Category Archives: Talking heads

Talking Heads: Ryan Wigglesworth

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In the first of two interviews themed around the Aldeburgh Festival, Featured Artist Ryan Wigglesworth talks to Ben Hogwood about the influence of his mentor, Oliver Knussen, and the inspiration he takes from the music of Britten, Debussy and Bruckner.

Picture credits: Benjamin Ealovega (Ryan Wigglesworth, Steven Osborne), Mark Allan (Oliver Knussen), Sussie Ahlberg (Sophie Bevan), Lawrence Power (Giorgia Bertazzi)

Ryan Wigglesworth is a musician of many disciplines – and for half an hour he has joined us to talk about his work as a composer, conductor and pianist, specifically within the rarefied world of the Aldeburgh Festival, where he is a Featured Artist for 2026.

The festival has played a key part in his career, as I ask him to cast his mind back to the first time he visited. “My first contact with Aldeburgh was through the young artists programme, which is where I first met Ollie Knussen – that would have been 2000 or 2001. I had forced my parents, when I was much younger, to take me to Aldeburgh. It must have been the time when the Humphrey Carpenter biography of Britten came out. I read that biography and begged my parents to drive from Sheffield so I could see the place and go on a pilgrimage. It’s been a very special place to me for such a long time, and since the turn of the century, when I met Ollie, that became the most important musical friendship and mentorship of my life. I spent so much time there and was virtually living at his house for a period. It’s a home to me.”

It is striking in conversations with artists that worked with Knussen, the speed with which his name comes up, and the affection it provokes. In this case, Wigglesworth met his mentor through the soprano Claire Booth. “Claire and I were undergraduates together”, he says, “and she was on the course at Snape. I tagged along, because I wasn’t officially there as a student that first year. Claire and I had already learned his Whitman Settings, and we kept asking if we could sing it to him. He was dreading it was going to be awful, but he finally caved in, and we performed it. I think he was very touched, and I think that was the beginning of him thinking, “Maybe they’re not so bad, these two!”

As with fellow-students, Knussen (above) left a lasting musical and personal footprint. “It was my education. I must have sat in hundreds of hours of rehearsals with the London Sinfonietta and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. I could never understand why no-one else was there, and it was the same when I used to go to Boulez’s rehearsals. That was my education, because Ollie’s rehearsals were masterclasses in time management, efficiently sorting our problems, and that pristine conducting technique. I’m so grateful to have had that as my starting point, and with such a dominant creative force in your life, it takes a while to free yourself from their way of doing it, and finding your own way, but it still informs everything I do. When it comes down to it, it’s still about respect for the text, and that the composer is the most important thing – not the performer’s ego!”

He considers further. “You couldn’t not be learning, just spending time with him, sitting at the kitchen table. As everyone knew him understood, he had obsessions at a particular moment in time. He would be gorging on the music of Busoni, or whatever it happened to be that week, so we’d go through tonnes of his music – and that’s an incredible education, going through those scores together – and learning how he marked up scores. It was my starting point, and I’ve developed it in how to learn a score thoroughly, especially when I’ve had to learn something quite quickly, stepping in for a cancellation. I remember having to learn Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius in two days, and it was incredible to fall back on that technique of inhabiting a score.”

The influence of Knussen spreads to the programming for the 2026 Aldeburgh Festival, where his innovations can be felt in Wigglesworth’s repertoire choices – such as the pairing of his own Piano Concerto and that by Ravel, both to be performed with Steven Osborne (above) as soloist. “It’s a bit of a risk, that one!” laughs Ryan, “putting your piece alongside one of the greatest concertos ever written. That was something I began to think about much more deeply spending time with him, the way pieces resonate together. It’s a very subtle and complex business, and of course you get it wrong sometimes, but that’s fine because you don’t know until you do it, very often. It’s one of the great pleasures to have the freedom you have at Aldeburgh where your wings aren’t clipped. It’s worrying that so much of concert life is becoming so narrow, reduced in its scope and imaginative adventure.”

We reflect on his role as Featured Artist at Aldeburgh this year – a chance to spread musical wings? “It’s very special to be able to think about bringing the different aspects of what I do under one roof, because they’re all sides of the same business of making music. Of course they feature in different ways. Playing chamber music is so important because it’s my only direct contact with producing the sound, and I need that. Yet at the same time, if I’m conducting Pelléas et Mélisande, I hope I’m becoming a better composer as a result!”

His reference is to Debussy’s only opera, with which the festival opens on Friday 12 June. “You can’t not learn from every page of a score like that”, he says, “about how to be a better composer and holding the mystery. I don’t think I’ve ever met a composer for whom that’s not the greatest opera ever written, because it’s so difficult to fathom how he did it! It is so elusive, you can’t see how he put it together. The more time you spend in the orbit of masterpieces like that, it’s stimulating for me as a composer, and to spend time with the orchestra. It’s such an organism, this group of individual musicians with a collective personality, sound and ethos – it’s extremely mysterious! That was the great thing about spending all those hours in rehearsal with Ollie”, he reflects, “that’s what you’re soaking up, how these groups function, and how you balance the double basses and harps – what needs to be done on the most basic practical level.”

The orchestra to which he refers in Pelléas is the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, of whom he has been chief conductor since September 2022. “They are uniquely versatile”, he says, “When you think of what they do in the Tectonics festival, with Ilan Volkov, from the most experimental new music – from that to Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony – and they approach it with care and flair. City Halls is so good for classical repertoire, too, and they are incredibly stylish in Mozart, which is such a difficult thing. It’s incredible what they can do, and in such short spaces of time. To be able to flick the switch is amazing, with something like Birtwistle’s Earth Dances, which we performed with Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony at the BBC Proms last year. To achieve that in such little rehearsal time would have been almost unimaginable in the mid-1980s. The speed with which things are inhabited is incredible.”

On a much smaller scale is The Poet’s Echo, a concert where Wigglesworth will take to the piano, joining soprano Sophie Bevan – his wife – in a programme marking the centenary of the birth of Russian powerhouse Galina Vishnevskaya. Along with her own husband, Mstislav Rostropovich, Galina played an important role in the career and life of Benjamin Britten. Britten’s song cycle The Poet’s Echo was completed in 1965 for Vishnevskaya, and will feature alongside Wigglesworth’s own settings of George Herbert, Till Dawning – written for Sophie (above). “The Poet’s Echo is new for both of us”, he says, “and it is wonderful to have a major work of Britten’s to come to fresh and learn together. We’ve done selections of the folksongs for a good few years, now.”

He has great affection for them. “I love them so much – and those accompaniments in the Britten folk song arrangements, each one is a sort of bull’s eye! There are one or two very focused, simple ideas, and it comes back to Britten’s economy.” A quality Britten and Knussen shared? “Exactly – a supremely practical approach. I learned from Ollie, and almost at Britten’s feet. Ollie’s Dad was so involved with Britten as a conductor, taking part in the premiere of works like Curlew River, and Ollie was there as a kid, taking all this up. He always said about Britten that he could have been a grandmaster chess player, or even an army general. The ability to move things in the abstract, in his head, was so strong, and that extends to planning the entire act of an opera in his mind before committing it to paper. He had an extraordinary ability to manipulate things in space and knowing, in the operas, when to introduce a colour, treating the instruments of the orchestra like individual characters, and knowing when to hold one back for dramatic purposes.”

