Barbican, London
The UK premiere of the composer’s concerto written for Anne-Sophie Mutter was placed alongside two of Stravinsky’s ballet scores in this musically rich and vivid concert

The list of composers who have written concertos for violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter is a long and varied one, from André Previn and John Williams to Wolfgang Rihm and Unsuk Chin. The latest name to be added to that distinguished list is Thomas Adès; Mutter gave the premiere of his Air at last year’s Lucerne festival, and she was also the soloist in its UK premiere, with the composer himself conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.

Composed during lockdown in 2020 and 2021, Air carries the subtitle Homage to Sibelius, and certainly there is an echo of the modal opening of that composer’s Sixth Symphony in the way that it begins, not in obvious thematic terms, as much as in the sense of tranquil reflection that the works share, as Adès’s soloist weaves a gossamer thread of sound through the orchestra’s stepwise descending lines, which gradually build, layer on layer, colour on colour, until the full ensemble is involved.

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© Photograph: Mark Allan

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© Photograph: Mark Allan

Royal Opera House, London
David McVicar’s 2015 staging of Giordano’s French Revolution opera is the final production of Antonio Pappano’s tenure as music director of the Royal Opera. With leads Jonas Kaufmann and Sondra Radvanovsky, it is an exciting, affecting evening

Antonio Pappano’s final production as the Royal Opera’s music director is a revival of David McVicar’s 2015 staging of Andrea Chénier, Umberto Giordano’s 1896 examination of the relationship between desire and fanaticism, set during the French Revolution. It’s a thrilling account of an often remarkable work that sends you out into the street feeling elated and slightly jittery.

Pappano’s interpretation has shifted with time. What in 2015 was a slow burn has now become a thing of extremes, magnificently shaped, the high emotional pitch relentlessly sustained. Grand passions and political fervour are repeatedly elided in this music, as crowds acclaim revolutionary leaders with an uneasy rapture not far removed from the sensuality of lovers’ meetings. Elsewhere the ancien régime dies to mock Rameau, its faded elegance replaced by the revolutionary Ça Ira hurled out by the brass with terrifying exhilaration. Pappano is unsparing with it all, by turns lyrical and furiously energetic, and the playing can only be described as sensational.

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© Photograph: Mark Brenner

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© Photograph: Mark Brenner

Andreas Homoki’s detailed staging focuses on compelling and clear storytelling, and, with Gianandrea Noseda bringing energy and directness to Wagner’s music, this is a fresh and intelligent new cycle

Unlike all too many Ring cycles, Zürich Opera’s new staging will stay in the memory for lots of the right, not the wrong, reasons. This is a fresh and intelligent cycle that is full of interest and consistently musically distinguished.

The Zürich Ring’s principal achievement is musical and theatrical coherence. Andreas Homoki’s production and Christian Schmidt’s neoclassical sets provide a unified visual framework. They are centred on a rotating axis of interconnected rooms and settings. Homoki is explicit that his aim is to move “in the other direction” from what he dubs the “interpretational meta levels” of other Ring productions, especially of those that dominate German opera houses. That does not mean that this is a cycle without an interpretation. But it does mean Homoki trusts Wagner more than some modern directors do: he has staged a storyteller’s Ring.

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© Photograph: Monika Rittershaus

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© Photograph: Monika Rittershaus

Takács Quartet
(Hyperion)
The group’s new recording of G major quartet is strikingly different from their intense 1997 recording, while the Haydnesque B flat is a model of good manners

The Takács have recorded the G major quartet, the last and most ambitious of Schubert’s string quartets, before, on a disc released by Decca in 1997. Both the first violin Edward Dusinberre and the cellist András Fejér on that disc are still members of the group today, and play on the new version, which was recorded in the UK a year ago, but in some respects the two performances feel strikingly different.

Where the earlier reading seemed to be driven by nervous energy, every rhythm taut, every accent sharply etched, the new one seems much more relaxed, and distinctly less intense. The tempos for the first and last movements in particular feel markedly slower this time around, and the great first movement, one of Schubert’s most sublime tragic statements despite its major key, takes almost two minutes longer than before. Of course, it almost goes without saying that technically the performance is as precise as ever, and the account of the rather Haydnesque B flat quartet D112 that’s also on the disc is a model of good manners, but the G major quartet just doesn’t quite compel attention in the way the Takács’s playing so regularly has in the past.

