To see the revival of David McVicar’s fabulous ‘Turn of the Screw’ (left) is to be reminded just how good English National Opera can be when it sticks to its metier: getting brilliant directors to give tried and trusted classics a new and original twist, with singers who understand how to work as an ensemble. While 84-year-old Charles Mackerras cast a lovely spell from the pit, the cast who bodied-forth Britten’s ghost-story might have been born to their roles. No praise can be too high for Michael Colvin’s sinister Peter Quint, Cheryl Barker’s louring former governess, or Rebecca Evans’ plangent incarnation of the current governess; the boys alternating as Miles - opposite Nazan Fikret’s vividly-imagined Flora - were as good as any I have seen in that precarious role (the treble voice must be strong and pure, with no intimation of the adolescent break to come); Ann Murray, as the housekeeper, carried real authority. Tanya McCullin’s delicate sepia designs haunted the mind long after the last notes have sounded; the moment when Quint literally summons Miss Jessel up out of the earth remains one of the most convincingly spooky I’ve ever seen.

To see Rupert Goold’s version of ‘Turandot’ (right), on the following night, was to be reminded that this company can still, with great deliberation, shoot itself in both feet. Nothing in Goold’s theatrical track record - garlanded with praise for his flashy ‘Enron’ production - had given an indication as to how he would deal with this problematic work, with its melange of sublime music, adolescent emotion, and sheer vulgarity: we were assured his take would be original. It was, but only in the sense that it plumbed depths of crassness never before seen at the Coliseum.

The curtain went up on a Soho - or SoHo - Chinese restaurant, where a Halloween party was in progress containing just about every stereotype known to metropolitan man. Camp queens, jewelled Goths, a trio of Elvises, a Chelsea pensioner, some Hasidic Jews, a NYPD officer, a nun - you name it, it was all in there somewhere. There was also a white-suited Tom Wolfe journo, who was sometimes the invisible chronicler, and sometimes the impresario making things happen; the Emperor was presented as the shambolically-colourful lord of Longleat on a bender; Ping, Pang, and Pong were dolled up as camp cooks with cleavers, sometimes supported by a bevy of dancers with pigs’ heads, and at others by a leggy troupe of mannequins. You got a message: this director doesn’t like women.

You also sensed his desperation to reference everything to topical reality: unsurprisingly this periodically misfired, with some stereotypes being toe-curlingly out of date. Nothing made dramatic sense at any level; the ritualised violence was about as threatening as the violence in ‘The Mikado’. When the journo got inexplicably impaled by Turandot, and scrambled up onto the kitchen range - yes, we were in the servants’ quarters for the final act - to expire bloodily with his notebook falling from lifeless fingers, we got a clumsy reference to the dying Puccini, but so what? Nothing, I repeat, made sense. The whole thing was like having the room invaded by a tiresomely camp friend who is constantly shouting ‘Let’s do the show right here!’, when all you want is to have some sort of conversation.

The sad thing was that in strictly musical terms this was a decent evening. If Kirsten Blanck’s Princess Turandot was efficient rather than inspired, Amanda Echalaz’s Liu was ringingly sung, as was Gwyn Hughes Jones’s noble Calaf; the chorus was in splendid form, and the long trio for Ping, Pang, and Pong was rivetingly delivered under Edward Gardner’s skilful beat. What a waste.

What this show reflects is that most common of failings among would-be cool-dude directors - a total lack of faith in the work itself. When in doubt, let postmodern ‘style’ replace thought, and turn it into a Broadway musical: ‘That’ll draw the crowd!’ Oh really? It will be interesting to see whether ENO has the nerve to revive this brainless travesty.

And so to the long-awaited ENO double bill: Bartok’s ‘Duke Bluebeard’s Castle’ in an unusual pairing with Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’ - opera and ballet yoked together for once. To direct the former, ENO has drafted in Daniel Kramer, another flashy young theatrical figure - but at least one with a brain. So simple, and so obvious: transpose the castle to a basement in an Austrian suburb, and turn Bluebeard into Josef Fritzl. Why not? Bluebeard’s collection of ghostly victims makes an excellent fit, as does his enjoyment of this secret harem. We meet the Duke - Clive Bayley, possessor of the most wonderfully sepulchral bass - on a dimly-lit street, where he links up with soprano Michaela Martens. Their initial encounter is crudely, almost comically sexual, as she applies her lips to his like a limpet, before being drawn in through his front door.

I won’t spoil the pleasure of designer Giles Cadle’s coups de theatre by describing them: suffice it to say that the eye is as ravished as the ear is by the glorious singing (and the equally glorious playing under Edward Gardner in the pit). Bayley’s Duke is an extraordinary creation, sometimes convulsed with fearful excitement, sometimes dancing about like a delinquent 12-year old. And though his patent lack of sex-appeal makes Martens’ initial attraction inexplicable, he projects a queasy and credible necrophilia. The final tableau is so shocking that the applause takes at least a minute to materialise - and to me it felt crassly over the top, but the rest of Kramer’s Polanskian imaginings are highly persuasive. What we need now is a revival of Willy Decker’s majestic ROH production of this work, with John Macfarlane’s darkly suggestive designs. Kramer’s literalism is ingenious, but ‘Bluebeard’ is better served by something more oblique.

Meanwhile Stravinsky’s ‘Rite’ was woefully ill-served by the banal choreography which the Ireland-based Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre chose to plaster over it. We were promised a dance piece which would reinforce the ritual intensity of the music, but what we got instead was a cloudy sequence of events which did precisely the opposite; it might have been a ‘Lord of the Flies’-type story, and then again it might not. A sacrifice of sorts began to unfold at the outset - we were in a park full of young social rejects in a bleak Celtic place - but the whole thing degenerated into undressing, cross-dressing, and much donning of animal masks, with the final sacrifice replaced by what looked like a clumsy piece of social didacticism. Nijinsky’s choreography worked because the music was gloriously transparent through it: this choreography was opaque, while the music - conducted with an odd lack of finesse - blundered irrelevantly along below. Memo to ENO: by all means revive ‘Bluebeard’, but in tandem with something that works.

