Violinists, and other players

I: Joshua Bell at the Wigmore Hall

February 2026 is by no means over but already it has been marvellous for solo violinists in London. Although in previous weeks I’ve praised the dazzling playing of Alena Baeva in Prokofiev’s second violin concerto (Philharmonia Orchestra, February 1), I omitted to mention the memorably incisive soloism of Josef Špaček in Martinů’s second violin concerto (London Philharmonic Orchestra, February 4). On Friday 13, the celebrity Joshua Bell performed three sonatas - Schubert (in A, D574), Grieg (no 3 in C minor, op.45), Prokofiev (no 2 in D (op. 94bis) - at the Wigmore Hall 

I must have been hearing and seeing Bell play for thirty years - though, alas, there have been gaps. I first saw him at the Edinburgh Festival at the Queen’s Hall - above all, in trios with the cellist Steven Isserlis. In my New York years, I remember him at the Mostly Mozart Festival, playing concerti by both Bach and Mozart. On Friday 13, he and pianist Alasdair Beatson played with ever rising levels of beauty, and refinement. The Schubert sonata has very exposed lines, in which Bell’s intonation sometimes sounded flat - and yet his playing was always so full of interest that it invariably transcended these moments. What’s more, his intonation sounded increasingly pure throughout the evening, with breathtakingly sure attack on several high lines. The Grieg sonata was intensely dramatic, the Prokofiev a marvel in its modernist-classical spectrum from virtuosity to elegantly lyrical spirituality. An incidental fascination of the programme was that its level, always high, rose as the music grew more modern.

Bell and Beatson first gave an adagio/allegro pair of encores - the Mélodie from Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir d’un lieu cher” (op. 42) followed by Wienawski’s Scherzo Tarantelle (op.16). They then returned with an arrangement of Chopin’s nocturne in C sharp minor. The whole evening abounded with the love of music.

II: The Concerto Italiano in Monteverdi.

On the evening of Valentine’s Day, the Concerto Italiano returned to the Wigmore Hall, often singing a capella, under the direction of the group’s founder, Rinaldo Alessandrini. Although the Concerto’s repertory covers more composers than one, my experience of it, starting in the 1990s, has only been of it in Monteverdi madrigals. Voices were never raised or strained: the exemplary marvel of the evening was how the audience was drawn into music that felt like a murmur. “Murmur” features in the opening phrase of the madrigal that most haunts me,  with ravishing words by Torquato Tasso: “Ecco mormorar l’onde”, with its sensually hushed account of nature - leaves, birds, sky, the horizon - at dawn.  

To spend an evening hanging on Monteverdi’s web of interlocking vocal lines is one of music’s peak experiences. He will suspend some vocal lines on single notes like gossamer, while making another voice gently dart up a scale; the interplay of rhythm, harmony, and melody is enchanting and profound.

III: Gianandrea Noseda and the London Symphony.

Gianandrea Noseda, principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra since the 2016-2017 season,  has returned to it for a number of concerts. On Sunday 15, it was impressive how much more variety and texture he elicited from his concert-opener, Stravinsky’s “Divertimento from ‘Le Baiser de la fée’”, than had Santtu-Mathias Rouvali with the Philharmonia Orchestra two weeks before. 

This “Divertimento” isn’t often heard in concert. At New York City Ballet, it’s familiar as accompaniment to George Balanchine’s 1972 haunting ballet of the same name - though it should be noted that Balanchine, while famous as a highly musical choreographer and longterm friend of Stravinsky, made very significant structural alterations to this score. I far prefer the music for the complete “Baiser de la fée” (just some fortyfive minutes long). but, although Frederick Ashton (1934), Balanchine (1937 and three subsequent other stagings), and Kenneth MacMillan (1960, with a revised staging in 1986) all tackled it, the only current production  of it I know is by Alexei Ratmansky (2017, excellently staged in 2024 for Dutch National Ballet).

The connection between Noseda and his London Symphony players is marvelously impressive. The Barbican Hall was packed (many Koreans) for the Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, whose account of Chopin’s second piano concerto was the evening’s centrepiece. The amalgam of speed and delicacy in Cho’s playing is a marvel: never showy, wonderfully subtle. 

