In we go, through the gaping jaws of hell into an apocalypse of eternal damnation straight out of medieval imagery. Nothing is comfortable in the Royal Opera’s staging of Il Trovatore. That front curtain hell-mouth acts as a grim, faintly comic warning: Adele Thomas’s 2023 production, back for the first time (revival director Simon Iorio), exposes Verdi’s 1853 opera in all its anarchy. Naturalism, doubtful anyway with a plot that includes sinister curses and a mother mistakenly throwing her baby on the fire, is out. Beneath the convention of set-piece choruses and magnificent coloratura arias, transgression holds sway. In Annemarie Woods’s designs, the 15th-century Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch provides a touchstone. No surprise to see humans in animal skulls, cavorting and thwacking to that famous, harmonically slithering melody we call the Anvil chorus (Coro di Zingari). Horned goblins pop through trap doors, squirming up and down the stairs, which, fixed within three large frames, fill an otherwise empty stage. Chorus and cast (choreography by Emma Woods) must deliver every detail of the story in sharp focus.
On first night, momentum was elusive initially, the conductor Giacomo Sagripanti pausing for applause that might not automatically have come, and with some dropped stitches in ensemble between stage and pit. Once Agnieszka Rehlis appeared, as the vengeful Azucena, the pace quickened, uncertainty receded. The Polish mezzo soprano, fearless in urgency and despair, held histrionics in tight rein (a contrast to Jamie Barton’s no-holds-barred Azucena in 2023, equally compelling but different). As Count di Luna, the Russian baritone Aleksei Isaev, sometimes overshadowed in ensembles, shone in his big aria “Il balen”, in which Luna’s thwarted love for the noble Leonora shows Verdi at his most compassionate. The American soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen was rich-toned and assured in negotiating the taxing range, vocally and emotionally, of Leonora, in love with the troubadour-rebel of the title, Manrico. The star American tenor Michael Fabiano excels in this Italian repertoire, silky toned and ardent. Manrico’s battle cry aria “Di quella pira”, full of high-note risk, had exciting, pulsating energy, in the orchestra, too. His final duet with Azucena was lyrical and intense. This is brave and powerful theatre, easy neither for performers or audience. It leaves you rattled: surely what Verdi wanted.
The BBC Symphony Orchestra’s latest all-day Total Immersion, called Symphonic Electronics, was an exploration of music using electronics old and new, with a glimpse at an AI future. Since the greatest work featured, Tristan Murail’s “spectral” classic Gondwana (1980), is for large orchestra with no electronics, there’s a challenge in summing up the porous boundaries of this extravaganza. A UK premiere by Steven Daverson (b 1985), Figures Outside a Dacha, with Snowfall, and an Abbey in the Background, used live electronics to pay homage to the film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky.
Daverson’s inspiration was the final shot of Tarkovsky’s 1983 film Nostalgia, which shows a man, a dog, a pool, an abbey, then snow starts falling. It would not be true to say this was immediately clear on listening, though the spatial effects of synthesised bells, mournful brass refrains and amplified saxophone, guitar and other instruments created a haunting, slow-moving avalanche of sound. The other premiere, Bab-Khaneh: Gatehouse of Memory, was a BBC commission by the British-Iranian composer Shiva Feshareki (b 1987). Its starting point was the Barbican itself: a sonic survey of the building’s acoustics and design. At the same time, her piece required a complete reinvention of the hall’s natural sound through the positioning of an orchestra of loudspeakers – her words – to make a 360-degree surround sound system.
Positioned behind her turntable deck, she plays the hall as an instrument, “sculpting my spatial turntable performance” live in the moment. The BBC Symphony Orchestra played mainly sustained, slow notes, which may have tested their patience. Whether you respond to boulders of sound blasting around the hall at high volume, with a lighting design in winking colours, now like glow-worms, now orbs, now searchlights, is a matter of sensory resilience. I was ready to apologise to the friend I persuaded to go – 50 minutes begins to feel epic, in any medium, even Mahler – but they loved the whole thing. It certainly acts as a “web of memory”, as Feshareki intends. Out of the electroacoustic edifices, songs flickered to the fore, evocative shreds of aural balm: from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Paul McCartney and Wings’s My Love, Foreigner’s 80s hit Waiting for a Girl Like You and the Iranian song Gole Sangam. Listen out for the broadcast on a future edition of Radio 3’s New Music Show. A mono smart speaker may not have the same effect as the entire, multi-channelled Barbican hall, but there’s time to re-rig your house in preparation.
On a small scale, in overlapping spectral territory, I must mention the newish, six-strong ensemble Mad Song, who gave an enterprising programme at the October Gallery: two premieres – by Thomas Metcalf (b 1996) and Jean-Louis Agobet (b 1968) – and two 20th-century works, by Elliott Carter and Gérard Grisey. Metcalf’s Photogenia looks back to a photographic process pioneered by William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830s: delicate whirrings and tappings fade or grow like Talbot’s ghostly silhouettes on light-sensitive paper. To say it left an impression is not intended as clever wordplay: it did. These expert young players deserve to reach a wider audience.
The 50th anniversary of the death of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) is in spate, as demonstrated by cycles of his 15 string quartets, at Milton Court and Wigmore Hall, running in near parallel. In the second of the Jersualem Quartet’s Wigmore series (they return in June), the group played the fourth, fifth and sixth quartets. The cellist’s twice-broken string notwithstanding, these were brilliantly detailed performances, at once acidic and melancholy. Founded in 1993, the ensemble is characterised by a viola player capable, in resonance and volume, of creating a true bridge between the two violins and the cello. Ori Kam plays a modern instrument by the famed American maker Hiroshi Iizuka. Kam has likened its response to putting your foot down on a Maserati. I wouldn’t know, but I’ve never heard anything quite like it.
Star ratings (out of five)
Il Trovatore ★★★
Total Immersion: Symphonic Electronics ★★★
Mad Song ★★★★
Jerusalem Quartet ★★★★
• Il Trovatore is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 19 July
