From Monteverdi to Rossini and Mahler
From Monteverdi to Rossini and Mahler
<Slipped Disc, September 18>
You thought that the end of the Proms season might bring less music to London? No way.
I: Mahler’s Ninth at the Proms, Friday 10th September
My last Albert Hall prom this year – the 2026 season’s penultimate evening – was the Mahler Academy Orchestra playing Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. This orchestra has been established to re-create and investigate the instrumental and orchestral sound of Mahler’s own time. Conductor Philippe von Steinaecker has trained his players also to show a full grasp of Mahler style. Portamenti are strong, rubato is audacious. For some devotees of Mahler music, this is heady stuff; but I’ve long remembered how the critic Andrew Porter wrote in 1980 of how the Mahler playing of his youth had made greater impact when older conductors had played his music with the kind of portamento and rubato that had subsequently become outmoded. (Porter had that kind of ear and pen for detail. He once wrote about Nellie Melba’s portamento phrasing of three notes – serious slurring – in the Germont duet in La Traviata in a way that made me pay new attention to that aspect of Melba’s recording. I have missed her phrasing – which shows why Verdi marked his music that way – in all subsequent performances.) I wish Porter, who died in 2014, had lived to hear the Mahler Academy Orchestra and Von Steinaecker; I hope I myself live to hear them in all Mahler’s music.
Mahler’s Ninth symphony is a ne plus ultra of Mahler’s sound and thought, an extreme meeting of Romanticism and modernism on the precipice. Friday’s was a superlative account. (Too bad that the final spell of its conclusion was immediately spoilt by a too-loud ‘Bravo’ from one eager member of the audience.)
II: Vikingur Ólafsson at the Wigmore Hall, Saturday 12th September
The Icelandic pianist Vikingur Ólafsson is already the centre of a cult: his three performances of the same programme at the Wigmore Hall were all sold out. He doesn’t behave as if he knows he is the object of a cult, but he does play the five pieces of this programme in a single bloc: Bach (Prelude in E, BWV 854, from The Well-Tempered Clavier), Beethoven (Piano Sonata no 27 in E minor op.90), Bach (Partita no 6 in E minor, BWV830), Schubert (Piano sonata in E minor, D566), and Beethoven (Piano Sonata no 30, op.109). (They’re all related in key. His point is to suggest links of spirit and inspiration.) His only pauses are between musical movements.
Ólafsson’s a complete master, with the coolest kind of authority. He’s so absorbed by his music that his head bows low over the keys until his forelock comes cross to brushing them.
III: Pomo d’Oro at the Wigmore Hall, Sunday 13th September
We live in a marvellous era for Monteverdi performance: how strange to think of the past centuries in which his music was unknown. The Italian ensemble Pomo d’Oro is the third Italian period-instrument group I’ve heard bring Monteverdi to Britain this year. As seen on Sunday 13, Pomo D’Oro (which returns to the Wigmore Hall for a residency later this year, giving two concerts) consists of five players, while the Pomo d’Oro choir has two sopranos; one female alto; three tenors; two basses. The vocal sound is both bright and mellow. It’s a keen pleasure to feel and observe how well these artists truly listen to one another.
This concert focused on his religious music, along the lines of Dixit Dominus, Confitebor Tobi, Domine , “Salve Regina”, and Magnificat. It also included items of Gregorian chant and by Monteverdi’s contemporaries Dario Castello and Francesco Turini. The polyphony of the Reniassance – bordering on the Baroque – becomes expressively rich and complex: the spiritual life takes on new subtleties – old subtleties that here become new.
IV: Alice Coote at the Wigmore Hall
The mezzo-soprano Alice Coote has been part of British musical life all this century – I’ve also seen her as Hänsel at the Met – and yet I’ve seen too little of her. She’s an admirable mix of intelligence and feeling: one doesn’t doubt her thoughtfulness, but she brings enough impulsiveness to her singing to prevent her singing from seeming calculated.