Amid week of second concertos and second sonatas, Noseda ended with Borodin’s second symphony: a robust array of melodies and heroic energy. Although Borodin was working at the same time on his opera “Prince Igor”, he wrote to his wife “Anyhow, opera seems to me an unnatural thing… Besides I am by nature a lyricist and symphonist; I am attracted by the symphonic forms.” Yet the sound world of this symphony is not so far from that of “Prince Igor”: it has epic sweep, romantic fervour, exciting pageantry.

IV: The English National “Mahagonny”.

The English National Opera production of Kurt Weill’s “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”, which opened on Monday 16, has been greeted with admiration by several. The production is by Jamie Manton, the conducting by André de Ridder. There are ingredients to admire: Simon O’Neill’s singing of Jimmy sustains long, high lines with gleaming power; Rosie Aldridge brings fearless force to Widow Begbick. Danielle de Niese wields a microphone to help project Jenny’s famous numbers. Physically and dramatically, she’s a star with luscious vocal quality - but without much power or edge. 

Surely, though, “Mahagonny” belongs in a far smaller theatre? And in truth its nonstop account of cynicism, corruption, and decline is immediately wearying. CertainlI derive no pleasure from Weill’s music or Bertolt Brecht’s drama: I’m unlikely to try experiencing this work ever again.

V: Amplification and the National Theatre “Man and Boy”.

There are still a few theatres - the Haymarket Theatre Royal, the Orange Tree, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the Donmar Warehouse, and others - where amplification is avoided, but too few. At the National Theatre’s smallest auditorium, the Dorfman, Terence Rattigan’s “Man and Boy”, new in 1963 with Charles Boyer in the lead role, is played by a team of miked actors, all of whom could surely project their voices in this space without problem. Ben Daniels, playing Gregor Antonescu, is an experienced and versatile actor, in the very top rank of actors I esteem but seldom fully believe. Anthony Lau’s direction, unfortunately, has made Daniels more obviously artful (even Brechtian) than usual, emphasising gestural and vocal effects. 

I have no notion why this style is deemed suitable to “Man and Boy”. This - last staged in the West End in 2005 with David Suchet - is Rattigan’s darkest play, but far from his best. The play is set in 1934, with Antonescu at the nefarious heart of international capitalist plotting. The manipulative evil that he maintains until the play’s end may well make today’s audience think of Jeffrey Epstein. Yet only has Lau chosen the wrong performing style - everything says “Don’t believe this” - but Daniels is miscast: he lacks the massive authority this role requires. 

VI: Anne Sophie Mutter, fifty years on.

To return to violinists. Anne Sophie Mutter is celebrating her fiftieth anniversary of public performances, playing the Tchaikovsky violin concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Karina Canellakis: the tour - which will move on to Germany, Luxembourg, and Austria  - began on Wednesday 18 at the Festival Hall. The concerto was the centrepiece of an entirely lovable and excellent programme, that opened with Sibelius’s “Pohjola’s Daughter” (1906) and ended with Beethoven’s Seventh (1811-1812). In a speech before an encore, Mutter - stunning in a sleeveless figure-hugging sky-blue dress, hair falling over her bare shoulders - praised both the orchestra (singling out its wind players for their playing in the concerto) and the transcendent power of music to produce beauty and emotion amid times that are otherwise dark and troubling. She then played a tango romance by her second husband, the late André Previn.

Her playing of the Tchaikovsky concerto was the stuff of superlatives. Not only did it surpass all other accounts of this music I’ve heard (I’ve been listening to it since 1971) but also any other playing I’ve heard of any instrument in any concerto. Every note she played, no matter how high and quiet, gleamed with honey; every phrase, no matter how fast or brilliant, was newly considered and nuanced. None of it was cerebral; all of it was affectionate. At every point, even when vehement and biting, Mutter’s playing was also tender. How she has reached a fiftieth anniversary in such marvellous form is cause for wonder.

@Alastair Macaulay

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