Going to concerts as a critic in the past weeks has been like a round of university reunions – seeing people in the music world with whom I’ve had no contact since before the world closed down, and noticing how much they’ve aged (as they were no doubt noticing with me). But then the music world itself has aged, at an accelerated rate, during the past year and a half of misery. And as it edges back to life, we’ve all been making quiet assessments of how well, or otherwise, it’s weathered the ordeal. 

Something of promise is that new ventures are now starting up – a good example being a baroque band with the slightly puzzling name of Figure that’s just made a very credible debut at St Bartholomew the Great in London. Taking on Bach’s mighty St John Passion as an opening venture was a bold move for its young founder and conductor, Freddie Waxman, and the reading wasn’t flawless. But it was exciting and engaging, with accomplished soloists including Richard Robbins, the evangelist, who sang his narratives with the investigative energy of a whodunnit: you could only hang on every word, anxious to know what happens next. 

Hearing it in the pre-Reformation splendour of St Barts, you could believe the pains of the pandemic had been healed: Bach has that kind of power. But not so many music institutions have been spared from an ongoing crisis. Some have handled it with fortitude and creativity, others have not. And in the process there’s emerged a sort of league-table of post-pandemic heroes (as opposed to mere survivors).

Ranking high is Wigmore Hall which made defiant efforts to get back to business at a time when other venues were still dark, with an impressive sequence of free-access online concerts to which thousands tuned in. None of this made money, but it generated profile and prestige. And though I should declare an interest as one of the people doing presentation for the livestreams – seated in an empty auditorium with no one but the artists and the Hall’s director John Gilhooly – they were something I was proud to be involved with. Happily, they carry on, at least as far as Christmas, even though there are now audiences in the Hall again.

Another star is Grange Park Opera, whose director Wasfi Kani took a typically gung-ho decision not to be defeated, replacing her lost season with what she called a “found” one: all of it online, and not just films of old productions from the past but new things, specially commissioned. That was brave. And for her latest, out-of-lockdown season at the Surrey country house estate where she erected her own theatre, she has bounced back with a vengeance and with the kind of focused energy that several, larger opera companies would do well to copy.

One is ENO, which didn’t do too well in lockdown and was slow to get back on its feet. The company has just returned to full, mainstage productions, starting with a revival of one of its past successes: a Phelim McDermott staging of Philip Glass’s meditative (to the point of mental shutdown) Satyagraha. But this was well after Covent Garden had already managed to return with two new shows – initially a Rigoletto that wasn’t quite as new as claimed (bearing an unmistakeable resemblance to something the director Oliver Mears did for the smaller, country-house opera venture at Nevill Holt some years ago), but worked well enough. It had a star of serious dimension in the soprano Lisette Oropesa, and was handsomely conducted by Antonio Pappano, whose orchestra could in any event do no wrong and were cheered before they played a single note by an audience only too grateful to have them back.

Hot on its heels came a genuinely new production of Jenůfa, Janáček’s harrowing opera about small-town claustrophobia, oppressive families and people trying to do the right thing in the wrong way. Claus Guth’s semi-abstract staging ditched the small-town detail, edging toward clichéd modernism with its bare white space and rows of upright chairs, but it still packed a punch. And the performances were stunning, with Asmik Grigorian unforgettable in the title role, and Karita Mattila supplying in all-round presence what she sometimes lacked in voice as the formidable stepmother.

Away from London, the summer/autumn festivals struggled to convince their audiences it was safe to turn out. Wherever I went it was the same story: numbers down. But that didn’t stop the more enterprising ones from taking risky decisions of the kind that festivals should take. One instance was Music@Malling in Kent, which focused most of a weekend around composer Brian Elias, a quietly fascinating figure, now 75, whose music reflects the life journey of someone born in India to Iranian-Jewish parents, relocated to north London, and still steadily productive. He was never going to pull crowds, but he’s worth playing. And all credit to Music@Malling that they had the strength of character to do it.

Whether the pandemic will produce a legacy of benefit in some Darwinian manner that rewards the strong, I don’t know. Maybe. But right now, the key thing for us all in music is to claim back what was lost, and take new pleasure in the things we haven’t seen or heard for 18 months. However bruised and battle-weary they appear.

This article first appeared in the November 2021 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.

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