Wędrówki operowe/Operatic Journeys

Soon – if I don’t run out of steam – we will celebrate together the tenth anniversary of this website, and with this small jubilee various other anniversaries, both sad and happy. However, let me once again put my nose out of our backyard and point out that various eras are coming to an end across the operatic world: entire generations of musicians associated with a particular performance practice are passing away, the splendour of companies that were supposed to last forever is fading, great projects initiated years ago are coming to a close. What is also coming to an end is Antonio Pappano’s musical reign at the Royal Opera House. The conductor, in the prime of his life and at the height of his creative powers, is leaving the legendary Bow Street building after twenty-two years to take the helm of the London Symphony Orchestra in September. In January Pappano bid a symbolic farewell to the ROH audience, choosing for his final premiere a work by the same composer and prepared with the same director with whom he triumphed in 2002, when he opened his first London season as Covent Garden’s Music Director. From Ariadne auf Naxos to Elektra. From a magnificent, colourful staging of an opera the creators of which deliberately juxtaposed the world of Greek myth with Wagner’s ideal of boundless love, to a dark study of revenge derived from Sophocles’ tragedy. A brilliant closure of the collaboration with the German freelancer Christof Loy, with whom Pappano has come a long way – from the youngest-ever boss of the ROH to the acclaimed architect of the London company’s undisputed greatness.

This time I went to London in a semi-official capacity, making it a social occasion as well, and after the performance I was able to share my impressions about the musical and theatrical side of the farewell event as much as I wanted. I knew Ariadne – revived at the ROH four times, last time in 2015 – only from video recordings, but I always thought it was an outstanding production. I was surprised, like Pappano, that for so many years he had not decided to have his “own” Elektra, even though during his reign Strauss’ one-act opera had appeared on the London stage several times under different conductors and in staging by other directors. I expected from the very beginning that the production would attract extraordinary attention of both critics and music lovers. I decided to come to see the third of the six scheduled performances – after the general slackening and decline of form that usually accompanies the so-called second premiere, at a point when the singers are beginning to identify with their characters and the conductor is coming to a full understanding with the ensemble he is leading.

Nina Stemme (Elektra) and Sara Jakubiak (Chrysothemis). Photo: Tristram Kenton

However, I could not have predicted that Nina Stemme would withdraw already after the first performance to be replaced by the Lithuanian soprano Aušrinė Stundytė (in the end, the Swedish artist returned to the stage for the last two performances). The London audience, discouraged by the scathing reviews of Stemme’s performance at the premiere, was beside itself with joy. I was reserved, having seen Stundytė’s portrayal of Renata in Prokofiev’s Fiery Angel in Warsaw. It was nearly six years ago, the singer was just over forty, but already at that time her voice was tired, had too much vibrato and unattractive colour. Unfortunately, my fears were confirmed by the London Elektra, although I suspect that Stundytė’s intelligence and uncommon musicianship won the hearts of some English music lovers, who were charmed by her fragility and unexpectedly gentle take on the eponymous heroine of Strauss’ opera.

The problem is that this is probably not what Pappano and, especially, Loy had in mind. Loy this time created an unambiguously dirty staging, set in the static space of an unspecified bourgeois residence in Vienna during the Strauss-Hofmannsthal era. In this concept, Elektra – with her heart seething alternately with love, hatred and desire for revenge – does not wander around the palace in rags. Dressed in a modest black-and-white maid’s uniform, she coexists with the rest of the palace staff in the home of Klytaemnestra and her lover. She sneaks out into the coal-smeared courtyard with the Oversser and five Maids, for whom the ultimate freedom is to be able to crouch, even for a moment, on the steps of the staircase leading to the rear of the queen’s residence. We can only guess what happens inside the palace: the world lost by Elektra after Agamemnon’s death hides even deeper, behind one of the doors in the faintly yellowish-lit corridor. This space – positioned by the set designer Johannes Leiacker on a low mezzanine floor of the building surrounding the courtyard and perfectly lit by Olaf Winter – creates a striking impression of inaccessibility. Behind the high windows something is still going on, but in dead silence. The space of human relationships is suggested primarily by the costumes, especially of the three female protagonists: Elektra, relegated to the role of a servant; Chrysothemis, locked in a schoolgirl’s dream of normality (wearing a girlish, pale pink dress that looks as if it has aged with its owner); and Klytaemnestra, guilty of her two daughter’s misfortune  (wearing sapphire silks and a white fur stole, the sumptuousness of which cannot hide the passage of years or the inner ugliness of the character).

Karita Mattila (Klytaemnestra) and Nina Stemme. Photo: Tristram Kenton

Such a staging – minimalist, far from being literal, operating primarily with symbols – has no room for a fragile Elektra and Stemme probably did not portrayed her as such. It is difficult for me to objectively assess Loy’s concept, because I suspect that the weakening of dramatic tension may have been caused by the sudden cast change, rather than any shortcomings on the director’s part. With Stundytė in the title role, Elektra came across as more delicate and in some ways less determined than Chrysothemis. The scene in which she recognised Orestes was indeed touching, but it didn’t touch the hearstrings the way it should have; even the eerie waltz in the finale, when Elektra can no longer hear anything but the music coming from within her, seemed strangely cautious and shaky.

Of course, I can’t put all the responsibility on Stundytė, who was brought to London at the last minute and had to add Loy’s instructions to her experience of recent productions by Warlikowski and Tcherniakov. There is this snag though – the Lithuanian soprano should not have taken on the role of Elektra in the first place. In no way does her voice resemble that of a “twenty-year-old Brünnhilde” demanded for the part: instead, she is a mature Tosca who has strayed into an unsuitable repertoire, being cast in Strauss and Wagner operas thanks to her musicality combined with fine stage presence and good acting skills. Stundytė’s soprano has a limited colour palette and lacks not only volume, but also the necessary intensity, traits that put Inge Borkh – whose voice was relatively small, but had exceptional dramatic potential – among the greatest Elektras of all time. Much better than Stundytė was Karita Mattila, a singer with great charisma, with which she skilfully masks the limitations of her inevitably aging soprano: although in the mezzo-soprano part of Klytaemnestra she had trouble projecting her voice in the upper and lower registers, she nevertheless managed to maintain her characteristic consistency and smoothness of sound across the scale. The thankless role of Aegisth was well sung by Charles Workman, whom I appreciate not only for the beauty of his voice, but also for his complete freedom and lightness of phrasing. Łukasz Goliński made a very successful ROH debut as Orestes. His is a resonant and deep baritone, golden in tone and wonderfully developed in the lower register. If he can be faulted for anything, it would a few intonational lapses, which can be put down to the earnestness of his interpretation. At least decent performances came from the rest of the numerous cast, led by the five Maidens (Noa Beinart, Veena Akama-Makia, Gabrielė Kupšytė, Ella Taylor and Valentina Puskás) and Lee Bisset in the small role of the Overseer.