Anyone wanting to take the pulse of the fine-art world in its present state should use the BBC’s watch-again facility to catch Stephen Sackur’s interview with Anish Kapoor in BBC World’s Hard Talk slot. Because in twenty-five delicious minutes this encounter definitively lays bare the vast con-trick which has turned contemporary fine art into a standing joke - at least for those who don’t have a professional or financial stake in it (and perhaps, in a secretly gloating way, for the profiteers as well).

Sackur may be good on the Middle East, but there’s no softer touch than a hard-news journalist who ventures into fashionable culture. And it was clear from the outset that this one had bought Kapoor’s expensive publicity, hook, line, and sinker: Sackur was a sucker. Running his hands through his perfect silver mane, and with a face positively bloated with self-love and condescension, Kapoor gave the impression of having just enough energy to open his sleepy eyes to answer the BBC man’s gently-lobbed questions. His manner was that of a genial professor leading neophyte students into a maze of his own making: patient, amused, and oh so superior. Sackur, meanwhile, was all wide-eyed eagerness: he doesn’t often get to talk to artists this rich and famous. Did Kapoor see any contradiction, he asked respectfully, between the demands of art and money? ‘We must be adult about money,’ Kapoor purred in reply, after some exquisitely-nuanced prevarications about the successful artist’s ambiguous plight in contemporary society. The well-heeled, feather-bedded Tracey Emin - bleating about our tax laws and running off to France - would doubtless have heartily concurred at this point. How can these people be so full of shit and not know it?

We glimpsed Kapoor’s gigantic oozing red-wax ‘sculpture’ portentously leaving blood on the walls at the Royal Academy; we got the obligatory hushed question about the relevance of the (in this context irrelevant) Holocaust. It emerged that he was actually - gasp! - glad that people should interpret his work in opposing ways. He showed a sublime ignorance of any other artistic world than the one he inhabits, suggesting that never before had spectators brought ideological baggage to their viewing of what they saw - no awareness that, at all times in European history, people have come to public art literally weighed down with ideology - religious, political, or whatever. Sackur’s awe-struck inquiry as to how he found the courage to face the terrifying prospect of a whole day of creative block got a beatifically cosy smile in reply.

But this being ‘Hard Talk’ - and Sackur having a macho image to maintain - we eventually got the killer-question he’d been carefully saving up. Not everybody was an admirer, he said through nervously clenched teeth: what was Kapoor’s comment on Brian Sewell’s typically forthright verdict that he was a total charlatan? Kapoor’s face became wreathed in smiles, and he gave the prettiest little laugh. ‘Poor Brian…’ No, really, coming from such a source, that verdict was a compliment!

If this nauseating own-goal was a perfect encapsulation of contemporary fine-art effrontery, it also served as a reminder that classical music’s commercialisation has a long way to go before it can begin to compete. There are of course plenty of parallels in the way the press and television collude in the big labels' promotional racket. When the boss of Deutsche Grammophon confesses that musical quality alone is not enough to ensure you a place on his roster, and that marketability demands quite other qualities, we know we’re in trouble. Would Nicola Benedetti be the ‘star’ she is without her unprecedented initial advance, her assumed Italian name, and her tumbling golden tresses? Nigel Kennedy’s knack for publicity perennially disguises the fact that as a musician he’s a one-trick pony. Yet both these people can play, and this points to classical music’s saving grace. You don’t need skill or talent to make a fortune as a fine-artist: all you need is nerve, and ars longa, vita brevis doesn’t come into it. But with music - even if you’re only a second-ranker like these two - if you don’t have the basics, you’re rumbled immediately.

(Photos: Reuters)

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This year’s penultimate late-night Prom - on September 13 - will see Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Ensemble celebrating 10 years of musical discovery and experiment. An inspired project, whose growth and development I described in the Independent on Sunday. But this is just the tip of a far more important iceberg, in the form of the Aga Khan Foundation’s remarkable cultural conservation work spanning the whole of Central Asia, without which Yo-Yo Ma’s project would not exist.

This foundation is currently running a broad package of development projects - ranging from microfinance to music - intended to improve the material and spiritual well-being of the inhabitants of old "Turkestan": this includes all the countries bounded to the north by Kazakhstan and by Afghanistan to the south, most of which are seriously poverty-stricken. When the Soviets arbitrarily carved up the map, they tried to erase ethnic identities, with particularly damaging results for music. Nomadic instruments were "tamed" by being marshalled into orchestras, Sufi chants were proscribed, and shamans - whose flutes and horse-hair fiddles were their professional armoury - were persecuted, sometimes to the point of execution. The region's master-musicians are now being supported in a variety of ways: help with international tours, permanent recognition through Smithsonian Folkways’ superb 10-CD series on Central Asian music, and, most importantly, appointment in a tutorial capacity in one of the new music schools which the AKTC has set up across the region. For more on this, see my article in the March 2009 issue of ‘BBC Music Magazine’. For more on the Aga Khan Foundation, go to www.akdn.org.

When the Proms’ annual foray into other musics misfires, it’s usually because the musicians chosen are cross-over folk, keener to ingratiate themselves with a Western audience than to celebrate their own culture. This year’s Indian Voices Day was a welcome exception to the rule: a morning of Khyal, an evening devoted to Bollywood (a sensible piece of populism, given the size of London’s Indian community), and sandwiched between - much blessed by fine weather - a sequence of village song-and-dance groups in Hyde Park.

