Florian Boesch; “I Puritani”; “Tristan und Isolde; Russell Tovey

I: Florian Boesch at the Wigmore Hall

The Austrian baritone Florian Boesch, in his mid-fifties, was only a name to me until his Wigmore Hall recital with pianist Malcolm Martineau on the evening of Sunday 26. He’s in his mid-fifties; I feel I’ve missed his vocal prime. Some of his vocal lines are just sketches of what he surely once achieved.

Yet I’m delighted to have caught him now. (He was singing with an injured left shoulder, which obliged him to support his left hand and arm in various ways, during the recital, something he explained with good humour.) His choice of songs – Loewe and Mahler – were all arrestingly chosen. Many of us know the spectral Erl King (Erlkönig) from Schubert’s song about him, but here was Loewe’s version of a different poem, Herder’s “Herr Oluf”, about the same figure. The Emperor Charles V, who occurs in two Verdi operas, was the voice of Loewe’s “Der Pilgrim vor St Just” (the words by August von Platen). All these songs were dramatic; and Boesch, with excellent diction, remains a dramatic singer. A handsome man with a handsome voice that could not delver the more taxing stretches of several songs, he was good company at every point, showing the point of every song even when giving us only hints of what he would once have achieved.

II: “I Puritani” at Covent Garden

Even in the era of Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland, productions of Bellini’s opera “I Puritani” were distinctly unusual events. Yet now, within six months of each other, both New York’s Metropolitan Opera House and Covent Garden’s Royal Opera have staged new productions of this very work with the same soprano, Lisette Oropesa – and yet it’s hard to see that either production begins from a premise of complete faith in the opera itself.

And why are both productions so long? Both run over three hours (the Met’s considerably longer – whereas, when the Met revived this opera in 1986 with Joan Sutherland, Richard Bonynge, and Sherrill Milnes, it lasted merely two hours eleven minutes. (I remember an excellent 2017 Met revival – Diana Damrau, Salvatore Camerena – that lasted two hours and thirty-seven minutes.) I’m a Bellini fan, I love his melodic invention, but I’m unaware of any special revelations in these longer versions.

What you can’t miss at the core of “Puritani” is the heroine’s madness. Numerous Romantic operas feature scenes where the heroine’s emotional vicissitudes take her through scenes of lunacy, sleepwalking, fraught deliberation – usually as the result of unfeeling behaviour by one or more male characters. But while Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” (1835) has opera’s most vocally spectacular mad scene (after its heroine has killed her husband), Bellini’s “Puritani” – which had its premiere eight months earlier the same year – takes its heroine, Elvira, through a more sustained, and more melodious, condition of derangement that lasts for two whole “mad” scenes: scenes so placed that Elvira’s mental fragility becomes a more central ingredient of the drama. We’re shown how long this heroine stays locked into her melancholic fixation: madness here is not one more turn of the screw but a long-lasting effect of extreme affliction.

Certainly Oropesa’s affectingly bright soprano is an asset. Her top notes have something of a squeaky quality, her delivery of rapid coloratura passagework lacks any brilliance, but the quality of her voice goes straight to the heart. As her lover, the Sardinian tenor Francesco Demuro has an equally touching vocal character, melting where her voice shines. And his voice is strengthened by the kind of wonderful – and seemingly effortless – Italian utterance from which you could take dictation. He tackles all the role’s stratospheric top notes, though the audience can’t miss their element of panic.

The conductor Riccardo Frizza shapes the music sympathetically. But the baritone Andrzej Filończyk entirely lacks the kind of line or diction that Bellini’s music is all about, while the bass Ildebrando D’Arcangelo makes a loosely generalised impression, with none of the precise musical or verbal impact implicit in the score.

The director Richard Jones seems to understand what’s at stake in this opera without trusting it. He begins the opera with Elvira plodding heavily on her heels across the stage in a way that feels anti-Elvira from the outset; and he ends the opera with Riccardo, who has never been successful in winning Elvira’s love, stabbing Arturo, who has been finally joined with her, on the very final chord – followed by a blackout. This murder isn’t what the opera’s makers had in mind; and the musical timing of this death clashes with everything we’ve observed so far.

In between, Jones does have some wonderful touches. The lighting designer, Adam Silverman, arrestingly transforms several scenes so that they’re melodramatically illumined by either footlights or spotlight. Particularly when Elvira, in her second mad scene, sings of the moon in the sky, the direct spotlight upon her takes us straight into her moonstruck condition: she gazes into the spotlight as if this is the love where she belongs. Very touching, too, is how Jones has her seated, motionless, in one corner of a window seat. The scenery moves – we even see her from behind – but she remains motionless in that window seat, a chilling image of emotional fixation.

These pluses and minuses of Jones’s production alternate throughout; it’s a bumpy ride. Too often we’re aware that Jones has been working on “I Puritani” from way outside, rather than letting the music (as Maria Callas, the most influential Bellini exponent of the last century, urged) tell the players what to do.

III: Pappano’s “Tristan und Isolde” at the Barbican

The decades pass, and yet the genius of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” remains just as overwhelming. In this century alone, I’ve witnessed Met Opera performances conducted by Daniel Barenboim and Simon Rattle that struck me as the greatest conducting of opera I’ve heard. On Wednesday, the conducting of the London Symphony Orchestra by Antonio Poppano at the Barbican seemed their equal. New details of subtle string portamenti leaps out; the orchestra’s brass section pinpointed other details to newly illuminated effect.