Nina Stemme. Photo: Tristram Kenton

I left Chrysothemis for last, because it’s been a long time since I had to deal with a singer who would take control the entire stage from her first entrance on the word “Elektra!”. Sara Jakubiak was superior to Stundytė in every respect: her commitment to the character she created, the beauty of her voice, her phenomenal vocal technique and her extraordinary freedom in carrying out the tasks assigned to her by the director. I only hope – judging from the American singer’s career so far – that Jakubiak will not listen to the remarks of some reviewers who, having recovered from the initial shock, would like to cast her in the title role. God forbid: hers is a dark, powerful, but still lyrical soprano, crystal clear, floating over the orchestra like a voice from another world, impeccable in terms of production, the only one in the entire cast thanks to which the audience was able to marvel at the elegance of phrasing combined with a clear, deeply thought-out delivery of Hofmannsthal’s text. Had it not been for Jakubiak, I would sum up the vocal side of the London performance as generally decent, but unmemorable with few exceptions. Her portrayal of Chrysotemis was a memorable experience, somewhat unfairly overshadowing the other qualities of this altogether successful staging.

Pappano conducted the whole in line with Strauss’ own original instruction: “as if it were Mendelssohn”. He resisted the temptation to go for an extremely modernist reading of the score in terms of a persistent dramatic crescendo, an overwhelming cacophony of sounds, which many conductors further emphasise with a deliberately “dirty” sound of the various orchestral groups. Instead of the contrast between black and white, we got myriads of shades of love and hate, revenge and chaos, doubt and hope – and with them unexpected layers of lyricism, so often disregarded by contemporary conductors and so longingly remembered by admirers of Georg Solti’s legendary interpretation with Birgit Nilsson in the title role.

We didn’t get a new Nilsson, but no one dared doubt that Pappano was saying goodbye to the ROH in a style worthy of his greatest predecessors. Another circle is coming to a close. And I will soon share with you my impressions from La Monnaie, to whose glory Pappano contributed greatly before taking over the reins at the Royal Opera House; and from the English National Opera, which will soon disappear from London’s musical map. Let’s hope that this year I will witness the birth of new delights more often than bury irretrievably lost hopes.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

The artists who today can honestly be described as ambassadors of Polish culture in the world include several individuals whose careers I have followed from the very beginning. Agnieszka Budzinska-Bennett occupies a unique position among them: primarily because she has triumphantly followed the same path I began to tread tentatively in the early 1990s. The beginnings of a female medieval music ensemble which I co-led with Aldona Czechak for nearly a decade were as crazy as the whole era. I have said that it was beautiful but difficult. Experience gained at masterclasses in the West – where we were able to go with money scrimped and saved, borrowed or scrounged from institutions and foundations – were more often the subject of derision rather than genuine interest in Polish musical circles. I still find it hard to believe that we nevertheless notched up several important successes: first of all, abandon the „imitative” model of historically informed performance, common in Poland at the time, in favour of an engaged model requiring source research, work on manuscripts, comparative studies of vocal traditions and development of conscious improvisation skills. However, it so happened that I took up music criticism at more or less the same time. The conflict of interest grew. I gradually moved away from performance. Or maybe I simply lacked the determination, diligence, charisma and talent – all the qualities that have taken Agnieszka to the top and made her one of the leading specialists in this narrow and difficult field. By European, if not global standards.

I remember when she contacted me for the first time, while she was still a musicology student at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She had already participated in several prestigious courses, including those with the British sopranos Evelyn Tubb and Emma Kirkby, for years associated with The Consort of Musicke. At the time I was involved in a research programme focused on the oeuvre of Hildegard von Bingen, initiated by Barbara Thornton and supported by Benjamin Bagby of the legendary ensemble Sequentia. I spent nearly two years shuttling between Poland, Belgium and Germany, gathering knowledge and experience, which we confronted every few months during intensive sessions at Barbara and Benjamin’s home in Cologne. Agnieszka – in love with the Middle Ages since childhood, engrossed in recordings by pioneers of period performance since high school, and confronting her life’s passions with the musicological knowledge at the university – inquired about everything in minute detail. Her passion, determination and a sense of self-worth as steadfast as it was justified made an electrifying impression on me. This exotic-looking, bright, energetic girl was a force of nature. I thought to myself that if she managed to take part in the courses taught by Sequentia’s co-founders, she would benefit a hundredfold more from them than I ever would. She managed to do that twice. And my intuition did not fail me.

Years later we started calling each other “sister”. This is because the beginnings of our foray into early music were surprisingly similar. From the beginning Agnieszka was fascinated by cooperation, teamwork. Although she conscientiously went through all levels of musical education in her hometown of Szczecin and received a diploma in piano at the end of her high school education, she never became friends with the three-legged black giant. She felt lonely at the keyboard: she was fascinated by the world of medieval dragons and heroes, courtly love and sophisticated poetry, over which she had been poring with dictionaries since childhood, absorbing the magic of foreign-sounding words and the melody of forgotten languages. She read Scandinavian sagas and Nibelungenlied, and then confronted them with Wagner’s Tetralogy. She devoured Beowulf as if it were the best crime novel. To this day she still has a weakness for fantasy literature and quirky television series, including Ragnarok, a Norwegian tale with more than one moral, the authors of which have brilliantly reinterpreted Norse myths to attract modern teenage viewers uncertain of their own identity. We recently shared our impressions of several episodes on Messenger, laughing uproariously and making sure no one was looking over our shoulders.

I spent years honing my reviews, essays and columns, while Agnieszka devoted herself wholeheartedly to musical archaeology and increasingly successful attempts to bring this world to life in performance practice. After the last semester of Poznań musicology, in 1997, she began her studies in Switzerland, at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, one of the most important centres of medieval music studies and the bastion of period performance. SCB students included Gustav Leonhardt and Jordi Savall; Sequentia, the fruit of Thornton and Bagby’s joint graduation concert, was also born within SCB’s walls; singing was taught there by the charismatic countertenor Richard Levitt, a member of the legendary Studio der frühen Musik, and a favourite teacher of Agnieszka, Andreas Scholl and… Sting, who used his advice when preparing an album of Dowland songs. It was there, in Heidrun Rosenzweig’s class, that Agnieszka mastered the basics of playing the medieval harp. It was there that in 1997 she founded the all-female ensemble Peregrina – or Wanderer – the name of which refers not only to a “pilgrimage” of musical ideas across medieval Europe, but also to the biographies of the ensemble’s members, who had come to Switzerland from the United States, United Kingdom and Finland in search of the musical Holy Grail.

