The Old and the New

I. 

For those of us who feel the lures of history and tradition, the evening of Friday 17 at the Wigmore Hall turned out to be doubly resonant. On the one hand, part of the occasion was the presentation of the hall’s Wigmore Medal to the Duke of Kent, recently ninety years old, for being an important longerm patron. (I’m antiroyalist, but less so in moments such as these.) The medal was presented by Janet Baker, herself ninety-two years old. Among those present were Felicity Lott as well as the duke’s brother and sister. On the other hand, it matters to the hall, we were told, that this presentation was part of a recital by an accomplished young singer, Anja Mittermühler, a twenty-two-year-old Austrian mezzosoprano who cannot have heard Baker sing live even in her cradle.

Mittermühler, fair of form and face, delivered an exquisite selection of songs in four languages by Schubert, Grieg, Ravel, Rachmaninov, Richard Strauss, Wolf, Marx, and (an encore) Quilter. Everything showed taste and refinement: she floated notes with sensitivity. But who is Mittermüller herself? That’s not yet evident: her vibrato is too fluttery to reveal clear line. She could also use a finer accompanist than Richard Fu, whose way with solo passages is somewhat brutish. But her sheer good taste, accomplishment, and loveliness give her a marvelous endowment for the career to come.

II.

Was Frederick Ashton (1904-1988), as is often said (by me among many), really the greatest of British choreographers? Today, th  sheer toughness and darkness of the best works by Kenneth MacMillan, Richard Alston, Matthew Bourne can seem more rewarding than the ballets of Ashton, with their tendency to sweetness and sentimentality, even though the superior  craftsmanship of the Ashton ballets is not to be denied. 

“La Fille mal gardée” (1960) - unaggressive, unsnobbish, comic - was the greatest success of Ashton’s career. Although he himself was sceptical about the survival of choreography, he admitted that “Fille” was the one of his ballets likeliest to last. It celebrates vitality, community, innocence - human energy at its most deeply lovable. Thirty-seven years after his death, it’s back at Covent Garden - only a year after the Birmingham Royal Ballet’s last revival of it at Sadler’s Wells - and will return to repertory in May-June. But the first night on Saturday 18 was too saccharine. Marianela Nuñez, after performing the heroine Lise for twenty-one years, has found no new depths in the role, and still likes to slow down the choreography, sometimes to half the speed of Ashton’s day. Though she has by nature the right sunniness of temperament, she doesn’t vary it with touches of seriousness. Vadim Muntagirov, often so impeccably stylish without showing what style can reveal, plays his Colas like her Lise. All too bland.

Only Thomas Whitehead, as Widow Simone (Lise’s mother), knows how to take a cartoon role and play it three-dimensionally. His Simone is gruff, grouchy, even sour, but with grudging signs of deep affection for his/her daughter that, on Saturday, became the most moving moments of the performance, as when clinging on dotingly to Lise’s hand at the start of the wedding pas de deux.

III.

As you watch Nick Payne’s new play “The Unbelievers”, playing at the Royal Court until November 29, you realise how seamlessly it connects the various times that follow the disappearance of Miriam Wright’s son Oscar. There is no break between scenes - and yet we sense that time has been passing between them. When you read the play, however, you see how Payne means them to cover a span of seven years - the typography indicates which sections occur in the first week after Oscar’s loss, which a year later, and which seven years later. This establishes a deliberate ambiguity about how the loss of a child can suspend time, as its mother (especially) clings on to the belief that the child is out there and will return. 

Payne surrounds Miriam and the missing Oscar with plenty of human detail (we meet Nicola’s first husband, as well as the second, who is Oscar’s father), some of it hilarious. Marianne Elliott directs, with a wealth of sensitive humanity. Nicola Walker is Miriam, incisively catching the complex layers of denial and affection that co-exist in this situation, with the raw honesty in which this marvellous actress excels. 

The play takes us through a spectrum of tragicomic feeling, all of it interesting. Still, we can’t help feeling that the central human situation here doesn’t strike home - that Payne’s points about time and human loss become diffuse rather than piercing.

IV.

The Donmar Warehouse production of Jean Genet’s “The Maids” (1947)  is the latest and liveliest of London’s often disconcerting trend of updating plays in new versions that change them extensively. (One hallmark of these updates is that the characters all refer to podcasts.) Kip Williams has written and directed this one, with amazing use of screens. All three people onstage, gazing and talking into their iPhones, see - and we see with them - glamorously and/or grotesquely distorted versions of themselves or of the people to whom they’re speaking. This is among the most exciting use of technology I’ve seen onstage, not least because it says so much about our own fixation on small screens and on personal image.

And this adds a brilliant supplementary layer to Genet’s play, which is already a brilliant depiction of the power games between two sisters (Lydia Wilson and Phia Saban) and the Madame (Yerin Ha) whom they serve as maids. The power games are both entertianing and alarming, often moving to the borderline of hysteria and beyond. The maids talk of murdering their monstrous mistress; the tensions they feel between her and them also reveal the murderous tensions between themselves. 

“The Maids” can be played quietly, waspishly, almost classically. The note of babbling excess in Williams’s version might be intolerable, but, thanks to marvellous pacing, becomes wholly riveting. We’re watching three human monsters; this production locates them in a modern era where monstrosity is part of the style.

V. 

The pianist Stephen Kovacevich was eighty-five years old last week. Before his first appearance at the Wigmore Hall on Wednesday 22, he sent out the hall’s manager to explain that he, Kovecevich, had recently had an accident last week and would appear injured. Certianly he looked stiff and lame in walking on and offstage. 

But he no sooner sat at the piano than he played without hesitation, beginning with five Brahms fantasies and intermezzos from late in the composer’s life. After only a short pause offstage, he returned to play Beethoven’s sonata no 31. After the interval, he returned with the violinist Irène Duval to play Brahms’s violin sonata no 1. Next, he and his old colleague Martha Argerich, who is eighty-four and with whom he has a daughter, returned to play Debussy - the amazing “En blanc et noir” and then the classic Prélude a l’après-midi d’un faune”. When it came to an encore, he laughingly explained that he and Duval wanted to play just one passage of their Brahms again to get it right, remarking “She went to Edinburgh, I went to Glasgow”. He then started to play another piece, tries twice, but was dissatisfied with his own memory, and - again laughingly - dismissed his own efforts. 

Although it was wonderful to see the happiness that shared music-making gave to both Kovacevich and Argerich, and although it was marvellous to hear the Debussy, the evening’s most beautiful playing came from Kovacevich by himself before the interval, especially in the reflective, layered Brahms fantasies and intermezzos. In the Beethoven sonata, Kovacevich proved less personally intense and idiosyncratic than Mitsuko Uchida had been just the week before, but nonetheless revealed the piece with calm authority, letting its melodic lines sing firmly forth within complex textures.

@Alastair Macaulay 2025