that is undoubtedly lovely, but not backed by solid technique – although he can certainly “cheat” by means of spectacular trills, often unconnected to the logic of phrasing, as well as other, not always stylish embellishments. His volume is slight and he does not even know how to hide this: in fact, he exhausted all his potential in the aria “L’armi implora” from the first act. Musically, he was definitely outshone by Juan Sancho in the title role. I first encountered this singer live last year in Madrid, during the premiere of Corselli’s Achille in Sciro. Some over-expression in his luscious tenor – jarring in the role of Nearco at the time – worked perfectly this time as a vehicle for Sarrasine’s amorous sufferings. The beautiful and subtle Madame de Rochefide was portrayed by the Greek soprano Myrsini Margariti, an artist endowed with a voice that is luminous and wide-open in the upper register, but has too much vibrato at times. The soft, sparkling basso cantante of Sreten Manojlović (Balzac) caught my attention already in 2019, in the Viennese Halka conducted by Łukasz Borowicz, in which Manojlović was given the episodic role of the Piper. At that time I also appreciated his acting talent, although Mariusz Treliński handled the character he portrayed rather unceremoniously. The way Manojlović built the character of Lotario in the production of Flavio at last year’s Bayreuth Baroque became the subject of an in-depth analysis by several of my students at Warsaw’s Academy of Dramatic Arts. His Balzac in Sarrasine demonstrates his consistent development as an artist, both in his singing (a wonderfully passionate, “whispered” duet with Madame de Rochefide in Act One) and in his acting. Laurence Dale entrusted him with the extremely difficult task of playing the role of a participant in the events, while at the same time observing things from a distance, as a “storyteller”. And it was he, not the cardinal’s envoys, who was made Sarrasine’s killer by Dale – in the finale of the opera Balzac saves Zambinella by dealing a coup de grâce to the unhappy, pain-crazed creature he himself created as the narrator.

Musical Playmobil Performance at Sheddachhalle. Maren Ries (violin) and Jan de Winne (flute). Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

I left Göttingen two days after the premiere of Sarrasine, having become convinced that Petrou was successfully continuing the mission of his predecessors. I laughed at a less than hour-long performance by the NeoBarock ensemble, which, with the help of LEGO blocks and projections by Michael Sommer, explained to kids what Rameau’s Les Indes galantes was all about. I appreciated a concert by the saxophonist Lutz Koppetsch and the Bayerisches Kammerorchester Bad Brückenau, conducted by Johannes Moesus, at the Stadthalle Northeim, which was diligently prepared, though mainly with older listeners, still unaccustomed to the sound of early instruments, in mind. I was saddened to hear that Ernst Puschmann, the “Bell-ringer of St. Jacobi” who for years had expanded the church’s chimes by adding more bells and last year had created a “real” two-octave carillon – died less than a month before the opening of the Händel-Festspiele. Fortunately, he managed to inaugurate the instrument before that – and Martin Begemann was presumably proud to take over his mantle as performer of the festival morning concerts from the tower of St. James’ Church.

Next year I will try to hear and see more. May it return later. There is never enough surprises.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

In mid-May 1968, two days after the occupation of the Sorbonne and the general strike in France began, Jean-Louis Barrault opened the doors of the Odéon to a crowd of several thousand demonstrators. He did not suspect that the events of the 1830 July Revolution, when the theatre became one of the main centres of activity for the rebellious youth of the day, would be repeated in a distorted form and get out of hand. The first barricades made of cars, fallen trees and furniture hauled from the university were already standing in the Latin Quarter. The red banners of the socialists and the black flags of the anarchists flew in the streets, tear gas fumes were in the air. The protesting students ripped the lids off the city’s rubbish bins to use them as shields in clashes with the police. They were joined by artists, intellectuals and a growing number of agitators. On the night of 16-17 May Barrault noted in his diary: “We feel betrayed and have no desire to take sides. We are moved only by genuine students. It seems to me that they have been betrayed as much as we have”.

The revolt in Italy began much earlier and lasted much longer, from 1966 until the autumn of 1969. It swept through universities all over the country, from Milan and Turin, Naples and Padua, to Genoa and Salerno. Unlike in France, in Italy the student movement merged from the very beginning with the workers’ movement. The students helped the strikers edit leaflets, and held joint meetings to analyse the course of events and plan strategies for the future. The government focused primarily on torpedoing the activities of the extreme left. It ignored extremists on the other side, including the radical, neo-fascist faction of the Ordine Nuovo. In December 1969 two members of the organisation carried out a bomb attack in Milan’s Piazza Fontana. Seventeen people were killed. The “creeping May” ended and the “years of lead” began.

