Upiór w operze

I feel strange. For the first time since 2014 I have failed to get to Longborough to attend a performance conducted by Anthony Negus – this time in another revival of Carmen Jakobi’s phenomenal Tristan und Isolde. I will come to LFO this season, but it will be for a completely different production. I can’t help it, this is just how my professional commitments have turned out. But I am looking forward all the more eagerly to next year’s Meistersinger at the home of one of the greatest – and, at the same time, the most elusive – Wagnerian conductors of our time. At the same time I am happy that within a short period of time I was able to listen to, see and judge the work of two young musicians who in recent years have had the opportunity to benefit from Negus’ experience and through him – more or less consciously – join the guardians of a tradition which is still underappreciated on the Continent and which the Sorcerer of Longborough took over directly from his master, Sir Reginald Goodall.

It seemed at one point that Goodall – assistant to Albert Coates and Malcolm Sargent – reached his peak in the mid-1940s, when he went down in the history of British music as Britten’s unexpected guiding angel, first preparing the premiere of his Peter Grimes at Sadler’s Wells and then sharing the baton with Ernest Ansermet during the first performances of The Rape of Lucretia at Glyndebourne. He soon joined the Covent Garden company, where he was entrusted with several touring performances of Die Walküre. Despite excellent reviews, he was unable to spread his wings in the Wagnerian repertoire. In the early 1960s he was outshone by Georg Solti, the Royal Opera’s new music director. And yet Goodall continued to work in his “Valhalla” in the theatre’s attic – neither a dressing room, nor a broom closet – honing interpretations with singers of the stature of Donald McIntyre and Gwyneth Jones. He was biding his time until 1968, when Sadler’s Wells Opera asked him to prepare Die Meistersinger for the company’s centenary. The production became legendary, as did the Ring started in 1970 by the same team and the fruits of his later Wagnerian collaboration with the ROH and WNO.

The production remained a legend also because Goodall’s unique approach to Wagner’s music – stemming from his in-depth study of the score, extraordinary sensitivity to colour and phrasing details, and above all from the time devoted by the conductor to rehearsing with the musicians – was something only witnesses of these events could appreciate. The recordings of the performances conducted by Goodall got lost in the archives for a long time. When they finally resurfaced, in an era of ridiculously perfect studio recordings, few people were able to appreciate Goodall’s interpretative “endless crescendo” as well as his art of piling up tensions for hours, which could be captured only during a live performance.

John Tomlinson (Gurnemanz) in rehearsal for Inverness Parsifal. Photo: Mahler Players

Negus is not the only continuator of this almost extinct tradition (in this context it is impossible not to mention Sir Mark Elder, another of Goodall’s assistants at the time), but he is certainly the closest to its core idea of shaping the narrative over a broad timescale. This was spotted years ago by Tomas Leakey, the Inverness-born founder of the ambitious chamber orchestra Mahler Players, which after a few seasons of presenting works of its patron arranged for small ensembles decided to take the bull by the horns and introduce the Highlands residents to the oeuvre of Wagner. I have been following their ventures for over seven years, from the moment when Matthew King and Peter Longworth prepared for them an arrangement of Act One of Die Walküre for thirty instruments. Since then Leakey has been regularly consulting his ideas with Negus. In the last three seasons he shared the baton with him in concert performances of Act Two of Tristan, Act Three of Siegfried and Act Three of Parsifal. Using a method only he himself knows, he enlisted for these projects not only well-known Longborough soloists, but also artists like Sir John Tomlinson, a Bayreuth legend of nearly twenty seasons.

However, when he decided to present the complete Parsifal in Inverness, I could not believe it. Not because I doubted the passion and professionalism of his musicians. But I feared he was too optimistic about the endurance of the audience, who would be forced to listen to this four-hour work inside the local cathedral, in a performance that, despite some elements of stage movement, would still be a concert. How wrong I was. Wagner’s mystery captivated the audience members from the very first bars of the prelude – unfolding unhurriedly but inexorably, as spoke Goodall and then Negus after him – holding them on the edge of their folding chairs until the powerful climax in the finale of Act Three. This was largely due to the orchestration, arranged for forty musicians – nearly three times fewer than Wagner envisaged – by King himself, who somehow managed to preserve the unique colour and richness of the sound of the ensemble, despite the proportional superiority of the wind instruments over the string section of merely twenty. A lot of the credit for this success goes to Leakey, who shaped the narrative with a tender hand and a feeling for the challenging acoustics of the Gothic Revival cathedral. To complain about isolated clinkers and lapses in intonation would be unbecoming for a reviewer brought up on the legendary, beautifully imperfect Bayreuth recording under Knappertsbusch. Most importantly, the Inverness performance featured no cases of miscasting, even though there were singers with vastly differing levels of experience – and in some cases, with no experience whatsoever – in the Wagnerian repertoire.