Khyal means "imagination", and denotes the essentially improvisatory mode which grew out of the codified raga style. It’s both instrumental and vocal, but what we got here was the latter, in contrasting forms by its leading living exponents. Pandits Rajan and Sajan Mishra spun extraordinary sounds in their local version of scat, more like water in a madly-waving metal drum than ordinary human voices. What was notable about young Manjiri Asnare Kelkar (pictured, centre), on the other hand, was the way that even her most floridly extreme effects - the Indian equivalent to Western coloratura - sounded entirely human. I don’t know how she does it, but she manages to cover the whole range from our low contralto to the top of our soprano register - and all in a firm, vibrato-free, and gloriously unforced "chest" voice. Her first song, in the Jaipur gayaki style, was on an oblique but fertile minor scale; her second, which had affinities with Central Asian balladry, and which had sparky support from the harmonium and tabla, was on a beguiling major. Part of her art lay in the hand-gestures with which she accompanied herself, very like the mudras of a bharatnatyam dancer. Let’s hope she comes back soon.

The father-and-daughter act which preceded the khyals was a more muted but no less charming affair, as sarangists Pandit Ram Narayan (and old colleague of Yehudi Menuhin’s) and Aruna Narayan chased each other up and down the scale on their ancient bowed instruments, with never-faltering rhythmic precision.

Anyone wandering into the auditorium might have concluded that the attendance for this concert was disappointing, given the large numbers of empty seats. But as Proms controller Roger Wright likes to point out, a full Royal Albert Hall equals two full Festival Halls, or three full Barbicans, and this was definitely a Barbican and a half - not at all bad, for such a recondite art-form.

(Photo: Getty Images)

Having just watched - with mounting disbelief - the first production of Valery Gergiev’s Mariinsky ‘Ring’, I am digesting the implications. One is that if his ‘Rheingold’ is an amateurish clunker, the portents are dire for the other productions in his cycle. Since my ‘Rheingold’ review is already on The Independent website, I won’t repeat my unkind judgments here, but a second immediate thought is that many critics failed to appreciate the brilliance of Keith Warner’s Royal Opera House ‘Ring’, when it was unveiled in 2007.

In Bryn Terfel and John Tomlinson we had the best alternating pair of Wotans in the world, but they - plus many other pieces of inspired casting - were only part of the reason for that cycle’s dazzling success. Its greatest strength lay in the way Warner and his team - designer Stefanos Lazaridis, lighting designer Wolfgang Gobbel, and video specialists Mic Pool and Dick Straker, with Antonio Pappano in the pit - imposed their vision, in all its beauty, strangeness, and mystery. I hope the ROH revive it soon, to erase current memories.

But back to Valery Gergiev, who may be riding for a fall. Today’s Guardian carries a forelock-tugging leader "in praise of" him, but even this sounds a note of caution. His workload is extraordinary, says the writer: might this Ring be a self-imposed challenge too far? But never mind, he concludes: ‘his hyperactivity is overwhelmingly his strength’, and it’s not our business to ask him to be different.

But we do have the right to ask whether hubris is taking its toll. Gergiev’s intemperate political interventions over the Russo-Georgian war last year were shamefully tribal-verging-on-racist; his assumption that he can now function like a Diaghilev, acting as producer as well as music director, reinforces the impression that he never questions his own abilities, or his own behaviour. (We will pass over his close personal links with Vladimir Putin.) All this spells danger. Is an alarm-bell now ringing?

(Photo: Getty)

I never heard the Cypriot pianist Nicolas Economou, killed aged 40 in a car crash in 1993, but I’d heard about him. Friedrich Durrenmatt, Maximilian Schell, Arthur Miller, and Volker Schlondorff were among his (for a musician unexpected) friends; Martha Argerich, with whom he played chamber music, described him as a creature of outstanding intelligence, with a spirit at once warm, fastidious, and fantastical. He studied in Moscow, settled in Germany, but always championed the arts of his native island; he composed and conducted, wrote philosophical essays and poetry, and was constantly pushing out the boundaries of what his instrument could achieve; improvising with Chick Corea led to a CD, On Two Pianos, where he and the American jazzer interacted fruitfully.

Two years ago a previously unknown manuscript turned up in his still incompletely-excavated archive, and at Verbier we heard it: Vivaldi’s "Le Quattro Stagioni" arranged for four pianos. Well, why not? Almost everything imaginable has been done with this work - 600 different versions to date, including a tango one by Gidon Kremer - and though four boxes of hammers are about as far as you could get from the original bowed strings, it ought at least to be interesting.

And it certainly was. "Spring" came clad in pearlised high cascades, and bewitched and exhilarated us. "Summer" opened with a great stillness, which dissolved into a riot of bustling percussive activity; a breath of wind gave way to a raging tempest, with every effect in the pianistic book being pressed into service. And if the massed pianos failed to convey the grating cruelty of Vivaldi’s winter blasts, they did set up a series of magical atmospheres, much enhanced by the way the four Steinways were arranged in a circumambient square. A curiously faithful translation - and at the same time a completely new work. It should be heard again, though - given the complication of hiring and transporting four such beasts - I’m not sure where.

Here, led by that supreme chamber-player Manny Ax, its presentation was quintessentially Verbieresque: Yuja Wang and Alessio Bax were the other constants, with the fourth position being occupied by a different player for each season. For this game of musical chairs, Argerich, Kissin, and the other grandees stood back to let the next generation shine: no surprise that 21-year-old Yuja Wang should leave the most indelible impression, both through her pianism and her exquisite person. This Curtis Institute-trained Chinese, whose Chopin, Scriabin, and Ligeti disc I praised in May, is without doubt the next big star in the pianistic firmament: watch out for the flurry on the net, the ecstatic print and video profiles. I predict ten heady years, before maturity presents her with challenges of a different sort. Nobody can trade on youth for ever.

