Music; plays; artistry; art

I:   Kathleen Ferrier Awards 2026 at the Wigmore Hall 

The overall level of the 2026 Kathleen Ferrier (pic) award final – Friday 26 April – was happily high. At least five of the six finalists were distinct individuals. All of them were singing in at least three languages (the winner sang four), and in songs (including folk songs and revue numbers) as well as opera. I, not knowing the judges, could easily have imagined four of the six becoming winners – and indeed one of them came second, while another won the song prize.

The winner, the tall baritone Hector Bloggs, had the audience laughing at the – subtle – braggadocio of his Papageno before he even sang a note. He also caught the comedy of Wolf’s “Abschied” and the Flanders-Swann “Whale” (“The Bottle-nosed Whale with the Flu”), but also the suavely amorous tenderness of Tosti’s “Ideale” and the polished condescension of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin.His isn’t a big voice, and yet everything about him has a quality of natural projection. Likewise he doesn’t have film star looks, and yet his presence – virile, expansive, relaxed – is entirely pleasing. (Photographs don’t begin to catch his physical charm.)

Although I agreed with the judges about Bloggs, it would have not been hard to envisage the soprano Eyra Norman winning (she opened with the Queen of Night’s “Der Holle Rache”, won the song prize with her Schubert “Nacht und Träume”, and made a strong impression with Ann Trulove’s “No word from Tom” from “The Rake’s Progress”). The countertenor Zheng Jiang (almost a male soprano), singing Handel, Gluck, Debussy, and Herbert Howells, may have been the most phenomenal vocalist of the six, though he was no linguist. The Scottish tenor Liam Forrest, singing in a kilt and with a borderline-baritone voice , sang more “Rake’s Progress” and the evening’s only Puccini (“E lucevan le stellle”) as well as the traditional Scots “My love is like a red, red rose”. (Even though I don’t care for the song’s repetition of the phrase “my dear”, it has been haunting me ever since.) Competitions can be the death of artistry; but not so at the 2026 Ferrier event.

II:    Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” at the Jermyn Street Theatre 

The Jermyn Street Theatre, just a block south of Piccadilly Circus, is one of London’s tiniest – perhaps sixty seats. Its intimacy makes it ideal for some productions: I remember the singer Judy Campbell (1916-2004) there, she of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”).

That intimacy proves good for Flora Wilson Brown’s stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” (1931). This is not a novel that cries out to be adapted. Its six characters gradually advance from childhood to adult experience and parenthood. Singular events – an eclipse, the sudden death of a beloved friend – are common reference points that affect each of them differently. The play, like the novel, is a tapestry of their voices, a sextet that often subdivides into solos, duets,  and trios.

A particular fascination of Júlia Levai’s staging is that there is no attempt to re-create Woolf’s period or sociology. Each of the actors takes us on her or his own journey without side-tracking into any effort to create any separate character (though all six try to be childlike at first, few with complete success). The events that these six people face in their lives take on fresh reality.

III:    Alban Berg, Wozzeck, Stéphane Degout, Edward Gardner, and Ilya Shogalov 

Much of what is strangest and strongest in the drama of Alban Berg’s intensely compassionate “Wozzeck” (1925) lies in its orchestral music. It was therefore a first-rate idea of the London Philharmonic Orchestra to present a concert performance – Saturday 25 April – but a third-rate idea then to accompany that concert performance with an intensely distracting film, or rather with a dense and rhythmically irregular collage of stills. To the extent that we could just listen to conductor Edward Gardner’s account of Berg’s music, the performance was excellent, an equal to recent concert performances of such operas as Richard Strauss’s “Salome”, Prokofiev’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”, and several by Janáček.  Herr, however, the film/visual accompaniment by Ilya Shagalov did much to undercut the music. The urban imagery and facial closeups might not by themselves have been distracting, but the irregular rhythms of the stills – especially their sudden accelerations – were anti-musical.