At Monday’s lunchtime concert – in increasingly better voice – she sang seven Tchaikovsky songs and the five Mahler Rückert lieder before bringing matters to a close with one more Tchaikovsky and one more Mahler. All these songs came from the same forty-six years, 1855-1901, and most of them from the twenty-one years 1880-1901.
On this evidence, Tchaikovsky’s way with poetry is to release it in expansive melody; Mahler’s way is to distil it into melodious inwardness. At this performance, Coote was in admirable voice. She’s right for both composers: she has expansiveness and inwardness.
V: Paul Lewis at the Wigmore Hall
Originally, Monday 14th September evening at the Wigmore Hall was to have brought tenor Allan Clayton singing Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin with pianist Paul Lewis – a sequel to their rendition, earlier this year, of Schubert’s Winterreise. Clayton, however, became indisposed; so, instead, Lewis alone gave a recital of Mozart, Schubert, Poulenc, and more Mozart.
As always, Lewis was at his greatest in Schubert – three Klavierstücke D.946. Mozart is his element, too, but in the opening Sonata no 30 K.330 he was not at his most lucid. His nine Poulenc improvisations – new to many of us – were entirely fascinating: vivacious, sophisticated, and yet classical, without any of the consciously clever neoclassicism of the 1920s. (The improvisation no 15 was a homage to Édith Piaf.) And his encore, Schubert’s Allegretto in C minor D915, was calmly profound, a firm statement of line, pattern, and thought. There are musicians who seem to have the hotline to certain composers: that’s how it always feels between Lewis and Schubert.
VI: Alcina at the Royal Opera Covent Garden
Handel’s range in opera keeps becoming increasingly apparent with the wealth of his operas enriching today’s repertory, but I’m inclined to agree with the Ariosto specialist (and dance critic) Zoë Anderson that his best operas are the three to stories taken from Ariosto’s chivalric romance Orlando Furioso (1516-1532) – the operas Orlando (1733), Ariodante and Alcina (both 1735). The frequent changes of heart, the elements of fantasy and chivalry, in Ariosto’s narrative all bring out the best in Handel’s conception of opera seria. Certainly it’s good now to see a revival of Richard Jones’s Alcina on the main stage at Covent Garden within months of Jetske Mijnssen’s new production of Ariodante there. David Bates, conducting, helps all the music breathe and dance.
But here’s my main cavil. Ariodante, Alcina and the 1734 Il Pastor Fido represent an absolute peak of opera-ballet composition, with Handel at Covent Garden composing for ballerina-choreographer Marie Sallé some of the greatest of all theatrical dance music – making London the opera-ballet equal of the Paris Opera of his contemporary Rameau – and yet Oliver Mears, who purports to be championing Handel’s Covent Garden operas by presenting them all, is deliberately omitting most of their dances. (Sallé, a muse to both Handel and Rameau who had already spent music of her career in London as well as Paris, is one of the most fascinating figures in the theatre arts of the eighteenth century.) The opera house company’s new name “Royal Ballet and Opera” has always been a sham, a way of paying token honour to the dull but hard-working ballet company for its help with the adventurous opera company’s finances; and here is clear evidence that, when it comes to honouring superb ballet music written for Covent Garden, Oliver Mears and colleagues just aren’t interested. (The choreographer Paul Taylor’s classic Airs (1978), to ballet music from Alcina and Ariodante, used to be danced by Ballet Rambert and is still danced by Taylor’s company.) It is not unreasonable to hope that Covent Garden should honour Handel by staging his ballet music – his British ballet music – in ways that showed it in its something like original narrative context. (Sarah Fahie has staged some dances in this Alcina, with eleven dancers, but not using the opera’s dance music.)
To audiences in 2026 recently reacquainted with The Odyssey by the Nolan movie, the enchantress Alcina looks very much a Circe figure, an enchantress with her own island who transforms men into animals. And she takes Ruggiero – Odysseus – as her lover: something Nolan is too prim to include on screen. And Ruggiero’s wife Bradamante adopts male disguise, becoming “Ricciardo”, as whom he attracts Alcina’s sister Morgana and pretends to woo Alcina herself: one of baroque opera’s more wondrous gender-bender twists.