Each of them managed to create a convincing portrayal, beginning with the phenomenal Tomlinson as Gurnemanz, a character into which he put all the wisdom of his experience and beauty of his voice that time has treated exceptionally kindly – one might even get the impression that it has decided not to touch it at all. Tomlinson’s is a bass voice in the truest sense of the word, still magnificent in the middle register and skilfully handled at the extreme ends of the range, in perfect harmony with the libretto, articulated precisely, emphatically and without the tendency, so common today, to descend into caricature. The revelation of the Scottish Parsifal was Almerija Delic, a Bosnian singer with an excellent track record in German theatres, who impressed me with her exceptional stage presence as well as a rich, highly expressive dramatic mezzo-soprano, simply perfect for the role of Kundry. The eponymous “pure fool” found an brilliant interpreter in Julian Hubbard, a youthful singer in all respects, both physical and vocal. It has been a long time since I heard a Parsifal with such a resonant and luminous tenor voice, and spot-on intonation. I was a bit concerned about Amfortas, portrayed by Thomas Weinhappel, a decidedly lyric baritone who had only recently begun to venture into heavier repertoire. Fortunately, my fears proved unfounded: his velvety-voiced, anguished Amfortas was genuinely moving, especially in his interaction with Gurnemanz, well-thought-out by both singers. An excellent performance in the role of Klingsor came from the German bass Renatus Mészár, a memorable Wotan from the Karlsruhe Ring and soloist in the just as memorable recording of Bruno Maderna’s rediscovered Requiem, conducted by Frank Beermann. Titurel was successfully portrayed by Sion Goronwy, whose bass is rounded, pitch-black and authoritative in its sound. The Flowermaidens (Catriona Clark, Jessica Leary and Laura Margaret Smith – the last two artists also singing Squires) were excellent, as was Barbara Scott (Voice from Above). I should add that all the ladies, the two other Squires (Petro Wychrij and Aidan Thomas Phillips) as well as Grail Knights (Matthew Kimble and Jim MacPherson) not only excelled in their solo roles, but also formed part of the twenty-five-strong chorus. I also have to stress that Wychrij noted in his bio that he is a Royal Mail employee, while the Second Knight, MacPherson, turned out to be a historian and lecturer at the local university.

Chorus at the Inverness cathedral. Photo: Mahler Players

The Inverness Parsifal captivated me also with its imaginative use of the cathedral space as well as acting – equally well thought-out and executed. Every move, every grimace, every non-existent and yet palpably present prop made up a story that was more vivid that most stagings by today’s directors. I suspect that the scene in which Parsifal, proud of having shot the swan, is gradually losing his composure, and, above all, the image of the aged Gurnemanz supporting the anguished Amfortas on his way to the revealing the Grail will come back to me every time I encounter Wagner’s masterpiece in the future.

Shortly after that I found myself at a Grange Park Opera’s performance of Das Rheingold conducted by Harry Sever, a rising star among British conductors and assistant to Anthony Negus during the work on the Longborough Ring, which began even before the pandemic and ended two years ago with the entire tetralogy being staged over the course of one season. Wasfi Kani decided to present the monumental cycle at her “theatre in the woods” in Surrey, on terms similar to those at LFO, that is with a cast of British singers, presenting one part of the cycle per season, until the completion of the work in 2030, preferably under Negus’ baton. In the end it was agreed that Negus would join the venture only in 2028; the responsibility for the preparation of the first two parts of the Ring was assumed by Sever, who, in addition to serving as the master’s apprentice, also had an opportunity to try his hand at being a LFO conductor, taking charge of several performances of Die Walküre and Siegfried.

I will start with the staging of Das Rheingold, my biggest cause for concern, as GPO’s new production was to be directed by Charlie Edwards, the very same who three years earlier had staged Tristan here – in a setting resembling a huge garage sale of furniture and museum artefacts from the Neuschweinstein Castle, the Wesendoncks’ villa and the Bayreuth Festival archive. This time the stage space was much cleaner and more consistent with the logic of the work, also in terms of colours (the blue of the Rhine, the dazzling white of the gods’ residence, the black of the Nibelheim). Collaborating, like before, with the costume designer Gabrielle Dalton and the lighting director Tim Mitchell, Edwards has set the action in the nineteenth-century reality – not precisely defined but nevertheless bringing to mind the second stage of the industrial revolution in Britain. Hence the “Dickensian” costumes by Gabrielle Dalton; hence Valhalla’s resemblance not so much to Greek temples but to Victorian imitations of classical Palladian architecture; hence the dual form of the eponymous gold – of electricity, driving mass production, and of arrivistes’ wealth derived from it. There are also psychoanalytical tropes, like the abused Freia’s dependence on Fasolt.

Das Rheingold. David Stout (Alberich), James Rutherford (Wotan), and Mark Le Brocq (Loge). Photo: Marc Brenner

All this is actually quite interesting to watch, despite the fact that Tim Mitchell once again bathes some scenes in harsh, stark light, closer in its aesthetics to expressionism than to Victorian sumptuousness. I had the impression, however, that Edwards had replaced his mania for amassing props with collecting ideas stolen from other Ring directors. In addition to obvious references to Chereau’s legendary Ring celebrating the tetralogy’s centenary, we also have veiled allusions to the Ring production directed by Castorf – who turned gold into oil – and even some tropes from Schwarz’s failed staging, like the compulsive tinkering with the fuse box, which nevertheless worked better in the storm scene from Act One of the Bayreuth Walküre.