One hundred and twenty years earlier, in 1848, when the riots later referred to as “Cinque giornate” broke out in Milan, Verdi happened to be in Paris. Hearing about the uprising, he set out for Lombardy and arrived there on 5 April, two weeks after the end of the uprising. In a letter to Francesco Piave he announced that he was drunk with happiness after the rebels’ victory and did not intend to waste paper on composing, when it would be better to use it to make casings for bullets. It was a Pyrrhic victory. The losses suffered by Milanese were twice as big as those of the Austrians they chased away; and the Austrians returned to the city in July. The Risorgimento lasted until 1871 and did not end with the unification of all the lands inhabited by Italians. The year 1968 changed the face of the world, but it is still only one of the many milestones on the path to a united Europe that is yet to be travelled.

Rivoluzione. Enea Scala (Carlo). Photo: Karl Forster

Jacques Mallet du Pan was a royalist, but he rightly compared a revolution to Saturn devouring his own children. Krystian Lada followed this clue in his latest project, commissioned by Brussels’ La Monnaie and its boss Peter de Caluwe. This was the second attempt by the company – after the well-received Bastarda based on a concept by Olivier Fredj – to revive the Baroque pasticcio convention. However, while the idea behind the Bastarda was to extract the Queen Elizabeth thread from Donizetti’s four operas and glue their fragments together into a new, though still “Tudor”, whole, Lada went much further, creating a true pasticcio: an entirely new story based on musical material from Verdi’s sixteen operas, written during the initial stage of the struggle for the unification of Italy. The first part of the diptych, Rivoluzione, is set during the tumultuous 1968 riots, the second, Nostalgia – forty years later, when memories of the revolution are revived at a vernissage, under the impact of a sculptural installation drawing on those events.

A crazy idea, requiring painstaking dramaturgical work and a meticulous selection of fragments to match the concept (fragments taken from Oberto, Ernani, Stiffelio, I Lombardi alla prima crociata, Attila, I due Foscari, Giovanna d’Arco and Un giorno di regno, as well as from Nabucco and Macbeth, among others), and yet it turned out to be successful and, paradoxically, in many ways truly “Verdian” in spirit. If purists missed anything, it was a musical binder composed specifically for the occasion, which would have given both parts the semblance of a “genuine” nineteenth-century opera. Lada, however, opted for a different approach, stitching the various elements together with film inserts featuring the singers in spoken interactions and monologues, and thus avoided a “contamination” of Verdi’s music with any foreign musical body. And he probably did the right thing: the mosaic nature of the theatrical means used fitted much better with the narrative he devised, divided as it was by a distance of forty years, but still set in a not-so-distant past.

In Rivoluzione the action rushes forward like a crowd of enraged demonstrators. Lada plays out the crowd scenes brilliantly, weaves into the action excerpts from documentary films from the period, and enhances the message of the arias, cabalettas and ensembles thanks to the participation of street dancers (excellent choreography by Michiel Vandevelde). In the as usual clean stage space (the author of the entire concept was Lada, assisted in the making of the sets and video material by Łukasz Misztal and Jérémy Adonis, respectively; the costumes were designed by Adrian Stapf), superbly lit by Aleksander Prowaliński, a thread of truly Verdian intrigue is spun. The crucial character is the shipbuilder Carlo, a friend of Giuseppe, an engineering student and son of an influential police officer. Their “class inappropriate” relationship arises from their shared love of boxing. Giuseppe is dating Cristina, a film school student who still finds it impossible to recover from her old love for Carlo. Laura, Giuseppe’s sister, a violin student in a relationship with the pianist Lorenzo, who is head over heels in love with her, succumbs to a growing fascination with the devilishly handsome Carlo and abandons bourgeois ideals for the slogans of the revolt. Everything is heading for a dramatic finale on the barricades: Laura commits suicide and by the decision of the crowd joins the Pantheon of the great martyrs of the revolution.

Rivoluzione. Nino Machaidze (Laura) and Vittorio Prato (Giuseppe). Photo: Karl Forster

The story could have taken place anywhere in Europe at the time: in Paris, Milan, tank-wrecked Prague or Warsaw during the March 1968 events. Lada’s sources of inspiration might perhaps be found in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers or films by the French New Wave directors. Yet they can be more easily discovered in Verdi’s early operas, in which the “music of guns and cannons” is heard constantly, while youthful ideals clash with outbursts of equally youthful feelings in complicated amorous polygons. Lada used the potential of the Verdian convention to the full. He entrusted Laura with parts intended for a soprano with dramatic overtones, and Cristina – with parts suitable for a singer faithful to the tradition of the Italian bel canto of the likes of Donizetti and Bellini. The charismatic Carlo is a typical Verdi tenor, Giuseppe, an ambiguous character, is, appropriately, a baritone. Lorenzo’s anger and unrequited feelings are conveyed by a bass voice.