Agnieszka Budzińska-Bennett. Photo: Laelia Milleri

Along the way, in passing, as it were, Agnieszka learned six languages, including Latin, indispensable in her work. She completed a programme in Scandinavian studies, and a post-graduate course in musicology at the University of Basel. While working as an assistant at the Microfilm Archive of the Institute of Musicology there, she met her future husband Lucas Bennett, and thus happily married the worlds of medieval and contemporary music (Lucas, a theorist and musicologist, specialises in twentieth- and twenty-first-century works; his father, the composer Gerald Bennett, a longtime collaborator of Pierre Boulez, whom he helped found the famous IRCAM in Paris, is one of the world’s foremost authorities on computer and electroacoustic music). Agnieszka sealed her impressive education with an honours degree in vocal ensemble conducting from the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and a doctorate, defended in Poznań, on subtilitas, that is what can and cannot be heard in motets of the ars antiqua period. That was in 2010.

Peregrina already had two albums to its credit at the time: Mel et lac with twelfth-century Marian hymns and Filia praeclara with chants of the Poor Clares from Stary Sącz, for which I nominated Agnieszka for the first time for the Polityka weekly’s Passport Award. The nomination went unnoticed. The following year I mustered a small lobby, thanks to which Agnieszka made it to the top three “for her passion as a researcher who prepares concert and recording programmes through painstaking musicological, philological and historical work. For the excellent Crux album of Parisian Easter music from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century”. The Passport eluded her again. In 2012, with a persistence worthy of Cato the Elder, I urged the award jury members to open their ears to the artist’s new achievements, submitting her nomination “for another excellent album, Veiled Desires, an anthology that recounts the life, spirituality and sexuality of medieval nuns by means of music of that era. For her ability to embed artistic activity in a broader social and historical discourse. For the reliability of her source research, which is an essential part of the work of musicians performing early music”. Made it to the final again, passport denied again. Agnieszka hugged me backstage and asked me politely but firmly not to nominate her again.

I complied. However, I missed no opportunity to preach about Saint Agnieszka of Basel and her solid craftsmanship, which needs no passports. I appreciated the fact that in 2016 she was entrusted with the artistic supervision of a huge project of recording all the Melodies for the Polish Psalter by Mikołaj Gomółka with the Polish Radio Choir, but I still thought there was not enough response in Poland to what was closest to the hearts of both of us: medieval music. Music that is free of splendour, only seemingly easy, but in fact requiring maximum precision and concentration from the performers – in some ways similar to the Japanese Zen gardens, which encompass the entire universe, where gravel is raked into waves for hours, and a few stones are placed within a tiny space in such a way that it is impossible to take them all in at once.

Not everyone likes monochromatic landscapes of sand, moss and rock chips. Nor does everyone feel safe in them. So Agnieszka decided to rake, arrange and water her beloved music all the more calmly to give the listeners space and help them extract as much meaning from it as possible. She herself once recalled a mesmerising performance by Benjamin Bagby, who improvised an extensive passage from the Old English epic poem Beowulf, accompanying himself on a six-stringed lyre. His monologue went on for more than an hour, only some intelligible words could be extracted from the text, and yet, according to Agnieszka, everyone guessed at which point the monster “moved the third claw of its left hind paw”.

Agnieszka with Ensemble Dragma. Photo: Alejandro Lozano

With time similar things began to happen at her concerts. It is as if each one begins, as in Beowulf, with the famous cry of “Hwaet!”, which is usually translated as “Listen!”. In fact, it literally means “wait” and so the listeners obediently wait. Until a meaning emerges, until an image is outlined before their eyes, until hundreds of sounds, inconspicuous as couch grass flowers, form a symbolic pattern. The more inquisitive among the listeners will later start looking for contexts. The less inquisitive – or those simply tired of the chaos of the modern world – will be content with the sheer beauty of the composition.

Agnieszka is fully aware that it is impossible to impose on the audience one correct model of listening. Medievalist-musicians sometimes spend months preparing a short piece. They have to decipher it on several levels: read and understand the text, accurately interpret the notation, place the composition in a social, historical or liturgical context, combine it with the appropriate instrumentation if necessary. If doubts arise, they have to resolve them in the archives or ask colleagues for help. Once everything is ready, they have to check, if it can be played or sung at all. If not, they have to go back to the beginning and start all over again. They go to a lot of trouble and the listener may still turn a deaf ear to such an inconspicuous trifle. It thus takes a skill to arrange a programme, which in the case of medieval music is much more susceptible to the vagaries of acoustics, interior architecture and the general nature of the space.

This is why when I set off to attend the Swiss concerts under the “Kras 52” project, carried out by Agnieszka in cooperation with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, I asked the organisers to let me listen to the same programme twice: in the late-Gothic Calvinist church in Biel in the Canton of Bern and the following day in the fifteenth-century Haus zum Hohen Dolder in Basel, the former seat of a medieval society from the monastery village of St. Alban, whose duties included overseeing local vineyards, settling border disputes and fire protection of the monastery’s estates.

A manuscript marked by the mysterious signature Kras 52 was once kept in Warsaw’s Krasiński Library in Okólnik Street. It ended up there in 1857, as part of the legacy of Konstanty Swidziński, a bibliophile, art collector and patron who before his death had amassed a collection larger than that of the Ossoliński Library at the time. More than half of the collection – including the building – went up in smoke in October 1944, in a fire set by the occupiers after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising. The manuscript was miraculously found three years after the war in the Bavarian State Library in Munich, where Karol Estreicher recognised it by its light-coloured leather binding and ornate inscription “Manuscript from the fifteenth century”. In addition to the sermons of Jacobus de Voragine, Gesta Romanorum collection and a treatise on the expulsion of demons, it contains more than forty works in black mensural notation with music by composers of the late ars nova period and early Franco-Flemish polyphony, as well as seven of the nine surviving compositions by Mikołaj of Radom, and other musical relics associated with Kraków and the court of Władysław Jagiełło.

Photo: Alejandro Lozano

The first part of the project, entitled Regina Gloriosa, is based on a Marian repertoire – a fascinating testimony to the interpenetration of Italian, Avignonian and local influences, as well as the earliest Polish, still tentative experiments with Western polyphony. Agnieszka, this time with Ensemble Dragma – made up of her regular collaborators – presented one of the most subtle and sophisticated programmes of recent years. Divided into four parts (Marian Mass, music for Christmas and Epiphany, music for the Presentation of the Lord, and Marian prayers separated by the Magnificat), and performed with only five musicians, it not only revealed the light texture of these works, translucent like parchment, but also, with its thoughtful arrangement and a few wisely chosen additions from other sources, effectively sustained the attention of the entire audience. Without flamboyance, but with the tried-and-tested method of delicate contrasts – Agnieszka’s sensual soprano with Tessa Roos’ angelic, focused voice, intriguing dialogues between the harp and Marc Lewon’s lute, conversations carried out in such an expressive whisper of the instruments that whenever Jane Achtman and Elizabeth Rumsey’s vielles and Lewon’s gittern joined in, the medieval ensemble gave the impression of total completeness.

