21 Oct 2008
Le Roi d’Ys at Avery Fisher Hall
By the time he completed Le Roi d’Ys, in 1888, Edouard Lalo was sixty-five, approaching the end of a successful career as a chamber violinist.
Recently in Performances
ETO Autumn 2020 Season Announcement: Lyric Solitude
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.
Love, always: Chanticleer, Live from London … via San Francisco
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 …).
Dreams and delusions from Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper at Wigmore Hall
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.
Treasures of the English Renaissance: Stile Antico, Live from London
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.
A wonderful Wigmore Hall debut by Elizabeth Llewellyn
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.
The Sixteen: Music for Reflection, live from Kings Place
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’.
Iestyn Davies and Elizabeth Kenny explore Dowland's directness and darkness at Hatfield House
'Such is your divine Disposation that both you excellently understand, and royally entertaine the Exercise of Musicke.’
Paradise Lost: Tête-à-Tête 2020
‘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.’
Joyce DiDonato: Met Stars Live in Concert
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.
‘Where All Roses Go’: Apollo5, Live from London
‘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 're-connect'
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’.
Lucy Crowe and Allan Clayton join Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO at St Luke's
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.
Choral Dances: VOCES8, Live from London
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.
Royal Opera House Gala Concert
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’.
Fading: The Gesualdo Six at Live from London
"Before the ending of the day, creator of all things, we pray that, with your accustomed mercy, you may watch over us."
Met Stars Live in Concert: Lise Davidsen at the Oscarshall Palace in Oslo
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.
Precipice: The Grange Festival
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.
Monteverdi: The Ache of Love - Live from London
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: Rowan Pierce and Christopher Glynn at Ryedale Online
“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.”
A Musical Reunion at Garsington Opera
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.
OPERA TODAY ARCHIVES »
Performances
Like Massenet, Fauré, Reyer and Debussy, he had been dazzled by the achievement of Richard Wagner, and like them he was anxious to find a way to create an opera that would not owe too much to Wagnerian technique; imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it is not the best way to create stage works with lives of their own. Too, in a France still smarting from the Franco-Prussian War, it did not do for anyone hoping to succeed to be too German.
So he took a folk tale about a magical city that sank beneath the waves off the Breton coast, a city supposedly so marvelous (says my old Guide Michelin) that another city named itself “like Ys,” Par-Ys. In the opera, Ys is saved at the last minute, thanks to the intervention of St. Corentin and the pagan self-sacrifice of wicked but repentant Princess Margared, who opened the floodgates in the first place; in the legend, the city was lost, but its bells can be heard in the surf and it will rise again should mass ever be celebrated in the cathedral. (Try chanting and sipping wine while under water. Go ahead, try.) Debussy made that story a tone poem, La Cathedrale Engloutie, but Lalo, after the grand stage spectacle of a city being engulfed, saved it again. (Reminiscences of Der Fliegende Hollander are perceptible in the story and audible in the score.)
If Brittany were a nation (and the inhabitants will assure you that it is), Le Roi d’Ys would be its national opera – if it were in Breton and not in French. The characters are cardboard – the only one with any personality is Margared, a powerhouse mezzo (Dolora Zajick would have fun with it), mixing Ortrud with Senta. The orchestral textures (in which the chorus takes enthusiastic part) give the piece its not inconsiderable charm – the scene-painting of Breton occasions (a wedding, a storm, a flood) is masterful, but the only part of the work that is well known or striking is the matinade, the tenor’s wedding day aria from Act III, which turns up on many a recital disk and, in performance, stands as the one knockout hit in the score.
Leon Botstein insists that the work is a second-rank masterpiece, like Ariane et Barbe-Bleu and Le Roi Arthus – of which his performances, in my opinion, also failed to convince or excite. (His presentations of The Wreckers, Genoveva and Die Ferne Klang were far more persuasive. May one request Spohr’s Jessonda, Chabrier’s Briséis or Janacek’s Excursions of Mr. Broucek for his next novelty?) Except for some messy brass work, the presentation on October 3 –probably the first in New York in thirty-odd years (it was last given here by Opera Orchestra of New York, but some ad hoc company or other actually staged it at the Beacon Theater in (my) living memory) – was propulsive and enjoyable work in the many virtuoso parts of this intriguing score.
The singers were young and, for the most part, impressive and promising. Dana Beth Miller, hitherto a soprano, has made the best of a transition to a lower fach; her Margared, full of hysterical threats, remorseful asides, and heroic repentance, strayed only once – at a moment of shock when a saint’s statue came to life in her face – into the extramusical; otherwise one appreciated her cool control of a sizable and richly colored mezzo in a long, various and demanding part. She was ably supported by Frédéric Antoun, who gave a light, delectable account of Mylio’s matinade that made one eager to hear him in the Offenbach, Mozart and Bellini roles he’s been doing here and there, and Georgia Jarman was charming, as Margared’s bland but happy sister. Curtis Streetman ably held down the small title role and Andrew Nolen introduced the story as a Breton sidekick, then intruded portentously as the saintly statue come to life, both duties that became him well.
John Yohalem