English Touring Opera are delighted to announce a season of lyric monodramas to tour nationally from October to December. The season features music for solo singer and piano by Argento, Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich with a bold and inventive approach to making opera during social distancing.
This tenth of ten Live from London concerts was in fact a recorded live performance from California. It was no less enjoyable for that, and it was also uplifting to learn that this wasn’t in fact the ‘last’ LfL event that we will be able to enjoy, courtesy of VOCES8 and their fellow vocal ensembles (more below …).
Ever since Wigmore Hall announced their superb series of autumn concerts, all streamed live and available free of charge, I’d been looking forward to this song recital by Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper.
Although Stile Antico’s programme article for their Live from London recital introduced their selection from the many treasures of the English Renaissance in the context of the theological debates and upheavals of the Tudor and Elizabethan years, their performance was more evocative of private chamber music than of public liturgy.
Evidently, face masks don’t stifle appreciative “Bravo!”s. And, reducing audience numbers doesn’t lower the volume of such acclamations. For, the audience at Wigmore Hall gave soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn and pianist Simon Lepper a greatly deserved warm reception and hearty response following this lunchtime recital of late-Romantic song.
For this week’s Live from London vocal recital we moved from the home of VOCES8, St Anne and St Agnes in the City of London, to Kings Place, where The Sixteen - who have been associate artists at the venue for some time - presented a programme of music and words bound together by the theme of ‘reflection’.
'Such is your divine Disposation that both you excellently understand, and royally entertaine the Exercise of Musicke.’
‘And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven … that old serpent … Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’
There was never any doubt that the fifth of the twelve Met Stars Live in Concert broadcasts was going to be a palpably intense and vivid event, as well as a musically stunning and theatrically enervating experience.
‘Love’ was the theme for this Live from London performance by Apollo5. Given the complexity and diversity of that human emotion, and Apollo5’s reputation for versatility and diverse repertoire, ranging from Renaissance choral music to jazz, from contemporary classical works to popular song, it was no surprise that their programme spanned 500 years and several musical styles.
The Academy of St Martin in the Fields have titled their autumn series of eight concerts - which are taking place at 5pm and 7.30pm on two Saturdays each month at their home venue in Trafalgar Square, and being filmed for streaming the following Thursday - ‘re:connect’.
The London Symphony Orchestra opened their Autumn 2020 season with a homage to Oliver Knussen, who died at the age of 66 in July 2018. The programme traced a national musical lineage through the twentieth century, from Britten to Knussen, on to Mark-Anthony Turnage, and entwining the LSO and Rattle too.
With the Live from London digital vocal festival entering the second half of the series, the festival’s host, VOCES8, returned to their home at St Annes and St Agnes in the City of London to present a sequence of ‘Choral Dances’ - vocal music inspired by dance, embracing diverse genres from the Renaissance madrigal to swing jazz.
Just a few unison string wriggles from the opening of Mozart’s overture to Le nozze di Figaro are enough to make any opera-lover perch on the edge of their seat, in excited anticipation of the drama in music to come, so there could be no other curtain-raiser for this Gala Concert at the Royal Opera House, the latest instalment from ‘their House’ to ‘our houses’.
"Before the ending of the day, creator of all things, we pray that, with your accustomed mercy, you may watch over us."
The doors at The Metropolitan Opera will not open to live audiences until 2021 at the earliest, and the likelihood of normal operatic life resuming in cities around the world looks but a distant dream at present. But, while we may not be invited from our homes into the opera house for some time yet, with its free daily screenings of past productions and its pay-per-view Met Stars Live in Concert series, the Met continues to bring opera into our homes.
Music-making at this year’s Grange Festival Opera may have fallen silent in June and July, but the country house and extensive grounds of The Grange provided an ideal setting for a weekend of twelve specially conceived ‘promenade’ performances encompassing music and dance.
There’s a “slide of harmony” and “all the bones leave your body at that moment and you collapse to the floor, it’s so extraordinary.”
“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.”
The hum of bees rising from myriad scented blooms; gentle strains of birdsong; the cheerful chatter of picnickers beside a still lake; decorous thwacks of leather on willow; song and music floating through the warm evening air.
Glyndebourne opened this year's festival with "a new production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, subtitled ‘The school for lovers’, will open the 2006 Festival. This masterpiece includes some of Mozart’s most exquisite music, and Così’s now established popularity, following comparative neglect in the 19th century, is partly due to Glyndebourne’s championing of the work since the opening of the Festival in 1934." Here are some initial reviews:
Dispassionate look at young love
By Andrew Clark [Financial Times, 21 May 2006]
Women are like that – when they are in love with love. And so are men. That is the bit Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte left out when they called their opera Così fan tutte. When you are young, love is gullible, superficial, promiscuous. You get carried away with the very idea of being in love. It is puppy love, running the gamut of ecstasy and despair in a day. It blinds those involved but its effects and pitfalls are glaringly obvious to onlookers, usually middle-aged, who know better.
Click here for remainder of article.
A wobble at Glyndebourne as bland blancmange is served
Rupert Christiansen reviews Cosi fan tutte at Glyndebourne
[Daily Telegraph, 22 May 2006]
Pleasantly tasteful are the words that spring to mind as I think about this new production of Cosi fan tutte, Glyndebourne's tribute to Mozart on his 250th birthday. The frocks are pretty, nobody sits on the lavatory or wears a Guantanamo Bay jump-suit. It's just the thing for visitors to Glyndebourne who are more interested in its herbaceous borders than the art of opera.
Click here for remainder of article.
Glyndebourne `Cosi fan Tutte' Boasts Cleavage, Breeches, No Vim
By Warwick Thompson [Bloomberg.com, 22 May 2006]
May 22 (Bloomberg) -- I've seen Mozart's ``Cosi fan tutte'' (1790) set in a public toilet, in someone's mind, in a cheap diner and in a trendy London cafe. I'd almost forgotten it could be staged where the librettist intended, roughly in the period it was written, with pretty costumes and naturalistic action.
Click here for remainder of article.
Cosi Fan Tutte
Tim Ashley [Guardian, 22 May 2006]
The Romantics of the early 19th century detested Cosi Fan Tutte, deeming it for the most part trivial and obscene. Mozart's emphasis on the irrational nature of desire and its attendant dangers, however, in many respects prefigures Romantic concerns - a fact not lost on Nicholas Hytner, whose new production re-imagines the opera as a parable of the threat posed by sex to classical certainties.
Click here for remainder of article.
Così fan tutte
Hilary Finch at Glyndebourne [Times Online, 22 May 2006]
Gales, rain and Mozart. It has to be the start of a new Glyndebourne season. But the sun was shining out of the eyes of a company clearly determined to celebrate to the full its first production in Mozart's anniversary year.