He reflects further. “It’s about finding the off-kilter but logical solution. A great example is the ‘interview chords’ in Billy Budd – they’re every way of harmonising the F major triad. He’s working through a secret, and it’s absolutely right, a key emotional part of the opera.”

Returning to Wigglesworth’s own music, there is a significant premiere with the Knussen Chamber Orchestra on Saturday 27 June, in the form of his Viola Concerto, written for Lawrence Power (above). “It’s quite difficult to talk about, because I’ve not long finished it!” he confesses. “I’m still too close to the process of having written it, but I haven’t heard it yet. Like all of my recent pieces, and I hope my pieces in the future – they’re all my reactions to who is performing, and who I’m writing for. I think I would struggle now if I were commissioned by a musician or orchestra I don’t know, I’d struggle to have ideas. I’m so lucky with Sophie, or Steven Osborne, who’s playing my piano concerto at the beginning of the festival, to have these long term, meaningful relationships. With Laurence, we first worked together years ago. I wrote these Five Little Waltzes for him during lockdown. He’s such a one-off, and his artistic personality is so strong. He has this incredible sound, and variety of colour, and the piece came from my reaction to that.”

He describes the work. “It’s slightly unusual – in three movements, which sounds very standard, but it’s slow-fast-slow. It was a deliberate attempt to try to achieve something a bit more spacious than anything I’ve attempted before. I suppose it allows the viola to occupy a lyrical space. It’s not a battle between soloist and orchestra, more a fluid relationship. It comes back to the music that becomes more meaningful as a performer. Like Bruckner – I love this music so much, and what can I learn from it? Bruckner’s vision is so personal, but there are things to be learned – how to create a long wave, a big paragraph. It’s finding the things that challenge you, because in the past I’ve struggled to create a genuinely long line. You could say Britten concentrated on little cells of ideas, but it’s nice to think about how to achieve something that doesn’t come naturally, that can become more a part of your make-up.”

Debussy comes to mind as a composer capable of uniting the two ways of working, which returns us to the festival’s opening night. “To have created Pelléas as his first dramatic work, and to have got it that right… it was a long gestation process written it a long time before it was premiered, but it’s unlike anything else!” he says, under Debussy’s spell. “As he admitted himself there is a lot of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov in it, but these scenes tend to be conversations between two characters, with the function of these orchestral interludes, which seem so necessary. To think they were added so late on in the process, just to cover the stage move time, is remarkable – but you need them because of the intensity of each scene. You need the space afterwards to process what you’ve just heard, for the brain to catch up. It’s an incredible living organism, when you’re in it – and it really does grip you! This score is just as much like a drug as Wagner is said to be. The more you spend time with it, the more you need it!”

You can read more about this year’s Aldeburgh Festival at the Britten Pears Arts website, with full concert information and details. For biographical information on Ryan Wigglesworth himself, you can visit his artist page

Published post no.2,915 – Friday 12 June 2026

Talking Heads: John Gilhooly

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The Wigmore Hall director talks to Ben Hogwood about the London venue’s 125th anniversary celebrations, the 2026-27 season and what keeps him motivated in his role after 25 years.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, there has been a concert hall on London’s Wigmore Street, just a couple of minutes’ walk from the hullabaloo of Oxford Street. Opened as the Bechstein Hall in 1901, the Wigmore Hall has become an institution in British musical life. For its last 25 years the hall has been under the artistic direction of John Gilhooly, who is also the venue’s executive director. John generously gave Arcana a chance to discuss his plans for the hall in its 125th anniversary year and a packed, vibrant 2026/27 season. To begin, however, I asked him to recall his first visit to Wigmore Hall.

“It was in the 1990s, to hear Sir Thomas Allen in a program of mostly French song. The hall wasn’t quite full, and I got a last-minute ticket as a student. I ended up sitting in the back row. My memory was that Tom sang very well, and that Roger Vignoles was accompanying him. He sang some Fauré, but I remember three men sitting beside me at the time, all scribbling, and thinking they must be the critics.”

A link had already been forged, however. “Wigmore concerts used to come to my home town of Limerick, and the local music promoter, John Ruddock, the principal of the Protestant school beside my Catholic school, ran the Limerick music society with his wife. So I heard András Schiff, the Takács Quartet – who remembered me in the audience! – Imogen Cooper and Wolfgang Holzmair, probably the first lieder singer I ever heard. I heard Angela Gheorghiu before anybody knew who she was, I remember that recital very well. My ear was trained very early on to the Wigmore Hall; I knew what it was – but I remember expecting it to be so much bigger! I got used to it very quickly.”

At the time, there was competition. “I didn’t leave Ireland until 1997, and at that stage my first love was opera. I don’t think I could say that anymore, my brain has been completely rewired! I love the opera, of course, and obviously I love chamber music because that’s what we heard at home. My teacher, Veronica Dunne (he points at a photograph behind me), was the last person to sing with Kathleen Ferrier. She drove me up from being a baritone to a tenor and had me singing lots of arias. Song was not her thing, but for my first teacher, Jean Holmes, song was very much her thing – and she went on to sing at Covent Garden. She was my first proper singing teacher. We learned singing at school, and settings of the Latin mass, which was very important in my formation in every sense. That happened very early on, which is why I keep saying if you don’t get 7- and 8-year-olds, you’ll never get them interested in music. It doesn’t cost anything to sing in a choir, so I don’t understand why the government don’t take that on, frankly. Music provision is so bad in schools, we won’t have audiences as diverse as they should be in the future.”

His frustration is evident. “It’s really easy – I just don’t understand. Get children singing!” To that end, the BBC’s recent initiative, Get Singing, is timely. “It’s what it does in terms of the physiology of the voice, the vibrations and everything that’s going on, that communal experience. There is something very special in that, the friendships you make – and it’s a pity that it’s just not embraced, but it’s great to see Radio 3 doing this.”

Do many schools visit the Wigmore Hall? “Yes, there were some in to see the Hugh Cutting concert last night”, he says. “Part of the announcement for the new season is that from September we will introduce free tickets for under-25s, as long as they bring a parent or guardian. Hopefully we can get the parents interested in the music as well, if they’re not. That is an expansion of the under-35 scheme, which has done really well since its launch ten years ago. We also have five new strategic partnerships in Europe – with the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin, where we will expand our relationship, and the new hall in Edinburgh, the Dunard Centre. I’ve been asked to chair the programme committee for the opening in 2029. There is the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities and the Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford, and finally Glyndebourne, whose singers will come here for recitals. These are new partnerships which enhance our position, in the post ‘non-public’ funding.”

For the Wigmore Hall is now entirely free of dependency on the Arts Council for grants and artistic direction – a liberating situation indeed. “Yes, and nobody in there is public funded either, so we can do what we like with that. It’s going to be very diverse, ticking all the boxes without being told to do so.  We want to be diverse, but you don’t need to report back constantly what you’re doing. We’re all being told to do the same thing, but what we need to all find is the things we’re best at – and everybody has their own niche. We should look different to the South Bank, to theatre, dance, and the visual arts, but we’re all being judged by the same criteria, and that’s crazy. The Margaret Hodge report on the Arts Council vindicated everything we said, and I hope for a response in due course.”

