Bryn Terfel’s Boris at Covent Garden; Angela Hewitt’s baroque recital at the Wigmore Hall; Imogen Cooper’s Mozart with Manfred Honeck’s Brahms German Requiem; Vladimir Jurowski’s Mahler Tenth.

<First published in “Slipped Disc” on January 30, 2026>

I.

Most operas have grown longer and longer over the decades, as traditional cuts have been opened - but not so Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov”. There have been four main texts of this opera, but Mussorgsky himself was never able to see a stage production of his original 1869 version. Only when he expanded it in 1872 was it staged; and it only took off once it was rearranged after Mussorgsky’s death by his colleague Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, twice - first in 1896, then again in 1908. In recent years, however, the  1869 version, first staged in 1928, has recently become widely performed; Richard Jones directed it for the Royal Opera in 2016. His production, which runs without an interval at two hours and a quarter, returned in 2019 and again this Thursday, January 29. In our age of textual purism, this version suits many tastes.

And in every version “Boris” remains a great opera, grand but also lively in its multi-layered panorama of politics and history. The particular vitality of the 1869 version lies in how it is doubly dominated by Boris Godunov and by the chorus - the ruler and the people, both troubled and self-contradictory. Jones’s two-tier production has a wonderful pictorial quality - now like icons, now like a strip cartoon, always showing us history as something more than pure biography.

Certainly it’s good to be at a Covent Garden production with no intervals - and that therefore isn’t ruined by one of that house’s many over-long intervals. (Twenty minutes is fine for a break between acts. Thirty - though bringing in revenue at the bars - is often ruinous in terms of momentum and concentration.) It’s also impressive to watch a production that has only ever had one singer in the title role: the great Bryn Terfel.

Terfel, now sixty years old, really is a great artist, one of those rare singers who brings onstage the larger feeling of a life lived offstage as well as on. He’s an actor-singer whose accounts of Mozart’s Figaro, Wagner’s Wotan, and Puccini’s Scarpia have become classics for our time. It’s remarkable to watch how he shows the physical decline of Boris, from massive upright authority in the Coronation scene (albeit already wracked by evident anxiety) to crushed torment in the final scene.

Still, though he can sing all Boris’s bass notes, he never opens up the weighty darkness of sound that a great bass can do here. Much of his singing - that heavy vibrato - tells you that he’s forcing his voice. My first two performances of this role (the second Rimsky version), both at Covent Garden in 1974, featured Nicolai Ghiaurov and Boris Christoff in the title role, both unforgettable. Vocally, Terfel isn’t in their league. Perhaps that’s the point here - Boris isn’t a Titan - but Christoff and Ghiaurov certainly showed as much of the paranoia, the pain, the conscience of this shortlived Tsar as does Terfel here.

Adam Palka sings the monk historian Pimen with incisive authority. Although Jamez McCorkle doesn’t quite show the duplicitous scheming of the monk Grigori (who will succeed Boris on the throne), his vocalism has marvellous clarity. Mark Wigglesworth, conducting, released the score’s expansiveness; the orchestra rose handsomely to his direction.

How interesting that “Boris” and Puccini’s “Turandot” are both in current Covent Garden repertory. Listen to the opening scenes: you easily hear what Puccini took from Mussorgsky in making choral, orchestral, and political drama

II.

Bach! Rameau! Scarlatti! At the Wigmore Hall on Friday 23 January, the recital of baroque music by pianist Angela Hewitt was a glorious event. At the simplest level, the contrasts between those three contemporaries - Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764), and Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) - are mind-opening in how they open up the sounds of local styles (German, French, Italian), and then mind-opening again in how they showed the diversity of each composer.

In her first Scarlatti sonatas, Hewitt made me hear the Italian composer as a brilliant dramatist of intrigue, with left and right hands so often seeming in naughty opposition to - even undermining -  each other. But in the F minor sonata K466, Scarlatti moves on to a more sublime form of contemplation. Hewitt’s pianism has both the nimble attack for the enjoyably busy side of the composer and the architecturally large serenity for his philosophical side.

And she has so much more: she shows how Rameau took the Lully legacy of elegant phraseology onto a new subtlety and complexity in France, while her Bach, always architectural, always melodious, always propulsive, takes us into the endless layers of this master.

III.

An equally superb pianist, Imogen Cooper, is making quiet farewells in London. At the Barbican Hall on Sunday 25, she was - I’m told - making her final appearance with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Austrian conductor Manfred Honeck, only days after her final recital at the Wigmore Hall. In Mozart’s piano concerto no 27 (B flat major) - a work she will revisit on February 20 with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra - her playing was always an object-lesson in how to give breath to even the most rhythmically regular of phrases, in how to show how playfulness and thoughtfulness co-exist in this composer, and how he can build these elements from calmness to drama.

At that same concert, Honeck went on to conduct the London Symphony in a superb performance of Brahms’s German Requiem, weakened only by the tremulous singing of Chen Reiss in the soprano part. (Her vocal quality is lovely, her shaky vibrato less so.) Gerald Finley exemplified the glowing steadiness of line that best becomes this music, while the London Symphony Chorus, in a score with large choral sections, beautifully showed the dynamic  range of Brahms’s writing.

One highlight was the thrillingly solemn “Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras” (“For all flesh is as grass”). We’re not far from Wagner’s Grail knights in “Parsifal” here (though let’s not let Wagner or some Wagnerians know).

IV.

London has been abrim with superb music-making of late. I had never heard Mahler’s Tenth Symphony in live performance until the Saturday 24 Festival Hall performance by the London Philharmonic, with Vladimir Jurowski conducting (and completing a Mahler symphony cycle that, for him and the orchestra, began back in 2007). This is the symphony that Mahler left incomplete at his death, though with enough sketches to guide his survivors; Jurowski, choosing the version by Rudolf Barshai, elicited dazzling playing from all his orchestral players.

Jurowski’s style is impersonal but revealing - fabulously lucid, invariably cogent, utterly moving while never being heart-on-sleeve. Mahler’s largeness of spirit was always in evidence (though I prefer my Mahler with a more generous application of string portamento than Jurowski or most of today’s conductors employ).

All composers take you on a journey of the spirit, but Mahler - as the super-long opening, super-suspenseful phrase of this symphony shows so astoundingly - takes you to highs and lows you have not known before. And, even more than most, his music is best experienced live. I’m sorry to have reached the Jurowski LPO Mahler cycle only as it is ending.

First published in Norman Lebrecht’s “Slipped Disc”, February 1, 2026

@Alastair Macaulay 2026