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.
The Sixteen continues its exploration of Henry Purcell’s Welcome Songs for Charles II. As with Robert King’s pioneering Purcell series begun over thirty years ago for Hyperion, Harry Christophers is recording two Welcome Songs per disc.
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.
In February this year, Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho made a highly lauded debut recital at Wigmore Hall - a concert which both celebrated Opera Rara’s 50th anniversary and honoured the career of the Italian soprano Rosina Storchio (1872-1945), the star of verismo who created the title roles in Leoncavallo’s La bohème and Zazà, Mascagni’s Lodoletta and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.
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.
Collapsology. Or, perhaps we should use the French word ‘Collapsologie’ because this is a transdisciplinary idea pretty much advocated by a series of French theorists - and apparently, mostly French theorists. It in essence focuses on the imminent collapse of modern society and all its layers - a series of escalating crises on a global scale: environmental, economic, geopolitical, governmental; the list is extensive.
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.’
Amongst an avalanche of new Mahler recordings appearing at the moment (Das Lied von der Erde seems to be the most favoured, with three) this 1991 Mahler Second from the 2nd Kassel MahlerFest is one of the more interesting releases.
‘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.’
If there is one myth, it seems believed by some people today, that probably needs shattering it is that post-war recordings or performances of Wagner operas were always of exceptional quality. This 1949 Hamburg Tristan und Isolde is one of those recordings - though quite who is to blame for its many problems takes quite some unearthing.
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."
![Vera Galupe-Borszkh [Photo by Robert Milazzo]](http://www.operatoday.com/Galupe_Borszkh.gif)
Last week (May 27), “without further a-don’t,” as she adorably puts it, Madame Vera Galupe-Borszkh, the world’s reigning traumatic soprano — lately, she says, more of a soprano “spento” — bade a last, lingering, loving farewell to her adoring public in a sold-out concert at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
She said it again twice more that week, in the same venue; no doubt other such occasions will occur. (In any case, there are several CDs and DVDs available. Check her Web site, www.granscena.org.)
It is easy for anyone to make jokes about opera — everyone already has. Most of them aren’t funny, never mind witty, never mind as delicious as the real thing — but that never stops the jokers. What is rare, besides jokes about opera that are actually funny, witty, and delicious, is someone who can make a joke about opera last (before a pretty knowledgeable audience, too) for three hours at a stretch, without deadening out. Anna Russell managed it — but opera, though her best-known target, was not the only string to her bow. (I’m not mixing metaphors; I’m setting them on PUREE.) Gerard Hoffnung managed it, but died too tragically young. Vera Galupe-Borszkh can still clock it in at three hours after 28 years in the saddle, which is nothing short of extraordinary — sometimes she has even been known to resort to new material! No doubt she owes some of her creativity to a long and suspiciously well-guarded but indescribably relationship with the vastly knowledgeable Ira Siff, who co-announces Metropolitan Opera broadcasts.
But how she manages to get her magnificent mane of red hair (natural, she swears by the Virgin of Kiev) out of its scruffy featherduster á la nature into a taut geisha coiffure during one swift scene change (you never saw a redheaded Butterfly? This must be the place) and then formed into a trillion sausage curls for the dying Violetta in another — that calls for skill, technique and effrontery, which have been (along with a haphazard, not to say biohazard, shtetl Bessarabian accent) the hallmarks of her career.
Born Vera Vsyevelodovna Borszkh on the outskirts, or fringes, or gym socks of Odessa, more years ago than Madame can be relied upon to count, she fled Soviet Russia “when I got tired of singing Aida in languages which got no wowels.” Later she became the last pupil and ultimately the bride of the last bel canto castrato, Manuel Galupe (“for a diva, marrying a man already a castrato is good thing — it save so much time”). Vera Galupe-Borszkh is not only a living legend (they’re common enough), she is a voice from the golden age when such things were preserved only by memory and by the rare and often unconvincing magic of scratchy shellac at 78 revolutions per minute. When you hear G-B, you not only hear the technique, the talent, the dedication of a bygone golden era, you seem always to hear in her very throat the echo of scratchy shellac. Perhaps she is one of those who has used her throat not wisely but too well — the Muse is a harsh mistress, and G-B has never been one to hold back. Fake it, yes — hold back, never.
Only a cad — or a critic — to make a distinction without difference — would point out that Madame’s sustenance of tone has begun to waver, like the breeze flitting over the Ukrainian wheat fields at noon. To put it crudely, you could drive a tractor through that tremolo. Yet, properly warmed up, she can still exquisitely float the opening tone of the opening “Pace” in Leonora’s aria from Forza del Destino so that it seems to last longer than the entire opera usually does. (Just as well she omits the rest of the aria.) Her pitch in the Philip Glass takeoff is no longer machinelike — and Glass’s music, even in sendup, does not take kindly to human performance. And was I really the only member of the audience so moved by her singing of the Sleepwalking Scene from Bellini’s La Sonnambula that I could not resist shouting: “Jump! Jump! Jump!” (A friend said he was saving the comment for Mary Zimmerman’s next curtain call.)
More grateful for her instrument in its present vocal estate (or tenement, as she has been a New Yorker for years), were five “Rossyan fok songs,” in which the audience was invited to join her. (“You are good! You must all be Juilliard drop-outs!”) Lieder, too — her signposted “Erlkönig” is justly famous, her “Morgen” sublime — were rather easier on voice and ear than the full-scale arias. Let lesser singers take note: Madame never sings with surtitles or subtitles or translations — the voice and the gestures (and the costumes) give us every drainable drop of meaning, and you’re lucky to get it.
It was a great event in the present — but it was, still more, as Madame put it herself, an evening of extraordinary mammaries. So much of the style — and the singing — and the shtick — and the annotation — seemed uncannily to recall occasions long, long ago. But it was delicious to hear her shtick it to the Met, with all the fervor of someone who might have been tactfully repressing her real opinions during a season of broadcast commentary. (“I love the Salome — where she take off everything! Even some of the high notes!”)
She was ably assisted by Maestro Sergio Zawa, engulfing the piano, and Carmelita della Vaca-Browne stealing the crumbs of the scenes Madame was chewing. Della Vaca-Browne lovingly recreated a moment I’ve never forgotten, from the very first season of La Gran Scena Opera Company di New York in 1981, when Annina beheld the gasping Violetta on her deathbed and tossed confetti in her face, then responded to her furious glare with the explanation, from the libretto: “E carnevale.” In Vera’s vocal presence, when is it not Carnival?
Ladies and gentlemen, all I can say is (to echo Tosca, one of Madame’s great roles): “Ecco un artista!”
John Yohalem