Grange Park Opera, West Horsley, Surrey
Natalya Romaniw is touching as the heroine trapped in a loveless marriage, while Susan Bullock is chilling as her monstrous mother-in-law in David Alden’s staging

Only a generation ago Janáček’s operas were outsiders, regarded as spiky and hard to place. Now they are so much part of the repertoire that they are regularly served up between the champagne and interval picnics of the country house opera circuit. Grange Park Opera’s latest Janáček production, in the theatre in the grounds of West Horsley Place – which fans of the TV series Ghosts will recognise as Button House – reunites some big names for his 1921 opera, supporting a powerhouse role debut from the Welsh soprano Natalya Romaniw.

The director is David Alden, almost fresh from reviving Janáček’s Jenufa at ENO and here revisiting a work he first staged more than a quarter of a century ago. His familiar fingerprints are all over it. Apart from some chaotic moments as Katya’s world unravels in the final act the action is staged simply and allusively on Hannah Postlethwaite’s sloping slab of a set, with Tim Mitchell’s lighting creating silhouettes that seem almost like characters in their own right. The era is vaguely Janáček’s own, the setting dour and almost plain apart from a door marked Vychod, “exit”, at the back. In the storm, whipped up by chorus members brandishing umbrellas, the ruined building in which everyone shelters is unambiguously an abandoned church, the chorus witness Katya’s self-inflicted downfall as a stony-faced congregation.

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© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Caroline Shaw/Sō Percussion
(Nonesuch)
All five musicians share writing and performing duties on these 10 songs. The closing version of Schubert’s An die Musik is mesmerisingly beautiful

Composer and vocalist Caroline Shaw’s second album with the four multi-instrumentalists of Sō Percussion is a true collaboration, with writing and performing duties shared between all five musicians. There’s a gleefully eclectic range of sources and influences woven into the sequence of 10 songs, which ends with the group’s own take on Schubert’s An die Musik, in which the melody is slowed right down, individual harmonies highlighted, and extra layers of decoration added; led by Shaw’s haunting breathiness it’s mesmerisingly beautiful, and despite all the transformations, still strangely Schubertian.

All the numbers are built up in a similar way, layer upon layer, perhaps starting with a bass line or a rhythmic scheme, adding more instrumental colours and samples, and with the texts of the songs a mix of words mostly by female poets, including Christina Rosetti, Gertrude Stein and Emily Dickinson, and by the musicians themselves. There’s a distinctly minimalist flavour to some of the songs – Slow Motion starts out like a riff on Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, for instance, while Silently Invisibly unfolds over a metallic pulsing. But the melodic lines that Shaw adds above them belong to a very different musical world and, as in everything here, the results are never quite what you might expect.

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© Photograph: PR handout

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© Photograph: PR handout

Johnston/Minnesota Chorale & Boychoir/ Minnesota O/ Vänskä
(BIS, two CDs)
Conductor completes his Mahler cycle with this unfussy and effective recording

Osmo Vänskä’s account of the Third Symphony, recorded in Minneapolis in the autumn of 2022, completes his Mahler cycle with the Minnesota Orchestra that began with the Fifth in 2015. The qualities of that first disc, with Vänskä’s deliberately unhistrionic approach, the superb orchestral playing and vivid (if sometimes over-bright) recorded sound, have more or less defined all the releases that have followed. As some of the reviews have demonstrated, the soberness of the performances won’t be to all tastes – those who admire, say, Leonard Bernstein’s Mahler recordings may find them lacking in physicality and drama. But at their best – as in the outstanding account of Deryck Cooke’s performing version of the Tenth Symphony – the unfussy directness of Vänskä’s conducting is powerfully effective.