The same music – which rose like a pillar of light towards the vault of the Calvinist church – heard in the tiny hall of the Haus zum Hohen Dolder with its squeaky boards spoke directly to the listeners, sometimes from a distance of less than a metre. And once again I was able to experience the quality of these performances, just as I experience the mastery of opera singing in modest five-hundred-seat theatre. In such conditions musicians stand before the audience exposed as they were at birth. Ecce homo. Ecce mulier. Any deficiency in the technique would have resounded in this chamber with the power of the trumpets of Jericho.

When it was all over, when – like in the good old days – we cleaned the room together and washed the dishes, Agnieszka’s family invited me to dinner at a restaurant the name of which I will not reveal. Look for yourself where to eat the real braised brawn and ossobuco in Basel. Because what I also have in common with Agnieszka, her husband Lucas, her beloved father-in-law Gerald and his partner Pam is that we like to eat well and sip good wine to go with the feast. We also love to cook, finding in this a delight similar to browsing through ancient archives. Next time we will make ourselves some Spanish salsify with red lentils or spicy chicken with pumpkin. Perhaps I will be able to rival Agnieszka in this particular art.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

When it became clear that the number of premieres of this year’s season at Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera would come down to a total of three – a certain co-production that we will see four years after its opening in Salzburg lambasted by the critics; yet another staging of one of the most popular operas in the repertoire; and a world premiere of a work that I don’t quite see returning to any stage – I again became jealous of the Czechs. Czech opera companies offer a true embarrassment of riches, there are plenty of rarities in their repertoires and the interest of international critics is huge. This is hardly surprising: the Czechs don’t need to fill their casts with foreign stars of dubious quality, nor do they lack great directors or competent conductors. Besides, they don’t go to the opera once in a blue moon, but on a regular basis and they are really knowledgeable about it.

What has certainly contributed to this state of affairs is the bourgeois egalitarianism of our southern neighbours, who, unlike Poles with their sabre-wielding longings, have opera in their blood. Yet when I went to the Janáček Theatre in Brno for day-to-day performances of Strauss’ Salome and Dvorák’s comic opera Jakobín, completely unknown in Poland, I did not expect that in both cases I would be confronted with a theatre that was open and modern, and, at the same, time stemming from a tradition dating back at least to the beginning of the previous century.

Suffice it to say that David Radok, director of the Brno Salome, is the son of Alfréd, a legend of twentieth-century Czech theatre, co-creator – with Miloš Forman, among others – of the famous Laterna Magika, and a member of the D34 theatre company founded by Emil František Burian. Emil František, in turn, was the son of Emil Burian, one of the first performers of the role of the eponymous Jacobin in Dvorák’s opera. Emil’s younger brother Karel Burian sang the role of Herodes at the premiere of Salome at the Semperoper. When I began to investigate what the young Lucie Kaňková, Terinka in the Brno Jakobín, meant when she claimed to come from a family of respected Prague musicians, I discovered that on her father’s side she was a great-great-granddaughter of Jan Nepomuk Kaňka, Beethoven’s composer and lawyer friend, and on her mother’s side – a great-granddaughter of the violinist Jindřich Feld, whose students included Rafael Kubelik. I postponed further research, so as not to be influenced by anything. What if the apples did fall far from the tree this time?

Salome. Linda Ballová in the title role, and Jaroslav Březina (Herodes). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Born in 1954, David Radok emigrated with his family from Czechoslovakia after the defeat of the Prague Spring. He learned his craft in Gothenburg, primarily at the Folkteater, where his father Alfréd found refuge. He made his debut as a director at the local opera house with a staging of Menotti’s The Medium. In fact, he has continued his collaboration with Scandinavian companies to this day: he is the man behind the Peter Grimes production, dusted off after nearly thirty years and very well received in Copenhagen, which in May saved the honour of the Operaen, when a co-production with Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera fell through for reasons that are yet to be explained. He has dozens of productions to his credit, primarily of Baroque and modernist operas. His stagings are clean, but dark, precise and marked by a uniquely Czech brand of black humour. This was also the case of Salome, although the action, set on an almost empty stage enclosed on three sides by a brick structure reminiscent of the interior of the ruined Basilica of Maxentius in Rome (set design by Dragan Stojčevski), unfolded rather sluggishly at first. I suspect that the director may have intended to build tension in this powerful one-act opera by means of the Hitchcock method, but the earthquake started only with the confrontation between Salome and Jochanaan. When the prophet emerged, dripping with water, from the trapdoor – with a black sack over his head, hauled out of the palace cistern in chains – the audience shuddered with horror for the first time. Radok’s concept proved coherent: Herodes’ palace was a universal metaphor for totalitarian violence and decay of all values. Hence the bizarre hotchpotch of costumes (designed by Zuzana Ježkova), ranging from operetta-style liveries, uniforms and suits, silk gowns and déshabillés, to the slightly over-the-top idea of having The Page of Herodias wear a Muslim niqab; hence the repulsive austerity of the sets and the terrifying indifferentism of the protagonists. There are only monsters roaming around the stage. Had the footmen not rushed to wipe the blood on the floor, Narraboth’s suicide would have gone unnoticed. Orgies and scheming take place somewhere in the background, almost imperceptibly, behind the semi-translucent glass of the palace’s living room. Paradoxically, the character that turns out to be the most human in the drama is the weak, demoralised Herodes – shouting that he will not allow the saviour of the world to raise the dead, because that would be horrible; frozen in humiliation when Salome, in the finale of the Dance of the Seven Veils, pushes his face into her crotch; vomiting with fear and disgust, when his stepdaughter gets her way and has the servants bring Jochanaan’s severed head on a silver platter. My perception of the Brno production may have been influenced by the current events in Poland – but I have to admit that the downfall of the grotesque tetrarch made a much bigger impression on me than the dilemmas and frustrations of the utterly spoiled Salome.

It is more likely, however, I was a bit disappointed by the performer of the title role, the Slovakian Linda Ballová – an excellent and extremely convincing actress as a psychopathic Lolita Salome, but possessing a soprano that I cannot, for the life of me, associate with a “sixteen-year-old princess with the voice of an Isolde” as Strauss himself suggested. Ballová’s voice, relatively small, artificially darkened and characterised by a persistent, uncontrolled vibrato, pales in comparison with the luminous, truly girlish sopranos of Destinn and Cebotari, and above all the phenomenal Olive Fremstad, who sang Salome in the American premiere of the work at the Metropolitan Opera in 1907. Despite the powerful orchestration, those singers easily cut through the dense tutti: Ballová continuously struggled with the matter, at times departing from the musical text, and even the famous low G flat on the last word of her monologue was lost in the flood of instrumental chords.

