Artists of bygone empires

I: The Cherry Orchard, Stratford-upon-Avon

How good it is to find new lights by which to see the works we love. In most circumstances, we speak of Chekhov and Mahler as unrelated artists. Yet to see Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” three days after a performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony (reviewed by me a few days ago) is to see what they share. Both Chekhov and Mahler were born in 1860, each in one of the great European empires of the day. Both artists often juxtapose the tragic and the comic, the highs and lows of human feeling about life and the larger world; both had strong senses of history, society, landscape; both had married in the early years of the twentieth century. “The Cherry Orchard” was written in 1903, Mahler’s Sixth in 1903-1904. 

Chekhov himself considered “The Cherry Orchard” a comedy. Although he certainly made it bittersweet, he complained of how Stanislavsky’s production of the premiere made it a tragedy. (Mahler’s Sixth has often been nicknamed “Tragic”, but the nickname did not come from Mahler, who - despite its desolate conclusion - wrote it at a happy time of his life.) The Royal Shakespeare Company’s new production of Chekhov’s wonderfully ambiguous play, in a good new version by Laura Wade, directed at Stratford-upon-Avon’s Swan Theatre by Tamara Harvey, certainly avoids any tragic sense. (This is at least the ninth production I’ve seen of this play. The best of them also began life in the Swan Theatre, again with the Royal Shakespeare Company, in 1995 - directed by Adrian Noble, with Penelope Wilton, Alec McCowan, David Troughton,  Peter Copley, Emilia Fox, among the cast.) 

This new staging does feel thoroughly, if not intensely, Chekhovian - mercurial in mood, with a sense of the absurdity of human behavior. It’s clear that everyone onstage, though wonderfully diverse in age and temperament, inhabits the same world - a rarer virtue than you might suppose. Anna Fleischle has designed a set that, simply and attractively, suggests a central room in a Russian country house, with multiple fragments of its cherry orchard; but Fleischle’s costumes suggest a midwar period, perhaps around 1930. Since the elderly manservant Firs speaks nostalgically of life before “the freedom” - life before the emancipation of Russian serfs in 1861 - “The Cherry Orchard” works best if set in a period when Russia was still ruled by tsars and grand dukes. Firs’s old-retainer hankering for the bygone world of serfdom is the most startling of the absurdities with which Chekhov fills this marvellous play.

There are three main accents used by the cast. As the self-made Lopakhin, Kenneth Branagh uses a strong version of his native Northern Irish accent - to emphasise the sense of provincial society. But this would be more effective if the upper-crust, entitled, Ranevskaya and her brother Gaev, both returning after five years to her estate with debts they don’t begin to manage, were played with posh Home Counties accents. Instead, Helen Hunt and Bill Pullman retain their own American accents as Ranevskaya and her brother Gaev. Hunt in particular, though elegant and never unfeeling, gives a strangely muted account of Ranevskaya: neither the recklessness of her extravagance nor her disregard for social change registers with much power. Pullman, though charming and urbane, is too vague with the details of Gaev’s behaviour: he keeps talking billiards (one of Chekhov’s most brilliant suggestions of leisured eccentricity) without ever convincing us he’s used to playing with a cue. 

Branagh, however, plays Lopakhin as if he’s been released. He has energy and force, but it’s also striking how socially and emotionally inhibited his Lopakhin remains. Beautifully, he shows how he’s emotionally incapable of proposing marriage to Varya (Esther Smith), even though everyone wants him to do so. 

Two of the very best performances - two that heighten the play’s multi-faceted absurdity are those of Alfred Enoch’s Trofimov and Guy Henry’s Pishchik: Enoch’s engaging account of the adult student Trofimov has a brilliantly inhuman streak: in him, we see the heartless revolutionary who will tread on mere human lives as unimportant, though we also see just how his seemingly reasonable flair inspires Ranevskaya’s daughter Anya (Chumisa Dornford-May). They will be the next generation, in whom Chekhov presciently foresees the revolution that lies ahead. Henry’s Pishchik is the opposite, a charming sponge full of fragments of what only superficially sounds like a brilliant education (casually misrepresenting this philosopher or that) while, very charmingly, asking for money to pay his rent. 

