From Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country” to Bach’s B Minor Mass
Slipped Disc
I: Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country” at the Donmar Warehouse
Frederick Ashton’s one-act ballet “A Month in the Country” was fifty years old this February. You’d have thought that a company as anniversary-conscious as the Royal Ballet would have given performances in its honour, especially since at times in the last thirty years “Month” has been the most frequently performed of all Ashton ballets at its home theatre. It has been called a perfect work: its original 1976 cast, most of whom can be seen on YouTube in a 1978 performance, made it exceptionally affecting. Generally it’s been kept in admirable shape over the decades.
Yet (this is too often forgotten) Ashton’s ballet is merely an incomplete distillation of a much more intricate (and much greater) five-act play by Ivan Turgenev: a bittersweet comedy which, because of its portrait of a married woman’s adulterous feelings, was originally banned. In Ashton’s ballet; the leading man is the young tutor Alexei Beliaev, who causes several female hearts to flutter during his month in the country house. But the play’s leading man (a self-portrait by Turgenev) is Mikhail Rakitin, a courteous, generous, intelligent, self-sacrificing character: his astonishing views on love - expressed to Beliaev - far more embittered than anything expressed by Ashton in the ballet. And the play’s second man is not Beliaev but Dr Shpigelsky, a highly original character, tough-minded and cynical; Ashton simply omits him altogether absent from the ballet - though Ashton took his 1976 cast to see Toby Robertson’s marvellous production of the play, in which Timothy West’s account of Shpigelsky was definitive and hilarious.
If the play has a protagonist, it’s Natalia Petrovna, a wonderfully multifaceted character (Turgenev says she is twenty-nine years old) who is wife, mother, guardian (to the seventeen-year-old Vera), and, if this is not too grand a word, chatelaine. Rakitin loves her, but she keeps him in tow as a perpetual admirer and devoted friend without returning his devotion. Her sudden crush on the young Beliaev makes her impatient with Rakitin, even shockingly cruel to him, and unkind to her seventeen-year-old ward Vera. The role has been wonderfully played in London by Dorothy Tutin (1976) and Helen Mirren (1994). Still, I find that the real core of the play is really the character of the self-sacrificing Rakitin: Derek Jacobi was never finer than here, but John Hurt, playing beside Helen Mirren in 1994, was superlative.
Turgenev’s play, very proto-Chekhovian, abounds in wonderful characters. (When it finally reached the stage, Turgenev lost his heart to the actress of Vera.) The new Donmar Warehouse production, directed by Lyndsey Turner and set in the mid-twentieth century (though this diminishes it), should be seen by everyone interested in theatre and in Turgenev. It’s worth noting that Brian Friel’s 1992 version is more a re-working than a translation: multiple details, including the final scene, are quite different. But Friel was himself a master-playwright; there are even ways in which he improves on Turgenev (without ever indulging in the gross alterations à la Simon Stone that now disfigure so many of today’s London versions of classic drama). Several of the supporting performances in Turner’s staging - notably Susan Brown as Natalia’s mother-in-law Anna Semyonova Islayeva, a role given added weight in Friel’s version - I have never seen better played.
The role of Natalya Petrova can be played many ways: Helen Mirren’s 1994 interpretation may actually have been too virtuoso, too watch-my-acting-technique in showing the character’s lightning changes of mood, though it was certainly both riveting and exciting. Dorothy Tutin was compellingly complex - vulnerable, witty, authoritative, unkind, ruthless by turns. Sophie Okonedo, wonderful actress, isn’t yet in Tutin’s league in this role, but I love the way she’s unafraid to show, amid Natalia’s charm and divisions, her unappealing streaks of calculation. It’s good to see Alistair Petrie as Rakitin, a role he plays with marvellous lightness; if he can show more of the heartbreak and intelligence behind the courtesy, this will become a great interpretation.
II: Martha Argerich and the Munich Philharmonic at the Proms, Saturday 5
The renowned pianist Martha Argerich, aged eighty-five, now plays only a handful of concerti in her big concert-hall appearances. One of these is Beethoven’s second: she played it at the proms with a spontaneity that belied her long history with it. Her conductor was Lahav Shani: Argerich often allows the piano to merge gently into the orchestra, always then to emerge eloquently.
Argerich never loses her personal playfulness. She and Shani played the end of Ravel’s “Ma Mère l’Oye” - magical music, slowly reaching its climax with the quality of a radiant epiphany - as an encore.
Shani was conducting the excellent Munich Philharmonic, whose music director he has just become. He and it had opened the concert with Louise Farrenc’s Overture no 2 (1834), a highly accomplished demonstration of the French music of its day. They closed the concert by directing the Munich players in an elegant, fluent Brahms’s Fourth Symphony that showed this orchestra’s admirably high level.
