The 2026-2027 season

 

Photo: User 'Mysid' on Wikipedia

My new season has already started, with a concert in Brussels. But before the summer, Parterre Box asked its readers to say what they were most excited about in the coming season, and I thought I'd post my reply here.

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What am I most looking forward to next season?

Good question. I don’t remember ever being quite so unexcited about a future season’s line-up. Perhaps, this coming year, I’m just unlucky with the houses I frequent, and other places (Munich? Madrid?) have more stimulating things on offer. In my case, the feeling I have is that I subscribed dutifully, more out of habit than enthusiasm. My overall feeling when next season’s programmes started to emerge was simply that they were disappointingly tame.

One of the things I’m most interested in is a production that’s part of neither the past nor the coming season, as it’s Le siège de Corinthe at the Pesaro festival in August. By the time Parterre publishes this Talk of the Town series, that will be behind me and I will, in theory, already have posted about it.

(Note from me: I have.)

True, La Monnaie has programmed a Mussorgsky, but I’d far rather have had Khovanschina than Boris. The one thing in Brussels that might come up with the goods - though I’m not certain of that, having seen some video clips of Mariusz Treliński’s production - is Ariadne auf Naxos. We can only wait to suck it and see, which is true, too, of Les Pêcheurs de Perles at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées. I booked that, not because I love it, but simply because I’ve never seen it before.

I’m also glad, as ever, to have another chance to hear Ann Hallenberg live, this time in Vivaldi’s Juditha Triumphans in Versailles, but that’s in concert.

Apart from these, as I say, I’ve dutifully put together a season of, so far, nearly twenty performances, but the works I’m personally most enamoured of are back in revivals of productions I’ve already seen. They are Káťa Kabanová, in a revival of Christoph Marthaler’s Mortier-era production, and Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Lady Macbeth de Mzensk.

A late friend of mine always used to say, ‘Expect nothing, and you’ll never be disappointed.’ My expectations are currently fairly low. Let’s hope I get some nice surprises.

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I should perhaps have added that this reply was intended in part to be a comment on the conservative programming houses are apparently adopting now times are hard.

In addition, while I'm here and looking towards the future... Though I regret to say it, I will almost certainly not, after well over 30 years, subscribe to La Monnaie next season. La Monnaie has, over all that time, been an admirably creative organisation offering interesting (and sometimes the most interesting) productions of both new or unusual works and the operatic 'classics'. And there's the added attraction of the great Alain Altinoglu in the pit, with an orchestra he has taken to extraordinary heights. So it's nothing to do with the house.

But the high-speed train service from Paris to Brussels has been taken over by Eurostar, and while performance has worsened - the Sunday evening trains are nearly always late and occasionally cancelled outright - fares have shot up, so much so that I'm not sure I'll even carry on to the end of the current season. I may just sell the opera tickets and stop going in mid-season.

End of an era for me, I'm afraid.