Lada “breaks” this convention with extraordinary sensitivity in Nostalgia, which takes place forty years later. Cristina is gone. Her daughter Virginia has inherited her late mother’s love of film art, subtle beauty and no less subtle voice (Lada cast the same singer in the role). The protagonists have aged. Carlo is a baritone, Giuseppe a bass and Lorenzo stops singing altogether (the bass is replaced with the actor Denis Rudge). Icilio, a politically engaged artist, sings with a tenor in which we can hear a distant echo of young Carlo’s voice. Enter Donatella, an art gallery owner, who organises a double vernissage of Virginia’s film and her boyfriend Icilio’s sculpture, entitled “Barricade 1968”. This archetypal Verdi prima donna will provoke a catharsis on the scale of an ancient tragedy in the finale: she will accidentally make Virginia realise who her father really is, summon the spirit of Laura from the beyond, unleash dormant energy in three old men, order them to destroy Icilio’s work and chase away the demons of the revolution that devoured everything they once loved.

There are several very memorable images in this diptych: a girl’s naïve delight at the sight of an atomic mushroom cloud, a delight stifled a moment later by the immense sadness of the “Patria opressa” chorus from Macbeth; the finale of the third act of Rivoluzione, binging to mind ghastly associations with Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa and several paintings by Delacroix; and the symbolic ending of Nostalgia, in which Lorenzo tries to rescue a plaster bust of Verdi from an orgy of destruction. This was another encounter for me with ultra-modern opera theatre, precisely directed, intricately put together from a myriad of perfectly fitting pieces, but, at the same time, drawing on the composer’s legacy with a fidelity bordering on homage.

Huge credit for this goes to all the musicians involved in the project, above all to the conductor Carlo Goldstein, who combines an admirable knowledge of the Verdian idiom with a sensual fervour of interpretation. Laura was finely portrayed by Nino Machaidze, singing with an impeccably produced soprano that was powerful and perfectly developed in the upper range, although not very resonant in the middle. Endowed with a luscious and tireless tenor, perfect for the role of Carlo in Rivoluzione, Enea Scala could have varied the dynamics a bit more, but I will put this minor shortcoming down to his enthusiasm, which enabled him to build a more convincing character of the young rebel. Scott Hendricks, his older incarnation in Nostalgia, has a fairly small and rather gravelly baritone, which in the second part of the diptych should, paradoxically, be regarded as an asset. The two performers of the role of Giuseppe, the baritone Vittorio Prato and the bass Giovanni Battista Parodi, did a great job. I admire the expressive power of Justin Hopkins’ interpretation (of Lorenzo), although his dark, velvety bass would definitely have benefitted in terms of beauty of tone, had the artist not been prone to singing with a low larynx. Paride Cataldo, an artist with a resonant and richly coloured lyric tenor, did well in the small role of Icilio.

Nostalgia. Gabriela Legun (Virginia), Giovanni Battista Parodi (Giuseppe), and Helena Dix (Donatella). Photo: Karl Forster

As usual, I have saved the best for last. The sensation of the diptych was Gabriela Legun in the dual role of Cristina and Virginia. Legun is a phenomenally gifted Polish soprano, winner of the 2019 Ada Sari Competition, who I think will have a beautiful international career. Legun’s golden, soft voice already impresses with its impeccable technique, and if her interpretations are still “transparent” at times, they will certainly become more expressive as she accumulates more stage experience. The other jewel in the vocal crown of Rivoluzione e Nostalgia was undoubtedly Helena Dix (Donatella), a singer endowed with a supple, sensuous, truly Verdian soprano, which she wields with enough awareness to turn Lady Macbeth’s great madness scene into both a dazzling display of bel canto and a perverse parody of the convention associated with the role. In today’s opera houses it is rare to find such an great combination of superb singing and outstanding acting with an unparalleled sense of humour.

Jean-Louis Barrault wrote shortly after the events of May 1968 that the streets of Paris were seized by hatred, that people would not be able to realise the momentousness and consequences of those events for a long time. I think the time has come. Krystian Lada and the co-authors of the success of his Brussels diptych began to dig out from under that hatred the first crumbs of love – the one that died, the one that was revived years later and the one that will last forever. As in Verdi’s music, which turned out to be a perfect vehicle for a story about quite different times.

Translated by: Anna Kijak