We left at the interval...

La Monnaie at Bozar, Brussels, Sunday March 9 2025 Conductor: Alain Altinoglu. Magna Peccatrix: Manuela Uhl. Una Poenitentium: Jacquelyn Wagner. Mater Gloriosa: Ilse Eerens. Mulier Samaritana: Nora Gubisch. Maria Aegyptiaca: Marvic Monreal. Doctor Marianus: Corby Welch. Pater Ecstaticus: Christopher Maltman. Pater Profundus: Gábor Bretz. La Monnaie Orchestra and Chorus. Belgian National Orchestra. La Monnaie Choir School and Children's Chorus. Vlaams Radiokoor (Flemish Radio Choir). Photo: Marco Borggreve This performance of Mahler’s Symphony N°8 at the Bozar in Brussels will probably be my last ever Mahler concert. I’ve tried over the years, hoping that one day I’d get what others see in his symphonies. More than twenty years ago, after a performance of his Symphony N°2, at the Châtelet, under Salonen , I wrote: ‘I booked this concert thinking that, perhaps, the Philharmonia under a famous conductor might work some kind of epiphany on me and that finally I'd understand. It di...

BOZAR, Brussels, Sunday February 18 2024 Conductor: Alain Altinoglu. Baritone: Stéphane Degout. Violin: Saténik  Khourdoïan. La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra. Schönberg: Fünf Orchesterstücke , op.16 Mahler: Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen Korngold: Concerto in D major for Violin and Orchestra , op. 35 Williams: Harry Potter and the sorcerer's stone , suite for orchestra. I: Hedwig's Theme . II: The Sorcerer's Stone . III: Nimbus 2000 . IV Harry's Wondrous World . Alain Altinoglu rehearsing Parsifal in 2022 at the BOZAR. Photo: Simon Van Rompay The blurb for this concert on La Monnaie's website puts the emphasis on magic in music, saying it would be 'An ideal evening for both Wizards and Muggles.' (I had to look 'Muggle' up.) This is no doubt a clever way to draw people who might not normally go to symphonic concerts into one that opens with a work by Schönberg. But I think the programme could more plausibly be described as simply a small selection of wo...

La Monnaie at BOZAR, Brussels, Saturday May 21 2022 Conductor: Alain Altinoglu. Amfortas: Werner Van Mechelen. Titurel: Konstantin Gorny. Gurnemanz: Franz-Josef Selig. Parsifal: Julian Hubbard. Klingsor: Shenyang. Kundry: Elena Pankratova. Stimme aus der Höhe: Iris Van Wijnen. Gralsritter: Willem Van Der Heyden, Justin Hopkins. Knappen: Sheva Tehoval, Raphaële Green, Paul Curievici, Alexander Marev. Klingsors Zaubermädchen: Hendrickje Van Kerckhove, Lisa Willems, Raphaële Green, Sheva Tehoval, Lies Vandewege, Iris Van Wijnen. La Monnaie Orchestra and Chorus, La Monnaie Children's and Youth Choir. I have a difficult relationship with Parsifal , the text especially (cf my report the last time I saw it ), though I don't mind the 'Salvation Army band' music so much. I don't feel the same reverence for the work its fans do, so I was tempted to wriggle out of writing about this concert performance in Brussels, and just say 'If you love the work, I think you'd bett...

Bozar, Brussels, Sunday October 17 2021 Conductor: Alain Altinoglu. Stella: Tineke Van Ingelgem. Geertrui: Christianne Stotijn. Ivo Mariën: Yves Saelens. Petrus: Werner Van Mechelen. Bolten: Kris Belligh. Frederik: Gilles Van Der Linden. La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra. La Monnaie's 'post-Covid' season opened, for me at any rate, with this rare work, Lodewijk Mortelmans' De Kinderen der Zee , performed in Flemish at the Bozar hall in concert. The occasion wasn't altogether auspicious, as one or several members of the chorus had tested positive and the work was therefore performed without them. Yet, oddly in the circumstances, though proof of vaccination had to be shown, masks weren't mandatory in the auditorium. I see Mortelmans was a respected Lieder composer, and was indeed at times annoyed to be pigeonholed as such. The work is an accomplished, rip-roaring 1915 'sea-symphony' kind of score, with lots of chromatic runs and sparkling woodwind and trills ...