If this arrangement was a rarity, the four-piano work by Milhaud which preceded it was scarcely less so. "Paris suite pour quatre mains" was his excited response to the sounds he heard from his window, and the six pieces moving from Montmartre to the Tour Eiffel had an infectiously urban gusto; hardly a masterpiece, but definitely worth an airing. The same applies to the four-piano treatment of ‘Carmen’ which Mack Wilberg wrote for the Los Angeles Piano Quartet, and which rounded off this evening: an oblique, wrong-note, spookily negative image of Bizet’s all too familiar music.

The other big mid-festival event was Thomas Quasthoff’s recital of Schubert’s "Die Schone Mullerin" with Emanuel Ax at the piano. There has recently been some muttering about Quasthoff being in vocal decline - that his voice is no longer "supported" as it should be. No hint here of any such problem: he projected comfortably to every corner of Verbier’s substantial church, with the drama as poignant as one could wish. Interviewing him for the Independent on Sunday last winter, I got the full measure of his heroism; why his shockingly candid autobiography The Voice remains unpublished in Britain, despite its success in America, is a mystery. What are the publishers waiting for? He’s still in his prime, so get it out now.

It’s never happened before, and won’t happen again, but what we have here - in a big tent on top of a high Swiss mountain - is an extraordinary line-up. Bryn Terfel and Rene Pape - the world’s greatest Wagnerian basses - with fellow-bass Thomas Quasthoff (all pictured, left), the world’s most moving exponent of Schubert Lieder, perched on his high stool between them. And what they are doing is cabaret - a gamey mix of Broadway hits, with ‘Anything you can do, I can do better’ recurring like a leitmoiv in a variety of forms. "I can sing higher - lower - longer…" -they take it in turns to outdo each other, with Quasthoff bringing the house down with a bawled "Fuck you" when Terfel, in basso profundo mode, wins a round.

He and Quasthoff - to whom thalidomide plus a Dickensianly awful German "special" school dealt an atrocious hand, but whose subsequent life represents an unparalleled triumph of the will - are cabaret veterans, and take to this game like ducks to water; they round things off gracefully with one of Terfel’s signtaure tunes, ‘Danny Boy’. Pape, who is a perfectionist to his fingertips, finds it harder to get into the swing of things. But what’s fascinating is to see how these very different voices, each backed by an outsize personality, emerge in such an unaccustomed format. They’ve only had one rehearsal, and the show is rough at the edges, but that’s part of the pleasure.

But this is only the half of it, because at the piano - and the man whose brainchild this weird encounter is - is another outsize personality in the form of Lang Lang. The basses had been singing "Don Giovanni" the night before, and as it was Lang Lang's turn to have carte blanche for a night, why not follow that with this? Meanwhile, as violinist Vadim Repin and cellist Mischa Maisky have been playing with him in the first half of this evening, why not rope them in too? Maisky vamps, Repin brings a touch of bluegrass, and Lang Lang tickles the ivories as though he’s been playing cabaret all his short life.

This instrumental trio - another unlikely yoking - have come together to give a first public airing for a programme they will soon be recording for Deutsche Grammophon: Rachmaninov’s youthful "Trio elegiaque" plus the great trio Tchaikovsky composed in memory of his friend and mentor, Nikolai Rubinstein. These pieces work well together, and though one could sense these musicians - all superstars in the classical firmament - sizing each other up, and feeling their way towards musical synergy, it’s a fair bet that the resulting Cd will be a success. DG hope that its sprinkling of Lang Langian stardust will help rope in a new audience for chamber music, and good luck to them. A few blogs ago, I accused Lang Lang of compulsive self-aggrandizement: having watched his ultra-professional behaviour as a chamber player, I take it all back.

All this is why the Verbier Festival is such an important annual fixture. The world’s greatest musicians don’t just come to strut their stuff – they come to experiment, try out new works, and new combinations. And though it’s an exclusive event, packed (and financially supported) by droves of the super-rich, it also becomes everyone’s property thanks to its presence on the net. Classic FM are doing daily podcasts, and Medici Arts are broadcasting it live on film. Click on www.medici.tv and watch Martha Argerich play Scarlatti like the wind.

All pictures courtesy of Verbier Festival

My colleague Adrian Hamilton argues in the Comment pages that there’s too much Shakespeare on the London stage at present. No disrespect to the Bard’s greatness, he says, just a touch of indigestion. I know what he means, but would widen the thought. Throughout the 70s and 80s I was a hopelessly-addicted theatre junkie, four or five nights a week, every week. This was as much about discovering new writing on the fringe, as about savouring the delights of the National. But around 1990 I noticed that I was more often leaving at the interval than staying to the end - my addiction had passed. Being shut in a darkened auditorium with a bunch of desperately self-projecting actors had begun to feel like an incarceration, and if the play was anything less than first-rate, the experience was unendurable.

Transferring my allegiance to opera, I gradually understood what it was that I had fallen out of love with: the self-regarding nature of the actor’s trade, at least as practised in London. This goes not just for the media-friendly wannabes in the junior ranks, but also to the top. When people talk of Olivier’s Henry V, or McKellen’s Richard II - or even Jude Law’s Hamlet - the focus is squarely on the actor, whose performance is seen as his personal apotheosis. He, as much as Shakespeare, becomes what the thing is about. This way of thinking is deeply embedded in theatreland’s unconscious: it was always there, but the cult of celebrity has greatly intensified it.