II: Jette Parker Artists performance, Royal Opera House, Sunday 26

The Jette Parker scheme, giving both training and professional operatic experience at Covent Garden to young professional singers over two-year residencies as parts of the Royal Opera, has been operating for twenty-five years. Because I began attending Covent Garden in the pre-Jette-Parker 1970s and watched such young singers as Thomas Allen, Robert Lloyd, and Kiri Te Kanawa ascending through the repertory through small as well as large roles  - Te Kanawa was my first priestess in “Aida”, Allen and Lloyd were Paolo and Pietro in my first “Simon Boccanegra” - I have sometimes felt that the Jette Parker scheme is not achieving more than already happened in the last century. But it’s now a well established part of operatic life, giving important breaks to foreign and British artists. 

And it brings its fascinations. On Sunday July 26, all the current trainee artists sang in a programme, directed by Talia Stern, that fielded them in four extended scenes, which were introduced by a non-singing awakening staged to the overture from “The Sleeping Beauty”, and were concluded by an ebullient ensemble from “The Merry Widow”. The four extended scenes were from Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress”, Leoncavallo’s ”La Bohème”, Bellini’s “I Capuleti ed i Montechi”, and Bizet’s “Djamileh”. While a few experienced connoisseurs had seen productions of all these operas, this performance was, for many, their first taste of two or more of them. Certainly, I was hearing both Leoncavallo’s “Bohème” and Bizet’s “Djamileh” for the first time - and now would like to hear more of them. 

The highlight was a scene for the star-crossed Romeo and Giulietta from  “I Capuleti ed i Montechi” (1830). Bellini’s opera - following a version of Veronese events often unlike Shakespeare’s - used to be seen at Covent Garden in a production that, new in 1984, remained in house repertory until 2009, often with top international singers as the lovers. Dressed for this occasion in mid-twentieth-century couture, the South Chinese mezzosoprano Jingwen Cai, as Romeo, and character, and the Armenian soprano Marianna Hovhannisyan, as Giulietta, made a grippingly vivid case for “Capuleti” as engrossing music drama. Cai, physically small, has a mature voice of remarkable size, focus, presence, and technical accomplishment, which she filled with urgency and poignancy here; more even than with the other singers here, it’s to be hoped she’ll go on to an important career. Hovhannisyan matched Cai to very good effect: her soprano has youthful glamour as well as feeling.

In the excerpt from Bizet’s one-act comedy “Djamileh” (1872), the mezzosoprano Ellen Pearson (in the title role), and tenor Emmanuel Fonoti Fuimaono (as Count Haroun) were brilliantly teamed as singers and as actors: they packed every moment with lively, inventive comic action. Baritone Sam Hird completed the scene, the scamp Splendiano. He and Djamileh-Pearson gleefully robbed Haroun-Fuimaono of a treasury of jewels - all while Djamileh was seducing Haroun. (The story is adapted from de Musset’s 1831 poem “Namouna”. Ten years after Bizet, an older French composer, Édouard Lalo, composed a ballet of “Namouna”, a wonderfully orchestrated score admired by Chabrier and Debussy, extensive parts of which were choreographed by Serge Lifar in his 1943 “Suite en Blanc” and Alexei Ratmansky in his glorious 2010 Namouna”.) 

The bass-baritone Ossian Huskinson, though young, had been making impressions in several roles at English National Opera and elsewhere before joining the Jette Parker scheme in 2024. He has gone on making an impact, though at Covent Garden more often in supporting roles. Here, he sang Nick Shadow in a scene from Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress”. His voice has presence and bite; I’d have liked it to have developed more body by now, but he’e a natural stage animal of effortless authority and wit. As Tom Rakewell, the tenor Emyr Lloyd Jones is more singer than actor; but his is a real voice, most impressive of all in its upper register. 