The cast of the GPO Rheingold featured several singers I knew not only from British theatres, including James Rutherford with his beautifully nuanced take on the tortured figure of Wotan. I heard him in the role for the first time in the Frankfurt Walküre conducted by Weigle and I am very much looking forward to his performance next season. The lord of the gods found a perfect partner in Christine Rice, whose wisdom, stage experience and magnificent technique enabled her to create a Fricka worthy of the best opera houses in Europe. Rachel Nicholls takes a long time to warm up – long enough not to be able this time to shine vocally as Freia, which does not change the fact that acting-wise she round rings round her colleagues, as usual. It is quite possible that I would have appreciated Sara Fulgoni’s craft in the role of Erda, if the director had not had her appear – as if it were an amateur theatre – between the rows of seats in the auditorium, as a result of which the bloodcurdling prophecy of this Nordic Gaia completely lost its momentum. I may have been impressed by Mark Le Brocq’s Loge more than I was in Longborough: not only in vocal, but also in acting terms, as a vision – as unsettling as it is close to my own sensibilities – of a failed intellectual whom nobody wants to listen to. Of the two giants Matthew Rose definitely stood out as Fasolt.  Other members of the cast – perhaps with the exception of Adrian Thompson and his over-the-top Mime – did a more than decent job. However, I did not expect that the artist that would become king of this Rheingold would be David Stout – an Alberich incarnate I would say, if I did not know this singer earlier and could not say with absolute certainty that with a voice of such beauty, with such intelligence and such awareness of the context he is ready not only for this role and not only in the Wagnerian repertoire.

Mark Le Brocq, David Stout, James Rutherford, and Thomas Isherwood (Donner). Photo: Marc Brenner

On the other hand, I truly do not know what to say about the orchestral sound in this production. Wasfi Kani extended a helping hand to the English National Opera company, which is irrevocably bidding farewell to London and is trying to come to terms with its exile to Greater Manchester. Kani’s initiative is laudable, but I would like to know who was responsible for the line-up of the ensemble performing Das Rheingold, which, out of necessity, was reduced to fewer than seventy instrumentalists. Was it a coincidence or someone’s conscious decision that although in the GPO orchestra pit there were ten more musicians than in Longborough, the string section was much smaller, which in this particular work went against the composer’s intention? Is it down to Harry Sever, extraordinarily musical and sensitive to the beauty of sound as he is, that nothing came of the prelude, that the “music of the beginning”, so celebrated by Thomas Mann, failed to flow already in the very first bars, failed to build up in a torrent of successive passages, failed to recede like a dead wave before Woglinde’s first phrase? Would it not be better to follow Tomas Leakey’s and Matthew King’s example, not only reducing the size of the orchestra, but also trying to bring its sound and proportions closer to what the composer intended?

I would rather not jump to any conclusions today. I will wait for Sever to begin to tell his own tale himself. After all, it is not that everybody should read Wagner through Goodall’s interpretation. It is about finally breaking free from the diktat of the anachronistic, monumentally “Teutonic” approaches to the Bayreuth master and returning to the very essence. This is being done not only by Negus the sorcerer and his apprentices. Attempts are also being made by heirs to other traditions, like, for example, Altinoglu and Nagano. Let the Wagnerian aoidoi finally sing their hearts out – for in these masterpieces what matters is not just the details of the texture. The essence is a myth, an eternal tale, a narrative that will be able to liberate us from the nightmare of the everyday or at least will make us realise that we cannot escape it.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

The work of William Kentridge has not had much luck when it comes to Polish audiences. It eludes our attention like a fleeting image seen from the window of a speeding train and is quickly forgotten. In 2009, when Krystyna Meissner finally managed to bring Kentridge’s production Woyzeck on the Highveld to Wrocław’s Dialog Festival, it went virtually unnoticed. When Kentridge came to Kraków to receive the ASIFA Prize 2014 for outstanding achievements in animated film, it once again became necessary to remind people of his life and artistic accomplishments. Opera lovers preferred to watch Lulu and The Magic Flute in other stagings. The film screenings of Il Ritorno d’Ulisse from La Monnaie at Kraków’s Cricoteka attracted mainly fans of Kantor curious about Kentridge’s play with his theatre of death. Last year’s presentaiton of the installation I am not me, the horse is not mine at Białystok’s Galeria Arsenał did not even get a separate vernissage.

One might say, therefore, that the situation with the reception of the South African artist in Poland is even worse than with the proverbial sea serpent: not only has no one seen him, but hardly anyone has even heard of him. This is quite unlike in the UK, where the new production of L’Orfeo at Glyndebourne attracted interest for two reasons: because of Kentridge’s involvement in the project and the astonishing fact that Monteverdi’s masterpiece – the premiere of which in 1607 is regarded as the symbolic birth of opera – had never before featured in the programme of the legendary Sussex festival. Another thing is that reactions following the first performance on 14 June ranged from rapture to complete rejection of Kentridge’s concept. Intrigued, I decided to break my iron rule and, before heading off to the fourth of the thirteen performances, read – even if only perfunctorily – the director’s pre-premiere comments.

