Composer: Alban Berg
Conductor: Edward Gardner
As part of Southbank Centre’s 75th year celebrations, it has curated the Multitudes Festival, a multi-arts festival centred around orchestral music. It’s a bold way of bringing artists from different art forms together and inviting new audiences to classical music. London Philharmonic Orchestra’s offering within the festival is a semi-staged performance of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck, combining orchestral music, operatic singing, choirs and video art.
Premiering in 1925, 11 years after beginning the composition, Berg’s three-act opera is a scorching work. Musically, the piece is predominantly atonal. It is not an easy listen but a deeply evocative piece that shifts between tranquillity, violence and unease. Based on George Büchner’s 1836 unfinished play, Woyzeck, both stories look at the title character’s exploitation and painful descent into madness.
Edward Gardner leads all of the musicians, holding tension and intensity throughout the piece. The semi-staged performance is full of world-class performances that would have been engaging even without the additional video art. Peter Hoare, as the Captain, gives a captivating performance despite being behind a music stand, and Stéphane Degout’s Wozzeck is full of nuance. It is almost a shame not to have been able to give the singers full attention as the video and surtitles take our eyes away.
The video art by Ilya Shagalova and Nina Guseva, projected above the orchestra, features haunting and disturbing imagery to support the story. The images are presented as photographs; however, it seems apparent that a huge amount of AI was used to create the artworks. Whether you ethically agree with this or not, it should have been made clearer to the audience from the outset, particularly as there are highly skilled artists on stage giving true, human performances.
Wozzek looks at those completely disenfranchised in our society, and while it is obviously important to engage with stories outside of the middle class, there is a disconnect between the haunting imagery and the opera singers in their beautiful gowns.
Reviewed on 25 April 2026
Multitudes runs until 30 April 2026