Opera, which has given us the term prima donna, is far from immune to this disease. Pavarotti, who couldn’t act to save his life, became a self-created sacred monster: when he sang ‘Turandot’, it was to glorify his own voice, rather than Puccini’s. But since the composer has in some respects done the stage director’s work for him - indicating in detail how a role should be sung - there’s a built-in protection against self-aggrandisement by singers. Music demands a humility on the part of the performer, almost an anonymity, in the face of the work being performed. Liberties are rationed by the professional discipline required. Angela Gheorghiu’s (above, left) off-stage behaviour may sometimes be a story in itself, but when she sings ‘Tosca’ as brilliantly as she does at present in the Royal Opera production, all one registers is her consummate artistry - and the scale of Verdi’s genius. Between opera-singing and acting lies a greater gulf than is sometimes realised.

Such thoughts were crystallised for me by Jonathan Kent’s new production of Purcell’s ‘The Fairy Queen’ at Glyndebourne. This ‘semi-opera’, with its anonymous libretto loosely based on Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, juxtaposes acted scenes with sung ones, and I found myself increasingly impatient for the actors to finish, so the singers could start. This was more than just the consequence of an unequal battle between cod-Shakespeare and vintage Purcell. And it was not that the actors weren’t good: they were mostly RSC and RNT regulars, with Sally Dexter and Joseph Millson bringing majesty to Titania and Oberon, and Desmond Barrit making an irresistibly funny Bottom, while the ensemble performance of the misaligned lovers was as good as it gets. But what struck me was this little quartet’s sheer actorishness: by the way each had worked out his/her personal comic routine, and was plugging it for all they were worth.

Whenever the actors fell silent, we were free to float off in an experience beyond the limits of speech. Designer Paul Brown’s fertile imagination has run riot as never before, creating worlds beyond worlds with a range of reference including Disney and Max Ernst, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and the Renaissance painter-fantasist Guiseppe Arcimboldo - and not excluding a stageful of inventively copulating rabbits. Kim Brandstrup’s choreography gives the masques a wonderful suggestiveness, while William Christie and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment weave exquisite spells from the pit. As for the singers, no praise is too high for tenor Ed Lyon (whose sound has an extraordinary sweetness), for bass Andrew Foster-Williams (whose incarnation of Winter might be Edward Scissorhands’ granddad), and for their melodious fellow-spirits. When the incomparable Carolyn Sampson (right) deploys her delicate artistry in ‘The Plaint’, the earth holds its breath.

At moments like this, one remembers that theatre for the ancient Greeks initially meant song and dance. And one realises anew the truth of Walter Pater’s dictum: all art aspires to the condition of music.

‘The Fairy Queen’ is sold out at Glyndebourne, but this production comes to the Proms on July 21.

Is there anything mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato (left) can’t do? As the scorned Donna Elvira in ‘Don Giovanni’, her sulphurous rage incinerates everything it touches; as Handel’s jealous Medea, she runs the gamut from plangent wistfulness to enraged coloratura; shaking her tousled blonde mane, she does raunchiness with the best of them - her first ambitions lay on Broadway - yet her sound is always beautiful, and never at the expense of the drama. In Covent Garden’s revival of the Leiser-Caurier ‘Il barbiere di Siviglia’ she unexpectedly found herself facing the biggest test of her career, and handled it with absolute brilliance.

We had the dream Latin line-up, led by Juan Diego Florez (below, right) as Almaviva, with Pietro Spagnoli as Figaro, Alessandro Corbelli as Bartolo, and Ferruccio Furlanetto as Don Basilio, with Antonio Pappano in the pit. Florez’s singing was as usual beyond compare, Spagnoli brought an irresistible burly forcefulness to the title role, Furlanetto did astonishing and surreal things with his ‘slander’ aria, while the protean Corbelli became commedia dell’arte incarnate; the chorus nimbly doubled up as musicians, soldiers, and G&S policemen; and DiDonato’s flouncing and petulant opening aria - hurling darts at the wall to underline her frustration - had all the heft one could wish for.

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Erupting in ecstatic roars after three hours of white-hot passion, a packed Barbican audience rammed home a point which conductor Paul McCreesh (left) had made before he led his army onstage. This late oratorio by Handel deserved to be performed as often as Beethoven's Ninth, he declared in a pre-performance chat. Oh yeah, one felt like saying, the usual directorial hyperbole… My only memory of Jephtha was Katie Mitchell's staging for ENO, which over-strenuously tried to make up for the fact that it wasn't meant to be staged, and thus fatally deflected attention from the music itself.

The plot closely mirrors that of Idomeneo. The Israelite leader Jephtha vows that if he is successful in battle, he will sacrifice the first living creature he encounters, which turns out to be his only child Iphis. As the knife hovers, an angel appears and announces that Iphis - who nobly hasn’t complained - will be spared if she takes a vow of perpetual virginity. The message of Thomas Morell’s sanctimonious libretto is that self-sacrifice is the means of redemption, and virginity an excellent thing: the message of the music is not so bland. Handel was going blind: the stark way he sets Pope's cold maxim - "Whatever is, is right" - suggests he was wrestling with his own fear of the impending unknown.

The work opens in sunlight, dives down to Hades, then surfaces again: bold melodies in major keys give way to contorted chromaticism and dense counterpoint, before their transfigured resolution. McCreesh had not only signed up the best tenor in the oratorio game as Jephtha - Mark Padmore (right) - but also mezzo Christianne Stotjin and soprano Mhairi Lawson as his wife and daughter, and these three singers carried all before them.

Padmore’s artistry allowed him to deliver every repeat of every aria with subtle variations in colour; the recitative in which Jephtha all but falls into madness acquired the oracular intensity of Hamlet’s "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow". The ironic juxtaposition of rejoicing and lamenting at the plot’s pivotal moment became edge-of-the-seat stuff, as dramatic as any opera - and this was a mere ‘concert performance’ at the Barbican!

