Azerbaijan’s musical traditions took centre stage in Montreux as the Swiss city marked the 80th anniversary of the Septembre Musical Montreux-Vevey festival, with around 200 artists led by the State Symphony Orchestra performing works by Uzeyir Hajibeyli alongside opera, mugham, jazz and national dance. The spectacle wrapped state culture, national identity and elite festival branding into one polished package. The people on stage were there to present heritage. The institutions around them were there to curate it, package it, and sell it back as prestige.
State Culture on Display
The programme brought together different parts of Azerbaijan’s musical identity, from classical to contemporary, and performers used the occasion to share Azerbaijan’s musical heritage at one of the world’s best-known music venues. That is how soft power works when it wears concert black. A state orchestra, a famous festival, and a global stage turn culture into diplomacy, with the audience invited to admire the result and forget the machinery behind it.
The article described Uzeyir Hajibeyli as the father of Azerbaijani classical music, and the performance placed his work at the centre of the Montreux event. Around 200 artists took part. The scale mattered. So did the setting. The festival’s 80th anniversary gave the whole production the sheen of permanence, as if institutions and national traditions simply arrive fully formed, untouched by the politics that bankroll and frame them.
Workers, Death, and the Concert Hall
In London, Julia Wolfe’s multimedia oratorio Fire in My Mouth was reviewed as a work built around the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of Saturday 25 March 1911, when 146 garment workers, mostly recent Jewish and Italian immigrant women, died after many were unable to escape because stairwells and exits were locked by management. That detail sits at the centre of the piece, and it should. Locked exits. Management. 146 dead. The old industrial order didn’t need speeches about discipline; it had doors that wouldn’t open.
The work, first performed in 2019, is the third in Wolfe’s series of large-scale works drawing on the history of the American worker. The London performance was described as a punchy opener to the Southbank Centre’s autumn season. It featured the Philharmonia conducted by Marin Alsop, an all-female professional chamber choir and youth chorus, London Voices, the RSNO Youth Chorus and Farnham Youth Choir. The production also included a slow-strafing slideshow of black-and-white photographs and archive film footage created by Jeff Sugg, plus ritual gestures and movements by director Anne Kauffman.
The review said the score churned and whirred with kinetic energy, evoking sewing machines, the ocean and the women crossing “without passports or anything.” That line lands hard. No passports. No permission. Just movement, labour and death, all under a system that decides who gets to move freely and who gets locked in.
The piece ends with a litany of the names of the dead, a statement that would have been impossible until 2011, when the final victims were at last identified, just a year before a fire in a Bangladesh garment factory killed 124. The review also said Wolfe’s 2026 London season had opened with unEarth at the Barbican, described as an earnest homily on the climate emergency. The Philharmonia was called “a keenly expressive” orchestra, and Alsop marshalled the performers “crisply and undemonstratively.”
The Avatar Economy
Another Guardian piece turned to digital avatars and the possibility of recreating dead performers. Unit1 Studio’s CEO Barney Wragg said, “We [are] talk[ing] about using AI to simulate the way that tears evaporate in your eye between blinks, or subcutaneous blood flow, so that when one of our [digital] characters laughs or opens their mouth or smiles, areas of their flesh will change colour as it would do in a real human.” That’s the pitch: not performance, but simulation so exact it can mimic tears, blood flow and flesh changing colour.
The piece said Unit1 plans to roll out avatars of musicians living and dead, and that Wragg had reported a massive investment in his company to make hyper-realistic avatar-entertainment. Its ambitions include recreating Live Aid, Hendrix at Woodstock, the Beatles at the Cavern Club, and doing so in multiple locations simultaneously. Wragg said, “We are re-engineering a moment in time, absolutely to fidelity. It’s not a case of interpreting what somebody said, it’s just representing exactly what they said.” He also said, “We have been approached where people say, ‘What about if this person met this star?’ We’ve said, ‘Look, you’re straying into a world of fiction.’”
The article said Wragg’s teenage nephew had discovered and fallen in love with Janis Joplin’s music and wanted to see her live, but her death in 1970 made that impossible. It also said the frontiers for Wragg and his team were endless and that the technology could be used to bring back Joplin and other favourites in what Wragg called “time-travel tourism,” assuming permission from the musicians’ estates. The piece said classical music is about interpreting what somebody wrote in the context of current times, not recreating the same thing night after night. That distinction matters. One side treats art as living interpretation. The other treats the dead as content.