Wigmore Hall recitals; “The Rivals” at the Orange Tree; “La Traviata” at Covent Garden

The Wigmore Hall has begun the New Year most impressively. The young pianist Mao Fujita, who is twenty-seven but looks twelve, played like a Titan, driven and visionary, in a tremendous programme on Friday 2. The far more experienced pianist Kirill Gerstein played on Wednesday 7 with no less purposefulness and mastery. On Saturday 3, the tenor Cyrille Dubois and pianist Tristan Raës had presented a selection of French songs with perfect style (if not always immaculate preparation – Dubois, who sang while following musical scores, had to stop one item because he had not found the right song, while Raës, later, had to nip offstage to find the right score for another song). On Tuesday 6, Christopher Maltman and Graham Johnson delivered an unusual selection of Schubert lieder – often Greek-mythological, often narrative, largely death-lorn, never jolly, sometimes ecstatic.

Although all of the artists are known recording artists, none of them is a frequent fixture in the London recital scene. (Maltman is now so well known in opera – he’s Wotan in the currently-unfolding Covent Garden “Ring” cycle – that it’s startling to be reminded that in 1997, he won the Lieder Prize at the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition.)

And all their programmes were mind-expanding. Dubois wasn’t just singing Fauré and Duparc and Reynaldo Hahn, he was singing mélodies by César Franck, Gabriel Dupont, and Louis Beydts. Listening, you learnt about the high standards of French composition in the late nineteenth century. (How many of us know the work of Gabriel Dupont? It’s really good.) Mao Fujita played Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Brahms, but he also included rarities by Wagner (“In das Album Fürstin Metternich”) and Berg (“12 Variations on an Original Theme”). Maltman opened his Schubert recital with the seldom-heard and lengthy “Die Bürgschaft” (D246); nor was that sole little-known item of this Schubert recital.

I. Mao Fujita

Mao Fujita (January 2) looks so innocent but plays with such wisdom. And such impetus! He played the Beethoven, Wagner, Berg, and Mendelssohn numbers with scarcely a pause for applause after each one – none at all between the Wagner and the Berg. The Mendelssohn, Berg, and Brahms all used the variations-on-a-theme format: in Fujita’s playing, you could feel the alchemist’s fascination with showing how the same material is successively transformed.

He’s a passionate player, always inflecting his gifts of terrific speed with dynamic subtleties. The greatest knockout of his concert was Wagner’s “Tristan” Liebestodas arranged by Liszt: here were rapture and virtuosity, fused on a sublime level.

II. Cyrille Dubois

Cyrille Dubois (January 2), a happy performer, likes to talk to his audiences, with charm and good humour. The trouble is that, at the Wigmore Hall, only a minority of his audience can hear what he’s saying: his speaking voice is light, conversational, but indistinct. When he sings, things are different. His high tenor places every syllable without ever compromising its purity.

Still, he’s a singer with good diction from whom you nonetheless could not reliably take dictation: he always makes precisely the right sound, without planting words in your mind by way of communication. Since many of his songs are to poems by France’s greatest poets (de Musset, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud), this is a matter of consequence.

Dubois’s manner is so amiable, even sweet, that it’s easy not to spot the rigour of his style. As he sings them, most of these songs are remarkably high; his tenor voice plucks lines from the air – and sustains them in the air like gossamer – with gentle firmness. It’s wonderful to hear so high a tenor place these songs with such gentle firmness. I’m haunted now by his account of Duparc’s painfully elegiac “Soupir”, a quietly intense account of longing in anguish. He and Duparc softly sculpted the opening lines – “Ne jamais la voir ni l’entendre…..” – in an arching bitter-sweetness that has branded me.

III. Christopher Maltman

Christopher Maltman, entirely different, is a baritone for whom German is not his first language but who enounces German with such lucidity that you really could take dictation from him. And many of the Schubert songs he sings are to poems by Goethe and Schiller: Maltman truly communicates these poems to his audience. He can shape a poem from quiet to loud – the start of “Der Zwerg” was hushed, as if spectral, from which the dramatic emotions then arise with terrific power.

Even so, Schubert seems to have been expecting a bel canto quality of vocal “ping” in his songs: which Maltman seldom now possesses. You never doubt his intelligence or his involvement – but his voice keeps changing focus without often finding ideally placed tone.