The layers of Wagner’s drama stay audacious even when you’ve been acquainted “Tristan” for fifty years. As with (but ahead of) Ibsen, Wagner shows the characters coming to terms, effortfully, with different aspects of the past. Isolde in Act One is so much a major study of denial that it remains hard to grasp all that Isolde is saying. Though she’s direct in her rage and in wanting death, she’s highly oblique in explaining that she’s been in love with Tristan long since – and that she sees death as the only solution. Tristan and Isolde, so resolutely keen to drink the death potion, are amazingly unaware they’ve instead drunk the love potion. Their confusion after drinking is gloriously expressed, so that, when Tristan’s loyal squire Kurwenal speaks of “the king”, Tristan replies “Welche König?” (“Which king?”): to him, it’s now more likely he’s about to meet the king of the dead than his own uncle, King Mark of Cornwall.

Brangäne’s offstage warning in Act Two is the most gorgeous example in all music of words saying one thing while music says the opposite. She’s telling Isolde and Tristan to take care while she alone keeps watch, but everything about her music sounds like a dreamy surrender to love’s spell. How wonderful to find this aspect of “Tristan” still so potent here at this Barbican performance.

Each act of “Tristan” creates its own world, its own drama, even its own music. In Act Three, Pappano isolated the solo cor anglais at the back of the balcony, adding a new level of strangeness to one of music’s greatest masterstrokes, with that cor anglais playing melodies, harmonies, and rhythms of an exotic melancholy for which nothing has prepared us (but which prepare us for the start of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” among other modernist amazements). When that cor anglais – now onstage and now joyous – finally bursts into rhythmic regularity, with the whole orchestra in support, we seem to have jumped from one plane to another – and the shock of this return to the “real” world is drastic. For Act Three has plunged us into Tristan’s deathlorn dreams of Isolde and night, with thoughts about the deaths of his parents in his childhood that are another twist for which we haven’t been prepared. In an opera that has continually connected love and death in arrestingly new ways, Isolde’s arrival coincides with Tristan’s death. But gradually we realise that Isolde, alone, is in the same realm of thought as Tristan. The others now understand her plight – except that they don’t. Her final sinking beneath the waves of Tristan and love becomes the most sublime demonstration of transcendence in all music and all drama.

Bravo Pappano! Bravo, and profound thanks, for making this masterpiece reach us anew. His connection with the London Symphony Orchestra has now reached a new level of symbiosis. The American soprano Sara Jakubiak, making her role debut as Isolde, begins as an already superb exponent of the role (far more connected to the words than the Met’s Lise Davidsen, with no loss of connection to the music). Dressed in green, with superb cheekbones, she looked an ideal Irish princess. The two top Cs of Act Two, though clearly sounded, were the only moments when she seemed guarded in the role’s vocal lines. When she returned for Act Three, her voice sounded startlingly re-born. She is a wonderful discovery for many of us; I hope we see and hear more of her from now on.

Clay Hilley, another American – dressed as a prosperous restauranteur, with a blue dinner jacket – was an excellent Tristan, tireless in joining music and words. Though he’s less marvellously tragic and heroic than the Met’s superlative Michael Spyres, he remains gripping at every moment. Though this was a concert performance, he sketched part of the role’s movement; I especially admired the way he began isolde’s Liebestod as if entirely dead but slowly woke to life as she sang. (I hope some director follows his cue – and ends the opera with the two lovers walking together away into another realm.)

Marina Prudenskaya’s Brangäne – too splendidly attired to convince as a handmaid! – was gorgeously sung, not yet fully in control of her words. Gyula Orendt was a valiant Kurwenal, absolutely leading us from the bluster of Act One into the deeply compassionate pain of Act Three. Others admired Franz-Josef Selig’s King Marike more than I. I was always impressed by his communicative grasp of the words – it’s with Marke that Wagner gives us a whole new facet of tragedy in showing us what has been lost with Tristan’s loss of knightly principles – but I found his phrasing too strenuous. (King Marke is often the opera’s most elusive role.) Supporting roles, not least Michael Gibson as the Shepherd, were all marvellously taken. As I’ve begun to suggest, each singer took a different approach in dressing for this concert performance; their disparities were occasionally distracting. I hope this “Tristan” leads to a recording; and I hope the glorious Jakubiak now becomes a leading Wagnerienne.

IV: Russell Tovey in “The Guilty” at the Donmar Warehouse

The actor Russell Tovey, in his mid-forties, is all set to become a national treasure. Onstage and screen, he has intensity, vulnerability, humour, naturalness, power, stillness. (Offstage he has a life too, including a modern art collection.) For those of us who remember him as one of Alan Bennett’s original History Boys at the National Theatre in 2004, it’s been exciting to see him journey from playing Tintin at the Barbican to Harold Pinter at the Pinter Theatre (2018).

When I found he was playing a policeman in the world premiere of Chloë Moss’s “The Guilty” this week, I imagined a stage version of “Plainclothes”, the 2025 film in which Tom Blythe and he play men involved in a secret gay affair while trying to maintain straight public personae. In the event, “The Guilty” is very different. This is a thriller in which Tovey, alone onstage, is a policeman manning an emergency helpline, receiving calls that range from life-and-death crises to time-wasting complaints about noisy neighbours – all while preparing for an inquiry and coping with problems related to his young daughter and his estranged wife. The whole play lasts only an hour, but – thanks both to Moss’s writing and Tobey’s acting – it takes its audience through a nail-biting gamut of feeling: alarm. I recommend it whole-heartedly; and I long to see Tovey extend his range further and further.

 @Alastair Macaulay 2026