One only has to look at a snapshot of programming across a week in the Wigmore Hall’s 2026/27 season to see the variety on offer, for the diversity is astonishing. “We say, without apology, that it is the most diverse classical music programme in the United Kingdom, and one of the most diverse in Europe at this stage. There are 600 concerts a year.” These include composer focuses on Britten, Beethoven, Feldman and Kurtág, along with a comprehensive list of Associate Artists, of which more later. “That’s the reason I get up in the morning”, says Gilhooly. “There will be a lot of that next season, too.”

The new season is effectively given a prologue by two weeks of celebration in May, where the Wigmore’s 125 years as a concert hall will be celebrated. “I built the programming around that anniversary”, he says, “but as far as I’m concerned, the whole season has been a celebration.” Standout examples include a series of songs from the year of opening, 1901, and Songs, Airs & The Blues, a fascinating concert with vocalist Elaine Mitchener and lutenist Elizabeth Kenny which will include the blues as seen by two Robert Johnsons – the Tudor composer and the legendary Blues artist.

“I consciously didn’t do things like brass and wind, because they’ve been done through the season, and so I focussed on strings, piano and voice”, says Gilhooly. I wanted to make a coherent statement, and invite some top-notch singers and pianists. The capacity was there to have Lise Davidsen, Yunchan Lim, and the Leonkoro Quartet (above) who are just astonishing, with Igor Levit. We also have the soprano Asmik Griogorian and the young pianist Lukas Geniušas, who will play the Schubert B flat sonata in a separate concert. We have an evening with the Belcea Quartet and Tabea Zimmermann, then a whole evening of Johann Sebastian Bach with Christian Tetzlaff, which ties in with his 60th birthday. That was very conscious, and then to bring in Stockhausen with mentions of gods and goddesses. Our stage has been watched over by Apollo since 1901, so I wanted to make that point – and replicate the first evening with judicious editing.”

That night will coincide with the launch of a new book on the hall by Julia Boyd, There Is Sweet Music Here. “It’s an astonishing read”, says Gilhooly, “I devoured it in the last 48 hours after it went to print, because I purposely didn’t want to see it before then. She’s a compelling writer, and the early chapters – and the things people didn’t realise – are fascinating. There was no social media of course, just word of mouth between the musicians. There are dips in the history – the First World War, then trouble in the 1960s. I think a defining moment was 1976, the 75th anniversary where Artur Rubenstein played here, and stood up to declare it was his last ever appearance. This was quite something, as he had been attending concerts here since around 1914. He heard Busoni here, and the fact that Fauré was here – drawn by word of mouth – was amazing. The change 50 years later, is interesting to see”.

Clearly understating, he reflects further. “Even 25 years ago, the turnover was £2 million, and now it has been raised to £11-12 million with extra fundraising. The attendance has never dipped, and the audience is very different. I looked at a message from Prince Charles in the anniversary programme for 31 May 2001, and the list of donors then has only five or six that are still alive. The current brochure has a much bigger list, so the notion that the audience is dying is wrong. So where’s the crisis?”

The hall holds a strong appeal to tourists, too. “We had a tube campaign in recent weeks, and the returns for András Schiff mainly went to tourists – a lot of whom came twice. They got Beethoven’s Tempest sonata – and so much more! Some of our visitors plan their London trips around our programme, and while the Monday lunchtime audience is by definition an older one, the evening audiences are very young, very diverse.”

At this point I share my own experience, where I can happily credit Wigmore Hall with introducing me to the idea of a song recital, and – what’s more – enjoying it. “The ear has to adjust, as it is refined listening”, he says, “but not impossible. We are quietly trying surtitles, which will be rolled out quietly in the autumn.”

Gilhooly turns to the announcement of the Associate Artists. “We have five-year partnerships with composer-pianist Thomas Adès, soprano Louise Alder, jazz trumpeter and composer, Ambrose Akinmusire, the Gesualdo Six ensemble, pianist Boris Giltburg, multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens, cellist Anastasia Kobekina, the Leonkoro Quartet, the baritone and composer, Will Liverman, jazz pianist, Harold López‑Nussa, mezzo-soprano Anja Mittermüller, violinist Daniel Pioro, violist Timothy Ridout, cellist Abel Selaocoe, and composer-conductor, Jack Sheen. Finally we have the conductor Peter Whelan, who was here last night with the Irish Baroque Orchestra. We’ve doubled the number of associated artists and it’s exciting.”

Within the hall there is an interesting change in the timeline – where photos of legendary artists appear downstairs and in the green room, but while out front there is a much more recent set of portraits with current and future artists. “That is courtesy of Christopher Jones, who was photographing towards the end of the pandemic, with masks and socially distanced audiences – so it was a very emotional time, and quite bleak in many ways.”

A standout moment of the pandemic was the return of music to the Wigmore Hall, with a solo recital from Sir Stephen Hough with just two audience members – John himself and the BBC Radio 3 presenter Andrew McGregor. “Can you imagine, at that time the government almost said no, but they were having parties right at that time?! We were still locked down a year later, and I remember a St. Patrick’s night lockdown recycle in 2021, and it really struck me that I hadn’t been home for over a year. It went on for so long, but it was a collective trauma, and we’ve all kind of parked it.”

Another key aspect of the Wigmore Hall’s development is its role in developing young artists, such as the YCAT and BBC New Generation Artists. “We collaborate with them, and people who aren’t part of any scheme who we help along as well, for instance the winners of our string quartet and song competitions. We cross fertilise, which is wonderful, and these partnerships will help.”

Image by Amanda Tipton Photography

Also appearing in the new season are the Takács Quartet (above) – themselves celebrating 50 years as an ensemble, with cellist and founder member András Fejér still in the group. “He’s the one who remembers me from Ireland”, says Gilhooly. “They’re playing brilliantly and are teaching in Colorado. There will be a celebration around Gábor Takács-Nagy at some point…they won the first string quartet competition at the Wigmore Hall in 1979, so there’s a continuity there.”

One obvious change around the Wigmore Hall in the last 25 years is its neighbourhood, for as any visitor to central London knows there are building sites and new constructions at every turn. Has that presented a challenge? “We had problems next door, with banging during concerts. We try to get on with the builders, and thankfully there’s no noise from the street. That’s fine – but the area has come on so much, which is wonderful. Marylebone High Street is fantastic, and there is a Marylebone belt – we work in the community here. The concerts at Spanish Place have been a bonus, with things we can’t fit on the stage. There will be more there in the next few years, and I’m talking about a mass for Schubert on the day of his death in 2028.”

On the day we speak, the Duke of Kent visited – to take in a highly emotive concert profiling Irish composer Ina Boyle, through her songs – the sort of cause the Wigmore Hall furthers without ceremony but in a way that is not signposted. “It has to be of a certain quality”, says John. “I’d rather not have a concert than have a bad concert. They lived that today; you need that commitment. I am a patron of the Ina Boyle society, so I have seen the evolution of how the rediscovery has happened, and obviously was convinced quite a while ago.”