Salome. Linda Ballová. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

However, the other members of the cast did a great job, led by the phenomenal – also acting-wise – Jaroslav Březina in the role of Herodes. Warm words of praise should go to Vit Nosek, who sang Narraboth with a rounded and ardent tenor, although he was not fully able to cope with the tasks entrusted to him by the director. The vengeful Heriodias was successfully portrayed by the experienced Eva Urbanová, a singer endowed with a powerful and superbly controlled soprano; Jochanaan was convincingly sung by the German baritone Birger Radde, a technically superb, extremely musical singer with a voice that is exceptionally noble, beautiful and rich. Marko Ivanovic led the whole thing with an assured hand, but at times paying too much attention to polishing individual details – at the expense of the agitated, kaleidoscopic narrative of this remarkable score.

After such intense impressions of the previous evening, the meeting with Jakobín obviously took place in a completely different atmosphere. The fruit of Dvorák’s second collaboration with the librettist Marie Červinkova-Riegrova – after the mediocre success of the 1882 production of Dimitrij – proved to be the first real triumph in the composer’s operatic career. The story of Bohuš, son of Count Vilém – who returns to his homeland incognito, together with his wife Julie, only to discover that his father is still convinced that his first-born has allied himself in France with the Jacobins and married a woman of ill repute in Paris – runs parallel to the love story of Terinka, daughter of the choirmaster Benda, and Jiří, gamekeeper at the count’s estates, jealous of burgrave Filip, who is courting his fiancée. Dramaturgically, the thing struggles a bit, musically it dazzles, both with the lyricism of the vocal parts and the sumptuous orchestration as well as references to, on the one hand, Czech folklore and on the other – Italian comic opera and the opéra à sauvetage, a genre popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the example of which was also Beethoven’s Fidelio.

Jakobín. Pavla Vykopalová (Julie), Jan Šťáva (Filip), and Roman Hoza (Bohuš). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

This convoluted story was tackled by Martin Glaser, a director a generation younger than Radok, but nevertheless faithful to the Czech tradition of engaged theatre, imbued with the spirit of satire and, at the same time, with the poetic magic of old school plays, which, in the words of Jan Komenský, were to entertain in a way that would make “our games a preparation for serious matters”. In his delightfully colourful Jakobín we can find not only inspirations from eighteenth-century Hanakian opera, but also less obvious, perhaps not entirely conscious references to the oeuvres of other directors from this part of Europe (I’m thinking of, for example, the undulating wooden platforms known from Nekrošius’ productions, with which Glaser builds the landscape of an imaginary town just as evocatively as he creates the interior of the count’s palace). How I miss such stagings: beautiful, clean and clear, human in the most literal sense of the word, provoking laughter and emotion, perfectly coupled with the composer’s idea.

This makes it all the more gratifying that the main contributor to the success of Jakobín was the Janáček Theatre team. The singers permanently affiliated with the Brno company were completed by just two artists: Lucie Kaňková, a singer blessed with a luminous, colourful soprano beautifully opened at the top, and Aleš Briscein as Jiří, an indefatigable and reliable tenor, who brings to mind Klaus Florian Vogt – the difference being, however, that, unlike the German star, he has a truly beautiful voice and uses it with admirable musicality. A lovely pair of the main protagonists came from Pavla Vykopalová (Julie), whose soft soprano had already delighted me in The Greek Passion, and the extraordinarily versatile baritone Roman Hoza (Bohuš), who had clearly worked diligently during his master classes with Christa Ludwig. The indisposed Petr Levíček heroically faced adversity and won over the audience with his bravura portrayal of the choirmaster Benda. The two priests from the production of Martinů’s opera I had seen – David Szendiuch and Jan Šťáva – showed themselves at their best as Count Vilém and the grotesque burgrave Filip. The role of the disreputable Adolf, who tries to seize Bohuš’s inheritance, was entrusted to Tadeáš Hoza, Roman’s younger brother, who possesses a baritone equally well placed, albeit a bit brighter and open more widely in the upper register. Jakub Klecker conducted, making good use of his extensive choral and choirmaster experience in this singing score.

Jakobín. David Szendiuch (Count Vilém). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Given the lack of operatic excitement in Poland, I will have to visit Brno more often. If I were to die in an isolation hospital, like field chaplain Matyáš from The Good Soldier Švejk, no one would be pulling their hair out in despair after me. My record is clean: even if I borrowed one thousand eight hundred crowns from someone, I gave it back long ago.

Translated by Anna Kijak

One day a woman locked in Einar Wegener’s body decided to tear down her prison. Had she chosen to act on the decision, the deed would have been referred to as suicide. She even set a date for herself: 1 May 1930. She had tried everything, but the doctors, instead of helping her, tried to forcibly treat Einar. They diagnosed him with either neurosis or schizophrenia, recommended a lobotomy and treated him with X-rays. Einar, exhausted by the treatment, was in anguish and so was Lili living inside him. When the anguish – described today as gender dysphoria – reached its peak, hope sprang up suddenly. The difficult case was taken up by the famous German gynaecologist Kurt Warnekros, a pioneer of gender-affirming surgery. No one before him had taken the risk of “completely transforming” a man into a woman. No one before had trusted him so desperately. The first surgery took place in February 1930. After the second Einar ceased to exist and the woman freed from him was issued a passport in the name of Lili Ilse Elvenes. We do not know whether she ever used the surname Elbe: perhaps this was a later invention of journalists seeking to commemorate the river flowing through Dresden, where Dr. Warnekros’ clinic was located.

A few months after the fourth procedure – groundbreaking from the medical point of view – the patient’s body rejected the transplanted uterus. And yet Lili welcomed death with calm and gratitude for the brief period spent in the body she had always dreamed of. She died on 13 September 1931, at the age of just under 49. Before her death she said that Einar had wanted to die for a long time: so that Lili could awake to life. This harrowing story, told by herself and compiled by a friend who hid under the pseudonym Niels Hoyer, was published as a book shortly after her death. The Danish original Fra Mand til Kvinde (Man into Woman) was immediately translated into German, an edition followed by two independent translations into English. Lili’s tragic fate,  discussed before the war mainly in terms of a moral sensation, kept returning from time to time in other contexts: in the middle of the last century on the wave of discussions about new methods of surgical gender reassignment, in the early twenty-first century – after the publication of David Ebershoff’s acclaimed novel The Danish Girl, subsequently filmed by Tom Hooper. The critics received Ebershoff’s debut with mixed feelings: although the author created a vivid story about the power of love, the essence of marriage and gender models, he let his imagination run wild, obscuring the already vague story of Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener, who may have married Einar precisely because someone else lived in his body.

