“Duke Bluebeard’s Castle” and other Proms; the Glyndebourne “Kaťa Kabanová”
The best of the Albert Hall Proms (July 18- September 13) may yet well be to come. Famous orchestras from Amsterdam, Leipzig, Vienna lie ahead of us. The high point so far, however, has surely been the August 6 concert led by Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. In a few decades, Fischer has made this into one of the world’s finest and most individual orchestras. A vital part of its colour derives from its woodwind and brass. The marriages that these make with one another and with its strings are alchemies that cast new light even on so beloved a work as Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. In its sublime Adagietto second movement, the high violins played one long melodic line with a subtly incisive edge that cut into the nervous system. In every movement, the flute’s sheer attack made further transformations.
After the interval, these glorious Hungarians played Bartók’s fabulously scored, one-act “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle”. As Bluebeard takes his new wife Judith around his castle, letting her open each of its seven doors in turn, Bartók’s music charts a different view. Beyond the literal view (walls, garden, lake), each view is metaphorical, opening a new aspect of masculine power. Bartók’s mastery of instrumentation rises to every dramatic challenge. Fischer scaled everything with marvellous suspense.
The mezzosoprano Dorottya Láng was Judith. Her beautifully voluptuous voice is absolutely steady, easily mastered through a wide range of volume. Although she stood still, her use of hands and face - musical at every point - suggest that she’s an important singing actress; I hope to hear her in other roles soon. Her voice was ideally contrasted with that of the unyielding bass of Krisztián Czer: marvellously firm, rivetingly juiceless.
Part of the fun of the Proms is their unpredictability. I attended the August 7 concert by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra chiefly to renew acquaintance with Dvořák’s “From the New World” symphony, a piece I haven’t heard in live performance since my teens: it rewarded the wait. But the evening had begun with three Proms premieres. The American composer Adolphus Hailstork (b.1941) was present for the European premiere of his breezily Bernsteinian “An American Port of Call” (1984). His compatriot Jennifer Higdon’s “blue cathedral” (2000) was a marvel of imaginative orchestration, showing us both grand effects within a large architecture and hushed, intimate moments.
The evening’s biggest surprise, however, was the first performance at the Proms of “Concierto de otoño” (2018) by the Mexican composer Arturo Márquez. The trumpeter soloist, Pacho Flores, making his debut at the Proms, was a sensation. Márques’s concerto was written for Flores, who plays four kinds of trumpet during its course; it calls for coloratura trumpet skills amid intensely Mexican and dance-based music of great warmth and high spirits. The Venezuelan conductor Domingo Hindoyan is compelling: marvellously engaged in his music and its players, yet always elegantly restrained.
There is no single formula to programming a Proms concert. The Albert Hall was packed on August 1 for the twenty one-year-old Korean star pianist Yunchun Lim’s account of Rachmaninov’s fourth piano concerto, deservedly so. He is the least showy of virtuosi: amid the cascading complexities of Rachmaninov’s writing for the soloist, he’s gently lyrical. But how did this concerto fit in between John Adams’s energetically post-modern “The Chairman Dances” (1985) and Luciano Berio’s still avant-garde “Sinfonia” (1968, revised in 1969)? The third, fourth, and fifth nominees of the Berio were marked by many of Lim’s admirers politely beating it to the Albert Hall’s exits. There’s a sentimentality to the Rachmaninov concerto that’s at odds with the other two works; I happen to find “Sinfonia” an absorbing and bracing piece, but I’d rather experience it in entirely different circumstances.
The operas of Leoš Janáček seldom receive routine performances. Something in the music’s spirit impels the singers to rare levels of intensity and humanity. Janáček’s idiosyncratic vocal lines are both challenging and rewarding, while the range of colours and rhythms in his orchestration give immense vitality to his dramas.
I can certainly find fault with Damiano Micheletti’s Glyndebourne production (new in 2021) of Janáček’s “Kaťa Kabanová”. As my companion remarked, Micheletti imposes visual symbols - an angel, cages, feathers - onto an opera that doesn’t need them, though at every point the production falls gratefully on the eye. Musically and theatrically the current revival’s cast, new on August 3 and continuing to August 23, is marvellous. Conducted by Robin Ticciati, the lead singers here are led by Kateřina Knéžiková (Kát’a), Nicky Spence (Boris Grigorjevič), Susan Bickley (Kabanicha), Rachael Wilson (Varvara), and John Tomlinson (Savel Prokofjevič Dikoj), with Robin Ticciati conducting. Since Knéžiková was the Kát’a in 2021, I’m surprised she has not been invited to make many more international appearances in the interim: she’s a singing actress of rare pathos, purity, and vulnerability.
Other Janáček operas give us the sense that the lives of others will continue valuably after the death of individuals; but “Kát’a” is unremitting in its heartbreaking focus on the bleakness of life. And its central pathos is large: how women in traditional communities are deprived of independent choice in their lives. I don’t object to the angle and the cages in Micheletti’s production, but the feathers motif is heavily forced upon the audience as if we should find no more important task in “Kaťa” than interpreting these feathers. As the production closes, one character holds out a single red feather towards us like an Agatha Christie character brandishing a crucial clue. Sorry, but no. The feathers are a distraction, and no one feather helps us to unlock the meanings of either “Kaťa” or this symbol-laden production.
@Alastair Macaulay, 2025