What is the immediate and long-term future for the hall? “We’ve gotten so far, and we’ve achieved so much – and the ambition is to keep it there. Sometimes stability, when something moves so much, is important. To have 600 concerts is a risk, financially, but to keep the standards up and to keep introducing fresh things every season is also important. This anniversary looks like a huge peak, but you always find a way of moving it on.”

The concert platform is also surprisingly versatile, fitting a solo pianist one night and the Irish Baroque Orchestra the next. “Last night the stage was packed, and while those concerts cost a bit more to put on, they are special. Hugh Cutting (above) sang brilliantly, it was a very moving concert – with Che faro senza Euridice, but also Caro mio ben, which I haven’t heard in years. People were telling me they haven’t had so much joy from a concert in years. One woman came up to me and said she’s been coming to concerts since she was 16, and is now 89, and she said it was one of the best concerts she’s ever seen. That is what it’s all about!”

Classical music still matters, clearly – though that is not so evident from the media. “There was a time when Sir Michael Tippett was interviewed by Sir Terry Wogan, and what we did was so central. If you look at the great Viennese conductors of the past who used to sell loads of CDs, the glory years of EMI with Maria Callas – and Dame Janet Baker was a household name. How the world has changed, for the worse.”

Talking of recorded media, while the Wigmore Hall still stream concerts, are there plans to revive the record label? “Streaming effectively is the label”, he says, “but it might be directed in a different way. There are some special festival announcements”, he says, intriguingly.

Does the hall still have a transformative effect on John the audience member? “Yes. As I get older, I find I’m able to park the distractions. Sometimes I go in with a problem in the back of my mind, and the concert will fix it for me. The only time I used to have that peace was doing transatlantic flights, when nobody could get to you. I did some of my best programming when travelling, it was important to get out and meet colleagues internationally in Berlin, Paris. It’s very important to see what’s going on in other halls, and it’s a very supportive network – and I hear orchestral concerts to clean out my ears!”

I close by asking Gilhooly to choose an achievement of which he is most proud. “We’ve had refurbishments, and the Covid thing – but independence from public funding, I think, getting 600 concerts. But the greatest achievement is seeing young artists succeed, which is their achievement, but to know we have created the conditions so that that can happen. That’s the most satisfying thing.”

The Wigmore Hall’s 125th anniversary festival begins on Monday 25 May – with further information at the hall’s website. The website also includes a summary of the 2026/27 season. There Is Sweet Music Here: The World of Wigmore Hall, by Julia Boyd, will be published on 21 May and can be ordered here

Published post no.2,885 – Tuesday 12 May 2026

Talking Heads: Martin James Bartlett

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by Ben Hogwood

In this interview, the affable pianist talks about his new album of Bach, Mozart and Britten works for piano and orchestra, delighting in the opportunity he had to record it in Salzburg, and giving insight into the performance, recording and instrument he played.

Pianist Martin James Bartlett has joined Arcana to talk about his cleverly programmed new album of concertos. Bartlett, who won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 2014, has since earned a regular contract with Warner Classics, recording themed solo albums, Rhapsody with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and now an album of works by J.S. Bach, Mozart and Britten, made with the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra and conductor Howard Griffiths.

When we speak, Bartlett has already had the pleasure of giving two enthusiastically received concerts at London’s Wigmore Hall in 2026 – a solo recital and a piano duo concert with his friend and label mate Mariam Batsashvili.

“It has been wonderful – twice in two months – but I’m not going to be there every month! John Gilhooly has invited me back again, but in 2029 – because they book so far ahead. There’s a great song history of the Wigmore Hall, which is fabulous, because you go into the backs and you see all the photos of pianists and singers!” He confesses to being more than a little unnerved by the pictures. “It’s terrifying! You’re warming up backstage in the room where there is a picture of Artur Rubinstein, and it is quite imposing because you are stepping onto hallowed ground. In the end, it comes down to thinking, “I love this music, and I know the audience are there to have a good time. People don’t buy tickets unless they want a good evening out, and you’ve just got to enjoy it and have fun with it, even in spite of the pressure from the previous greats who have trod the boards.”

Does he think he might venture onto record with Batsashvili, in the form of some two-piano repertoire? “Well, it would be lovely to do it”, he says. “It’s one of those ones where there can often be so much red tape about who you can record with. It really helps that we’re both with Warner Classics, and the lovely thing is that they came along to see us both at the Wigmore concert. I’m sure we would have a great time working together if the opportunity arose.”

Bartlett’s new album is a clever and sprightly walk through works that initially appear to have little in common, but which all enjoy a youthful disposition. That by Johann Sebastian Bach is the substantial Keyboard Concerto in D minor, BWV1052, and it is refreshing to hear this work back on the piano. “It’s one of those things”, says Bartlett, “that when you look back at the great composers they were all in favour of the progression of the instrument as well as the art form. Liszt himself was trying out all of these new instruments, and Bach was interested in cultivating the future form of the instrument. Whenever you record something that is a ‘period piece’, it’s always a choice of how historically informed you want to be, and how modern and individual you wish to make it. For me, playing on the piano is an amazing thing, because I have no doubt that Bach would have really loved the piano as well. I love the harpsichord too, and that’s the nice thing – I love all forms of today’s instrument. I love the clavichord, where you can do vibrato on each note because it holds the string. I love the organ works of Bach, too – it just so happens that I’m a pianist, so that’s the instrument I use!”

The versatility of Bach is a key helping factor, too. “You could play Bach on a hollowed-out carrot, and it would still move you! That music transcends everything, and when the intention is so strong, you can do what you like with it. There are so many recordings of people singing the First Cello Suite, and there’s the wonderful singer Angélique Kidjo, who has worked with Alexandre Tharaud – they do Bach together, and it works so brilliantly.”

The youthful thread through the album is enhanced by Mozart’s Piano Concerto no.9, the young composer’s first notable piano concerto success – and a daring piece of music for its time. Bartlett agrees. “It’s the piece that helped Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto come along, and that idea of there not being a huge opening ‘tutti’. The piano interrupts almost precociously, which would not be surprising given that it’s Mozart. I loved when I was thinking about the album how these pieces pushed classical music forward. Bach’s piece is one of the first keyboard concertos, and it takes so much from the past. It’s quite evidently inspired by Vivaldi – however it’s also pushing forward. That’s exactly the same with the Mozart, which really is such a beautifully conceived work.”

He goes into more detail. “I read some theories about the last movement, and the confusion around the name Jeunehomme. It was apparently misunderstood from Jenamy, the surname of the pianist Victoire Jenamy, and because Mozart had the most ghastly French accent, it had been noted down incorrectly! Her father was a choreographer, and ground breaking in the dance world. I surmise that’s why Mozart puts that minuet in the last movement, because it is ‘Presto’, and it’s moving quickly, and then suddenly there’s that breath of fresh air which is this little Minuet. I have no doubt it was written for her, or as side note to gain some favour with her father, who would have appreciated it. There is so much of a story in this music.”