Photo: Edyta Dufaj

Both were talented and both very young when they fell in love with each other. They met at the Royal Danish Academy of Arts, having arrived there from provincial towns and conservative communities in the south of the country: Einar was the son of a spice merchant, Gerda – of a Lutheran pastor. He won acclaim as an author of atmospheric, impressionistic landscapes, while she dedicated herself primarily to illustration and portrait art combining Art Nouveau and Art Deco and characterised by ambiguous, decadent eroticism. It was apparently Gerda who awakened Lili in Einar – by prompting him to replace Anna Larssen, a popular actress at Copenhagen’s Folketeatret, during one of Gerda’s portrait sessions. Innocent dress-ups became a ritual. Dressed in female attire, Einar began to go out with Gerda for walks, to attend exhibition previews and social gatherings, with Gerda introducing him as her husband’s cousin from Jutland. Lili was given her own set of clothes, settled in the marital bedroom, but was afraid to come out in the stifling atmosphere of Puritan Denmark. The couple’s move to France proved of little help: Gerda flourished as an artist, but Lili felt increasingly bad in Einar’s hated body. Deliverance came with Dr. Warnekros’ offer. Lili emerged from the shadows as a mature woman and lived her entire new life over the course of fourteen months. The marriage was annulled. Lili became infatuated with a French art dealer, Gerda married an Italian pilot. Everything fell apart after Lili’s death. Gerda’s marriage turned out to be a mistake. The artist spent the last years of her life in poverty, forgotten, drinking herself into a stupor and supporting herself by selling hand-painted greeting cards. She died shortly after the outbreak of the war, at the age of just 54. She may have always loved the woman in her husband.

If Tobias Picker – author of six operas based on famous literary works, most of which were commissioned by major American theatre companies – had wanted to cash in on the success of Ebershoff’s novel, I probably would not have gone to the premiere of his Lili Elbe at the Theater St. Gallen. However, from the very beginning this project promised to be extraordinary. Just before the outbreak of the pandemic, Picker – then artistic director of Tulsa Opera in Oklahoma – cast the transgender Lucia Lucas in the role of Don Giovanni. The baritone-singing Lucas began the transition process in 2013, went through a hell, purgatory and heaven similar to that of Lili Elbe, and seemed to Picker the perfect performer for the opera he decided to compose especially for her. The libretto was written by his husband Aryeh Lev Stollman, a neuroradiologist at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, using primarily the book Fra Mand til Kvinde; the dramaturgical side of the whole thing was handled by Lucas herself and direction – by Krystian Lada, who “discovered” Lucas for himself back in 2019, during the Brussels premiere of Unknown, I live with you.

Photo: Edyta Dufaj

Picker has created an opera of the kind that European composers are often unwilling or simply unable to write: real two-act opera with a linear plot that arouses strong emotions in both connoisseurs and people who come to the theatre for well-told stories. Above all, in Lili Elbe he has given a tremendous opportunity to shine to the singers, led by Lucia Lucas, who spins this treatise on recovered identity with the passion and understanding of a person who can really empathise with her character’s plight. In musical terms Picker does not so much juggle with convention as harnesses it in the service of the narrative: in the theatre within theatre scene, when Einar and Gerda watch a “modernist” performance of Orpheus and Eurydice, he draws on the treasury of Webern’s and Schönberg’s oeuvres; he conveys the atmosphere of the frenzied 1920s by means of references to Weill and Parisian cabarets; he interweaves the whole with threads drawn from the music of Korngold, Copland and Puccini; he dresses the moving finale in a robe of sound with clear allusions to Wagner’s Tristan and the love transfiguration of Isolde.

Krystian Lada presents the story within a space with few props (stage design cooperation by Łukasz Misztal), suggestively lit by Aleksander Prowaliński, as usual building tension with precise acting and expressive stage movement (choreography by Frank Fannar Pedersen). There are clear examples of his directorial “signatures”, like the half allegorical, half fairy-tale pantomime in the prologue: with bachelors and maidens pair up in the open, like princes with their Cinderellas, the maidens find the right shoes, one is left without a partner, little Einar runs off stage with one foot in a boy’s shoe and the other in a shiny pump. Another element that has become an integral part of Lada’s staging are theatrical emanations of the characters’ identities – when Lili awakens in Einar, she manifests herself under many guises: an Androgyne, a pregnant woman, a woman with a beard, and other vague visions of femininity, evocatively conveyed by dancers from the Tanzkompanie St. Gallen. Again, there is a great understanding between the director and the costume designer (Bente Rolandsdotter), who managed not only to emphasise the stark contrast between the grey everyday life in Denmark and the colourful world of bohemia, but also to contrast Gerda’s joyful colour imagination with a melancholic, subdued palette of shades suggesting the sadness of Lili locked inside Einar. A beautiful idea was the final cleansing of the protagonist from the dirt of her previous existence: in a ceremony that brought to mind associations with baptism as well as ritual washing of the body by the deceased’s loved ones.

Photo: Edyta Dufaj

The musical side of the production was overseen by Modestas Pitrenas, who led the soloists, the chorus and the Sinfonieorchester St. Gallen with an assured hand, if a bit too heavy at times. I think, however, that with each successive performance the balance between the stage and the orchestra pit will continue to improve. Among the very large cast special mention should go to Sylvia d’Eramo, as Gerda, singing with a beautifully rounded soprano; the singing- and acting-wise superb mezzo-soprano Mack Wolz in the triple role of Anna Larssen, Wegener’s Mother and the Young Woman; the touchingly lyrical Brian Michael Moore in the tenor role of Lili’s beloved, Claude LeJeune; and, above all, the technically superb Théo Imart, endowed with an extraordinarily handsome soprano countertenor, and singing three extremely varied roles of the Danish Countess, Dagmar and Matron. However, I cannot help it, but what will stay in my memory above all is Lucia Lucas’ harrowing portrayal. Leaving aside her innate musicianship, mastery of nuanced dynamics and articulation, attention to rhythm and melody of phrasing – there is something irresistibly feminine about Lucas’ voice, more sonorous at the bottom of the scale and more widely open at the top than in the case of many performers of the role of Wotan. I have no idea where this comes from: certainly not from the timbre; if anything, then from the intensity and ardour of emotion, not normally associated with “male” singing. This sparkling baritone is clearly comfortable in its new body.

