‘A brief history of song’ is the subtitle of the 2020 Oxford Lieder Festival (10th-17th October), which will present an ambitious, diverse and imaginative programme of 40 performances and events.
‘Signor Piatti in a fantasia on themes from Beatrice di Tenda had also his triumph. Difficulties, declared to be insuperable, were vanquished by him with consummate skill and precision. He certainly is amazing, his tone magnificent, and his style excellent. His resources appear to be inexhaustible; and altogether for variety, it is the greatest specimen of violoncello playing that has been heard in this country.’
Eboracum Baroque is a flexible period instrument ensemble, comprising singers and instrumentalists, which was founded in York - as its name suggests, Eboracum being the name of the Roman fort on the site of present-day York - while artistic director Chris Parsons was at York University.
‘There could be no happier existence. Each morning he composed something beautiful and each evening he found the most enthusiastic admirers. We gathered in his room - he played and sang to us - we were enthusiastic and afterwards we went to the tavern. We hadn’t a penny but were blissfully happy.’
When soprano Eleanor Dennis was asked - by Ashok Klouda, one of the founders and co-directors of the Highgate International Chamber Music Festival - to perform some of Beethoven’s Scottish Songs Op.108 at this year’s Festival, as she leafed through the score to make her selection the first thing that struck her was the beauty of the poetry.
“At the start, one knows ‘bits’ of it,” says tenor Mark Padmore, somewhat wryly, when I meet him at the Stage Door of the Royal Opera House where the tenor has just begun rehearsals for David McVicar’s new production of Death in Venice, which in November will return Britten’s opera to the ROH stage for the first time since 1992.
“Trust me, I’m telling you stories …”
When British opera director Nina Brazier tries to telephone me from Frankfurt, where she is in the middle of rehearsals for a revival of Florentine Klepper’s 2015 production of Martinů’s Julietta, she finds herself - to my embarrassment - ‘blocked’ by my telephone preference settings. The technical hitch is soon solved; but doors, in the UK and Europe, are certainly very much wide open for Nina, who has been described by The Observer as ‘one of Britain’s leading young directors of opera’.
“We need to stop talking about ‘diversity’ and think instead about ‘inclusivity’,” says Bill Bankes-Jones, when we meet to talk about the forthcoming twelfth Tête à Tête Opera Festival which runs from 24th July to 10th August.
The young Hong Kong-born British composer Dani Howard is having quite a busy year.
For Peter Sellars, Mozart’s Idomeneo is a ‘visionary’ work, a utopian opera centred on a classic struggle between a father and a son written by an angry 25-year-old composer who wanted to show the musical establishment what a new generation could do.
“Physiognomy, psychology and technique.” These are the three things that determine the way a singer’s sound is produced, so Ken Querns-Langley explains when we meet in the genteel surroundings of the National Liberal Club, where the training programmes, open masterclasses and performances which will form part the third London Bel Canto Festival will be held from 5th-24th August.
“Sop. Page, attendant on the King.” So, reads a typical character description of the loyal page Oscar, whose actions, in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, unintentionally lead to his monarch’s death. He reveals the costume that King Gustavo is wearing at the masked ball, thus enabling the monarch’s secretary, Anckarstroem, to shoot him. The dying King falls into the faithful Oscar’s arms.
A mournful Princess forced by her father into an arranged marriage. A Prince who laments that no-one loves him for himself, and so exchanges places with his aide-de-camp. A melancholy dreamer who dons a deceased jester’s motley and finds himself imprisoned for impertinence.
‘Aloneness’ does not immediately seem a likely or fruitful subject for an opera. But, loneliness and isolation - an individual’s inner sphere, which no other human can truly know or enter - are at the core of Yasushi Inoue’s creative expression.
What links Wagner’s Das Rheingold, Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Cavalli’s La Calisto? It sounds like the sort of question Paul Gambaccini might pose to contestants on BBC Radio 4’s music quiz, Counterpoint.
Though she won praise from the literary greats of her day, including Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound and Siegfried Sassoon, the Victorian poet Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was little-known among the contemporary reading public. When she visited the Poetry Bookshop of Harold Monro, the publisher of her first and only collection, The Farmer’s Bride (1916), she was asked, “Are you Charlotte Mew?” Her reply was characteristically diffident and self-deprecatory: “I’m sorry to say I am.”
“It lives!” So cries Victor Frankenstein in Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein on beholding the animation of his creature for the first time. Peake might equally have been describing the novel upon which he had based his 1823 play which, staged at the English Opera House, had such a successful first run that it gave rise to fourteen further adaptations of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novella in the following three years.
It sounds like a question from a BBC Radio 4 quiz show: what links Handel’s cantata for solo contralto, La Lucrezia, Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, and the post-punk band Joy Division?
The first two instalments of the Academy of Ancient Music’s ‘Purcell trilogy’ at the Barbican Hall have posed plentiful questions - creative, cultural and political.