The last movement, in fact, is almost a concerto in itself. “It has all those interlocking cadenza passages that get you back to that main theme that’s possibly bustling with energy. You have so many choices of what you can do there, and I just love that sort of creativity. It’s spontaneous music, written down!”

Was it helpful working with the experience of conductor Howard Griffiths? “I met Howard a couple of years back, and before we came up with this project, I was lucky enough to work with him in the Tonhalle in Zurich, and we did a beautiful concert where we played this concerto. It’s one of those relationships that you don’t come across very often, with artistic connection that is so easy. There are no laborious discussions about how to do something because you come to music from a similar perspective, and way of feeling it. That’s what I felt when I first worked with Howard.”

The rapport extends well beyond Mozart. “With the Bach concerto, how many different speeds is it possible to use to play the first movement well? You’ve got Glenn Gould on one hand, the slowest side, and then you have these harpsichord recordings, which are far more nippy and sprightly. Howard asked me to play the first beat, and he said “Brilliant, I was just hoping we would be able to move through it. For me the speed of these pieces dependent on the harmonic progression, and how quickly the harmonies change indicates the feel you want from it. Howard and I were on the same page, thank goodness!”

The pair were clearly having fun with Britten’s impetuous Young Apollo, too. “It’s interesting,” says Martin, “to choose a piano for an album like this. There are very different characteristics you might require for all three pieces, but this piano was just a dream. We got it from Bösendorfer, and I went to try it in Vienna. This one stood out to me, as it’s got such a beautiful tone – individual and characterful. I got a very nice message from Benjamin Grosvenor the other day, who had listened to the Bach, and he noted it was a Bösendorfer. It goes to show it has such an individual sound, that worked perfectly for this! What surprised me was I tried the beautiful bits of the Mozart and some of the sprightly bits of the Bach, and I thought, “Will it have the monumental sheer power to illuminate the sun god, Apollo? And my goodness, it did! When I crashed down on the bottom ‘A’ I thought it had was something of a ‘beautiful beast’, with the beauty and the power to work the Britten.”

His enthusiasm is contagious. “It has a capacity to do that “pearls on a string”, Rembrandt-esque thing, where you can see every facet of everything. At any speed, this piano provides the most gloriously rich sound in every note.” This works especially in the Mozart, with the dance being played out – to which the orchestra respond. “The perspective with Howard was that this was chamber music. Gone are the days where you have Mozart concertos that have a huge orchestral introduction but it is mismatched with the piano. We wanted it to feel like a piece of spontaneous chamber music where everybody is active in the production, and listening.”

The start of the Britten is indicative of this, with its bright colours. “It’s one of those works where I understand it musically very well, but I don’t understand the mystery behind it. It’s shrouded in mystery a bit for me, the love affair he had with this young German boy, and then Peter Pears. I only read recently that the man to whom it is dedicated, Wulff Scherchen, was discovered to be alive until very recently, and had been married 70 years – but still had all this incredible correspondence between him and Britten.”

The album’s tracklisting acknowledges the old form classical album, with full works and a linked programme, but also the new, where music streaming is key, and record labels look to release singles ahead of album release. “Again, it helps to have the versatility of Bach – that first movement especially. Playlisting is a double-edged sword – it’s wonderful, as it puts our music out there to so many more people. As an artist, though, I want my music to be on the ‘Wake Up’ playlist rather than the ‘Go To Bed’ one! I would rather my music thrill someone rather than put them into a lengthy snooze! However, when I think about the Bach first movement, it is perfect study music, because it is relentless in the way the harmony evolves. We came to this album from a slightly old-fashioned point of view, making it because it has incredible music – which hopefully means it will be on some playlists, which the first movement of the Bach already is, happily!”

The album was enjoyable to make, too. “The recording process for me was incredibly special, because I’ve never recorded anything in a different country to England. All of my albums so far have been recorded in London, but recording in Salzburg, where Mozart spent his youthful career working, was very special. To be able to get up every day, staying in the centre of Salzburg in those beautiful, crooked streets with cobblestones, get out of bed and know you’re going to record Mozart, walking down the streets that he would have walked himself, and in the snow too – it was so Romantic! If not a little hazardous and evocative.”

Bartlett immersed himself in the city. “I went into these wonderful restaurants, where they serve specialities like boiled dumplings. You feel close to being his friend, with a couple of hundred years in between! Then at the other end, the only place that was open late at night was a kebab shop across a river, across an icy bridge, about a 40-minute walk from my hotel. That brought me back to reality sharply!”

He is enjoying travelling after a concentrated period of work in England, with another visit to Bösendorfer in Vienna where the album was launched, “nestled into the Musikverein”. Thinking back to the Young Musician competition, was this what he hoped might happen as a result? “Every time something new comes up, it somewhat surprises me, as mentally I feel like I’m still the same person as when I was doing Young Musician! I feel incredibly grateful, especially with Warner Classics, who have allowed me to record whatever repertoire I want, and have really been on board when I’ve come with themes of Love and Death, you know? I’ve had such a wonderful opportunity, working with the London Philharmonic Orchestra for my Rhapsody, with their symphonic excellence, and now, with the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra, the most incredible chamber experience. To have that contrast has been wonderful, and it’s what I love about music. My albums are widely different to each other, as I’m a glutton for this amazing music! As Rachmaninov said, “Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime isn’t enough for music!” That’s how I feel, especially being a pianist!”

You can listen to clips from Martin James Bartlett’s new album, and purchase the recording, at the Presto Music website. You can read more about Martin at his website

Published post no.2,852 – Thursday 9 April 2026

Talking Heads: Anastasia Prokofieva and Sergey Rybin

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Interviewed by Ben Hogwood

One of the most intriguing classical albums to be released in 2026 so far is an album of songs by Sergey Rachmaninoff. Nothing particularly unusual in that, you might think, but on this occasion he shares top billing with his teacher at the Moscow Conservatory, Anton Arensky. A composer often overlooked, Arensky played a critical part in Russian musical history, forming a tangible link between the Romantic composers Glinka and Tchaikovsky, the ‘Mighty Handful’ Russian group of composers Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin, and the 20th century giants, of whom Rachmaninoff is certainly one.

The artists on this album for Somm Recordings, soprano Anastasia Prokofieva and pianist Sergey Rybin, have joined Arcana on a call to discuss their album, and in particular the central character Arensky. People who know the composer are likely to have heard his Piano Trio no.1, one of his finest chamber music works, but the songs are not familiar at all. “The songs are lovely, but they are absolutely unique and rare – even in Russia”, says Anastasia (below). “It came to our attention that this music should be elevated and performed. The idea came that when you hear and sing this music it is something very fresh and very new. It should be more present for people, otherwise it will vanish.” “I knew some Arensky before”, says Rybin, “particularly the songs, through being curious about the facets of Russian music and not just Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff, though we did want to do some Rachmaninoff to begin with. Then this idea came to us that there is a connection between the two composers, because one is a pupil and one is a teacher. The idea grew from there, and we thought this slant, this side view would be an interesting way to put it across. So what is the chicken, and what is the egg?! Suddenly you realise that Rachmaninoff wasn’t born in a vacuum, and there are things so closely connected to his style, and you can literally hear how his style was influenced by Arensky, particularly in the piano writing. From my point of view can absolutely see and touch it.”