IV. Kirill Gerstein

If you wanted Brahms played with greater darkness than Mao Fujita had managed, Kirill Gerstein showed how on January 7. But his programme also connected Brahms to Liszt. The first half of Gerstein’s programme had been Liszt at his most visionary – the three Petrarch sonnets S 158 and the “Dante” sonata S 161 – with Gerstein catching all Liszt’s spiritual drama. Then, to hear Brahms in this context was to fee how, taking much of Liszt’s sound world and Romantic intensity, Brahms imposed his own new classicism on them. Gerstein played the Scherzo in E flat minor op. 4 and Piano Sonata no 3 in F minor op. 5: Brahms around age twenty.

All this music was intense. Yet, with no apparent change of gear, Gerstein lightened up for his encores: Schumann (“Blumenstück” op.19) and Chopin (Waltz in A flat op.42 – at a breathtaking lick). A concert that opened whole windows on nineteenth century Romanticism.

V. The Rivals

“The Rivals” (1775) is one of the classics of eighteenth-century English drama: Mrs Malaprop and her malapropisms are just some of the reasons why it’s a continuing part of our currency today. But the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, has decided it needs help. Artistic director Tom Littler has updated it to the 1920s, has changed lines throughout the play. (Lucius O’Trigger becomes an American.) For the audience it’s confusing: what was written when?

I caught a performance shortly before Christmas. Robert Bathurst was entirely admirable as Sir Anthony Absolute (a part that I, as a child, saw Ralph Richardson play), elegantly and authoritatively catching both the affection and the interference of a concerned father – the cast’s most stylish performance. Patricia Hodge, though not always at ease, was a Mrs Malaprop of nicely judged absurdity.

The production, which continues to January 24, has panache and humour, but seldom takes off, because it’s trying to ride two horses (1775 and 1920s) at the same time. The intimacy of the Orange Tree is actually an ideal space for pre-Victorian plays: expressions that might challenge audiences in larger auditoria work at close quarters when we see actors who are at home with them.

VI. La Traviata

“La Traviata” is an opera I first saw at Covent Garden in 1974, which I have enjoyed many times, but which in recent years has often become problematic for me. Amid the many operas that focus on the suffering of their heroines, this opera seems especially intent to show the humiliation of this heroine, a humiliation to which she accedes, to pay for the sins of the male sex. But some Violettas seem less masochistic than others.

The Royal Opera has yet again revived Richard Eyre’s 1994 “Traviata” production, which has now been a part of Covent Garden repertory much longer than its two postwar predecessors. (Tyrone Guthrie’s, new in 1948, lasted till 1965. Luchino Visconti’s 1967 one lasted only till 1986.) I’ve no objection to productions that are more than twenty years old, but Bob Crowley’s sets for Eyre’s have always been made its action uncomfortably constricted. Act Two Scene Two – Flora’s party – is especially awkward, so that such basic matters as the entrances of central characters cannot be effective.

The current revival, conducted by Antonello Manacorda, features Ermonela Jaho as Violetta. In the programme, she tells that she has sung the role more than three hundred times. On Thursday, I found myself wishing I had caught her some time before Performance No 250. Her singing of most of the music is thoroughly tremulous – although, when she floats long lines for certain big sequences, it emerges that her unattractive vibrato elsewhere has been a matter of choice. Her diction is peculiar – her Es and Os are thoroughly odd – especially when you hear the beautifully idiomatic utterance of the tenor Giovanni Sala as Alfredo and the baritone Aleksei Isaev as his father Germont.

A peculiar feature of this revival is that, when Violetta asks Germont to embrace her as a daughter, he pointedly doesn’t. Meanwhile – this is Verdi’s fault, but Jaho emphasised its masochism – Violetta keeps repeating (in the words of the supertitles) “Someone must tell him how much I suffered” – a line that should feature large in the Little Book of Passive Aggression. Jaho’s way of indicating that Violetta is consumptive is weirdly inconsistent: quite energetic in bed when trying to get her maid’s attention, then ending the aria “Addio del passato” with a prolonged display of loudly stertorous breathing.

@Alastair Macaulay, 2026