Yet after a long applause I became overwhelmed with sadness: that in Poland we are not yet mature enough to tell difficult stories using the language of opera. And even if we are mature enough, we do not know how to tell them with such sincerity and simplicity. It is either shouting or pathos, or allusion wrapped in black humour. And yet we need moderation so much.

Translated by:
Anna Kijak

It is hard to believe that Bayreuth – the capital and second largest city of the Regierungsbezirk of Upper Franconia – is still almost exclusively associated with the Wagner Festival. Few people know that it was the birthplace of Christiane Eberhardine, the uncrowned queen of Poland – wife of Augustus II the Strong and mother of Augustus III – for whose funeral ceremony Bach composed the famous Trauer-Ode BWV 198. Tourists marvel at the gems of German Rococo in Dresden and Potsdam, having no idea of how many treasures of architecture of this style can be found in Bayreuth itself and on the outskirts of the city. Judaica devotees often fail to note that the Great Synagogue, which has been in operation since 1760, emerged almost unscathed from Kristallnacht: only because its building was adjacent to the Margravial Opera House. Few music lovers remember that this magnificent theatre, a UNESCO heritage site since 2012, hosted a baroque music festival already in the first decade of this century. The decision to revive the event, as Bayreuth Baroque, was not made until 2019, after a major renovation of the building.

Not only the Bayreuther Festspiele on the Green Hill, but also the new festival, under the artistic direction of Max Emanuel Cenčić, almost fell victim to the 2020 pandemic. Fortunately, the organisers managed to “squeeze” into the short break between the waves of the pandemic and hold Bayreuth Baroque under a strict sanitary regime, with no programme cuts. I went to Bayreuth at the time literally for just one evening, for a concert performance of Vinci’s Gismondo by the soloists and {oh!} Orkiestra led by Martyna Pastuszka.

In the years that followed Bayreuth Baroque managed to consolidate its reputation and attract new audiences to the city, which, much to the despair of its councillors, became deserted every time after the Wagner Festival ended. For various reasons I was unable to make it to the second and third instalments of the event, received increasingly well also by critics. This year I decided not to give up and to go to see performances of both staged operas included in the programme; sandwiched between them was a recital by a singer who has been all the rage recently among lovers of stylish performance of Baroque music.

Rolando Villazón as Orfeo. Photo: Clemens Manser

The performance of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, in a production directed by Thanos Papakonstantinou, left me confused, to say the least. The production is by no means new: this theatrical experiment, featuring live-electronics and material arranged and composed by Panos Iliopoulos, was premiered in 2017 at Athens’ Megaron. It was quite favourably received by Greek critics and ignored by most foreign reviewers – not without reason, as it was one of the many events accompanying the “true” celebrations of the 450th anniversary of the composer’s birth. The creative team honestly admitted at the time that it would be an Orfeo “with a twist”, a staging appealing to the sensibilities of audiences other than the supporters of historical performance truth. Indeed, there were plenty of surprises: from the addition to the Baroque instruments (Latinitas Nostra ensemble led from the harpsichord by Markellos Chryssicos) of, among others, the saw, bass guitar and theremin, the rather intrusive identification of Orpheus with the figure of Christ, to bizarre casting decisions. To make the matters worse, most of Iliopoulos’ ideas were not only in poor taste, but also contradicted the musical and dramatic logic of the original.

This is, in fact, also true of the staging, which, although quite pleasing to the eye (set design by Niki Psyhogoiu, lighting by Christina Thanasoula), puts spectators familiar with the work and the reception of Orphic literature in Monteverdi’s time to a severe test. Especially given that ideas like wedding dances with ribbons being wrapped around a cross (and a Latin cross at that) neither are revealing, nor reflect too well on the cultural competence of the creative team. Nor am I convinced by the concept of turning the entire opera into a thriller, announced already in the prologue, in which the famous toccata is replaced with a melody from an ominously jamming music box. Monteverdi resorts to a masterful dramatic trick, conducting the narrative of Act I in an atmosphere of growing joy and ecstasy – so convincing that the listeners forget what comes next; that the news of Eurydice’s death is as unexpected for them as it is for Orpheus. This adaptation oozes horror from the very beginning and everything is heading towards the final pandemonium, that is the version – abandoned by the composer – with a frenzy of maenads tearing apart the Thracian singer. I should add that this version was lost, so Iliopoulos went the whole hog and added something that had no connection to Monteverdi’s La favola d’Orfeo whatsoever.

Another thing is that he managed to spoil the original as well. His insertions and arrangements disrupted the chord base in the basso continuo to such an extent that the singers had trouble intoning their lines correctly. Chryssicos compounded this, further confusing the artists with his bizarre choice of tempi and disregard for the internal symbolism of key passages in the work (for example, in “Possente spirto”, a poignant clash of emotion and convention, which in this interpretation was more like the soundtrack to a B horror film). The soloists sang generally correctly but unstylishly, with an excessively wide vibrato, leaving out most of Monteverdi’s characteristic ornamental figures. The notable exception was Marios Sarantidis, who with his lovely, brilliantly controlled bass impressed already in the ensembles – unfortunately, as Charon he was effectively drowned out by the electronics. Different dilemmas were posed for me by Rolando Villazón’s participation in the venture. After his vocal crisis, his voice returned in a completely different form: smoky, gravelly, less wide in terms of range, which, however, the artist knows how to mask and even turn to his own advantage with his excellent technique and expressive interpretation. This time he did not succeed. In Act I his Orpheus was literally fighting to survive. After that things improved somewhat, although I could not shake the feeling that Villazón strayed into this experiment from a completely different story and got no support from anyone: neither the conductor, the director, nor the author of this bizarre adaptation.

After the performance all hell broke loose. Half of the audience booed like mad, drowned out by the other half with frenetic applause and shouts of enthusiasm. I hanged on in silence, feverishly gathering my thoughts and anxiously preparing for the following evening.

Bruno de Sá and the ensemble Nuovo Barocco. Photo: bayreuth.media

My fear proved unfounded. The recital by the Brazilian male soprano Bruno de Sá at the Baroque Ordenskirche St. Georgen, founded by Margrave George William for the courtly order of knighthood Ordre de la Sincerité, impressed not only with the quality of the performance and the deeply thought-out arrangement of the programme, but also with its unique atmosphere – it took place in an interior bathed in natural candlelight, in close contact with the musicians positioned in the middle of the Greek cross on the plan of which the church was built.