The selection process was next. “We looked through 57 romances, we surveyed it all and selected what we liked.” The album is linked logically, rewarding continuous listening as the spotlight shifts between the composers so that it proves difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends. “They are so similar, and yet there is a difference”, says Rybin. “It is like listening to Debussy and Ravel, you can feel it is of the same nature, but there is a notion which is just imperceptibly different. I personally enjoy that as an audiophile, feeling that slight personal intonation, particularly with Arensky, It’s hard to describe what it is. With Rachmaninoff you hear the Orient, you hear that sort of Russian romantic Orientalism in play. With Arensky it is something else, and it is hard to put your finger on it.”

Was Arensky writing his songs with a particular singer in mind? “I don’t think he was”, says Sergei. “Rachmaninoff did, and his Op.38 songs were written for Nina Koshetz, and he went on tour in 1916 playing those songs with her. Subsequently her descendants emigrated to America, and there were two more songs discovered in their archives, Prayer and Glory to God. Somebody held it in a private archive for decades and then suddenly they appeared.”

“There is a funny story about this particular singer, which my professor in Moscow told me, that Koshetz did not like high notes at the end of the song, so she threw the score at Rachmaninoff and told him to sing them!”, says Anastasia. “It is emotionally so strong if you get to that point with this pianissimo, and you need to be on a very good day with your technique and with your state of mind. Our collaboration helps me to sometimes hold on and do the words first, with the music. That’s why it’s fantastic to work, with such a musician and such a pianist as Sergey. So it’s not only me as a singer, getting to the point of high notes, I always try to see it through our ‘duet’ point of view, so it should be tender and fragile, not necessarily loud and big.”

“I would add that in general Russian music is so vocally based”, says Rybin (above), because it is first of all coming from folk tradition, which is mostly singing. And then, as I often say to students, Russian music did not know a Baroque period – almost nothing. It’s only Bortniansky and Berezovsky, at the turn of the 18th to 19th century, and they studied in Europe. The Russian national school arrived straight in to ‘bel canto’, and St. Petersburg used to run a full time Italian opera company. When went to the opera, that meant Italian opera, and so the Russian school of writing for the voice is profoundly based on that, the bel canto nature. That points to your question – yes, they did know what to ask for the voice, and they asked hard things, because they heard all the Verdi, and Wagner came to Russia.”

“This connection between Italian bel canto and Russian styles is amazing, and in addition we are so blessed to have these amazing musicians who were not only singers but pianists or violinists too”, says Anastasia. “I was a violinist, so this kind of intonation and presentation helps when you play the instrument first. That helped me a lot. “I would add”, says Rybin, “that in Rachmaninoff and Rimsky-Korsakov, the separation of the female voice into soprano and mezzo-soprano is very, very pronounced. With Rachmaninoff the soprano is very high and the mezzo very low. Arensky is more on Tchaikovsky’s side, writing very centrally for the soprano voice, with maybe one top note. Rachmaninoff creates more of a diversion with his range.”

“Speaking of Tchaikovsky”, says Anastacia, “I think he and Arensky were quite close friends, because he complemented Arensky’s opera Dream on the Volga a great deal, and wrote letters to the Bolshoi Theatre asking them to invest more money for the staging.” The opera is based on the Ostrovsky melodrama Voyevoda, which Tchaikovsky himself set and ultimately destroyed. “It was actually presented at the Bolshoi Theatre”, she says, “and had a good deal of success, and Tchaikovsky was greatly touched by the music and the style. So they were quite close in terms of musical language and understanding. It touched me a lot, because Tchaikovsky is such a fantastic composer, a base of the whole Russian music culture, and knowing that there is another composer who was close in the thinking or musical language is fantastic, how close their musical worlds were, and that we can come back and elevate one of those voices. My first operatic aria was by Arensky, and some of his arias are particularly famous in Russia, but the rest of the world doesn’t know him so well, and we are really happy to lift his profile.”

She is helped by Rybin, who she praises for his informative booklet notes and presentational style at concerts, giving audiences an insight into the music they perform. “He is a unique musician who has an ability to explain this music, a talent for presenting it. I’m in good hands!”

Together the pair have recorded albums devoted to the music of Hahn and Dargomyzhsky. “His music is absolutely brilliant”, says Anastacia of the early Russian Romantic, “he wrote in French and in Italian, and elevated that with some hidden gems, and the album game together beautifully. Reynaldo Hahn wrote some fantastic music, too.”

It may seem an obvious point, but listening to a composer’s song output is to hear a whole new element of their output, which makes this album all the more important for highlighting this area of Arensky’s output – and Rachmaninoff’s, too. “By volume, you realise the songs are a significant part of the output”, says Sergey, “for Rachmaninoff too, who wrote 86 songs. It is a big output, and we all think of this grandiose composer with big hands and a crushing sound, but when you go into the songs – the majority of them, apart from Spring Waters, maybe – you realise those two or three pages are absolutely perfect, with not a note out of place. They are really works of absolutely refined precision, perfect vocal miniatures, and there are some bars in those songs when you can count the notes on one hand! This minimal restraint and nuance, the light and shade, are in a perfect miniature form, which is a refreshing thought for me. Of course I hear the finale of the Piano Concerto no.3, but then you look into the songs, and you realise that’s not all Rachmaninoff is. He is a perfect vocal miniaturist.”

“That emotional exquisite moment”, says Anastasia, “has roots in Arensky, because some of his songs are so touching and so beautifully done. Someone from the audience said to me yesterday, it’s like the ‘Letter Scene’ from Eugene Onegin, but shorter, a mini letter scene in three pages. That was the connection between the teacher who was already showing Rachmaninoff that emotional presence is possible in a couple of minutes, showing what is going on but also how the person is feeling.”

The two talk as they perform, in rather fetching harmony. “Rachmaninoff studied harmony with Arensky”, points out Sergey, “and Arensky was the first ‘harmonist’, with no study books to use since conservatories had just been established in Russia. He was the author of the first study book of harmony in Russian, and I find this very important. Rachmaninoff was just below 20 when he studied harmony, and then of course we realised that harmony for Rachmaninoff is a particularly important tool and dimension. We hear that it is his, but I also hear those dextrous shifts in Arensky, he is really mobile on his feet in terms of harmony, writing adventurous modulations. There is a line there, where Rachmaninoff was influenced in this harmonic sense, which carried through his life.”

With Rachmaninoff’s continually strong emphasis on melody, are there any challenges that are particular to phrasing in the songs? “Absolutely”, says Anastasia. “The Op.38 songs are particularly concentrated, and you have to never sharpen your intonation. Sometimes it takes you years to perfect! It has always amazed me that the compose were so young to compose these songs, especially Arensky, who had a short life, colourful and interesting. He was very young to be a professor writing this book. We need to present these people not only as composers, with the beautiful music, but also as human beings. They were blessed with so many talents, and have given us these amazing scores, books and knowledge – how to feel, to be happy and sad, this emotional flourishing that we miss sometimes these days when watching Netflix and things! This deep knowledge needs to be brought to the new world and presented to young people.”

