Cultural displacement in music and theatre

      I.

The countertenor Hugh Cutting, though he looks like a cherub, takes the stage like a man with a mission - briskly, surely, eagerly. Singing, he avoids the unearthly resonance cultivated by many countertenors but instead sounds like a man both sensuous and sensual, who can shape individual words as if taking possession of them while shaping lines to his will - or revealing the will within the music. He spent the summer singing Handel’s “Rodelinda” at Garsington, English songs of the last two centuries at the Wigmore Hall, and Handel’s Irish edition of “Alexander’s Feast” around Britain. Returning to the Wigmore Hall on Sunday 28 September as artist in residence,  he sang seventeenth-century items from Monteverdi to Purcell in Italian, German, and English, making unfamiliar numbers cast spells and making known works new.

He also has the virtue - rarer than you might suppose - of letting you hear his affection for his music and for his fellow musicians. This recital was given with the English Concert, led by Harry Bicket at the keyboard; I hope we have the chance to hear them again in “Es ist nun aus mit meinem Leben” by Johann Christian Bach (a senior cousin of Johann Sebastian), with its affecting, ultra-soft, calls of “Welt, gute Nacht”.

And in “Fairest isle” he persuades us that Purcell’s setting of words by Dryden is one of the all-time peaks of music’s marriage with poetry. It sometimes happens in music that the centuries fade away and we feel we’re in the composer’s mind. Thus it was with Cutting’s Purcell.

  • II.

On Saturday 27 September In a packed Royal Festival Hall, conductor Edward Gardiner led the London Philharmonic Orchestra in two peaks of the Romantic nineteenth-century repertory: Beethoven’s  Emperor Concerto - Yefim Bronfman as their piano soloist - and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. Both works come with many associations with prior performances, but on this occasion it was amazingly easy to feel that the barnacles of tradition had been scrubbed away. Bronfman packs his Beethoven with thrilling density in some passages and with spacious calm in others; Gardiner’s conducting is always purposeful.

Of a beautiful melody that Tchaikovsky employs in both the Fifth Symphony (second movement) and in the Vision Scene (the central adagio), the conductor Constant Lambert once wrote that in the symphony Tchaikovsky is crying for the moon whereas in the ballet he is content to gaze at its beauty. Gardiner conducts the symphony powerfully but as if content to gaze at the moon’s beauty; I couldn’t help wishing for the heart-on-sleeve phrasing of, say, Willem Mengelberg.

The concert began with George Benjamin’s entirely surprising score “Ringed by the Flat Harizon”, a work of wonderful harmonic tensions and sonic surprises. I have admired every score I’ve heard by Benjamin, while never feeling at home in his soundworlds. That’s fine: I always want to become better acquainted with the realms he creates. He was present at this performance; the memory of his music was not banished by the Beethoven and Tchaikovsky that followed.

  • III.

David Lan’s new play “The Land of the Living” is about the displacement and deracination suffered by children in wartime and afterwards. Juliet Stevenson plays Ruth, a United Nations aid worker whose work in the Germany of 1945 involves helping children stolen from their homes by the Nazis; Tom Wlaschiha plays the adult Thomas, a man whom she found as a child and who now, in the London of 1990, rediscovers her, despite layers of painful separation.

When you’re watching the play, you’re occasionally lost amid time zones and amid a cast of British, German, Polish, and American characters. Yet this confusion becomes part of the play’s mental landscape. As directed by Stephen Daldry, Stevenson never loses her place as the play’s poignant central anchor - her quality of emotional thoughtfulness is deeply affecting - while Wlaschiha (some will recognise him from a wonderfully mysterious role he plays in “Game of Thrones”) becomes increasingly moving as the now middle-aged man who is still trying to make sense of his past.

At the National’s Dorfman Theatre, the action occurs on a narrow stage, with the audience on either side on three levels : a design touch I love in Miriam Buether’s set is that the set is made to resemble a shelf in a research library, with files, shelves, and drawers beneath the action. It’s not a tidy play, but its many threads all enrich it. One of those threads is music, the art with which Thomas - thanks to Ruth’s guidance - starts to comes to terms with the traumas of his life.

  • IV.

How quickly history can be unwritten! In 2002, Euripides’s “Bacchae” received a memorably stylish production in the National Theatre’s Olivier auditorium as directed by Peter Hall, a former director of the National here returning to the building h helped into its early stages of life. The style, informed by decades of work on masks and Greek chorus delivery, was connected to an intelligent new translation that revealed overlooked details of this culminating masterwork from the golden era of Athenian tragedy.