If the Third Symphony doesn’t quite reach those heights, it certainly has moments of stirring grandeur and beauty. Vänskä’s tempi are generally on the slow side – the whole work, easily the longest of all Mahler’s symphonies, takes almost 10 minutes longer here than it does in Claudio Abbado’s astounding live performance from the Royal Festival Hall in London in 1999, which has to be the benchmark for any new version of Mahler 3. The scherzo is a little stately perhaps, but the performance only rarely drags, most obviously in the fourth movement after beginning in an almost audible ppp, and despite the eloquence of mezzo Jennifer Johnston’s delivery of the Nietzsche setting.

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© Photograph: Lisa-Marie Mazzucco

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© Photograph: Lisa-Marie Mazzucco

After 10 years at the helm of Britten Pears Arts, Wright is stepping down. He looks back at his festival highlights, and forwards to classical music’s increasingly uncertain future.

‘You know, had Britten and Pears pitched up on Dragons’ Den with their idea for turning a disused malting house into a concert hall, they’d have been turned away,” says Roger Wright. “There was no business plan!”

But what began with Benjamin Britten’s straightforward idea of transforming a former industrial building by the River Alde in Snape into a hall big enough to house orchestral concerts and operas for his Aldeburgh festival, has, over the decades since, developed into a centre, not just for concerts, but for all the other year-round activities that come under the umbrella of Britten Pears Arts (BPA).

Roger Wright picks his Aldeburgh festival highlights 2015-2024

Les Illumininations (2016) “A circus theatre performance staged by Struan Leslie, culminating in Britten’s Les Illuminations, performed by Sarah Tynan – an astonishing feat of musical and physical virtuosity.”

Billy Budd (2017) “Opera North’s semi-staging of Britten’s Billy Budd with Roderick Williams in the title role, was the first time the opera has been performed in Snape Maltings – the stunned silence of the close demonstrated its impact.”

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© Photograph: (no credit)

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© Photograph: (no credit)

Ustinov Studio, Bath
Deborah Warner’s staged version of Winterreise is a powerful and deeply moving piece of theatre

Schubert completed his great song-cycle Winterreise in what was effectively his own last winter; he would be dead just a year later. In this setting of 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller, depicting a man rejected in love and his painful journey across a freezing, stormy landscape, both actual and metaphorical, the singer’s challenge is exploring that balance between vocal and psychological elements.

By his own admission, tenor Ian Bostridge’s engagement with the cycle has long been obsessive. Now, he and pianist Julius Drake – singer as ego and pianist as id, Bostridge’s definition of the relationship – have collaborated with Deborah Warner in creating a staged version and it seems as if all their previous experience – 100-plus performances, different recordings, a film as well as a book – has flowed logically into this powerful and deeply moving piece of theatre.

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© Photograph: Claire Egan

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© Photograph: Claire Egan

Glyndebourne, Sussex
Double entendres, extra dialogue and sight gags ensure that Cal McCrystal’s new staging entertains, but it’s at the expense of emotional power. In the pit, John Wilson is superlative, likewise Germán Olvera’s charismatic Danilo

The Glyndebourne season continues with a new production of The Merry Widow, wonderfully conducted by John Wilson, less successfully directed by Cal McCrystal, and with Danielle de Niese as Hanna Glawari and the superb Mexican baritone Germán Olvera as Danilo. It’s an oddly unwieldy evening, affecting, funny and irritating in equal measure, by no means serving Franz Lehár’s masterpiece as well as it should, but paradoxically also reminding us on occasion why it really is one of the great works of the 20th century.

McCrystal, often an excellent director, misjudges tone and pace here too frequently. A new English version by Stephen Plaice and Marcia Bellamy pads the work out with reams of extra dialogue that add some 40 minutes to the originally projected running time. There are double entendres a plenty, where something more discreet might actually have been sexier, and interruptions and interventions abound, with Tom Edden’s Njegus cracking jokes with the audience before the show starts, and inviting us to play “Restaurant versus Picnic” after the dinner interval, though he is so delightfully camp and entertaining that he gets away with much of it.

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© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Using powerful technologies, scientists found staggering amounts of lead and other toxic substances in the composer’s hair that may have come from wine, or other sources.