The pair have recent experience in this field. “In our concert yesterday we had children around eight years old listening, and they could understand the music because it’s so emotionally easy and clear – not easy as in simple, but it appeals to them and has resonance. It is poetic, and the heart and imagination immediately start working, which we all want. I’m happy to have been a bit closer to them and bringing this music to the new generation.”

With regards to vocal technique, she considers. “Because he was such a brilliant pianist, Rachmaninoff didn’t really have limits, so you somehow need to make it happen, to make it work, and it’s quite an achievement to do. It’s beautiful when it happens!” Does it help that both composers were pianists, being able to set scenes with such economy? “I’m really pleased that it is such brilliant music for Sergey to play, because sometimes the piano part is limited. Here it is like an orchestra, and I was so happy that we could both flourish, with some beautiful pieces both to sing and to play. Our audience yesterday reacted very well to this musical language, which is so colourful and rich. They are great pieces to present!”

You can listen to clips and explore purchase options for the new album of songs by Arensky and Rachmaninoff at the Somm Recordings website

Published post no.2,828 – Monday 16 March 2026

Talking Heads: Francesco Cilluffo

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by Ben Hogwood pictures (c) Ribaltaluce Studio (Francesco Cilluffo); Pádraig Grant (rehearsals)

Arcana has the pleasure of an audience with conductor Francesco Cilluffo, in his third year as Principal Guest Conductor at Wexford Festival Opera. Previous outings have led to encounters with Alfredo Catalani’s Edmea (2021) and Fromental Halévy’s La tempesta (2022), both Italian operas with Shakespearean connections. This year, however, the action shifts to the coast of Florida, for a production of Frederick Delius‘s rarely heard opera The Magic Fountain.

As we talk, it is clear Cilluffo is excited and deeply passionate about communicating this little-known work to a wider audience, from his own unique position. “I’m a very unusual Italian conductor!” he says. “Alongside the staple repertoire one expects from an Italian conductor, I’ve always had a great curiosity about less performed repertoire. My musical upbringing was a mixture, because I grew up in Italy, but lived and studied in London for many years, and worked a fair amount of time in English speaking countries. I remember the first time I was exposed to Delius was when I heard The Walk to the Paradise Garden, in a Barbirolli recording. I thought there something very soothing about the music, but at the same time I could feel there were more layers. It made me very interested to know more and I learned it was from his opera A Village Romeo & Juliet, and gradually about Delius.

As I said I have an unusual profile, and to prove that I can say that The Magic Fountain is already better known than the only Delius opera I have already performed, which is Margot la Rouge, which I did in Opera Holland Park as part of a double bill (with Puccini’s Le Villi) two years ago. That is completely unknown but is his fourth opera, so not an early attempt. It’s a weird piece, because it is in French, and there are no other versions in any other language because it was written for a competition, for the famous Verismo opera competition that was in Italy, and was won by Leoncavallo’s Cavalleria Rusticana. Delius forced himself to enter it, because if you think of Delius, you don’t necessarily think about life and blood, or drama. Because I’ve conducted it now I can say it is probably the least interesting of his operas, because apart from his craft in writing for the orchestra, it sounds like something he felt he had to do, and it was not successful. So I arrived at The Magic Fountain knowing a lot about Delius. In the years coming up to this performance, I have always felt a particular connection with the music. It is gorgeous music, very personal, and clearly the music of someone with a very interesting and difficult life. All of that gets into the notes!”

During a rehearsal for the Magic Fountain, Axelle Saint-Cirel sings the role of Watawa

The plot has strong autobiographical elements that Cilluffo recognises. “It’s not just an isolated case, because all the Delius operas deal with a similar situation”, he says. “You could say the same thing about Benjamin Britten’s operas. Delius has different worlds, backgrounds, countries and social backgrounds, different worlds that collide through love. We can read a lot of autobiographical meaning here, starting with the name of the main lead, Solano. We know that one of the many crazy things that Delius did was manage the orange plantation in Florida, called Solana Grove, and while there is no proof, we know when he was there he probably had a love child with one of the locals. There is also a letter from Delius planning an operatic trilogy about outcasts. In a way he did, because if you think of his three main operas, The Magic Fountain has the native Americans and the clashes between their culture and the conquistadors. Then his opera Koanga is a clash between slaves and the owner of a plantation, and in a way A Village Romeo & Juliet is about, again, innocence versus society, but again there is the strong character of the Traveller, who is central to the plot.”

Like Britten, the connection runs deep. “Delius probably felt some connection with the outcast, for the main reason that he was a man without a motherland. In my experience a lot of British people don’t really see Delius as a British composer. His DNA starts in North Europe, then most of his early life was in Bradford, but then he moved everywhere! Apparently he didn’t master British language as flawlessly as one would expect, because he was writing this weird German with a hint of Norwegian, because of his relationship with Grieg. I am aware of a bit of a Delius renaissance, because I’ve seen a lot of programming of his stuff. I’m very glad, because I think he stands in a category of his own.”

Meilir Jones

Cilluffo remembers fellow countryman, the critic Paolo Isotta, sharing this view. “He was a very old school music critic, who was very controversial in his taste, but I remember he kept saying he thought Delius was one of the most interesting orchestral composers of the 20th century. That’s quite a statement, and it clicked in my thinking – I thought there must be a grain of truth there. So I was very glad to spend a lot of time learning and studying his music.”

One of Delius’ strongest characteristics is an ability to create vivid pictures in the mind of his listener, which carries through to The Magic Fountain. Yet Cilluffo goes further. “I think so, but descriptive music is just the surface. There’s a veneer of that, but what really stands out is an incredibly physical and sexual drive in the music, a sensuality needs to be embraced in a very unapologetic way.”

L-R Theresa Tsang, stage manager with Dominick Chenes, Axelle Saint-Cirel and director Christopher Luscombe

He also considers how the quality of the performance is particularly important in Delius’s music. “I think Beethoven and Puccini can survive, but for some composers a bad performance can harm them. I don’t mean technical, of course, but I mean when the music is not done in a way that does it justice or bring through the many layers of the music. Some composers can be doomed by that, and I think that’s the case with Delius. As much as Sir Thomas Beecham was an incredible champion of his music, and was an amazing conductor, I still feel to this day he gave the idea that this is lovely countryside, beautiful English music. As gorgeous as that can be, people can say after five minutes, “I’m done with your beautiful English idyll, there’s nothing else. Only by starting with the Delius biography, and reading his letters, which I’ve done, and knowing about the culture of Paris and Northern Europe at the start of the 20th century, then you start to see more. You see that why this person connected much more with expressionist painters and writers than any other – because there’s an incredibly violent and sensual layer in the music there. You just need to bring it up!”

There are interpretative dangers for conductors taking on Delius’s music. “The way it’s written – and we know that Delius was a self-taught musician – can lend itself to misinterpretation. If we talk about historical performers, I think Sir John Barbirolli understood him better, despite the fact that Beecham was the great champion of his music. We also have to remember that Delius never heard most of his music in his lifetime. He never sat through a performance or even the read through of The Magic Fountain. I don’t say to suggest that he would have changed anything, but I think there is an element of frustration and anger inside, of knowing he was writing this amazing music, but nobody wanted to put it on. That somehow creeps into the writing, especially towards the end.”

