Stages of Transfiguration
28 March – 3 April 2026
Saturday 28 March
London, Royal Ballet and Opera • Barrie Kosky’s take on Siegfried relied on a series of sophisticated visuals which drew me in from the get-go. It offered an apt setting for a musically sumptuous performance, led with zest and gusto by Antonio Pappano, and served by a cast attentive to the overall balance of the drama. Having sadly been unable to attend Kosky’s Die Walküre, I found myself looking forward to presentations of the full cycle, hopefully in the near future.
Sunday 29 March
London, Charing Cross Theatre • There are musicals which don’t sound very promising on paper but still grab the audience by the throat thanks to the sharpness of their writing. No such luck for A Mirrored Monet, which proved about as unexciting on stage as its “pitch” had implied. The flat, narrative book didn’t unearth striking dramatic hooks in the life of the French painter Claude Monet and was dragged down by a generic, charmless score. The only redeeming grace of the performance lay in its deft visual design, providing a convincing demonstration of what technology can bring to theatrical design.
Back to Paris by train
Tuesday 31 March
Paris, Théâtre de l’Athénée • This French-language production of No, No, Nanette, served by a winning cast, proved joyous and effusive beyond expectations. The orchestrations — the collective work of six people, if the programme is to be trusted — filled the auditorium with toe-tapping, jazz-infused effervescence, perfectly executed by the orchestra Les Frivolités parisiennes. Christophe Mirambeau’s French-language adaptation demonstrated a fine-tuned sensitivity to the fascinating art of lyric-writing, while the set design proved versatile if a little abstract. The direction was a little “semaphoric” to my taste, but the overall experience drew me into a mood of bubbly, sunny, jolly abandon.
Wednesday 1 April
Paris, Philharmonie de Paris • Leading the Orchestre de Paris, Esa-Pekka Salonen proved once again the deep kinship he obviously feels with both Debussy (Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune [1894], La Mer [1905]) and Sibelius (Pohjola’s Daughter [1906]). Both composers aimed to lead symphonic music into the 20th century, taking different routes that ended up freeing melodic and harmonic languages for generations to come. Salonen’s own Horn Concerto, written for and performed by Stephan Dohr, can be heard as a distant beneficiary of those new pathways, yet the aural experience somehow failed to take flight.
Friday 3 April
To Dresden by plane and train
Dresden, Semperoper • There are few musical experiences as fitting as attending a performance of Parsifal on Good Friday. Floris Visser designed a staging in which the story emerged as the product of a young boy’s imagination, a counterpart of sorts to the titular reiner Tor. A strong cast, led by the superb Georg Zeppenfeld as Gurnemanz, gave an intense and focused performance, while Daniele Gatti led the scintillating orchestra in a nuanced, expressive and eventually transfixing reading of Wagner’s sublime score.
And so, for now, the lights dim… until the next act.