![Christine Brewer [Photo by Christian Steiner]](http://www.operatoday.com/Christine_Brewer_Steiner.gif)
On 7 June 2010, I spoke with Christine Brewer who was enjoying a relatively free week at her home near St. Louis, Missouri, after long months of air travel between concerts, recitals and operatic performances.
A staunch believer in regular exercise, she has just returned from an early morning swim when I phoned her. We chatted about country living, her history, and the state of the art of singing.
MN: Where did you grow up?
CB: I grew up along the Mississippi River in southern Illinois. My brothers and I worked on local farms in summer when we were out of school. I finished high school early and was admitted to advanced placement at McKendree College, the oldest college in Illinois, which gave me a full scholarship. I graduated with a teaching degree when I was twenty. Ross Brewer and I married the following year and we both taught public school. During those years I never expected to earn my livelihood as a singer, but I did take voice lessons. I had a job singing in church and I was a section leader in the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Chorus. My voice was very small and light when I was young, but after I gave birth to my daughter at age twenty-eight, I noticed a big change in it. I was thirty-three when I won the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions so I definitely was a late bloomer!
MN: Do you have some tips for parents and teachers?
CB: These days music teachers are few and far between, but many classroom teachers are trying to include art and music in the curriculum as best they can. I suggest that those who want to help can do that by raising funds for a trip to a concert or by contacting people who can enable the kids to come for free. If you call your local symphony or opera company, you may find that they have an outreach program that will help. The St. Louis Symphony people tell me that some schools fail to take advantage of all the services available to them.
MN: How did “Echoes of Nightingales” come into being?
CB: Glenn Freiner, my voice teacher at McKendree, got me interested in doing songs once sung by artists like Kirsten Flagstad, Helen Traubel, Eileen Farrell and Eleanor Steber. Whenever he went to a recital he would note down the titles of the American songs he heard so he could buy the music. When he passed away, he left me this treasure trove of recital pieces. Roger Vignoles and I recorded more than twenty of them for Hyperion. The disc should come out in a few months. I’m already using some of the songs on my recital program.
MN: When did you start singing full time?
CB: I was the soprano soloist at The Church of St. Michael and St. George in St. Louis where several opera board members were in the congregation. Actually, General Director Richard Gaddes also attended when he was in town. I entered a young artist competition sponsored by the St. Louis Symphony and Gaddes was a judge. I did not win, but a few days after it was over I got a letter from him with a few hundred dollars in it. He wanted to make sure I would not give up because he thought I had potential, so he sent me what I would have gotten if I had won. He asked me to audition for the Opera Theatre of St. Louis Chorus and since they performed when school was not in session, I did. Eventually, I was asked to cover solo roles and conductors like Stephen Lord and John Nelson started giving me small parts. Then, Colin Graham asked me to do Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes. That was a true break-through for me
MN: Did you participate in any young artist programs?
CB: Yes, Colin Graham invited me to study for a summer in Banff, Canada. I sang the role of the Female Chorus in Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia and I understudied Lady Billows in his Albert Herring. It was one of my best early experiences because the study was so intense.
MN: Did you work with Birgit Nilsson?
CB: Yes, in 1988 I participated in a lieder master class with her in Washington, DC, and she invited me to a six-week program in Buekeburg, Germany. There were only six singers in the class and we had daily lessons. When the BBC recorded some of my concerts, I sent her the discs and she wrote back a critique.
I also sent her a disc of my first Isolde, which I did in London. Warner classics actually bought the recording and released it with no retakes, no patching at all. I did not hear from Birgit for a long time on that and I thought maybe she did not like it. Eventually, I got a letter that began: “Frau Isolde!!!” and went on to say how much she loved the recording. She said, “This is your role. You must sing it.” It really does fit me like a glove. I’ve already sung quite a few Isoldes and have a lot more coming up.
This summer I will spend two months in Santa Fe singing Lady Billows in Albert Herring. It’s one of my favorite roles. I love singing Britten’s music because of the way he captures true, honest humanity. That‘s why I love singing Ellen Orford so much. I think Peter Grimes is one of the best operas ever written by any composer. Albert Herring I love because it gives me a chance to show my comic side. I think I’m a very funny person because I always find the humor in things that happen to me. Comedy is difficult, however, because there is a very fine line between what is funny and what isn’t. In Santa Fe we have a fabulous director, Paul Curran. He directed the Peter Grimes there and the Die Frau ohne Schatten in Chicago. He’s a Scot and he understands Britten. Andrew Davis is conducting, so we really have the best in Santa Fe this summer. I know it’s going to be a fun production.
I love singing in my own language, English! Young singers need to learn to sing well in their native languages. So often I hear a young American singer singing in English and I can’t understand the words. To my mind, if you can’t sing in your own language there’s something wrong. I often sing entire recitals made up entirely of American and British songs because I think it’s important to sing well in our own language. People need to know that we have great music in English. There’s a lot of good music out there, actually, so it’s important to keep looking at new pieces, too.