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."
![Dmitri Hvorostovsky (Count di Luna) and Sondra Radvanovsky (Leonora) [Photo by Cory Weaver courtesy of San Francisco Opera]](http://www.operatoday.com/HvoRad_CW.gif)
SFO general director David Gockley has a mania for developing new audiences — last year The Bonesetter’s Daughter was aimed at enticing the Asian American community into the opera house, and Porgy and Bess encouraged the African American community to cross the threshold.
This fall season, besides programming only composers and operas that everyone has heard of, he seems to have targeted two other rather large groups — those who would not be caught dead in an opera house and those who are hard of hearing.
Verdi’s blockbuster Il trovatore opened the SFO fall season on September 11. The War Memorial’s familiar gold curtain flew out to reveal the production’s show curtain, a detail of one of Goya’s Disasters of War etchings, dampening the festive mood of the inauguration of the company’s eighty-seventh season. The Met and Chicago Lyric had conspired with San Francisco Opera to create this new production of Verdi’s first mega-opera. We can hope that it will not end up in SFO’s warehouse to be revived every five or six years, or ever again.
Verdi blockbusters are not fodder for little league opera. The great big San Francisco Opera had the goods. A big style, knock-em dead, real Italian conductor Nicola Luisotti, the company’s incoming music director; a real Italian tenor, Marco Berti (a recipient of the Giuseppe Verdi Gold Metal), Sondra Radvanovsky, an American soprano who brings real push to “spinto;” the mezzo Stephanie Blythe, Musical America’s (the major trade publication) current Singer of the Year; and Dimitri Hvorostovsky (who needs no introduction) as the Count di Luna. It was a lively contest as to who could sing louder, clearly at the urging of the maestro. It was loud, very loud.
The most beautiful singing of the evening came from Hvorostovsky in the second act reverie of his love for Leonora, though the effect was betrayed by the maestro who too aggressively drove Verdi’s delicate orchestration. Stephanie Blythe heaved the rantings of Azucena from her chest throughout the evening, leaving her vocally exhausted at the end, and arousing our concern for her on-going vocal health. Mme. Radvanovsky was busy with strange operatic acting accompanying her impressively goosed up, later in the evening bleating vocal production, evoking concerns for her eventual vocal health as well. Marco Berti squarely hit the high C (though not for very long) in Di quella pira, actually a high B as the whole aria had been transposed down to accommodate this show-off high note infamously interpolated by tenors.
At the September 25 performance many of the audience rose to their feet when Azucena appeared for her bow, then the balance stood when Hvorostovsky took the next bow (Azucena had just sung her guts out in the final trio while the Count di Luna merely looked on, one might have thought she would have taken the later bows in turn with Leonora and Manrico). Then la Radvanovsky got huge, the hugest applause, probably because she had the softer, prettier arias, followed by the title role, Manrico, who was well appreciated as the most genuine performance of the evening (no one expects sincerity from a tenor, so its lack was not a problem).
Scottish stage director David McVicar got the whole thing wrong. Il trovatore is not about infanticide or bloody revenge (or Napoleonic wars), it is about singing. Famously victimized as a bad libretto Il trovatore is a succession of set pieces that tell what has happened over a thirty year period. There is very little in Il trovatore of what is actually happening at the moment. Each of its eight scenes needs a specific mood to be set within which the story-telling takes place, and it was any attempt to create these moods that this production lacked. Unfortunately this led to a painful absence of poetry in this musically and theatrically over-blown production.
McVicar, as a good director thinks he should, attempted to make a dramatic whole, over-laying a larger mood or concept — the horrors of the Napoleonic wars. Il trovatore is far less than a national or social tragedy, and these larger horrors were quite pale, indeed unnoticeable beside the vicious personal dramas of Verdi’s characters. To the hopeless task of imposing a dramatic unity McVicars and his designer Charles Edwards developed a revolving set that could instantly move from one locale to another, one story to another, with no time for the Verdi’s moods to dissipate and then radically transform themselves. Put this together with the pushed-to-the-hilt conducting of Luisotti and it became opera that hit below the belt.
The performance on September 19 was beamed simultaneously to the digital scoreboard of AT&T ball park where a reported twenty-five thousand people converged to participate in this contest of who could sing loudest. More than opera, Opera at the Ball Park is a San Francisco happening that entices just about everyone to join in the sport of opera, if not the art of opera.
Michael Milenski