Richard Jones’s production is more lightweight than Handel or Ariosto – Alcina casts magic by squiring her high-fashion Alcina perfume – but all its original musical virtues are confirmed and increased by this 2026 revival: notably the performances of Lisette Oropesa as Alcina, Emily D’Angelo as Ruggiero, Mary Bevan as Morgana. Meanwhile the role of Bradamante is now taken by Beth Taylor (who in 2022 was the outstanding component of Glyndebourne’s new production of the same opera). This is Taylor’s Covent Garden debut: the dark power of her voice and her multifaceted expressiveness make a great and welcome impression.
Both soprano Oropesa and director Jones are better suited to Handel’s Alcina than they were to Bellini’s I Puritani this summer. Isn’t this odd? Bellini’s I Puritani has a Romanticism that long inspired Wagner and other nineteenth-century composers, and an inner musical sweep that helped to make the young Maria Callas an epoch-making artist in 1949, yet Oropesa sounded more inhibited by it than she did in Alcina. She just hasn’t the open-hearted sweep for Bellini’s greatest moments, whereas something about Alcina’s artfulness suits her to a T. Jones, a great director in some material, is uncharacteristically frivolous in Alcina, but that is less troublesome than the clumsiness with which he resisted Bellini’s grace.
The time will surely come when I will have had enough of Emily D’Angelo in baroque trouser roles – the Alcina role of Ruggiero is the fourth in four years – but so far I love even her limitations (her vibrato and her vowels). She’s forthright, brave, emotionally transparent. As Morgana (whose aria “Tornami a vagheggiar” is well known), Mary Bevan has charm, skill, and energy, though I wish Jones made her role less of an entertaining caricature. The tenor Ru Charlesworth, an increasingly remarkable stage performer and vocalist, does wonders with the role of Oronte. Only the quavery voice of bass Edward Grint lets the side down as Atlante.
VII : Don Giovanni at the Royal Opera Covent Garden
Certain artists produce great pairs of contrasting works. Are you a Hamlet person or a King Lear one? Do you find War and Peace greater than Anna Karenina? The choice between Mozart’s Figaro’s Wedding and his Don Giovanni is especially divisive. For some people, Figaro succeeds better than any other work of art in creating a real world, while for others Don Giovanni adds all the elements of extreme emotion and the idea of hell that makes its world uniquely thrilling. Just to consider how Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Mozart may have had room for such contrasting pairs of works greatly enlarges our ideas of their capacity for expression.
A problem for many of us, however, is that – while Figaroseldom fails in the theatre – Don Giovanni seldom works as stage drama. (Directors tend to be over-ambitious with it. And the mixture of comedy and tragedy is problematic in any treatment of the Don Juan legend. It is especially hard to weigh the many sins of Juan/Giovanni against the women he has seduced against his single but heinous sin of murdering the Commendatore.)
I, new to Kasper Holten’s 2014 production, find myself torn. Es Devlin’s set and Luke Halls’s video are excessive (as projected, the catalogue of the names of Giovanni’s female conquests keeps taking over the décor); but the idea that the stage world gradually becomes a ghost town is compelling. (Giovanni himself haunts Donna Anna and Donna Elvira in their private soliloquies – while the veiled ghosts of the many women in his past keep taking over the stage action.) I also like the way Giovanni just stands and waits while some women come to him; but I don’t like the way his mega-seductiveness is often presented as a worse crime than his having murdered the Commendatore. This production is an absorbing mess.
Of the many I have seen, it’s the only one to omit Mozart’s finale, ending the drama with Giovanni’s final “No!” cry of defiance: a practice that is thought to have begun with Mozart himself and to have continued throughout the nineteenth century. None of this “solves” this opera, but it often enough shows why this opera gets deep under the skin.