III: Nadine Sierra’s debut at the Wigmore Hall, Tuesday 8 September
When I used to hear the American soprano Nadine Sierra at the New York Met in the 2010s, she struck me as deft but callow. After the lockdown, however, she sang a Violetta that ideally transcended the Met’s dismayingly trite “Traviata” production - and transcended it by the touching new subtleties she had found within her own singing. In her 2024 “Lucia di Lammermoor” at Covent Garden, she went even further in terms of tragic intensity, all this while developing her remarkable vocal skills in coloratura.
On Tuesday night, the Wigmore Hall opened its season with her debut recital there. In excellent voice, often opening up above the stave with ease, she showed plenty of her callow side, but continually then surprising us by then showing depths and colours that revealed her three-dimensionality. The first half of her recital was in arias from Italian opera - Donizetti, Mozart, Puccini, and, yes, “Traviata”; the second half was of Spanish and Portuguese numbers. Which of us had realised before that that adorable old chestnut “Besame mucho” was by a woman composer (Consuelo Velásquez)? And which of us had known what haunting grace it can acquire when sung by a coloratura soprano?
Sierra’s skills include exemplary diction. Although she has capacious and expressive top notes - she not only holds them but can swell and diminish them as she chooses - her voice, well grounded, is often at its loveliest and most moving in its middle range.
With happily outrageous speed, she and her accompanist, Brian Wagorn, then delivered no fewer than eight encores. Eight. That’s a record in my experience and the experience of many others. Several times, she and Wagorn didn’t even leave the stage - they simply took bows after one number and then, with great good cheer, merrily proceeded to the next. One fool in the audience yelled “Stop!” at one point, fearing that Sierra might be damaging her voice, But Sierra, accustomed to long roles in big opera houses, knows her voice too well for any such calamity to occur at the Wigmore Hall.
Her first encore, sung in excellent French, was Juliette’s waltz song “Je veux vivre dans ce rêve”; among its charms was its seemingly effortless exemplification of how the music’s grace notes are ascending in one line, descending in the next. New Yorkers have been reporting that the aching melancholy of her Amina (Bellini’s “Sonnambula”) has been one of the peaks of 2026; I hope Covent Garden invites her to sing Elvira in the same composer’s “I Puritani” before it dispenses with its clumsy new production of that opera.
In her next life, Sierra revealed, she’ll be a tenor - and so she gave us both “O sole mio” and “Che gelida manina”. Underneath her bright and often flirtatious surface, she’s a canny artist: I hope both Covent Garden and the Wigmore Hall give her the chance to reveal further aspects of her expressive musicality.
IV: Natalya Romaniw’s “Four Last Songs, Wednesday 9
The programming for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra made Wednesday’s concert about aspects of death and transcendence: Henze’s “Erlkönig”, Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, Britten’s arrangement (“What the Wild Flowers Tell Me”) of one movement from Mahler’s Third Symphony, and, finally, Richard Strauss’s “Four Last Songs”, sung by Natalya Romaniw. Romaniw‘s voice should make her an ideal interpreter of this group, but on this occasion she sings it as a tentative vocalise - tentative when making the longer phrases sound like endurance tests. She has vowels and consonants without - here - being remotely eloquent with words.
I’m inclined to think that her conductor, Pawel Kapula, is not the man to help. His Schubert was badly proportioned, with none passages too quiet and others too loud; his Mahler was inclined to meander.
V: Arcangelo in Bach’s B Minor Mass
Although I’ve been listening to Bach’s B Minor Mass for most of my life, I realise that, until Thursday’s prom, I’ve never heard it in live performance. Because Arcangelo delivered a stunning account of Bach’s “Matthew Passion” this spring at the Barbican, I hoped it would do the same for the Mass.
In the event, not so, or by no means completely. The Arcangelo conductor Jonathan Cohen propels Bach’s music with ideal purposefulness. The fifty-strong choir projects beautifully into the large space of the Albert Hall; the period-instrument orchestra. But few of Cohen’s soloists were right for the Albert Hall. Even the stylish and sensitive tenor Nick Pritchard could not make all his music carry in the large space. The young and inexperienced German bass Florian Störtz was even more marooned. Although the soprano Jeanine de Bique and French mezzo Eva Zaïcik could always be heard, these are not singers who know how to address a big space with any eloquence. Amazingly, the one soloist who could do so was the countertenor Hugh Cutting - amazing because few countertenors project effectively in this huge space. Cutting succeeded not by volume but by focus; I remembered how Janet Baker, in Mozart, could make a pianissimo beam up hauntingly and glowingly into the furthest rows of Covent Garden.
Cutting sang the great “Agnus Dei” quietly, and then, having grasped the audience’s attention, by often singing yet more quietly. Like Baker - not an artist he resembles in general - he knows how to make his music’s lines reach the heart: the cleanness of his entry into some upper notes, and the calm way he sustains many long notes - these are magical. It’s to be hoped Arcangelo returns soon to the Mass, with Cutting, but preferably in the Barbican Hall.
@Alastair Macaulay