Sure, the Leoncavallo “Bohème” is less marvellous than Puccini’s, but it never lets go of the attention - and with a baritone Rodolfo and mezzosoprano Musetta it’s arrestingly different. We were given its final act, all of it well sung, with the soprano Hannah Edmunds outstanding as Mimì. You can feel how well this programme suits the Jette Parker artists and audience: it tests them all by showing them in unfamiliar repertory

III, IV: More Albert Hall Proms, Monday 27 and Wednesday 29

The experience of the open air - of nature - was the subject of all three scores played at the Albert Hall on Monday 26 by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, with Edward Gardner conducting: Kristine Tjøgersen’s evocation of Norwegian forests in “Between Trees” (2021); four of Joseph Canteloube’s  “Songs of the Auvergne” (1923-1930), sung here with soprano Louise Alder; and Richard Strauss’s “An Alpine Symphony” (1915). Although I was happy to listen at home, it was evident that all three must have had yet more impact when experienced in three-dimensional physical space. I hope to experience again the strange but imaginative modern soundscape of Tjøgersen’s “Between Trees”: it created the changing atmospheres of sounds in a forest. 

In the “Chants d’Auvergne”, Canteloube was capturing the folk traditions of shepherds in a mountainous landscape, often beaming their voices out to the echoes and to other shepherds on slopes opposite. The words - though caught by Canteloube in remote dialects that were already vanishing almost a century ago - are simple in expression; the songs have both charm and rapture as they suggest the expansiveness of singing freely in a landscape. They are often treated as vehicles a gorgeous and cultivated voice, but the classic recording by Netania Davrath suggests that each song should suggest a different kind of character, with each voice free of artifice. Louise Alder did well by her selection: although her vibrato sometimes grew too heavy for the vocal  line, she always returned to simplicity of manner, while evoking the freedom of space. 

“An Alpine Symphony” is one of Strauss’s greatest works, moving in its evocation of the changing emotions day’s climbing. Even though Strauss at least once breaks into the too-sweet kitsch that he so often enjoyed, here this is a very minor part of the wide views and deep feelings he conjures. Gardner’s authority and eloquence made every moment alive.

On Wednesday 29, Ryan Wigglesworth conducted an all-British programme, with two problematic modern scores before the interval and Elgar’s glorious First Symphony after it. Judith Weir’s  choral cantata “Moon and Star” is often marvellous in its orchestral scoring - percussion, brass, and woodwind meeting to make magical effects of distant light - but seldom succeeds in its setting of words  by Emily Dickinson (“Ah, Moon - and Star!/ You are very far…”): the BBC Singers mainly sounded word-free. 

There followed the world premiere of Brett Dean’s “The World’s Wife”, with soprano Claire Booth singing words by Carol-Ann Duffy. Not for the first time, I enjoyed Duffy’s spirit and sentiments (the third poem here, “Mrs Darwin” is funny, while her “Medusa” is excitingly dangerous in its characterisation of an angry woman from within) without admiring her locution. Dean’s vocal lines are strenuously modernist, anti-melodic in stress. A second work in which too few of the words registered. (Although Booth helped to commission this work, and although the femininity of her voice is appropriate, I think a more heroic soprano would provide far more oomph here.)

Remarkably, Elgar’s First Symphony (1904-1908) comes from the same era as Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard” and Mahler’s Sixth. With them, you can feel the end of empire; with Elgar, you feel the empire’s benign present glow, stirringly caught by the slow and steady tread of the noble melody with which he opens the first movement and to which he returns several times. Elgar always covers plenty of ground before returning to this melody: but the symphony does not have the startling contrasts of character or emotion that still make Chekhov and Mahler so modern. In this English symphony, we’re in the large Edwardian world - just as we sometimes are in English life today. 

Elgar’s authority and warmth and range remain enthralling company. Ryan Wigglesworth, conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, handled the score with ideal authority. Always his music’s master, he was a calm visionary at the helm.

@Alastair Macaulay 2026