Brian Cox heads a musical dynasty in Shakespeare's "The Score"

Peter De Jersey (Voltaire, left) and Brian Cox (J.S. Bach, right) in The Score, Shakespeare Theatre Company. Photo: Teresa Castracane

Shakespeare Theatre Company and its artistic director, Simon Godwin, have brought Oliver Cotton’s recent play The Score stateside. Premiered in 2023 at Theatre Royal Bath, the play stars Brian Cox as Johann Sebastian Bach during his May 1747 visit to the court of Frederick the Great in Potsdam. Cox, the star of the television series Succession, has come to Washington, along with some members of the British cast, for a run at Harman Hall, seen Thursday evening.

Cox is sharp-tongued and cantankerous as the fabled composer, who goes to the Prussian court to visit his son C.P.E. Bach (played ably by Jamie Wilkes), one of a stable of composers employed there. The elder Bach is advanced in age, only three years from his own death. His demise will be partly due to the ill-advised eye surgery that is discussed in the play, somewhat prematurely. Cotton has Bach challenge the Prussian king about his role in the Second Silesian War, an ahistorical invention.

The play soft-pedals the actual revelation of Bach’s visit: The Musical Offering, an intricate, complex work inspired by the theme Frederick the Great gave to Bach during the visit. Whether the king himself actually wrote the theme, or whether his court composers made it more forbidding is a matter of speculation. The melody is close in style to themes by Handel and others, but whatever its virtues or challenges, Bach made one of the most varied collections of musical elaborations out of it. Little of that is mentioned in the play.

Cox’s main foil in the play is Frederick the Great, given a wry, arrogant interpretation by Stephen Hagan. The scenes of confrontation between the monarch and the Thomaskantor are beyond fanciful, as is the concluding scene in which Frederick visits Bach’s home in Leipzig. Bach was most likely dazzled and flattered by the king’s attention. As the Bach-Archiv Leipzig has noted of the visit to Potsdam, “it was the only time when Bach was still alive that he was mentioned on the front page of a newspaper,” when the Berlinische Nachrichten reported on Bach’s reception.

Good fun is had by the range of Frederick’s servants, from the humble maid Emelia (Juliet Garricks) to the trio of royal composers, Carl Graun (Matthew Romain), Johann Quantz (Christopher Staines), and Franz Benda (Toby Webster). Whatever Frederick the Great’s faults, he was a first-rate musical patron.

Frederick also collected writers and philosophers, most famously Voltaire. While it is true that the French philosophe resided at Potsdam in the early 1750s, he was not present during Bach’s brief visit. Peter De Jersey plays him as an over-the-top French caricature, among the least convincing roles in the play. Voltaire soon enough made himself a nuisance at Potsdam, even referring to stories about Frederick’s homosexuality, one open secret among many at his court.

While Nicole Ansari-Cox, who happens to be Brian Cox’s wife, makes a piquant Anna Magdalena Bach, the role seemed almost entirely unnecessary to the plot, one of the elements that should probably be cut to shorten a long run time. Trevor Nunn, the director of Lady Jane (an Ionarts favorite film), has done well to minimize the play’s longueurs with a snappy production. Robert Jones’s lavish costumes and the musical soundworld designed by Sophie Cotton add much needed diversion as well.

The run of The Score has been extended to October 25. shakespearetheatre.org

Notes from the 2026 Salzburg Festival ( 3 ) Sol Gabetta & Kristian Bezuidenhout

Salzburg Festival • Soloists Concert • Sol Gabetta & Kristian Bezuidenhout

Also published in Die Presse: Salzburg: Sol Gabetta kredenzt hübsche Violoncello-Zuckerl

Brahms / Mendelssohn Cello Sonatas ♥ Starker/Sebők ♥ Mercury, 1996 US | UK | DE

Gabetta and Bezuidenhout: Well-behaved German Romanticism

Pretty Cello Bonbons and a Trio for Piano, Cello and Hearing Aid

Tuesday at the Mozarteum she was still part of Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s quintet, on Wednesday she was back as the headliner: Sol Gabetta – with fortepianist extraordinaire Kristian Bezuidenhout, in the Haus für Mozart. Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, sonatas by Brahms (No. 1) and Mendelssohn (No. 2), garnished with arrangements for cello and piano of various smaller melodic confections. The two concerts could scarcely have been more different. Gabetta fits in beautifully when Kopatchinskaja sets the agenda – wild, unruly, tussled. When the Argentine star is in charge herself, different principles apply. Here she plays with lyrical assurance, always nice-sounding, dutifully beautiful to the point of cooing. In the golden depths of her cello, she is tonally at home; as the register rises, the tone seems to lose color. Somehow Bezuidenhout went along with all of this and appeared to recede into the background.