Conductor Stefano Montanari takes the music at one hell of a lick: this works remarkably well. (An irritant, however, is the irksomely flamboyant self-advertisement of the harpsichord continuo.) Canadian baritone Gordon Bintner has the looks and vocal suavity to succeed as Giovanni, but he is sometimes underpowered. The brightest and most glamorous performance comes from Aigul Akhmetshina as Donna Elvira: since she’s a mezzosoprano, the music places pressure on the top of her voice, but this, like the role’s whole wild desperation, gives her just the challenge this artist needs right now. Whereas she was in danger of becoming generalised in her physical and vocal effects, here she’s vividly in focus throughout. Her only obvious shortcoming is her avoidance of appoggiature, a stylistic virtue observed by her colleagues.
Giulia Semenzato is a pretty, easily charming Zerlina. Dingle Yandell has presence and heft as Masetto. Andreas Bauer Kanabas brings eloquence without stentorian power to the role of the Commendatore. Roberto Taglavini is just another Leporello, with murky vowels. Rachel Willis-Sorensen sings Donna Anna with the kind of intrusively fast vibrato that spoils Mozart’s line. The Ukrainian tenor Bogdan Volkov, on the baritonal side, has the technique for Don Ottavio’s music but not the spirit. Yet the sum is greater than the parts. It is a tribute to Covent Garden that these singers, of multiple nationalities, all meld together in ensembles. They make the best case that the production should have included Mozart’s original finale.
VIII: The Anatomy of Melancholy in The Pit
It was a brilliant idea on the part of director Emma Doherty to create an intelligently analytical theatre show – An Anatomy of Melancholy, new in 2022 – from the connections between the melancholy music of John Dowland (c.1563-1626) and the book The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by writer Robert Burton (1577-1640). It is a chamber production: Doherty makes its mood quietly scientific, with the audience on four sides. At the centre are singer Iestyn Davies and lutanist Mónica Pustilnik. A taped voice provides a commentary on the various concepts of melancholy: what Freud says about it, what sociologists and medical scientists have found about it, and more. Since I missed the original 2022 production, I am glad to have a chance to visit it now.
My problem – which it seems I share with few – is with Davies, whose diction is limited even in this small space. Would that there were surtitles. As sung by him, one of the few sentences I did understand went “In duhkness let me lehve Till in døth I luy”, but there were many where I just drew a blank. Dowland’s music is wonderfully atmospheric, well suited to this production; but Dowland was interested in verbal communication. Davies is not.
IX. Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle at Alexandra Palace Theatre
If AI doesn’t take over the world, then period instruments will. After seven days in which I had heard music by Monteverdi, Dowland, and Mahler played by instruments known to those composers, I then spent the evening of Friday 18th September at a performance of Rossini’s last major work, the Petite Messe Solennelle, in its orchestral version, first performed in 1869, three months after his death. You can get lost in the arguments about Rossini’s diverse versions of this score, but conductor Jakob Lehmann has not only employed the four-string double basses that, though novel at the time, Rossini specifically requested, he is also schooled the choir in massive portamenti. In the mass’s Sanctus, the choir sings the words “excelsis” and “benedictus” with the kinds of slow-descending slides that are rare in individual singers but far rarer in choral forces: a thrill. “Historically informed” sounds pedantic as a term; Lehmann makes history live and breathe.
As when Lehmann conducted Rossini in concert (Ermioneexcerpts and Stabat Mater) at the Cadogan Hall last year, his international choice of vocal soloists for this Rossini was fascinating, especially with the three younger ones – the British soprano Robyn Allegra Parton, the American mezzo-soprano Natalie Lewis, and the Czech tenor Petr Nekoranec, each of whom revealed different virtues of line and tone as they proceeded.
The Petite Messe Solennelle was not petite even in Rossini’s chamber version; he, after decades of concentrating on inventive musical miniatures (Péchés de ma vieillesse, Sins of my old age), called this Mass his old age’s final sin. I think it lapses into triteness at the end of its long Credo section; but otherwise it is a triumph. Rossini, in his old age, was bringing new musical sophistication to the Italian tradition.
And even more sophistication to religious expression. When you consider how Christian ways of addressing God in music, often with the same words, had been transformed in thought and feeling in just over two centuries from Monteverdi to Rossini, you find impressive evidence that human nature itself had changed.
@Alastair Macaulay 2026