One felt that a major part of the acclaim was aimed at the music itself and its interpreters, then they leveraged the evening with many highlights. Alone the way in which Patrik Ringborg conducted the twelve members of the Freiburg Philharmonic and led them through the polymorph and subtly coloured score, how he accurately drew a sounding picture out of Britten's characterizing motifs and atmospheric reductions (with its time and again infatuating magical play with colours and tenderly singing lines in spite of his basic anachronism) and thereby intermittently gave the interjected recitatives life and tension as a pianist: Up till the large, Purcell-related final chaconne it was of the highest quality.

Let us for a moment linger on the orchestra. The deputy music director walks most subtly through the score - Ringborg develops Britten's compositional constants with transparency: the character presentation of the instruments, the boundlessly transcending motifs, the sounding quotations... are rarely so manifest, yet they remain resident in the strict stream of the opera.