Krystian Adam (Orfeo), Roseline Wilkens and Francesca Aspromonte (La Musica, Euridice). © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

And then something strange happened. Kentridge’s declaration – not surprising really – that the starting point for his work on the staging was Rilke’s poetry, his Sonnets to Orpheus and, above all, the extraordinary poem Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes, brought back memories of my youthful fascination with another, relatively little known piece from the collection Neue Gedichte. As a result, instead of analysing the source of Kentridge’s inspiration, I went back to Der Junggeselle, a poem in which chairs stand haughtily along the wall, night sneaks into the furniture and the mirror releases a drape behind which the eponymous bachelor sees his own death. Then I went on to read Sibyl, then other pieces and only quite some time later did I return to the first of the Sonnets to Orpheus, where a “tree climbed” at the beginning.

This is precisely how Kentridge works: his method is that of loose, rapid associations, sudden shifts, loops, which initially can overwhelm and seem chaotic, and yet they do consistently lead the audience to the heart of the matter. This L’Orfeo has basically everything we know from the artist’s earlier installations and productions. There are moving collages and Dadaist constructions featuring Kentridge’s signature motif of the megaphone. There are stop motion animations, projections by Janus Fouché on Sabine Theunissen’s sparse sets. There are subtle plays of shadows, there is unsettling “black” light (directed by Urs Schönebaum), there are stunning costumes designed by Greta Goiris, inspired partly by the aesthetics of Bauhaus theatre. There are also references to Kentridge’s works from recent years, including dynamic, evolving images of trees painted in ink on paper, charcoal drawings and monotypes on pages from old books.

This extraordinary multiplicity of visual stimuli is a symbol of our desire for the world to give us everything we expect from it, a metaphor for our refusal to accept suffering and dying. In order to understand that death is an inextricable part of human existence, Orfeo has to come to terms with the loss of Euridice. In order to remain an artist, he needs to learn how to transform the visible into the invisible. Following in Rilke’s footsteps, from that moment on Kentridge gradually cleanses the stage of excessive images. Euridice becomes a separate being, a patch of light in the blackness of memories.

Krystian Adam. © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

In Kentridge’s vision – the coherence of which we realise only in the finale of Act V – Orfeo is the figure of the poet. La Musica, present on stage not only in the Prologue, in which she announces the story of Orfeo’s love for Euridice, but also throughout the performance, is the figure of the artist, perhaps also the poet’s alter ego, and is thus a generalised allegory of art. She stands bent over a table in a studio that is strikingly similar to Kentridge’s own studio, and, with total abandon, “creates” all the projections and animations appearing in the background. For a brief moment she will lend her voice to Euridice portrayed by a sensual dancer – presumably the prematurely deceased Wera Knoop, a friend of Rilke’s daughter, to whose memory the poet dedicated his Sonnets to Orpheus. The Nymphs, Shepherds as well as the singer in the dual role of the Messaggera and La Speranza are a group of artists who are the couple’s friends. The gods occupy separate positions on ladders raised above the stage. The infernal spirits, which accompany Orfeo in his trip across the Styx, bring to mind the grotesque figures from the print series Dada Picnic, one of Kentridge’s most expressive works.

The rest is conveyed by the artist through movement drawn directly from physical theatre techniques and performative methods, giving the performers considerable freedom in their choice of the means of expression. An important role in Kentridge’s concept is played by props, including “Sibyl’s leaves” on sticks, symbolising the fleeting nature of human prophecies, and, above all, asymmetric cardboard “fans”, used highly evocatively as screens separating Orfeo from Euridice in the scene in which he tries to lead his beloved out of the underworld.

Kentridge’s vision is by no means easy to take in and interpret, which, in my opinion, is one of its strengths, although I do understand that it may have proved too much for part of the audience. However, in no way did it interfere with the musical side of the production. I have heard dozens of performances of L’Orfeo in my life, but I don’t think I have ever encountered an orchestra conducted with such lightness, playing with such ease and a sense of phrasing, supported by such a stylish and confidently executed continuo. Celebrating its fortieth anniversary, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is a self-governing ensemble that has been associated with Glyndebourne since its beginning. It plays under the direction of its concertmasters, who take turns in the role, or chooses conductors individually. Jonathan Cohen, the current head of Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society, led the OAE not for the first time and rightly so.

Francesca Aspromonte. © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

Krystian Adam, whom I have been following in the role of Orfeo for nearly a decade (that is, since his sensational debut in 2017, during John Eliot Gardiner’s concert tour featuring Monteverdi’s three operas), is undoubtedly one of the world’s leading performers of the role today. His voice has since developed a suitable baritonal quality in the lower register, while his interpretation has matured and gained in expressiveness. He had always known how to move a heart of stone with the powerful monologue “Possente spirto” from Act III, regarded as one of the finest examples of early Baroque performance practice. This time he dazzled me with the brief “ohimè”, a heart-rending cry of despair mixed with disbelief at the news of Euridice’s death. The news was brought by a phenomenal Messaggera portrayed by Xenia Puskarz Thomas, a mezzo-soprano with a power of expression worthy of a Shakespearean heroin. I do not share the admiration for the vocal artistry of Francesca Aspromonte, who sang the roles of La Musica and Euridice in a lovely soprano voice, albeit one that had too much vibrato and was uncertain in terms of intonation; however, I fully appreciate her brilliant acting. Among the other soloists one that deserves special mention is Hugo Herman-Wilson for his performance as the Second Shepherd; I would also like to express my highest praise for the outstanding Glyndebourne Chorus.