Too bad. Gardner’s handling of the score had depth and complexity. My admiration for the French baritone Stéphane Degout keeps growing. As Wozzeck, a role I first heard sung by Geraint Evans in 1976, and which I have seen this century played by both Mathias Goerne and Christian Gerhaher, he combines forceful verbal utterance and musical eloquence to an exceptional degree.

IV:   Fran Kranz’s “Mass” and the incomprehensibility of school massacres

“Mass”, by the American actor and film director Fran Kranz, is about a situation in which nothing happens but arrivals, sitting, talk, departures. But for four of the arrivals the talk is of killings – of children who lost their lives in an American school massacre and of the child who killed them before taking his own life. Two of the adults, Linda and Richard, were – are – parents of the dead killer; two of the others, Gail and Jay, are parents of one of the victims. Neither these characters nor their play try to wipe any slate clean. These parents all try to comprehend a crime that remains incomprehensible, to solve mysteries that remain insoluble.

“Mass” began life as a film, both written and directed by Kranz, released in 2021. Kranz then adapted it into a play; the Donmar Warehouse production, which opened on Wednesday 29 April, is directed by Carrie Cracknell. The production is highly realistic: the tall windows of the Episcopal church building in which these four parents are meeting are beautifully evocative of architectures that admit light and beauty. There are very few noises off, but the choral singing (a rehearsal) that begins near the end is a wonderful touch, a touch of transcendent beauty as well as of healing community.

With this production so soon after her Old Vic “Arcadia”,Carrie Cracknell wins major status as a director. The fine-tuning with which the four central actors here – Adeel Akhtar (Jay) and Lyndsey Marshall (Gail), Monica Dolan (Linda) and Paul Hilton (Richard), several of them marvellously funny artists in other plays – move through the interplays and overlaps of anger, frustration, grief, generosity, and responsiveness shows the highest levels of sensitivity.

V:    David Hare and “Grace Pervades”

Few playwrights are more prolific than David Hare, who will be seventy-nine in June. There have been past theatre seasons in which no fewer than four Hare premieres (including adaptations) have occurred. He has also written books other than plays, has performed a solo vehicle of his own, has directed plays, has written for television and film, and more. He abounds with contradictions – he contradicts himself but many others too – sometimes in ways that exasperate, and sometimes in ways that enrich. He’s a left-of-centre playwright whose plays have often been formally conventional; a state-of-the-nation artist whose plays have often been about artists making art.

His latest play, “Grace Pervades”, is about the collaboration of the dissimilar late-Victorian actors Henry Irving (all advance calculation) and Ellen Terry (radiant spontaneity and human truthfulness), who worked together for decades. Several of the play’s Irving-Terry duet scenes feel like debates within Hare’s own head: Irving believes in the sovereign importance of theatre itself, whereas Terry sees theatre only as a window to larger truths. This dialogue is framed by a larger debate about theory and practice in theatre as exemplified by Terry’s son Edward Gordon Craig, and his most famous lover, the rapturous dancer Isadora Duncan. The Craig scenes also include Konstantin Stanislavsky and (mention of) Peter Brook, while scenes for Craig’s sister also include the sapphic inspiration of Vita Sackville-West (another figure mentioned but unseen) and votes for women. In short, the play keeps beginning to sprawl – very Hare – away from its central subject. And some of what’s messy about it is endearing and absorbing.

Jeremy Herron directs. As Henry Irving, the intelligent and sensitive Ralph Fiennes has an altogether more congenial role than Robert Moses, as whom he was staggeringly wrong in Hare’s “Straight Line Crazy” (Bridge Theatre, 2022). And yet Fiennes isn’t much like the monumental, calculated, Irving of whom Hare’s play tells. Nor is young, lovely, contained Miranda Raison much like the luminous, inspiring Ellen Terry (about whom the words “grace pervades the hussy” were written early in her career). Fiennes and Raison are both charming, watchable artists: they do much to make “Grace Pervades” absorbing. Not for a moment, however, do they make it an important dialogue about the uses of theatre: I found myself re-casting it with actors who would suit better.