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© Photograph: Amanda Tipton

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© Photograph: Amanda Tipton

Booth/Glynn
(Orchid)
Soprano Claire Booth and pianist Christopher Glynn turn to Schoenberg’s early and little known songs in this immaculate recording

Soprano Claire Booth and pianist Christopher Glynn follow their earlier discs of songs by Mussorgsky, Grieg and Grainger with this thoughtfully assembled Schoenberg collection. As they point out in a sleeve note, Schoenberg’s songs are very much a neglected part of his output, but in the first third of his career, at least, it was poetry that fired his creativity and through setting it he found his voice.

The 24 songs that Booth and Glynn include are taken from six different sets, grouped thematically, so that there are three songs under the heading of “Expectation”, three under “Flesh”, three “Nocturne” and so on. Most were composed in the first few years of the 20th century, though they also include one of the two songs of Schoenberg’s Op 14 from 1908, when his music was just beginning to move into atonality, and another from Op 48, written 25 years later, in a fully fledged 12-tone style; Booth also sings one of Tove’s arias from the lushly romantic oratorio Gurrelieder, while Glynn punctuates the sequence with two of the little piano pieces from Schoenberg’s Op 19.

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© Photograph: Sven Arnstein

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© Photograph: Sven Arnstein

Bren Pointer says the American pianist Keith Jarrett was right to disallow photography during his performances. Plus letters from Barry and Joy Norman, Meirion Bowen and Joan Lewis

Your editorial about mobile phones in concert halls reminded me of the very strong stance taken by Keith Jarrett, the American jazz and classical pianist, who insisted that no photography was allowed during any of his performances (The Guardian view on phones in concert halls: what engages some enrages others, 19 May). This was expressed before the concert by the promoters and by Jarrett’s manager.

Sadly, on many occasions, a flash from a phone in the audience would happen and subsequently either the concert would come to an abrupt end or there would be a lengthy delay before the performance would resume. The wishes of the musician were not respected.

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© Photograph: Mafalda/Alamy

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© Photograph: Mafalda/Alamy

Scrapping over the way money is distributed is no answer to the problems created by a decade of underfunding

July’s election has sent Britain into a spin, but for Mary Archer, charged with reporting on the fitness for purpose of Arts Council England (ACE), it is particularly tricky. For that is the month when her report was expected to be delivered to ministers, in preparation for publication in the autumn.

All public bodies are rightly road-tested every few years to ensure that they are giving value for public money. But the remit for Dame Mary – a scientist and the wife of the former Tory party deputy chair Jeffrey Archer – is more than usually political. Arts funding has collapsed under the Conservatives, who have also pursued culture wars. Her report comes at a moment of profound dissonance, nearly halfway through Let’s Create, a 10-year ACE plan to spread the arts more widely, and 18 months into a funding term which attempted to put that plan into action while also complying with a government instruction to cut spending in London by £24m.

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© Photograph: Equity/PA

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© Photograph: Equity/PA

Weston Studio, WMC, Cardiff
As the Welsh National Youth Opera’s 10 to 18-year-olds update Cary John Franklin’s opera it is clear its message remains all too necessary three decades on

Welsh National Youth Opera’s two different age-groupings – 10 to 14 and 14 to 18 – joined forces for this latest production, throwing themselves into it heart and soul. The main thrust was Cary John Franklin’s opera, The Very Last Green Thing, dating from 1992 but set in a dystopian future to give voice to what he and librettist Michael Patrick Albano had found were American youngsters’ greatest concerns at the time, namely environmental issues. Three decades on, when it’s clear that nobody anywhere has been concerned enough, its message is still all too necessary and director Rhian Hutchings ensured it made its point, even if by no means a grand musical affair.

A prologue sees 1990s school children creating a time-capsule, depositing much-loved objects, ones they’d fear to lose. When the capsule is found again in the 25th century, the pupils of Data-class 452 – taught by an android – are intrigued. Trainers, mobile phone, rugby ball and transistor radio are seized with amazement, and the most visually attractive moment comes as they discover a pot of bubble-blowing solution, whereupon a machine fills the set with tiny bubbles which fade and die. This was almost the fate of the plant found by the curious Amy who feels a strange attachment for these last vestiges of growing life.