And I am grateful to Kentridge for the idea of introducing a silent, dancing Euridice into the story. Roseline Wilkens – grace and fire, passion enclosed in a body far removed from the European notions of the canon of dance beauty – proved in the finale to be so imbued with the great death, so convincing in her new girlishness, that I felt a twinge of sadness that Rilke could not see this.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

High up on the list of my guilty pleasures is reading comments on online fora. During this year’s visit to Göttingen I came across a surprising opinion of a tourist whose impression was that the city was beautiful but there were too many young people in it. I thought to myself – irrespective of my personal impressions, quite different from the disgruntled globetrotter’s opinion – that it would be hard to find a better description of the atmosphere in one of Germany’s most important centres of scholarship, the home to over forty Nobel Prize winners as well as the university known in Latin as Giorgia Augusta, whose students included the Brothers Grimm, Heinrich Heine and Hugo Steinhaus. Indeed, there are plenty of young people here. The student population alone is equal to that of an average town in Poland – approximately one-fourth of the total number of residents of the Göttingen District’s capital.

Apart from the fact that it is easier to be run over by a bicycle than a car here, Göttingen is quiet, joyful and fairly safe. This may be the reason why the atmosphere at the Händel-Festspiele Göttingen, the world’s oldest Handel festival, which celebrated its centenary in 2020, is decidedly more casual than most of the European festivals of early music. Tradition demands it: after all, the Festspiele is the brainchild of music-making amateurs, lecturers and students at the local university, who had enough audacity a few years after its launch to entice Gunnar Graarud, a star of the Berlin stages at the time, to come to Göttingen and sing in their first staging of Xerxes. After all, one of the first directors of the Deutsches Theater, the venue of festival opera performances today, was a sought-after film actor who starred in two thrillers directed by Hitchcock and died on the set of a musical comedy written by Billy Wilder, a comedy so full of plot twists and secrets uncovered by the protagonists that it would have sent many a Baroque librettist into a fit of envy.

It’s been seven years since I found myself at this wonderful event for the first time – quite by chance really, as I was in Göttingen for entirely different reasons. I was lucky to witness the last few years of Laurence Cummings’ musical tenure and now I watch with admiration how George Petrou, who has taken over the reins from Cummings, continues the festival’s established programming line, enthusiastically attracting an increasingly younger audience – also thanks to special concerts for children as well as family-friendly versions of operatic productions. The motto of this year’s Händel-Festspiele was VERLOCKUNG or “enticement”. It was hard not to succumb to it, even if only for three Festspiele days, which I had chosen carefully, complementing a performance of Handel’s Deidamia with concerts in Göttingen and at the Welfenschloss in nearby Münden, where the Weser River originates from the confluence of the Werra and the Fulda.

Unfortunately, due to the cancellation of some services, I was unable to attend a performance by the flautist Erik Bosgraaf and the Italian ensemble filoBarocco playing “Polish-Moravian” music by Telemann, who in 1705 took up the post of Kapellmeister to Count Erdmann II Promnitz, Lord of Żary, which enabled him to travel even farther, including to places like Pszczyna and Kraków. Fortunately, I was able to get to the evening performance of Handel’s Messiah at the Stadthalle, to which I had been particularly looking forward, because it featured several soloists I knew and admired, but mainly because of the FestspielOrchester Göttingen, which is celebrating its twentieth anniversary and has confirmed its versatility in recent seasons, easily adapting to Petrou’s spirited interpretations and his preferred expressive, pungent and juicy sound aesthetics.

George Petrou. Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

Yet this time it was the sound that was lacking, primarily because of the acoustics of the Stadthalle concert hall, ruined effectively – and probably irreversibly – during the thorough renovation of the modernist edifice. As it often happens these days, sight has won over hearing. The design by the German studio soll sasse architekten was showered with awards. No one thought that reconstructing the Grosser Saal on a larger scale and using different materials would have such a significant impact on its acoustic properties. I hope that with time the festival oratorio concerts will return to previous venues – in the case of Messiah the problem was further compounded by the fact that the NDR Vokalensemble was placed at the back of the stage, behind the orchestra, in a nineteenth-century style. As a result, the choral fragments, so important in this masterpiece, were heard as if through a mist, the text did not reach the audience – instead of being an equal participant in the narrative, the ensemble was relegated to the role of insignificant accompaniment. The orchestra, too, got off to a difficult start, from the very beginning sounding uneven when it came to intonation and, at times, also rhythm. I also wondered about the criteria for selecting the soloists, who were without exception talented artists with experience in this repertoire, though not necessarily a good fit for the vision of George Petrou, who, presumably, wished to remain faithful to the composer’s intentions.

The best among the four soloist was the tenor Ru Charlesworth, a former prize-winner at the Cesti-Wettbewerb in Innsbruck, a passionate singer with a still youthful sound, and, most importantly, peerless teller of the story of the Messiah’s life and death as well as the anticipated salvation of the souls (a phenomenal “Ev’ry valley shall be exalted” from the Isaiah’s prophecy scene). In this respect he was superior to the Canadian baritone Drew Santini, whose voice is far less expressive and marked by a small but persistent vibrato, not always consistent with his interpretation. The mismatching problem was especially evident in the case of the two ladies: Ana Maria Labin, whose soprano is light and resonant, shimmering like quicksilver; and Lena Sutor-Wernich, whose powerful, deep alto has a tenor-like quality in the lower register. Handel wrote the alto part in Messiah especially for Susannah Maria Cibber, an excellent actress and amateur singer, whom the composer appreciated above all for her “sweet voice” and extraordinary power of interpretation. Yet Sutor-Wernich’s alto brings to mind Wagner’s Erda or Gea from Strauss’ Daphne, both when it comes to the sound and style of expression, which was particularly evident in the duets.