The National’s new “Bacchae” is directed by the National’s new director, Indhu Rubasingham, whose work I have admired. But this (as with the shabby alterations Simon Stone has visited upon Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea” for the Bridge Theatre) is someone else’s revision (Nima Taleghani’s) of the original play, with references to podcasts and other modernities (“I’m not getting a friendly vibe from him”) and - so indispensable when translating into modern English onstage, though less advisable in visa interviews - multiple obscenities. In the 1990s, London theatre abounded in so many clever new translations of plays from two millennia and a half of European theatre that I wrote of a bumper age — very possibly a golden age - of plays in translation. Now the National, the Bridge, and other institutions are jettisoning all that. Claire Perkins, so vividly stylish in the Chaucer update “The Wife of Willesden”three years ago, is no less vivid here as Vida, a leading bacchante, but much less stylish, breaking lines up into declaratory prose. For those who have never read “Bacchae” in Euripides’s Greek, I testify that its rhythmic force is superlative - something that any new version should in some way emulate.

At any rate it’s fascinating - four months after the Royal Opera’s production of Handel’s “Semele” dramatised the circumstances surrounding the conception of Dionysus and just as the podcast “The Rest is History” has been addressing Greek myths and in particular those surrounding the house of Thebes - to see this intensely ambivalent drama about the mature god Dionysus as he inflames the residents, in particular the women, of Thebes. Taleghani and Rubasingham certainly catches the ambivalence and, above all, pathos of “Bacchae”: these characters learn too late what damage is done by wreaking violence - and learn too late the strangely heartless cruelty of God to man, or gods to men.

     V.

At the Cadogan Hall on Thursday 2 October, the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique - conducted by Jakob Lehmann - presented a wonderfully divided and thrilling programme: “Rossini: Sacred & Profane”. This began with seven striking fragments from his “Ermione”, an opera seria inspired by Racine’s tragic “Andromaque” - and started with a chorus lamenting the fall of Troy. “Ermione” (1819) was staged by Glyndebourne in the 1990s, but few of us know it well. Here, arrestingly, it became an opera about displacement - by no means far from “Land of the Living”.  Far from Troy, the characters Ermione, Andromaca, Pirro, and Oreste - displaced psychologically and geographically - all find themselves at odds.

These fragments focused on the opera’s rival heroines, with Hannah Ludwig (whose career has hitherto been largely across the Atlantic) as Andromaca and Beth Taylor (British) as Ermione. Both women are vibrant mezzosopranos of affecting Mediterranean sound, fluent coloratura, and impressively strong chest registers, yet they’re thoroughly unalike: Taylor, whom I’ve admired in Purcell and Mahler, reveals the marvellous but rare psychological intensity that can illumine the operatic repertory of Rossini (and, one hopes, Donizetti and Bellini before long). The largest excerpt performed was what Rossini himself called the “Gran Scena Ermione”, an exceptional scene in terms of changing structure and character. Taylor’s sheer daring made her at once seem like no British-born singer of my experience: it is glib to call her “Callas-like”, but it is right to observe that she unflinchingly reveals the complex layerings of both music and drama here. Even though I have admired her before, this performance was surely a breakthrough. May it lead to great things.

And Lehmann may prove the evening’s most exceptional artist of all. Every singer here, the choir not least, was entirely idiomatic. The programme’s second half was Rossini’s “Stabat Mater” (1842, building upon a 1831 incomplete start) - better-known by far than “Ermione” but not well known. The Cadogan Hall became a haven for both orchestra and choir. Ludwig, taking the mezzo role, proved an ideally responsive colleague to Romanian soprano Ana Maria Labin  in particular, but also to the very different voices of Alasdair Kent (tenor - Australian) and Anthony Robin Schneider (bass - Austrian and New Zealander). Kent’s voice is small and tight, but capable of real brilliance. As Oreste in “Ermione”, he had thrown off rapid coloratura and top notes with bewildering sureness; in “Stabat Mater”, he was no less sure. Schneiders bass - though he has sung such Wagnerian roles as Fafner and Hunding - sounds truly Italianate, Pinza-like in its quivering line and impact.

To discover all these singers in one concert is a cornucopia experience. Yet the evening’s hero was certainly Rossini. Certain figures in “Ermione” showed that he still relied on some buffo devices from his many brilliant comedies; but all these “Ermione” excerpts showed how he was moving to new kinds of drama, politically charged and psychologically exploratory, while “Stabat Mater” showed how well he could turn his theatrically communicative gifts to the Roman Catholic liturgy.

Rossini’s operas conquered Europe while he was in his twenties and thirties. He often joked about the laziness behind his seemingly prolific aboundance (one piece of advice about composing an overture was “Find one you have made earlier”). Yet, even if his mind could not always keep abreast of all the commissions he received, his career shows that his was a restless mind. I long for more Rossini concerts such as Thursday’s.

@Alastair Macaulay 2025

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