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© Photograph: Kirsten Mcternan/WNO

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© Photograph: Kirsten Mcternan/WNO

In 1924, cellist Beatrice Harrison caused a sensation when her duet with a nightingale in her garden was broadcast live. When the truth of this groundbreaking event was questioned, I decided to investigate

One hundred years ago this week, a cellist sat in the gathering gloom of her garden in Surrey, and played. She did so most evenings, by the ivy-clad tree in the woods surrounded by bluebells. But that evening she was not alone. More than a million people were listening. This was Beatrice Harrison, one of the finest players of her generation, and it was not a solo performance but a duet. She had found that when she played outside a nightingale would visit the garden and would join her. And in a moment that made broadcasting history, she was about to share it with listeners from across the Commonwealth. It would become one of the most successful broadcasts of all time.

So when in 1992 the Mail on Sunday published an article that claimed the whole thing had been faked, it was not only a huge slight on Beatrice’s reputation, but a source of great dismay to all who had grown up with the story of these groundbreaking, beautiful broadcasts. They were the first ever to take place outside a studio, the first recordings of nature. They represented one of the most significant moments in radio, but also something intimate, simple and poignant which profoundly moved its listeners then, and ever since.

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© Photograph: (await credit)

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© Photograph: (await credit)

Corn Exchange, Brighton
Ed Hughes and Peter Cant’s chamber opera meditates on literature, aesthetics and theology and boasts John Tomlinson as Milton. But this opera of ideas doesn’t allow us to make out the actual ideas

Given its world premiere at the Brighton festival, Ed Hughes’s chamber opera States of Innocence marks the 350th anniversary of Milton’s death. Setting a libretto by Peter Cant, it dauntingly takes the writing of Paradise Lost as the starting point for a meditation on the relationship between creator and creation in both aesthetics and theology, as well as an interrogation of the poem’s sexual politics. You can’t help but feel it buckles under the weight of the task it sets itself.

We see the blind Milton (John Tomlinson, no less) dictating Paradise Lost to his wife (Rozanna Madylus), his assistant (Thomas Elwin) and a group of friends and family, played by a small vocal ensemble. The characters are soon reconfigured as the protagonists of the poem, so Milton becomes God, his wife becomes Eve, and the resentful assistant morphs into Satan. Much is made of inconsistencies in the Book of Genesis as to whether God created Adam and Eve simultaneously, and therefore as equals, or whether Eve was created from Adam and consequently his subordinate. Milton ambivalently accepts the latter, but Cant and Hughes, drawing on a passage from the poem in which Eve gazes at her reflection in water, give her an alter ego called Eve’s Image (Rachel Duckett), who voices the alternative perspective in language drawn from The Woman’s Bible, written in 1895 by the American activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

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© Photograph: Ian Winters

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© Photograph: Ian Winters

While some feel that allowing live performances to be photographed or filmed adds to the buzz, others hate it

Since an outbreak last year of rowdyism in musical theatre, the question of how audiences should behave during live performances has been burrowing its way into the heart of the cultural establishment. It has now popped its head up in the classical music world, where it is not about sprayed beer and dancing in the aisles, but phone etiquette at concerts.

The debate was sparked when the tenor Ian Bostridge halted a recital in Birmingham because he was being distracted by people recording him. He later discovered that he was out of line with policy at the Symphony Hall, home to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO), which welcomed its audiences to take photographs and short video clips. The resulting set-to, with supporters deluging the orchestra with complaints about the policy, and its management promising to clarify and refine but not withdraw it, casts an interesting light on efforts to build new audiences in a sector that has been struggling to find its way in a straitened economy at a time of rapidly changing habits.

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© Photograph: Phil Broom/Alamy

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© Photograph: Phil Broom/Alamy

The novelist on the continuing relevance of Ibsen, the joyful quilt art of Faith Ringgold and where to find British scotch eggs in New York

Born in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1966, author Claire Messud studied at Yale University and the University of Cambridge. Her first novel, 1995’s When the World Was Steady, and her book of novellas, The Hunters, were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner award; her 2006 novel The Emperor’s Children was longlisted for the Booker prize. Messud is a senior lecturer on fiction at Harvard University and has been awarded Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, literary critic James Wood; they have two children. Her latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, is published on 23 May by Fleet.

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© Photograph: Rick Friedman/The Observer

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© Photograph: Rick Friedman/The Observer

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.