The above reservations stem solely from the fact that Petrou has got me used to performances pulsating with energy and, at the same time, thought-out in every detail. Fortunately, two days later he more than made up for any doubts relating to the Messiah performance. Before this happened, however, I had listened to some other festival concerts, each of which deserves a separate mention, despite their different statures and experience of the artists.

I will start with one of “out-of-town” events, at the Welfenschloss in Münden, which attracts a slightly different audience: made up of the locals as well as music lovers, who, thanks to a guided tour organised by the festival, can combine an encounter with music at the residence of the Princes of Brunswick-Göttingen with a walk around this small town, famous of its beautiful half-timbered houses. The programme of this year’s concert, entitled “Ein feste Burg”, a title borrowed from Martin Luther’s hymn, featured works by composers active in Lübeck during the Thirty Years’ War, which passed the city by, but marked the end of its former glory. Among the performers were participants in masterclasses devoted to the music of Hanseatic cities – as part of the Europäisches Hanse-Ensemble project, launched in 2019. The ensemble, led by Manfred Cordes – for many years a professor and former rector of the Hochschule für Künste Bremen – performs each season with a different line-up, supported by artists experienced in this repertoire (like the gambist Hille Perl and the soprano Ulrike Hofbauer, who joined it this year). I was amazed by the stylistic variety of this repertoire, from chorale cantatas, Venetian-style motets, to dances and other small instrumental pieces, in which the local north German traditions are combined harmoniously with Italian, French and English inspirations. I was delighted by the solo cantata Ach Herr, lass deine lieben Engelein by Franz Tunder – Buxtehude’s father-in-law and his predecessor as organist at St. Mary’s Church in Lübeck – with the same text by Martin Schalling the Younger that Bach used in the final chorale of his St. John Passion. I was moved by the listeners who recognised in many compositions melodies known to them from church services, but “performed so much more nicely”.

Rachel Brown and Laurence Cummings. Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

I expected a lot from Laurence Cummings’ return to the festival, to which he devoted ten years of his life. However, I did not expect that during the concert at the University Hall, where the harpsichordist appeared alongside the legendary flautist Rachel Brown, everything would go in line with the title “To Melt a Stony Heart”. This was not another musical tale by the charismatic artist, who – much to the audience’s delight – can transform any Baroque opera into a masterful one-man show, combining the roles of a compère, a singer and an accompanist. This was a true treatise on the nature of music, worthy of Orpheus himself – a two virtuosos’ tale of how to charm the listeners, how to captivate them not only with the content, but also with the form, built on a strong structural framework featuring appropriate ornamentation, skilfully repeated rhythmic figures and clear articulation. How to build up the tension in order for the audience not to melt like wax too soon, to keep their attention with a lively dialogue between the performers, with focused singing from the keyboard and a poetic passage woven into the narrative. Brown and Cummings led us through the oeuvres of Baroque Orpheuses – from Couperin, Campra, Lully and Vivaldi, to Handel and Gluck. And it was indeed as if shadows wept, as if the heart of the lord of the underground himself melted. I still hear the magnificent sarabande “Le Départ” from Hotteterre’s Flute Suite in E minor. I will remember for a long time the aria “Cara sposa”, ending the first part of the concert, in which Cummings sang from harpsichord Rinaldo’s despair after the loss of the abducted Almirena. The two artists were the source of one of my most beautiful experiences in recent years, not just in Göttingen.

And the very next day I was in for an experience that was just as intense: the festival’s closing performance of Deidamia, Handel’s last Italian opera, which proved to be undoubtedly one of the best productions of George Petrou’s tenure. His boundless energy at the conductor’s desk and his unique sense of humour, to which he gives free rein in each of his projects, found the perfect outlet in this work. Deidamia was written to a libretto by Paolo Antonio Rolli, who presented the mythical story in a slightly different and more playful manner than Metastasio in his Achille in Sciro. The story of Achilles, son of Thetis, who decided to save her son from certain death at the walls of Troy by hiding him, disguised as a girl, on the island of Skyros, where he fell happily in love with Deidamia, one of the daughters of the island’s king, Lycomedes, was enriched by Rolli with a number of subplots. Before Ulisse, arriving on Skyros in search of Achille – whom everybody except Deidamia believes to be a fair maiden named Pyrrha – manages to reveal his true identity and persuade Achille to go to war with him, he himself will begin to flirt with Achille’s beloved. In turn, Fenice, Ulisse’s companion, makes advances towards Pyrrha. Unsurprisingly, this will give rise to numerous misunderstandings and scenes of jealousy. In the end Fenice will settle for Nerea, Deidamia’s confidant, Ulisse will fulfil the mission entrusted to him and everything will end with the mandatory lieto fine, that is the marriage of the king’s daughter to Achille, who is preparing to set off for Troy.

