From Resurrection to Pathétique
29 November – 5 December 2025
Saturday 29 November
To Baden Baden by train. After a string of mishaps, I reached Baden-Baden’s Festspielhaus — one of my least favourite concert halls — exactly as the doors were closing. Paavo Järvi led the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and the Zürcher Sing-Akademie in Mahler’s monumental Symphony No. 2, with Mari Eriksmoen and Anna Lucia Richter.
Järvi is a meticulous conductor, yet on this occasion his instincts tended toward a vertical, somewhat rigid approach, at least partially at the expense of a broader view that would allow the score’s dramatic arc to bloom. He stacked up beautiful tableaux, but they failed to cohere into a compelling whole. Combined with the hall’s coldness and a handful of orchestral lapses, the result kept me at a distance — with a few exceptions, such as the otherworldly depth of the choir’s basses.
Sunday 30 November
Back to Paris by train. At the Théâtre de l’Atelier, Pierre Guillois’s farce Bigre was back on stage more than ten years after its debut. Three cartoonish characters living in adjoining apartments careen through a series of madcap, absurd episodes. Visual gags pile up in a meticulously calibrated cascade of twists and mishaps.
Later, at the Philharmonie de Paris, I managed a quick visit to the exhibition Kandinsky: La Musique des couleurs before hearing the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra under Lahav Shani in Schumann’s Piano Concerto with the wonderful, and seemingly ageless, Martha Argerich followed by Brahms’s Symphony No. 2. The orchestra never quite rose to the metaphysical heights Argerich charted, but the Argentine pianist’s performance more than justified the price of admission.
Monday 1 December
Paris – At the Fondation Louis Vuitton, violinists Renaud Capuçon and Daniel Lozakovich offered an eclectic programme of works by Leclair, Prokofiev, Wieniawski, Bartók and Ysaÿe. The striking kinship between Capuçon’s Guarneri and Lozakovich’s Stradivarius created a shared radiance enhanced by the exceptional surroundings, with Olafur Eliasson’s hypnotic, yellow-bathed installation shimmering just outside the auditorium’s windows.
Friday 5 December
Paris – At the Maison de la Musique et de la Radio, Krzysztof Urbański led the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in a cleverly curated programme. Lutosławski’s rarely heard Little Suite intrigued with its Stravinskian inflections. Evgeny Kissin’s mesmerising, luminous reading of Scriabin’s Piano Concerto proved the evening’s apex, while Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 closed the concert with gusto, the audience predictably erupting into applause at the end of the third movement.
And so, for now, the lights dim… until the next act.