Fidelio
Barbican, London EC2
The Marriage of Figaro
Glyndebourne, E. Sussex
Xenakis: Architect in Sound
South Bank, London SE1
If there's one thing old conductors don't do, it's fade away. All those years of taking so much exercise - conducting any concert or opera being the equivalent of a half-marathon - see most baton-wavers live to a ripe old age, improving, like fine wine.
In recent years we have celebrated the 75th birthdays of Bernard Haitink and Sir Colin Davis, who both seized the chance to demonstrate that they are still at the height of their powers. As indeed is their senior, Sir Charles Mackerras, 80 next month, who launched his own prolonged anniversary celebrations with an opera of his choosing, Fidelio, in an uplifting concert performance at the Barbican.
Mackerras has reached the point in his career where he can conduct whatever he fancies, and Beethoven's noble masterpiece proved an inspired choice, combining the three hallmarks of Mackerras's musicianship: scholarly refinement, inventiveness and dramatic flair.
Less flashy or indeed glamorous than other conductors, not known for his attachment to any particular orchestra or opera house, Mackerras has a much wider range than most, being equally at home in Mozart and Sullivan, Handel and Britten, Purcell and Janacek, whose operas he has almost single-handedly established in the mainstream repertoire. A lesser outfit like the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, moreover, becomes a class act under his leadership.
It is also typical of Mackerras's boldness to surprise us by including during the second-act transition the third of the three Leonore overtures, which he found in the Prague score of the opera dating from the 1814 performances conducted by Weber. More than merely a dazzling orchestral showpiece, the passage sums up (in Mackerras's own words) the opera's 'dramatic core of oppression, hope and joyous deliverance'.
With a Leonore of the stature of the magnificent Christine Brewer, and ideal younger casting in Lisa Milne (Marzelline) and Timothy Robinson (Jaquino), it was soon clear that this would prove a memorable evening. Peter Rose made a fine Rocco, and Terje Stensvold a powerful Pizarro. After some awkward early moments, Thomas Moser sang the great love duet with Brewer as affectingly as it deserves. If Mackerras's birthday party is to last as long as those of Davis and Haitink - best part of a year, in each case - we should be in for many more such treats.
The Marriage of Figaro is another work rethought by Mackerras in the 1970s, when his revisionist approach for English National Opera gave this timeless masterpiece an unlikely new lease of life. At Glyndebourne, in a version of Graham Vick's 2000 production recast for touring, the young Viennese conductor Thomas Rösner started at an unsustainable lick, but soon settled into a sprightly, elegant trot.
The adjustable see-through panels that dictate Jacopo Spirei's revival of Vick's staging seem less effective, more irritating than first time around; occasionally it is handy to see what is going on in the next room, but the resulting need to keep the stage peopled more often leads to irksome distractions.
But this touring version is wonderfully cast and sung, with an outstanding Susanna in Anna Maria Panzarella - a French soprano of Italian parentage - and a dignified young Countess in our own Kate Royal. Her equally young and dashing Count, Jeremy Carpenter, grows into the role after a muted start, while Iain Paterson's Figaro commands the stage from his first few eloquent notes.
If Lynton Black's Bartolo hams it up a bit, Anne Mason makes a handsome Marcellina and Harry Nicoll a traditionally camp Basilio. Only Christopher Adams's inadequate Antonio lets down the fine ensemble at the heart of a work requiring as much teamwork as solo virtuosity. This is a Figaro well worth catching as it visits a theatre near you.
Those in despair at the state of modern music will have been heartened, and perhaps a bit surprised, by the huge turnout last weekend for the South Bank's three-day festival in honour of Iannis Xenakis, the radical Greek composer who died in 2001.
A Greek born in Romania, who spent much of his life in Paris, Xenakis was a freedom fighter against the Nazis who lost an eye and half his face to his British liberators. After fleeing to Paris he became an architectural engineer under Le Corbusier. Only when they fell out (over the attribution of Le Couvent de La Tourette) did Xenakis switch his allegiance to Messiaen, applying much the same principles to writing music as he had to designing buildings.
'Music is number made audible' runs the Pythagorean theorem of which Xenakis is the prime modern exponent. He was the first, for instance, to compose on a computer, the resulting ST/10 among six works performed by the London Sinfonietta under Diego Masson. The evening displayed Xenakis's remarkable if mechanistic range, from exotic Elisabeth Chojnacka shining in a rare contemporary work for harpsichord, Al'Ile de Gorée, to pianist Nicolas Hodges's impossible virtuosity in Eonta - a piece played by Roger Woodward in Mark Kidel's 1991 BBC film about Xenakis, Something Rich and Strange, which put some engaging human flesh on these abstract musical bones.
The seething mass of youngish fans overflowing both film and concerts clearly regard him as a seer whose work goes almost beyond music, by venturing mathematical certainties about his chosen interests in the uncertain world around us, from birdsong to political prisoners.
The energy and expertise required of his players, the manic contortions involved in converting maths into music, make Xenakis a visionary composer whose voice will never date, and will always remain distinctively individual. For some his work may not be music; for many it is what music should strive to become. Myself, I'll stick to Mozart.