Deidamia. Bruno de Sá (Achille) and Sophie Junker (Deidiamia). Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

Rolli’s mad libretto, full of plot twists, enabled Handel to weave a number of comic elements into this melodramma. Unfortunately, the cunning plan of making the Londoners interested again in Italian opera – going out of fashion at the time – failed. Deidamia was performed at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre only three times and went silent for more than two hundred years. Despite tentative attempts to revive it in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it proved impossible to bring it back to the repertoire. Until October 2025 that is, when a production directed by Petrou, with splendid sets by Giorgina Germanou, was presented for the first time at the Wexford Festival – with the same conductor and the same cast. We commented on a recording of that event with Marcin Majchrowski on the Polish Radio Two. Dazzled by the performance, we complained about the crisis of Handel’s invention, still not predicting any success for the opera.

It was only in Göttingen that I realised that the critics’ enthusiasm at the time had been entirely justified. What carries this Deidamia forward and up is an extraordinary synergy between the musical and the theatrical side of the production, giving the artists not only freedom, but also authentic joy of spinning this convoluted tale. The undisputed star among the cast is Sophie Junker in the title role. She captivates the audience not only with her acting talent and her beautifully rounded, soft soprano, but also with her phenomenal technique and mastery of the rules of stylistic ornamentation (which she  demonstrated already in the showpiece aria “Nasconde l’usignol” in Act I). Despite an indisposition, manifested in slight intonation problems, Sarah Gildford gave a fine performance as Nerea with her fresh, warm and irresistibly sensual soprano. The two future heroes of the Trojan War – Achille and Ulisse – were portrayed by Bruno de Sá and Nicolò Balducci, respectively. These two outstanding artists have recently caused quite a stir in the world of historically informed performance. Both have voices Handel did not even dream of in Italian opera: de Sá – a genuine male soprano with an extensive range, Balducci – a very handsome soprano countertenor, which, as it turned out, sounds excellent also in a slightly lower tessitura. In the original cast of Deidamia the part of Achille was entrusted to the teenager Mary Edwards, another singing actress, who played characters of the opposite gender also later on in her career. The role of Ulisse was written by Handel for a mezzo-soprano castrato. I would, therefore, venture to say that de Sá’s and Balducci’s involvement in this tragicomedy of errors and mistaken identities fully meets the criteria of the historical convention. The baritone Rory Musgrave did well in the role of Fenice, written for a high bass, while the velvety-voiced Petros Magoulas was outstanding in the bass role of the equable king Licomede. And everybody had great fun, including the orchestra of the Festspiele Göttingen, playing under Petrou’s baton in the typical Handelian pitch of 422.5 Hz.

Deidamia. Nicolò Balducci (Ulisse) and Rory Musgrave (Fenice). Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

There would not have been so much fun, if it had not been for the staging – as handsome as it was mischievous. Petrou has the action take place on two temporal planes. The adventures of the mythical heroes unfold in parallel with a thoroughly modern themed trip to the island of Skyros (the tourists are played by members of the university choir, who are present on stage far beyond the requirements of their musical duties). The comic tension has its source in the fact that the representatives of the two worlds do not realise their co-existence and even if they do notice that something strange is intruding into reality, they are unable to interpret it. Nerea finds a suitcase on the beach, starts rummaging through it, and, disconcerted, pulls out a bra and a box of tampons. Something is knocking over the Sunday painter’s easel, though there is not a breath of wind. Licomede muses over peaceful old age amidst the depths of the sea, where an ancient treasure hunter is diving. Achille aims his bow at a cardboard doe at a shooting gallery. And yet everyone in this crowd grapples with their own dilemmas; they suffer and love in the same manner, and are overcome by bouts of equally painful jealousy. The group of holidaymakers even includes a suspiciously tall and sinewy lady who in the end will turn out to be a man.

I might have missed all these little details had I not been translating a book by a classical philologist who first allowed his elderly father to attend a student seminar on the Odyssey, and then took him on a themed cruise following in the footsteps of Homer’s hero. Petrou’s idea for Deidamia may not be as intricate as my author’s prose, but it does come down to a similar conclusion: in many respects the heroes of Troy were no different from today’s holidaymakers. Present-day tourists, too, can be killed one day: in another Trojan War, worthy of our times.

The organisers of the Händel-Festspiele Göttingen deserve credit for leading us into temptation for the works of bygone eras to make us think and to genuinely care about them.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Czech music lovers are just as unlucky when it comes to Dialogues des Carmélites as Poles. As I have recently pointed out, when reviewing the premiere or, in fact, reconstruction of Robert Carsen’s Amsterdam production at Teatro Regio di Torino, the first and so far the only Polish staging of Poulenc’s opera took place in 2000 at Łódź’s Teatr Wielki. Dialogues had to wait seventy years for its Prague premiere. It finally happened this year in May, at the Prague Spring, an event marked by several other round anniversaries.

