The Nederlandse Reisopera and the Noord Nederlands Orkest have received De Ovatie, the VSCD Classical Music Prize, for Second Love, their 2025–26 season-opening double bill pairing Gerald Barry’s The Stronger with Hagar, a new opera by Dutch composer Jan-Peter de Graaff and librettist Eleanor Barlow. The award was presented on 26 September 2026 at SPOT Groningen, following the premiere of Waiting for the Barbarians, another collaboration between the opera company and orchestra. Conducted in Second Love by Lochlan Brown, the production was selected by the VSCD’s Classical Music Jury as the prize-winning stage achievement of the 2025–26 theatre season.
Second Love brought together two compact contemporary works linked by adultery, emotional dependence and the unequal positions of people within a relationship. Barry’s The Stronger, composed in 2007 after August Strindberg’s monodrama Den Starkare, is centred on a meeting between Madame X and the silent Mademoiselle Y in a restaurant. Madame X gradually confronts the possibility that the other woman has had an affair with her husband. In De Graaff’s Hagar, the setting shifts to the restaurant kitchen, where waitress Hagar tells chef Abram that she is pregnant. Abram’s wife Sarai, who manages the business, discovers the relationship, setting in motion a wider confrontation involving staff, family and professional pressures. The new work places the biblical names Hagar, Abram and Sarai in a contemporary setting, using the restaurant as both workplace and dramatic arena.
The production was directed by Belle van Heerikhuizen, with set design by Koen Steger, costumes by David Laport, lighting by Tim van ’t Hof and dramaturgy by Michiel Bijmans. Its cast comprised Jessica Niles as Madame X and Jennifer Welts as Mademoiselle Y in The Stronger, alongside Hagar Sharvit in the title role of Hagar, Liam James Karai as Abram, Alison Scherzer as Sarai, Glen Cunningham as Gabriel and Fiona Kimm as Gertrude. The Noord Nederlands Orkest performed under Brown’s direction. The two works were presented as a continuous theatrical proposition: Barry’s concentrated, psychologically focused monodrama was followed by De Graaff’s larger-scale opera, whose score uses shifting rhythms and varied orchestral colour to follow mounting tension among the characters.
In its citation, the VSCD jury described Second Love as an “inventive diptych” on love triangles, emphasising the contribution of its seven soloists and the orchestra in demonstrating the expressive possibilities of modern opera. The award is given annually to performers and productions judged to have made a significant contribution to Dutch classical music life; its 2026 shortlist also included Amsterdam Sinfonietta’s Lonely Angel and the collaborative staging of Louis Andriessen’s De Materie by Het Muziek, HIIIT and the conservatories of Amsterdam and The Hague. For De Graaff, Hagar’s inclusion in the winning project marks a notable recognition of new Dutch opera within a programme that connected a contemporary commission to a twentieth-century literary source and an existing twenty-first-century score.
The winner of the Ovatie receives a sculpture designed and created by Amsterdam artist Iris Le Rütte. Depicting the nymph Daphne, it symbolizes how music helps people flourish, and how every artist blossoms through the audience’s appreciation. A larger version hangs in the Beatrix Foyer of the Concertgebouw as a tribute to all the award winners.