La Monnaie at Bozar, Brussels, Sunday December 20 2015 Conductor: Lothar Koenigs. Live projections: Manual Cinema. Conductor of children’s chorus: Denis Menier. Peter: Dietrich Henschel. Gertrud: Natascha Petrinsky. Hänsel: Gaëlle Arquez. Gretel: Talia Or. Die Knusperhexe: Georg Nigl. Sandmännchen and Taumännchen: Ilse Eerens. La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra. La Monnaie Children’s Choir, La Maîtrise.  Humperdinck As I’ve already said since this season started, the main Brussels house is undergoing renovation, so La Monnaie is peripatetic. I should imagine management realised that Hänsel und Gretel is hardly “oratorio” fare and therefore offered it to us “semi-staged”, or so they put it, at Bozar, an art-déco arts complex up the hill. Bozar’s concert hall has a warm, enveloping, “sherry commercial” kind of acoustics, so La Monnaie’s orchestra sounded impressively lush and loud there. Anything but post-modern and/or transparently analytical, Lothar Koenigs’ conducting seem...

Bozar, Brussels, Sunday December 21 2014 Conductor: Ludovic Morlot. Vierge Marie: Stéphanie d'Oustrac. Saint-Joseph: Lionel Lhote. Hérode: Paul Gay. Le père de famille / Polydorus: Frédéric Caton. Le récitant / Centurion: Yves Saelens. Orchestra & Chorus of La Monnaie, Reflection Vocal Ensemble, La Monnaie Children’s Choir. Pendant dix ans Marie, et Joseph avec elle / Virent fleurir en lui la sublime douceur, / La tendresse infinie / A la sagesse unie. Berlioz trying to stay awake “Sagesse” is probably not a word you’d usually apply to Berlioz, whose music is always full of surprises, often quite startling ones; but “sublime douceur” and “tendresse infinie” seem to sum up well the score of L’Enfance du Christ , one of his milder efforts. Sunday afternoon’s performance at the Bozar in Brussels showed little sign of conductor, Ludovic Morlot having recently stated: "I can only note that the orchestra and I have not succeeded in sharing a common artistic visio...

La Monnaie – Bozar, Brussels, Sunday November 3 2013 Conductor: Ludovic Morlot. Soprano: Sabina Cvilak. Tenor: Mark Padmore. Baritone: Dietrich Henschel. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie. Flemish Radio Chorus. Vocaal Ensemble Reflection. La Monnaie Children’s Chorus.   It's probably simplistic of me (and yet another sign of my lack of proper musical education) to imagine, when a composer decides to score for both full and chamber orchestra, that he expects the small band to make less noise than the big one. The main shortcoming of this performance of Britten's wonderful War Requiem was, to me, lack of dynamic variety. It was mostly loud to very loud, with Ludovic Morlot apparently making little effort to coax some more subtly nuanced playing from La Monnaie's players (or to cue his soloists' entries properly). As a result, tenor and baritone often seemed forced to bawl their parts and the best bits were either those that Britten undoubtedly intended to be loud - t...

La Monnaie at Bozar, Brussels, Sunday March 24 2013 Conductor: Evelino Pidò. Juliette: Nino Machaidze. Stéphano: Angélique Noldus. Gertrude: Carole Wilson. Roméo: John Osborn. Tybalt: Tansel Akzeybek. Benvolio: Stefan Cifolelli. Mercutio: Lionel Lhote. Le Comte Pâris: Alexandre Duhamel. Grégorio: Nabil Suliman. Le Comte Capulet: Paul Gay. Frère Laurent: Jérôme Varnier. Le Duc de Vérone: Patrick Bolleire. Manuela: Amalia Avilán. Pepita: Kinga Borowska. Angelo: Marc Coulon. Frère Jean: Pascal Macou. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie. Vlaams Radio Koor. Reflection. Concert performance There’s a certain kind of opera classed in my mind alongside Massenet’s Esclarmonde . Works, that is, that need top-rate performances to, well, work. Joan Sutherland’s famous recording of Esclarmonde does; an Esclarmonde put on by the local amateur operatic society on a shoestring budget probably wouldn’t. At the Opéra Comique some years back, it was decidedly unconvincing. The risk, with a superla...

Bozar, Brussels, Sunday October 31 2008 Conductor: Mark Wigglesworth. Marina Poplavskaya, soprano; Anna Larsson, alto; Fabio Sartori, tenor; Carlo Colombara, bass. Orchestra and chorus of La Monnaie, chorus of the Vlaamse Opera. Remember you must die I don't think I have ever been quite so shaken by a concert as the Sunday before last in Brussels. Since then I've spent over a week thinking about it on and off (I was also busy in India), trying to pin down what it was that had some people literally in tears at the end. Verdi's Requiem is often associated with deluxe performances: great conductors, great soloists (with the soprano and alto in sumptuous evening gowns, big hair and big jewellery), great orchestras. The result is a glittering musical event , but the glamour and gloss perhaps put a comforting distance between ourselves and the work. Mark Wigglesworth is not Karajan or Abbado, his young soloists, in plain black, are not yet Flemings and Domingos and the orchestra...