Dialogues des Carmélites finds its hard to get onto the operatic stages in the former Eastern Bloc, even after the political transformation. The work’s long absence in Czechia is all the more understandable given that shortly after the war the country introduced one of the most restrictive models of fighting the Catholic religion in this part of Europe – in line with the instructions given by Zhdanov, who held up the Soviet experiences in the battle against the Orthodox Church as a model for the USSR’s satellite countries. The repressive measures also affected monasteries. The night of 13–14 April 1950 saw the launch of the so-called Operation K, preceded by show trials of a dozen or so monks, some of whom received life sentences. Over 200 male congregations were dissolved, a few thousand members of monastic communities were interned, monasteries were left to their fate or deliberately vandalised, property was confiscated or plundered. August was marked by the launch of Operation Ř (from the Czech word řeholnice, meaning a nun), carried out in stages and more selectively, targeting mainly “non-useful sisters”, which for the communist authorities meant those involved in education and care of the sick. The victims of that persecution included Magdalena Anna Schwarzová, a Carmelite postulant, who was accused of high treason a few years later, sentenced to eleven years in prison and deprived of her public rights. In the 1980s, following another wave of repression, she was forced to renounce her citizenship before leaving for Kraków, Poland, where she spent the rest of her life as a cloistered nun.

Photo: Petr Neubert

No wonder, therefore, that Barbora Horáková Joly, the director of Dialogues at Prague’s State Opera, saw this inglorious chapter in the history of Czechoslovakia as a parallel with the fate of the wretched Compiègne sisters, guillotined in July 1794. The bad thing is that she treated it too literally, forgetting that Poulenc’s opera was not a reconstruction of historical events, but an adaptation of Gertrude von Le Fort’s mystical novella drawing on these events, an adaptation featuring new elements added by Georges Bernanos and the composer himself. Horákova Joly’s entire concept is dominated by violence, conflict and humiliation, which blur the attitudes and motivations of the various characters.  There is no existential fear, nor any inner transformation. For some unknown reason Marquis de la Force abuses his own son mentally and physically; the Old Prioress dies smeared with her own faeces, with her hair messed up, as if she were in a neglected care home and not in Mother Marie’s tender care; Chevalier de la Force arrives at the convent to say good-bye to Blanche covered in blood and barely able to stand – and yet he is supposed to pay her a visit as a potential guardian in her escape, convinced that he would be able to keep his sister safe in the turmoil of the revolution.

Photo: Petr Neubert

The list of absurdities is endless – which is a pity, because the production is presented in sparse and functional sets designed by Ines Nadler, well-lit by Sascha Zauner, complemented by Annemarie Bulla’s costumes that would have been quite sufficient as an allusion to post-war repressions: without the director’s excessive and ill-conceived ideas, without projections (by Sergio Verde) and fragments of documentaries overused to the point of tedium, not to mention Blanche’s child lookalike, as superfluous as in most opera productions à la mode. It is a pity, because had Horáková Joly reined in her vivid imagination and focused on the only clever, though perhaps not too original, idea of “assigning” to the sixteen nuns sixteen mobile metal structures, lowered from the flies and placed at various angles – which first get covered by the greenery of the vegetables and flowers cultivated by the sisters only to turn in the end into the condemned women’s graves – the rest would have told itself, in a simple reference to this clear metaphor. Like the final execution scene, in which the nuns stand on their own graves in beams of spotlight going out suddenly one by one after each strike of the guillotine.

This rather unsuccessful staging did not quite hold its own musically either. The weakest link was the orchestra, clearly not ready to tackle Poulenc’s shimmering, rhythmically relentless and, at the same time, inhumanly precise score. In Act I everything, including intonation, was off. Then things began to improve somehow – under the experienced baton of Hermann Bäumer, the new music director of Státní opera, whom I came to know during his excellent directorship in Mainz. This may have happened, because at some point the conductor abandoned any further attempt to bring out the sharp contrasts and wealth of harmonies in favour of sounds that were hard, harsh and powerful, but at least impressive. On the other hand, a fine performance came from the chorus, directed by Adolf Melichar, which has little to do in this opera, so I appreciate its commitment and clear articulation all the more.

Photo: Petr Neubert

In an exceptionally uneven cast the soloist that stood out was above all Jana Sibera, who has a soft, girlish, beautifully rounded soprano, perfect for the role of Blanche. I was also very impressed by Mother Marie sung by the Norwegian mezzo-soprano Tone Kummervold, whose dense, technically impeccable voice I had admired a few years earlier in Schulhoff’s Flammen. The sharp, strained high notes of Tamara Morozova (Madame Lidoine) were not very pleasant on the ear and neither were serious intonation problems of Ekaterina Krovateva (Constance). Markéta Cukrova was completely miscast as the Old Prioress, a character she was unable to bring to life either with her acting or with her singing: as she ages, her mezzo-soprano is getting increasingly harmonically deficient and increasingly unstable owing to insufficient support. Daniel Matoušek has a lovely tenor, but it is definitely too light for the role of Chevalier de la Force; Paul Gay as Marquis de la Force was rather bland; Michael Skalický did his best as the Chaplain, although the role was too complex and big for his experience and skills.

Perhaps I should have gone to see some of the following performances. Perhaps the production will grow with time. I left the premiere, feeling that the Prague Dialogues des Carmélites did not do justice to either the “Compiègne Sixteen” or the thousands of Czech and Slovak nuns expelled from their convents, interned in camps, harassed by the security services, deprived of the remains of their human dignity.

Translated by: Anna Kijak