His health – and sexual health – also played a part. “We know that his syphilis was such a constant in his life. His relationship with an illness that was inevitably linked with sexual freedom was against his very strict upbringing, with a Protestant father. If we put on one side his friendships with Munch and Gauguin, and writers like Strindberg, there is very little room left for beautiful, idyllic, ‘make you feel good’ music.”

For this production of The Magic Fountain, Cilluffo is drawing on previous creative relationships. “We are very much on the same level with the director, Christopher Luscombe, as we already worked together at Grange Opera on Tosca together. We have one recording of The Magic Fountain to refer to, which is already one more than we would normally have for Wexford style operas. As good a reference as that recording is, we feel we are going in completely the opposite direction. The recording sounds too beautiful, too even, and this is an opera with bursts of passion and conflict. There is also something very courageous about this opera, where someone who is so clearly middle class wanted to put on stage people who are victims of the very same system of which Delius is part. Maybe that’s also one of the reasons why people didn’t go out of their way to put on operas like Koanga or The Magic Fountain, because it was uncomfortable. With Koanga, we are talking about decades before Porgy and Bess could be considered as an opera to put on the stage. All this is part of what we have in mind in bringing this work back to life.”

When conducting Delius, what does Cilluffo consider to be the principal challenges? “There are two sides to this answer”, he says. “One is that as an opera composer, Delius always thought of the orchestra first. The orchestra is the colour that brings out the drama, contrary to a lot of opera where the drama is always from the voice, and enhanced by the orchestral palette. You also have to keep in mind that he never heard it, and – I’m going to use a very bad word here – he never ‘workshopped’ it. Nobody told him that if you want to have three horns blasting out when a soprano is singing in the middle register, you might want to consider lowering the dynamics here and there. But that’s the work we do, and where my background as a composer comes in very useful. The technical challenge is to adjust the work so that the orchestra doesn’t become the only character.”

Francesco Cilluffo, conductor

As to the other side, Cilluffo says, “The one composer that keeps coming up as a reference when we speak with Chris about the opera is Puccini, which you would imagine is as far as possible from this world. However he isn’t far, because Puccini is another one who suffered, especially in the past decades, as being labelled as just one thing, an Italian composer of desperate love. Puccini was a very troubled and dark soul and was in contact with the same world at the same time – Paris and Northern Europe, of the beginning of 20th century. You know, Delius used to go and attend autopsies in the morgue in Paris. Part of that goes into Margot La Rouge, which is set on the outskirts of Paris and is a fight between prostitutes and dealers. I’m bringing this up because that’s something we read about in the novels of Émile Zola, like Thérèse Raquin, and that’s the same world Puccini was fascinated by, as in one of the operas of Il Trittico – Il Tabarro. I think both composers, as different as they were, were triggered by the incredible war in Paris for artists at the beginning of 20th century.”

Coincidentally, Francesco’s diary for 2025 has been dominated by two composers – Puccini and Delius, heightening the levels of interest in linking them. “What really stood out – and finally made Puccini be considered a proper great composer – was the orchestra, and how the orchestra conveys, in a post-Wagnerian but personal way, what’s going on, the psychology, or what we’re really talking about. It’s always with the lesser known operas where it is easier to see, and I think a great underrated opera of Puccini in La Rondine. You could say it is a lighter version of La Traviata, but if you listen to the music, and the duet at the end of the opera, it’s about the end of a world of certainties, of the Austo-Hungarian Empire. It’s interesting because you read his letters, and Puccini writes, “I want La Rondine to be my Der Rosenkavalier”. That’s why I always insist with younger colleagues that you have to study what’s in between the notes as well studying the notes, because by reading these things, words open up to you about how to actually make it work apart from the technical side. Of course Delius was a very different experience, because Puccini was one of the most famous and richest composers of his time, while Delius had to sell his Gauguin painting towards the end of his life because he just couldn’t make money – and of course he was becoming blind as well.”

Axelle Saint-Cirel

Yet the similarity of what they experienced persists. “I feel they were both in touch with this incredible age, where we cannot even start to feel what it was like to be in the Paris at the beginning of 20 century, with all the contradictions, the violence, and their approach towards love, sexuality and wars – and, up to a certain point, the approach to different and far away cultures. Puccini treated it in a very normal way of his time, with Madama Butterfly and Turandot using different cultures as a background for a story that was totally Western European. In the case of Delius, he actually went to the places, and dealt with rather less comfortable situations. As part of my background research I have been reading a book by Claude Levi Strauss, the French anthropologist. One of his books, Tristes Tropiques, talks about his work in South America, and how that changed the perception of different culture and how we actually go from an anthropological point of view, at that time, to interpret things according to our own system of beliefs. He talks of how not to do that.”

Turning to Wexford, the 2025 incarnation of the festival looks set to be a colourful one. “I started going to Wexford in 2015”, recalls Cilluffo, “and my first experience was a Mascagni opera, Guglielmo Ratcliff. Funnily enough, one of the three operas that year was Koanga by Delius! It’s funny after ten years I’m now the one conducting the Delius, but that is one of many reasons why I keep coming back and I was very happy to be nominated principal conductor in 2022. It’s the one moment of the year where I know I’m going back to a place where music and studying matter. As a guest conductor I travel all over the world, and most of the time it is with operas that are well known. It is very much a traveller’s life, but sometimes you do feel you are just one wheel of a big machine. I always think that in Wexford, the real core of Wexford is an act of love, because you take some less fortunate operas, that for some reason have been forgotten. Some of them, when they were premiered, were huge success and were for a long time but then suddenly disappeared. I think Wexford reconnects you with the very reason you want to do this, which is to make a difference, to really live a month in a work of art that has been rarely heard, and to make a case for it. I cannot lie – not all the operas are going to be blockbusters – but I’m not sure that’s the point. It’s a great moment to reflect and to connect with this repertoire. I always look forward to this every year, it is a privilege to think I am going to spend a month with Delius, and with this work. I’m already fascinated, and I haven’t done the first rehearsal yet!”

The location is also a draw. “Wexford is a very Delius-like festival, the coming together of different countries and cultures in one space, and the nature there is so outstanding. Most of us go from one city to another, but suddenly here you are, with the Irish Sea in front of you, and you are far away from the closest big city, Dublin, which is two hours north. It is a very Delius-esque festival, and in fact this is the third Delius opera they have done in under 20 years – with A Village Romeo & Juliet, Koanga and now this. I do have to say personally, however, that I think Delius’ operatic masterpiece is Fennimore and Gerda. I hope one day to that, it’s a one-act opera so has to be part of a double. It deals with so much material of his life, art and life in Northern Europe, Scandinavia. It’s the closest he got, I think, to writing Pelléas et Mélisande.”

We may hear more of that in time, of course – but for now it is clear anyone attending The Magic Fountain will be treated to a fascinating work by a composer whose creative wealth and originality is finally being transmitted to the stage.

The Magic Fountain runs at the O’Reilly Theatre, National Opera House, Wexford, on 19, 23, 25 and 31 October. For more information and tickets, visit the Wexford Festival Opera website

Published post no.2,684 – Saturday 11 October 2025