Stotjin's dark art is subtler, but no less arresting; Mhairi Lawson's soaring arias were grace incarnate. And in William Docherty as the Angel we got a treble whose voice rang triumphantly out over the full chorus and orchestra - he's a "quirister" at Winchester College, where they clearly know how to train them. Trebles with this ability are very thin on the ground, so Docherty should make the most of his voice while it lasts.

Many conductors cut great lumps out of oratorios like this, claiming that the repetitions are boring: McCreesh's artistry allowed him - with his superb Gabrieli Consort plus the Wroclaw Philharmonic Choir - to give us every repeat Handel wrote, without any whiff of déjà entendu. Bravo - and encore!

(Photos: Paul McCreesh by Sheila Rock, Mark Padmore by Marco Borggreve)

After Sally Potter’s cack-handed shot at Carmen - "stripping away the flamenco clichés’ to reveal what she pretentiously termed the ‘secret emotional geometry" - film directors have been wisely kept away from English National Opera. But Abbas Kiarostami’s take on Cosi Fan Tutte - imported from Aix-en-Provence, and resurrected here by his assistant Elaine Tyler-Hall, because the Foreign Office perversely wouldn’t let him into the country - is a reminder of what enlightenment such people can bring. And when one sees this production and Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly on successive nights, the message is reinforced.

This Iranian film-maker’s screen work dissects personal and social relationships with patiently forensic skill: his latest film, Shirin, which focuses on close-ups of 100 women as they watch a film about a love-triangle, goes on UK release next week, and could hardly be more topical. He describes Mozart’s world as a ‘closed-up heaven’, into which he wants to let fresh air: his solution is so obvious that it’s amazing it’s been so seldom used. Quite simply, he replaces a painted backdrop with a cinematic one: a row of busy cafes in front of which Don Alfonso and the boys hatch their plot; a misty, dreamy view of the Bay of Naples, across which a red-sailed yacht slowly approaches, then bears the boys off to war; and a simulacrum of the theatre orchestra (plus a duplicate conductor) against which the denouement unfolds. So simple: if the third moving backdrop is somewhat distracting - one is aware of the real conductor trying to keep pace with the filmed one, and not always succeeding - the first two make gracefully suggestive reinforcements of the drama. The production itself has flaws: for example, the ending, which should underline whatever moral the director has settled for, here disintegrates pointlessly. But the singing, if not blindingly marvellous, is uniformly first-rate. You can catch this show until July 5.

Meanwhile it’s good to have Minghella’s Butterfly back, revived by his choreographer (and widow) Carolyn Choa: first time round, I was not totally convinced, but now I realise how apt his vision is. From the moment his performance space is revealed - a huge sweeping rake, with a correspondingly raked ceiling curving down to it, so that everything seems destined to be swallowed up by the horizon - we are drawn inexorably into the drama. And never has that drama been more clearly one of rape: the gorgeous costumes, the black-veiled figures manipulating symbolic puppets, the giant mirror which shows what goes on behind the sliding screens, as well as in front of them - everything deepens the pathos of the victim-culture. The vicious crimson stain which spreads across the entire stage as Cio-Cio San expires is the sort of coup only a film-maker would dream up. Minghella was a deeply musical film director - see how Gabriel Yared’s score pervades and underscores every scene in his masterpiece, The Talented Mr Ripley - and he would have worked more wonders with opera, had death not snatched him with such untimely speed.

What makes a man approaching his 101st birthday fly the Atlantic, and penetrate the remotest reaches of Suffolk? "You can’t keep a composer away from his music," explains a smiling Elliott Carter, in Aldeburgh to witness a blizzard of his works in performance - plus the unveiling of a new one - and beginning his stay with a public interview with pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, in which he proves that chronological time is irrelevant, and you’re only as old as you feel you are.

What’s fascinating about Carter is the way he didn’t find his voice until he was seventy. "I’m a fanatic," he tells us, in the airy new Britten Studio. "I wouldn’t be happy unless I was writing music, trying to do things I haven’t done before." He talks of the pleasure of finding that voice, and using it to explore the layering of time, which is something (pace Proust) which music does better than words. And it’s piquant to hear this arch-modernist declare that his polyphonic experiments picked up where the Elizabethan madrigalists had left off.

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Channel 4 are breathlessly puffing their new series The World’s Greatest Musical Prodigies without a trace of irony: they actually believe their own preposterous publicity. And so - surprise surprise - do most of the hacks who are writing about it. They may (correctly) type young Alex Prior - round whom the whole edifice is built - as a pain in the butt, but they blithely swallow the official line (laid down by Prior and his mother) that with 40 symphonies, concertos, sonatas, oratorios, and a ballet under his belt, he really is a major composer. Those who want the bottom line should acquire Wu Qian: Schumann, Prior, Liszt (on the Dal Segno label) and listen to Prior’s new 20-minute effusion: it fatally undermines an otherwise brilliant debut cd by this young Chinese pianist.

Meanwhile the genuine prodigies in this stomach-turning weekly spectacle are being shamefully exploited: for those who didn’t see my curtain-raiser commentary published in The Independent on June 5, here it is again:


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It sounded a neat idea, as Ian Bostridge outlined it in the Guardian. The Threepenny Opera’s perennial relevance - particularly marked, as capitalist binge leads to universal bust - makes it worth looking at anew: singing Lieder with Dorothea Roschmann and Angelika Kirchschlager prompted him to wonder "how wonderful it would be" to hear them tackling Brecht-Weill. Why not stand the usual tradition on its head, and replace singing actors by acting singers? "There’s room for both grit and cantilena" argued Bostridge: the Lieder-singers’ commitment to the words made them particularly suited to this challenge.