I needed such a purgatory after the hellish torments of the previous day. Let me start by praising the excellent Nuovo Barocco ensemble, founded by the Hungarian oboist Bettina Simon and the Greek violinist Dimitris Karakantas. Until recently, fans of historical performance could choose between the cold perfection of Northern European Baroque ensembles and the fiery, often sloppy element of the Southerners. Nuovo Barocco is part of a whole new trend of playing that is energetic and passionate, at the same time characterised by a dazzling, almost romantic beauty of sound, evident both in the accompaniments to the arias and in the instrumental pieces (phenomenally highlighted “sentimental” texture of Francesco Durante’s Concerto No. 2 in G minor ).

The musicians presented a programme made up of works by composers of the Neapolitan school: in the first part, Bruno de Sá sang arias intended for soprano castrati in female roles (Cunegunda from Gismondo and the eponymous heroine of Vinci’s Didone abbandonata, Sabina from Pergolesi’s Adriano in Siria and Ismena from Giuseppe Sellitto’s opera Siface); in the second – arias of male protagonists (Curiazio from Cimarosa’s Gli Orazi e I Curiazi, Volusio from Hasse’s opera Cajo Fabricio, Arminio from Porpora’s Germanico in Germania, and the aria “Son qual nave”, written by Riccardo Broschi for his brother Farinelli for the pasticcio opera Artaserse).

After the great revival of the countertenor voice, the time has come for the much more exclusive voice of male soprano, that is, the singing of men who, for various reasons, did not undergo mutation in adolescence. Of the three brightest stars in this rarefied vocal fach (I am also thinking of Samuel Mariño and Dennis Orellana), de Sá is unquestionably the most musical and technically the best. He is proficient in coloratura, can maintain a balance of tone in the transitions between registers, his phrasing is smooth and done with a great sense of style. In addition, his range is very wide – but it turned out not to be wide enough to meet all the challenges of the recital’s closing aria from Artaserse. The reason is simple: Farinelli moved with ease within a range of three and a half octaves and his breathing capabilities were remarkable even for a castrato.

And this raises the question of the usefulness of male sopranos in historical performance. Countertenors are unable to match the art of the castrati of the past either, but their voices are denser and more expressive. Bruno de Sá’s soprano, on the other hand, sounds like a lovely, incredibly well-trained voice of an adolescent girl, which necessarily limits the singer in his choice of female roles and almost disqualifies him as a performer of male roles in Baroque opera. It is unlikely that the problem will disappear in the future, when the pioneers –de Sá among them – will begin to give way to increasingly technically proficient male sopranos. This is because the problem is not in the technique, but in the physiology. In my opinion we should already start thinking about a suitable niche for male sopranos, whose instrument is fascinating, but much more delicate than that of most countertenors. I was reaffirmed in this belief by the encores of the singer, who was clearly tired at this point: from a not very convincing interpretation of “Tu del Ciel ministro eletto” from Handel’s Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, to “Ombra mai fu” from Bononcini’s Xerse, where even the dazzling timbre of his voice failed to mask the problem of tone stability.

Flavio, re de’ Longobardi. Julia Lezhneva (Emilia) and Max Emanuel Cenčić (Guido). Photo: Falk von Traubenberg

Yet overall the recital left a very good impression and I did not expect that the final performance of my trip, of Flavio, re de’ Longobardi, the fourth of Handel’s operas for the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, would take me straight to paradise. I can confidently say that I had not seen such a visually beautiful yet clever staging of a Baroque work for at least a decade. The creative team decided to stage the whole thing in the style of a courtly tragicomedy, highlighting the peculiar heterogeneity of this dramma per musica, which at times really verges on a parody of opera seria. Helmut Stürmer’s superbly designed sets, making up a new space again and again, provided a background for scenes reminiscent of Corneille’s and Molière’s theatre, Hogarth’s prints and Gainsborough’s paintings – possibly also filtered through Kubrick’s film adaptation of Barry Lyndon. However, the efforts of the set designer, costume designer (Corina Grămoşteanu) and lighting designer (Romain De Lagarde) would have been in vain, if it had not been for the direction of Max Cenčić, who, following the example of the greatest masters of opera theatre, derived this convoluted story not only from the libretto, but also from the score, phenomenally arranged the crowd scenes, and, at the same time, took care of every gesture, glance and change of facial expression of the singers as well as the several silent actors who were used in the action. Cenčić brilliantly weaves comedy and love with elements of the grotesque, sometimes on the verge of overdoing it, as in the episode when offspring is being conceived by Flavio, who fulfils his royal duty in front of a cheering court. However, Cenčić does not overdo it in the end – indeed, he forces laughter back down our throats when the debased queen emerges from her bed and, in the silence of the interrupted musical narrative, finds comfort in the tenderness of the court dwarf, who leads his mistress backstage, glaring at those present with contempt (excellent Mick Morris Mehnert).

There were many more such episodes in this performance, and the spectators had to swallow tears of emotion as often as they had to suppress violent fits of giggles. In several fragments the creative team invoked the convention of pasticcio, incorporating into the opera other works by Handel, instrumental compositions by Telemann, an aria from Lotti’s Theophane and Michel Lambert’s air de court “Vos mépris chaque jour” – that last piece performed by a lady-in-waiting singing delightfully out of tune (the actress Filippa Kaye). How on earth Cenčić managed to unleash such reserves of acting talent from all the cast members, I truly have no idea. All the more credit to him for that, as he assembled a dream cast. He himself took up the mantle of Senesino and sang the heroic role of Guido, in which he impressed not only with the luscious sound of his increasingly beautiful countertenor, but also with his extremely stylish ornamentation in da capo arias. The audience was completely bowled over by Julia Lezhneva in the role of Emilia, engaged to Guido: her round soprano was enriched with deeper, truly “feminine” tones and her improvisational skills were at their peak – I don’t know what purists would say, but in the third segment of the aria “Mà chi punir desio” she created a showpiece ornament from an excerpt from Nino Rota’s soundtrack to the film Romeo and Juliet. In the second pair of lovers Yuriy Mynenko (Vitige) was particularly worthy of note with his superbly placed soprano countertenor beautifully open at the top. He found a fine partner in Monika Jägerová (Teodata), a singer endowed with a contralto of extraordinary beauty, which in the last act, however, began to betray signs of fatigue. The eponymous Flavio was sung by the young French countertenor Rémy Brè-Feuillet, making up for minor technical shortcomings with an uncommon sense of comedy. The character roles of Ugone and Lotario were brilliantly performed by Fabio Trümpy and Sreten Manojlović – the former a bit better vocally, the latter incomparably better as an actor. The excellent as usual Concerto Köln orchestra was led from the harpsichord by Benjamin Bayl: precisely, with a flawless sense of the form of the work and the capabilities of the soloists involved in its performance.

When the applause finally died down, I really felt like an exile from the garden of delights. From now on, I will tirelessly seek to return. I have a vague feeling that this paradise can be regained. Because where I lost it, I now know for certain.

Translated by: Anna Kijak