From Cate Blanchett to the Berlin Philharmonic
London - like a few other cities around the world - really is a permanent arts festival. In one day, one can see - as this week I did - the Hollywood film star Cate Blanchett live onstage and the Berlin Philharmonic in concert. Such seemingly historic juxtapositions are, in the London we know, par for the course.
I: Sunday30 August, Albert Hall Proms:
Berlioz, “Damnation de Faust”
The young conductor Jakob Lehmann is becoming one of the marvels of our age. He specialises in period-instrument accounts of early-nineteenth-century music - but what matters more is the sheer esprit he brings to these scores: he plunges, apparently effortlessly, into their nervous systems. My first experience of him was in October 2025, when, at the Cadogan Hall, he conducted the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, the Monteverdi Choir, and an array of brilliantly chosen singers in a Rossini evening, with scenes from “Ermione” (Beth Taylor on fire in the title role) and all of the “Stabat Mater”. Later this month, he’ll conduct the same orchestra and choir in Rossini’s “Petite Messe Solennelle” at Alexandra Palace.
On Friday 28 August, at the Albert Hall Proms, he conducted Les Siècles (period instruments again) in Berlioz’s “Le Damnation de Faust”. (I listened on radio, enthralled.) Berlioz’s highly original orchestral sonorities and the whole mindset of his music drama sounded more original than ever before in my experience. Lehmann had three top international singers in his cast - the American tenor John Osborn, the French soprano Véronique Gens, and the Canadian baritone Gerald Finley - all of them wonderfully engaged by their music, with excellent French diction (and all sonorously negotiating the lower pitches of Berlioz’s day).
Finley is an especial paragon. His versatility ranges from Mozart, Schubert, Verdi, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Puccini to new music by several composers of different nationalities. His Berlioz Méphistophélès, a suave visionary in “Voici des roses”, was seductively and energetically dangerous. As Marguérite, Gens was more than a little approximate in the staccati at the frenzied climax of “D’amour l’ardente flamme” - and yet it hardly mattered: I’ve never known her so possessed by a role. Osborn’s voice retains its glow even amid Faust’s most desperate and wracked utterances.
I hope Lehmann gives us more Berlioz. The originality of this composer - which can elude many - can hit you on many levels: it’s there in his instinct for the psychology of his characters, there in his instrumentation, there in the vision with which he depicts the larger world over his characters’ shoulders. So it was in this Prom performance:
II: Tuesday 1 September, Albert Hall Proms:Hrůša, Kaprálová, Rachmaninov, Janáček.
The Czech conductor Jakub Hrůša, a London resident and now music director to the Royal Opera, is proving an ever more fascinating conductor to follow, in both opera and concert. Two years ago, he not only showed that the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, in two all-Czech programmes, is one of the world’s greatest orchestras, he also produced an object-lesson in Czech orchestral sound that’s there with few other living conductors: Hrůša gives a particularly Czech character to the intermeshing merging of strings and wind, while other conductors achieve a more international quality to the scores of Dvořák, Janáček, and others.
On Tuesday, he opened with the multi-faceted “Suita Rustica” (1938) by Vitézslava Kaprálová (1915-1940), a composer who made strong international impression in Western Europe during her tragically short life: the three-part suite seems two lively urban movements sandwiching a pastoral centre. Tuesday’s Russian centrepiece - Rachmaninov’s third piano concerto - was a superb example of Czech musicianship: this performance featured Hrůša’s long-term pianist colleague Lukáš Vondráček, who, fluently negotiating the longer and more notoriously challenging of Rachmaninov’s two cadenzas, always drew us into the musical values (rather than the surface display) of Rachmaninov’s score.
With the closing Janáček “Sinfonietta”, Hrůsa persuaded me that he is now London’s most grippingly idiomatic Janáček exponent since the late Charles Mackerras. If only you could have closed your eyes to the “Makropoulos Case” that he conducted last autumn at Covent Garden - Katie Mitchell’s production was notoriously and pretentiously over-elaborate - you could hear there that, like his 2024 Proms “Glagolitic Mass” and his 2025 Covent Garden “Jenůfa”, he’s a master of Janáček’s vividly colorful and pulsating found world. With him, Janaček’s “Sinfonietta” covers landscapes, cityscapes, and soulscapes. Sometimes, his violins played phrases with a thrilling element of grit in their texture; yet elsewhere in the same work, they provided startlingly shimmering - even spectral - intimations of eternity.
This spring, Hrůśa conducted the Covent Garden “Peter Grimes” as if Britten was home terrain for him. He has already led a superb “Lohengrin” there; I look forward to his “Parsifal” there in October.
III: Wednesday2 September, Albert Hall Proms - Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
It’s valuable to observe the top orchestras both in their home concert halls and to see them away from their home context. (The top ballet companies even more so.) Like thousands, I’ve been listening to recordings of the Berlin Philharmonic all my life; but I never saw it in live performance anywhere until a 2017 trip to Berlin and its Philharmonie concert hall. And, despite its many visits to London, I’d never seen the entire orchestra anywhere else - until this week, when it visited the Albert Hall Proms with Kirill Petrenko conducting two programmes.
Wednesday’s fare consisted of two non-Berliner works: Elgar’s “Enigma Variations” and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. These are scores I’ve known for well over fifty years - and yet, thanks to this orchestra and this conductor, here I was hearing new details in each. (The Berlin double basses are a particular phenomenon of firm power.) More important, both works felt idiomatic, purposeful, wonderfully spirited. Petrenko is an intelligent dynamo: economically but passionately, he focuses his great orchestra in marvellously shaped accounts where brilliant details fall expressively into place.
