Azerbaijan's State Symphony Orchestra brought the country's musical traditions to Montreux last week, performing works by Uzeyir Hajibeyli — the father of Azerbaijani classical music — alongside opera, mugham, jazz and national dance as the Swiss city marked the 80th anniversary of the Septembre Musical Montreux-Vevey festival. Around 200 artists used one of the world's best-known music venues to share a heritage that spans classical to contemporary forms, a reminder that Europe's cultural stages remain vital spaces for nations outside the EU to assert their identity.
Workers' Lives, Women's Voices
In London, Julia Wolfe's multimedia oratorio Fire in My Mouth opened the Southbank Centre's autumn season with 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. The piece, first performed 7 years ago, is the third in Wolfe's series of large-scale works drawing on the history of the American worker. The London performance 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 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. It said the work ends with a litany of the names of the dead, a statement that would've been impossible until 2011 — 15 years ago — when the final victims were at last identified, just a year before a fire in a Bangladesh garment factory killed 124. The same review said Wolfe's 2026 London season had opened with unEarth at the Barbican, described as an earnest homily on the climate emergency. It also said the Philharmonia was an expressive orchestra and that Alsop marshalled the performers crisply and undemonstratively.
The Digital Resurrection Debate
Meanwhile, a Guardian piece explored the rise of digital avatars and the possibility of recreating dead performers, a development that's drawn both enthusiasm and ethical concern. Unit1 Studio's CEO Barney Wragg discussed using AI to simulate the way that tears evaporate in your eye between blinks, or subcutaneous blood flow, so that when digital characters laugh or open their mouth or smile, areas of their flesh will change colour as it would do in a real human. 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.
The company's ambitions include recreating Live Aid, Hendrix at Woodstock, the Beatles at the Cavern Club, and doing so in multiple locations simultaneously. Wragg said the company is re-engineering a moment in time, absolutely to fidelity, and that it's not a case of interpreting what somebody said but representing exactly what they said. He also said the company has been approached where people ask what about if this person met this star, and that they've said 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 — a pointed reminder that art's value lies in its living relationship to the present, not its capacity for perfect reproduction.
Why This Matters:
Europe's cultural institutions remain spaces where histories of labour, migration and struggle can be told with dignity — as Wolfe's Fire in My Mouth demonstrates, honouring the 115th anniversary of a tragedy that killed immigrant women locked in by profit-driven management. But the rise of AI-driven avatars poses a question the cultural sector hasn't yet answered: who profits when dead artists are resurrected, and who decides what they say? The technology could democratize access to performances once confined to a single city or moment. It could also turn art into a commodity stripped of interpretation, context and the living presence that makes performance meaningful. As Europe debates the regulation of AI, the cultural sector's voice must be heard — not just on copyright and estates, but on what it means to preserve heritage without freezing it in time.