Thus it was that we gathered at the Barbican to hear this theory put into practice, with the aid of the versatile Klangforum Wien led by that arch-funster HK Gruber, who would both conduct and sing Peachum in his inimitable chansonnier style; as this was a concert performance, there would also be a narrator. And what an intriguing line-up: Roschmann as Polly, Kirchschlager as Jenny, Bostridge as MacHeath, plus three Austrian/German singers. Would they be as wonderful as promised?

The show seemed discombobulated from the start. The German narrator was stuck out in the distance, and stumbled over his words, while Gruber’s dry beat didn’t swing. Then Bostridge, who had been desperately mugging to convey the right sort of loucheness, opened his mouth. With hair slicked back, Tarantino shades, and his skeletal form encased in a sharp gangster suit, he’d done what he could to transcend the etiolated persona in which he sings Schubert and Britten, but the results were painful both to hear and watch. When he went down low, his voice disappeared: what was the mysterious "sound engineer" in the cast-list doing? Capriciously turning a mike on and off? When audible, alas, Bostridge’s sound was a mere wispy parody of the roughness which is a sine qua non for this part.

On the other hand, Roschmann gave Polly wonderful oomph, while Hanna Schwartz and Florian Boesch hit the button brilliantly as Celia and Tiger Brown; Gruber’s singing was nicely in character too. Kirchschlager projected raunchiness with her body, but seemed vocally constrained just as Bostridge was, if not to the same degree. Were they both instinctively protecting their voices, as all classical singers must, from the damage which unbridled raucousness would do? This is why, for example, the Handelian mezzo Sarah Connolly - initially an accomplished jazz singer - now doesn’t dare sing jazz. "It’s just too dangerous," she tells me. I think Bostridge may belatedly have discovered this too. Stick to Britten, Schubert, and Mozart, Ian: this is a blind alley.

After singing waiters, and "flash opera" - a musical mob suddenly bursting into song in Waterloo station - supermarket opera is a relatively sedate concept; indeed, Glyndebourne’s go-ahead education department did one back in the Nineties. But Flatpack Opera takes the idea on interestingly, being not only set in a supermarket, but making that its subject. Thus it is that I find myself mingling with bemused shoppers in the entrance to the Wembley IKEA, watching two leggy dancers cavorting in a cascade of yellow shopping bags, while a guitarist sings his West Coast heart out.

We are called to attention by a soprano chanting into a megaphone, and lured upstairs to the bedsit department, where a young man practises scales on a keyboard while his friend unpacks and assembles a bookcase. The comedy is largely wordless, mildly surreal, and seemingly improvised: two Middle-Eastern families who have been busily shopping put down their bags and join those who have come to see the show (no money changing hands, for this is free). On then, to another bedsit, where a young couple are setting up house, and the wife has been shopping: the trouble is, her husband likes nothing she has bought, and in the space of five minutes we see their relationship disintegrate - in song. Led on by a violinist like a Pied Piper with an ever-lengthening following, we move from scene to scene: in the kitchen department a Nigella-figure prepares a dinner with her partner, making Evelyn Glennie-type percussion as they chop and grate and slice; in the bedroom area, couples swap partners.

It’s all rather fey and whimsical, but the singing and playing by the small ensemble - strings, keyboard, accordion, guitar - is of the highest order: Lea’s singers are all young high-fliers, and she herself is at music-theatre’s cutting edge, while her composer Tom Lane works with a variety of smart quartets and the LSO. The idiom he’s settled for here is minimal-atonal, but oddly easy on the ear: perfect as an introduction to the art-form, which is what this event clearly was for its accidental audience. Some shoppers were so unnerved that they pretended it wasn’t happening at all, others moved from bewilderment to enjoyment, and forgot their shopping entirely. The best thing about it was the total lack of pretention or explanation: take it or leave it, was the message, and most people happily took it. Lea now hopes to do the show in other IKEAs across Europe: if she does, she should stiffen its sinews, and give the plot some bite.

The Keyboard Charitable Trust is dedicated to a noble cause: helping gifted young pianists to build a career, at a time when their debut concerts - which 20 years ago used to be routinely reviewed - scarcely ever merit mention in the press. (Who he? Never heard of him. Tell us about someone we know…) But the pianist who launched the Trust’s inaugural gala concert at the Wigmore Hall - where would chamber music be without this admirable institution? - was neither young nor unknown, just virtually unknown in this country. I had only clocked her through her four-hand appearances at the Lugano Festival, with her great mentor, Martha Argerich.

Born in Moscow in 1965, Lilya Zilberstein studied from the age of five at the celebrated Gnessin music school, where a host of stars, including Yevgeny Kissin, have cut their teeth. Winning competitions first in Russia, then beyond, she has enjoyed a dizzy concert career just about everywhere apart from London; now based in Germany, she tours with Argerich and Maxim Vengerov, and gives master classes in many conservatoires, including the Royal Academy.

Just how lucky her students are, was evident the moment her fingers touched the keys in Brahms’s Op 117 Intermezzi. The first, described by the composer as ‘the lullaby of my sorrows’, came with a wonderfully warm and singing tone; as the pieces unfolded, with that old-fashioned technique whereby the right hand sounds marginally before the left augmenting the expressiveness, we were transported to a long-gone world which lives on through its survivors. I’m talking about the golden age of Soviet pianism, whose finest flower was Sviatoslav Richter, but whose many other blooms still adorn the concert scene, with Zilberstein - with her amazing technique and magic touch - prominent among them.