IV: Thursday3 September (matinee): Lyttelton Theatre, National Theatre -
“Electra”/“Persona”.
The ancient Greeks began the endless re-telling of the story of Clytemnestra and her daughter Electra. Aeschylus’s version differs from Homer’s, while those by Sophocles and (especially) Euripides create further divergences. (Other authors make more of the earlier family killings within the same House of Atreus.) When Eugene O’Neill wrote “Mourning Becomes Electra”, he became part (a marvellous part) of a long process of revisionism.
Let nobody therefore now complain that the story is still being revised. London currently has three quite different accounts - one, Simon Stone’s version of the “Oresteia” now at the Bridge Theatre; two, the much-debated Christopher Nolan film of “The Odyssey” (in which Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband Agamemnon registers, even though Nolan deprives Homer’s epic of other women more central to the original); and three, “Electra”/“Persona” in the National Theatre’s Lyttelton auditorium.
Electra’s story is an early classic of revenge tragedy. Wracked by the anguish and fury after the never-to-be-forgotten killing of her father Agamemnon by her mother Clytemnestra and her mother’s lover Aegisthus, she broods so obsessively about the need to kill Clytemnestra and Aegisthus that she starts to become her mother. This mother-daughter psychological parallel becomes the cue for the two chief departures made by Benedict Andrews’s current production.
In the first of these devices, Cate Blanchett and the German actress Nina Hoss precede each performance by having an audience member shake dice to determine which of them will play the daughter and which the mother. The casting helps us to consider a family likeness: both women have pale blonde hair and striking facial structures, as does Ella Lily Hyland as Electra’s sister Chrysothemis.
In the other particular innovation of Andrews’s production, the Electra story gives way to a new staging of Ingmar Bergman’s classic - very Strindbergian - film “Persona” (1966). (The National Theatre programme promised us a twenty-minute interval, but none was forthcoming.) In “Persona”, Alma’s obsession with Elisabeth keeps accumulating until the two women - their faces faces and implicitly their psyches - overlap and merge.
Blanchett’s face itself is the very stuff of theatre: those wider-than-wide cheekbones never fail to astonish. Her temperament is to match: she’s always intelligent, memorable, forceful, dominating. And yet - this is now the fourth stage performance I’ve seen this film star give since 1999 - her stage acting has always tended to be artful and exaggerated, to the degree that it has made me spot comparable tendencies in her film acting. Granted, in “Electra/Persona” she’s actually less artificial than she was in “Plenty” (1999) or “A Streetcar Named Desire” (2009) or “The Seagull” (2025). At Thursday’s matinee, the dice determined that she played Clytemnestra and (in “Persona”) the hugely talkative Alma, while the German actress Nina Hoss played Electra and Elisabeth.
The voracious hunger of Blanchett’s manner and presence makes the production largely about her. Yet it’s the quieter Hoss who shows greater depth. Blanchett’s acting is showy, but it lacks mystery, suspensefulness. Hoss is far better at listening.
So what, though? Even Hoss proves tiresome in this production. Andrews, who has concocted this Sophocles/Bergman tandem, also directs. Both actresses deliver extensive acting into camera closeup. (Of course the production is heavily miked. When you count the London theatre’s that don’t amplify voices today, you’re lucky if you can use the fingers of more than one hand.)
And so, even with Hoss, “Electra/Persona” aims to make us intensely aware of acting techniques. Bergman’s “Persona” film is one ingenious and intricate drama, and yet it’s far more innocent than Andrews’s elaborate essay in postmodern theatrics. Does the National Theatre really think it wise to propel British theatre into this amount of Euro-artifice and self-consciousness?
V: Thursday 3September (evening): Albert Hall Proms -Berlin Philharmonic
The Berlin Philharmonic was just as energised in Thursday’s double bill as in Wednesday’s - in a pair of works composed almost a century apart. Beethoven’s violin concerto (1806), opening the programme, perfectly demonstrates Beethoven’s peculiar gift of reiterating and reiterating very simple melodic ideas in ways that somehow enthrall and entertain without proving irksome. Afterwards, when the tunes go round in your head, you wonder that they didn’t bore you, but actually, while you listen at the time, you marvel that Beethoven knows so many ways to enchant.
Sometimes in this concerto he succeeds just by being very quiet: Beethoven, so often legendarily forceful, can cast out a melodic thread like gossamer in the morning air, and it becomes an expression of the soul itself. And sometimes he succeeds by alternating between the violin’s simplicity and its capacity for polyphonic complexity.
At this performance, the soloist was Augustin Hadelich, whose marvellously mellow tone was gleamingly honeyed throughout, astonishingly liquid in passagework, and adorable in rhythmic vivacity. Beethoven’s third movement keeps recycling the impishly bright-eyed melody that Yehudi Menuhin himself used to sing as “It’s nearly o-ver! it’s nearly o-ver!” - yet its ebullience became here the intoxicating quintessence of brio, renewing itself even while repeating itself: sweet, bright, youthful, even unstoppable
The concert went on to Scriabin’s third symphony (1902-1904) in C minor: “The Divine Poem”. Scriabin’s orchestration is so sophisticated in its multilayering that watching and listening become partly separate experiences. On this occasion, I watched two harpists pluck their harps, yet, more often than not, I could not hear the very playing I was watching - just one example among many of Scriabin’s deliberately thick musical embroidery.
Yet elsewhere those harps - indeed every instrument - were intelligibly audible. This complex musical texture is part of Scriabin’s point. This music contains epiphanies and ecstasies amid its changing portrait of life and sensation. The glorious result is not for everyday consumption, but it does enrich the listener’s world.
@Alastair Macaulay, 2026