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.
HOUSTON — “Hansel and Gretel” has taken a beating in recent seasons, as over-zealous directors — aping the excesses of Eurotrash Regieoper — have made Humperdink’s largely innocent retelling of the Grimms’ tale the victim of hyper-active imaginations.
Humperdinck’s siblings have been turned into depraved teen-agers, wayward members of a sorely dysfunctional family, sometimes headed by an alcoholic father and a shrew-like mother. And drag-queen witches on motorcycles have brought lip-smacking realism to hints of cannibalism in the story, thus outdoing the fairy-tale original in grotesque ghoulishness.
In a holiday production the Houston Grand Opera has taken a happily refreshing “less-is-more” approach to Humperdinck’s one great hit, enhancing the appeal of the work to both children and adults. To achieve this Anthony Freud — in his first season as HGO general director and CEO — paired the talent of puppeteer Basil Twist with the acumen of newly appointed head of the HGO music staff Kathleen Kelly, who reorchestrated this score for chamber ensemble.
For almost a decade Twist, a third-generation puppeteer, has focused his career on music. His 1998 underwater visualization of Berlioz’” Symphonie fantastique” won both an Obie Award and a Drama Desk nomination. Two years later he staged Stravinsky’s ballet “Petrushka” with puppets and then directed two operas written specifically for puppets: de Falla’s “Master Peter’s Puppet Show” and Respighi’s “Sleeping Beauty in the Woods.”
In Houston Twist, doubling as designer and director, has combined humans and puppets on stage simultaneously for the first time. For the production Twist engaged eight professional puppeteers who — invisible to the audience — work both above and below the stage. In addition, from Japan’s Bunraku theater he has added black-clad assistants who bring puppets on stage.
Most impressive, however, is the illusion that he has created in the size of the singers involved. As the opera opens Hansel and Gretel seem truly child-size as they move among mammoth pieces of furniture. And the parents, when they appear, enforce this impression. With enlarged heads and walking on stilts, they recall “tricks” often used to make Wagner’s “Rheingold” giants Fafner and Fasolt larger than life.
Twist has outdone even himself with a femme fatale Witch, a 12-foot swivel-hipped diva in flaming red directly from the grandest of operas. To execute Twist’s design for the figure, Houston’s Jm Jensen Company mounted baritone Liam Bonner on a vintage rolling camera pedestal that is moved around the stage with fluidity and speed by two men beneath the Witch’ skirts. A third is responsible for the figure’s body movements, while Bonner sweeps the air with long-fingered hands and arms that extend from his own.
Twist calls the Witch “an extended opera singer,” whom he finds “pretty cool.”Her physical stature, he notes, reflects her power. And while the Witch, sung by Bonner without affectation, might scare the daylights out of kids, for the audience she speaks more of fun than fear, an impression enforced by an ornately colorful house built of gingerbread from a batter obviously rich in Russian Easter eggs.
Other impressive “twists” of the staging include 14 diaphanous angels — puppets all — who dance an aerial ballet above the sleeping children after their “Prayer” and the addition to the cast of an entourage of gingerbread people recruited from HGO Children’s Chorus. Following the demise of the Witch they shed their costumes to be real boys and girls, now liberated from captivity. (Karen Reeves rehearsed the children.)
Twist shares the success of the production with Kelly, whose reduction of Humperdinck’s Wagnerian orchestra to an ensemble of a mere eight — string quartet, horn, flute, clarinet and piano — gives the opera a whole new lease on life.Kelly undertook this task — independent of the HGO — for the Berkshire Opera, where she premiered the new version last summer in several Massachuset communities with small venues. (One theater was without a pit, making itnecessary for the instrumentalists to share the stage with the singers.)
As a chamber opera “Hansel and Gretel” is a kinder and gentler work than the original as it is often encountered today. “The score is lush,” Kelly says, “but its bone structure is clear and clean.” And it is the strength of these qualities that bring to the HGO staging a feeling of rebirth and rediscovery that make “Hansel and Gretel” a masterpiece of classic restraint.
In this lean environment the German children’s songs that Humperdinck built into the score retain their authenticity, and the transparency of the reduced orchestration brings to the surface a charm often obscured by the forces of the original version.
“The music at the heart of any work is greater than the forces that create the sound,” Kelly comments. “Hansel and Gretel” is sung here in Cori Ellison’s delightfully unmannered and infinitely singable English translation of the libretto, which includes such lines as these sung by the Witch:
“I plan to set his heart aflutter
With Belgian waffles and cinnamon butter.”
The production, seen at the opening-night performance on December 1and slated for 10 further December performances in the Cullen Theater in Houston’s Wortham Center, is in its entirety a product of the HGO Studio, the company’s highly regarded training program for young artists, which Kelly serves as music director.
A delightfully boyish Fiona Murphy and a convincingly adolescent Rebecca Camm sang the title roles on opening night; they alternate with Maria Markina and Alicia Gianni in later performances. Jennifer Root and Ryan McKinny are the parents, while Russian-born Albina Shagimuratova, a first-year Studio artist, makes her HGO debut, doubling as Sandman and Dew Fairy.
Regarding her collaboration with Twist, Kelly points first to the number of Baroque operas written for puppets — again, small venues prompted the practice — and to the favor that transcriptions and arrangements enjoyed before the age of recorded sound. “And it’s ideal for younger singers — artists still in their 20s or early 30s,” she says. Kelly conducted the overwhelmingly charming and convincing staging.
It is perhaps surprising that Anthony Freud chose “‘Hansel and Gretel” rather than “Turandot” or “Meistersinger” for his first new production in Houston. “It’s been interesting for me to look at a favorite opera with new eyes,” says Freud, speaking of his choice of Twist for the staging. “Basil has never directed humans before, and the combination of puppets and real people has been a fresh challenge for him.” Freud points to plans for projects designed specifically for the 1100-seat Culllen, less than half the size of the Brown Theater, the 2200-seat venue for HGO major productions. “And the talent of our Studio makes such projects doubly appealing, for they are of benefit both to the training program and to the company as a whole,”Freud says.
This “Hansel and Gretel,” a co-production of the Houston Grand Opera and Atlanta Opera, rescues the opera from the over-the-top productions that have become a modern tradition. It gives the score a new lease on life.
Wes Blomster