If the Intermezzi seemed to swim in a great surrounding stillness, all hell broke loose when we entered Brahms’s Paganini Variations. After an immaculate statement of the theme, Zilberstein tore into the first variation with demonic force, with each succeeding one emerging in its own unique colours - soothing, insinuating, pleading, avenging; the whole thing was intoxicating. Rachmaninov’s Opus 32 Preludes formed the second half: they may not have the furnace-wrought perfection of the Brahms, but they too were magical. The packed audience at the Wigmore consisted of the usual suspects: it’s time the wider world woke up to her excellence. Why doesn’t the South Bank give her a break? There she’d be dynamite.

When three young pianists tackle major works by Schumann at the Wigmore Hall on successive days, comparisons are mandatory. First up was the Kazakh pianist Temirzhan Yerzhanov, supported by a big cohort of his compatriots, who gave us eight pieces from Schumann’s "Bunte Blatter" plus his Piano Sonata No 1, followed by Prokofiev’s "Visions Fugitives" and Piano Sonata no 2. But in his hands both composers came across as unrelievedly dark and declamatory; Schumann was completely devoid of his lightness and fancy. The encore was a Chopin nocturne, and even that was ponderous.

I note that Yerzhanov records for a label called Con Brio: perhaps he should sign up with one called Dolce, because at present half his palette is missing. I note also that he traces his keyboard ancestry back via a chain of Russian pianists to Liszt, and that he is a globe-trotting conservatoire teacher: caveat emptor - buyer beware.

When Buenos Aires-born Ingrid Fliter sat down at the piano the next day, it was hard to believe it was the same instrument: launching into Chopin’s Grande Valse Brillante Op 18, she delivered its twists and turns with bewitchingly evanescent charm. Reaching the showy conclusion, however, she suddenly faltered, banged a note, got up and looked into the piano's works, shrugged apologetically, and walked out. But this was a live lunchtime broadcast for radio 3!

Were we still on air? What were the listeners in the shires hearing? There was no sign of Radio 3’s Fiona Talkington, who had enjoined us to provide "atmosphere" over which she would do her links. Instead, on marched the house manager, plus an assistant with a face like an undertaker, who shut the piano's lid. Then they took up the floor, and descended into the depths: three new piano legs appeared, followed by three new pedals, then a sleeping beast was unwrapped and cranked into the daylight. The scene was so surreal that people began to take pictures, until an usher sternly forbade it: a mere fifteen minutes later, business resumed - which must have been some sort of record.

The remainder of her recital consisted of Schumann’s "Etudes Symphoniques", a majestic work requiring a massive feat of imaginative control, but she had obviously been knocked off balance. She had thought deeply about how to negotiate the peaks and chasms of Schumann’s visionary landscape, and gave it wonderful sweep and grandeur, but many of the variations needed more shape. The theme should have stood out more starkly against the swirl which followed, and there were times when the musical line got lost in a welter of lovingly dwelt-on detail. Her unusual envoi was a pair of posthumous variations which came to us like ghostly, beautiful echoes; her defiant encore was Chopin's "Minute Waltz", which in her hands became 90 seconds of show-stopping fun. Come back soon, and justify the promise of your brilliant EMI Chopin disc last year.

Day three brought the 28-year-old Ukrainian Igor Tchetuev, whose dizzy career has taken him to the the world's smartest halls and festivals since he won the Grand prix for his country’s young pianists' competition at 14. And here it was immediately apparent that we could relax. Schumann’s Arabeske in C major came with a silky singing tone, sections of mellifluous murmur alternating with incisive declamatoriness. He moved on without a break into the Abegg variations, which were delivered with limpid resonance. Each was exquisitely shaped, and the virtuosity seemed effortless. He then gave us Chopin’s first 12 Etudes, followed by a stirring Petrushka (once nearly coming to grief, but not quite) in a manner which reminded us that the golden age of Soviet pianism is still alive and well, in the hands of its latter-day products.

This brilliant young player can next be caught at the Cadogan Hall on June 11.

China’s fabled 30 million piano students haven’t yet thrown up the hoped-for army of stars. Among the few to have emerged, Lang Lang may be the most prominent, but he’s a mere peasant compared to his aristocratic coeval Yundi Li, whose playing and demeanour are oddly Chopinesque. (I sense Lang Lang is at least dimly aware of this. I once asked him how he rated Yundi Li: he clammed up, and his face clouded over.)

There are even fewer young females in the lists. This is no surprise, given the one-child policy and the ‘little emperor’ tradition of which Lang Lang is such a fine example. But as it happens, two of China’s brightest young (expatriate) female hopes have just released debut discs: Wu Qian (25, pictured left) and Yuja Wang (21, pictured right). Both began in Chinese conservatories, but spent their teens training in the West - Wu at the Menuhin school and the Royal Academy, Wang at the Curtis Institute - and their approaches to the keyboard are Westernised in a manner which Lang Lang’s, for example, is absolutely not. Both are formidable pianists; both are articulate about art and literature, as well as music; both have notably independent minds. Their repertoire overlaps in Liszt, but Wang tends towards the translucency of Ligeti, while Wu is at her most comfortable with Schumann. Of the two, Wu is the one whose music I prefer to live with: there’s something too careful, almost clinical, about Wang’s perfection, while Wu’s sound has a wonderfully resonant warmth.

So check them out and make your own comparison: "Yuja Wang: Chopin, Scriabin, Liszt, Ligeti" (Deutsche Grammophon), and "Wu Qian: Schumann, Prior, Liszt" (Dal Segno). This latter would have been a perfect Cd, had Wu Qian not misguidedly invited the 16-year-old Alex Prior - a boy making waves at the moment - to contribute a piece: his 20 pretentious and leaden minutes fatally drag down her lovely work with Kreisleriana and Petrarch Sonnet No 104. (By all means include a new young composer to leaven the greats: just make sure their music can cut it.)

Meanwhile Wu Qian is carving out a glittering career with the Sitkovetsky Piano Trio, which she dominates (pace the excellent violinist) with immense style: catch them if you can.