This exquisite music-making – take Gabetta’s honeyed sweetness in the slow Allegro non troppo of the Brahms Sonata, and Bezuidenhout's sparkling-delicate accompaniment – is all a pleasure and music-making at the highest level. Objectively there is nothing to fault in the trim attack with which Gabetta draws her notes from the cello. Nor in her intonation or phrasing. And yet… Perhaps it was the vast acoustic of the Haus für Mozart itself, which resists the intimacy her playing needs – swallowing any and all of the energy that didn’t come directly from the chosen tempos. Fast tempos, however, had to wait until the concluding Mendelssohn Sonata. For everything before it – entirely in keeping with Johannes “ma non troppo” Brahms’s own prescription – was awfully tasteful and measured.

And yes: as if something had been building up, the Mendelssohn was, if not exactly exuberant, at least somewhat uberant. The applause after the first movement felt natural, necessary, and was considerably more welcome than awkward embarrassed coughing would have been. Then, at the close, a rogue hearing aid joined the ensemble persistently – at times louder than the cello. Gabetta was not notably displeased. Friction arrived at last. She threw herself into the notes with good deal of bite and fury: The best three minutes of the evening.

Sol Gabetta (Cello), Kristian Bezuidenhout (Piano) © SF/Marco Borrelli

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Notes from the 2026 Salzburg Festival ( 2 ) Kopatchinskaja, Friends, and György Kurtág

Salzburg Festival • Chamber Music • Hommage à Kurtág

Also published in Die Presse: Kopatchinskaja in Salzburg: Schnurren und Kratzen für Kurtág & Co.

Kurtág / Schumann Hommage à R. Sch et al Kashkashian, Levin, Brunner ECM, 2006 US | UK | DE

György Kurtág Játékok (selection) Gábor Csalog, M.& G. Kurtág BMC Records, 2006 US | UK | DE

Playing with Music

Music as lived joy: Kopatchinskaja brings Kurtág to Salzburg — and it's simply great entertainment

Patricia Kopatchinskaja was made for playing the music of György Kurtág — or vice versa. However that may be, in her chamber music homage to the hundred-year-old composer at the Salzburg Festival, she demonstrated how much is already won — not only in contemporary music — when a violinist refuses to insist on playing just beautifully, and instead interprets with the whole body, from the curls down to the tips of her toes.

Fiddling, stomping, plucking, she worked her way through Kurtág's profound scrawlings from „Zeichen, Spiele und Botschaften" and the „Játékok" collections with her musical partners. Pianist Olga Pashchenko had already impressed in the opening second Bartók Rhapsody for violin and piano — both in the restraint of her part, palying along as if parallel to the violin, and in the suddenness with which she lunged forward, like a hungry moray-eel, whenever Bartók thrusts the piano into the spotlight. In the Kurtág she drew out the abstract tenderness of „Hommage à Márta," just as Kopatchinskaja shaped „…féerie d'automne…" as a pianissimo exhalation — light as on butterfly-wings. Elsewhere Kopatchinskaja plunged into her instrument — alone or alongside Pashchenko, violinist Jonia Ilias Kadesha, the lusciously toned Lawrence Power on viola, and/or Sol Gabetta on cello — like a tomcat in a mating fight, driving it through Kurtág's fragile, skewed, compressed music. What strikes one above all is how unpretentiously modern Kurtág writes. What would sound simply absurd from other, self-important composers is here disarming.

Bartók's „Bagpipe" Duo from the „44 Duos" for two violins was staged as a small, spontaneous theatrical piece for all six musicians, with the musicians eventually exiting until only Reto Bieri (clarinet), Kopatchinskaja and Pashchenko remained for the wild „Contrasts" for violin, clarinet and piano — also Bartók — which, living up to its name, was carried forward wild and unleashed, then whispering and murmured.

Mozart's Clarinet Quintet K. 581 waited as a reward in the second half — though the audience was already so enthused by the Kurtág and Bartók that no lure would have been needed. Then again, one simply doesn't say no to a slow movement that sublime — and so they listened to the fiveseome, gathered around Bieri and his modern basset clarinet, in these four movements of pure pleasure: Sensitive, soft and supple, genuine ego-free chamber music atmosphere par excellance. Where Bieri had — deliberately — hissed and spat air in the excitable Bartók, here he was milk and honey manifest in the form of a clarinet, bewitchingly quiet and breathless in the slow movement. But „contrasts" was the watchword here too — the Quintet went off in the Menuetto as if stung by hornet: Kopatchinskaja does not let such opportunities pass to go for broke instead of playing nice. (That's rather Gabetta's game, although she went along with the general gist quite nicely here.) The Variations finale was handled with generous latitude — entirely in keeping with so playful an ensemble.

Jonian Ilias Kadesha, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Olga Pashchenko, Lawrence Power, Sol Gabetta. SF / Marco Borrelli

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