‘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.
![Jurgita Adamonytė [Photo courtesy of Askonas Holt]](http://www.operatoday.com/jurgita_adamonyte.gif)
‘Focussed and pure of tone’, ‘beautifully steady’, ‘pure clarity and note perfection’ — just some of the accolades bestowed on the Lithuanian mezzo soprano Jurgita Adamonytė for her recent performances of Mozart.
A treat is in store, then, for the audience at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where Adamonytė sings the role of the over-excitable page, Cherubino, in a revival of David McVicars’ production of The Marriage of Figaro.
Adamonytė has recently played Cherubino in the Salzburg Festival production which toured Japan. But, McVicar’s vision of Figaro is a subtly dark one: transferred from Revolutionary France to the 1830s, McVicar places less emphasis on the comic confusions, seeking instead to convey what the director himself has called the ‘heartfelt’ emotions of the opera. I asked Adamonytė if it was difficult to erase the memory of a former recent interpretation when stepping into a new, very different production?
“Yes, it can be, because one always forms some impressions of the character. But it has not been so difficult here because the director gives the singers a lot of freedom. Of course, we work out the blocking and so on, but then it is left to the singer to interpret.”
So, how does she see Cherubino? Is he a gauche ingénue or a more knowing, mischievous trouble-maker?
“Oh, he’s just a young boy — a young boy who is in love with everyone!” So, we should expect lots of rampant adolescent hormones? Adamonytė laughs, and one can see that she will bring a natural, fresh, light-heartedness to the role. She relishes her aria, ‘Voi che sapete’, which she sees as expressive of the essence of Cherubino’s experience.
Adamonytė clearly feels a natural affinity for Mozart. She made her debut with Zerlina in 2002 at the Lithuanian National Opera, and more recently received much praise for her Idamante in concert performances of Idomeneo in Amsterdam, Lisbon and London. Stepping in at short notice to replace the indisposed Christine Rice, Adamonytė produced what one critic described as the ‘most conventionally Mozartean singing … she gave every evidence of thorough and intelligent study of the role, all her expressive choices seemingly the perfect ones’.
“Mozart just feels so right, it is so natural for my voice.”
She does not come from a family of singers or musicians. Weekends as a teenager spent singing in a folk choir in her native Lithuania led to private singing lessons and subsequently to study at the Lithuanian Academy of Music. In 2004, she moved to London, and during her time at the Royal Academy won the Opera Rara Bel Canto Prize, the Isabel Jay Prize and the Ludmilla Andrew Russian Song Prize. She completed her studies at the Cardiff International Academy of Voice in 2008.
“I met Dennis O'Neill in 2006 in a master-class at the RAM and I loved working with him. When I found out he was opening a new school — CIAV (Cardiff International Academy of Voice) — I asked him to take me. It meant leaving RAM one year earlier, but I knew I had met MY teacher and I am happy I made this decision as it has changed my singing and my life.”
What influence has O’Neill had on the way she has developed as a singer?
“Technique. Absolutely, the importance of technique. And, how necessary it is to communicate the meaning through the voice. That is the thing that is most difficult, because the voice must convey the drama and the emotion.”
The need to communicate with an audience is clearly important to Adamonytė. She has recently performed and recorded, Karl Jenkins’ Stabat Mater, to great acclaim, and I asked her if she enjoyed singing Jenkins’ music, which is sometimes criticised for being rather mundane and predictable. She rejected such censures of the ‘cross-over’ idiom, emphasising the pure beauty of Jenkins’ melody, and the way that the music appealed to the audience and touched them.
More ‘cutting edge’ repertoire has also featured in Adamonytė’s recent experiences: she created the role of Scipio in D. Glanert’s La Caligula which received its world premiere at Frankfurt Opera Theatre in 2006. Does she enjoy singing new music?
“Yes, because one can actually influence the music. Working with the composer, one can suggest things and change things!”
So, what does the immediate future have in store? Despite being encouraged to explore Rossini — “I am always being told I should sing La Cenerentola and Rosina — Adamonytė is resisting the early-nineteenth-century Italian repertoire. Even though ‘home’ is now a quiet Italian village, “I don’t have a natural feeling for that music; it doesn’t feel right for me.” She has a refreshingly relaxed approach to her career. The recent birth of her baby — which, she observes, seems to have added a few notes to her top register! — has meant fewer auditions of late, although there are still some exciting challenges ahead.
Following a Dorabella in America, she will return to London. Indeed, Adamonytė is becoming quite a regular at Covent Garden … following a small role in Die Tote Stadt (2009) and a flouncy, ‘suitably flashy’ Blanche in The Gambler earlier this season, she returns in September 2010 to take the role of Dorabella in Jonathan Miller’s oft-revived Così fan tutte. Is it difficult to step into operatic shoes which are already well-worn?
“It can be difficult, but there is always something fresh about the interpretation. The director may make small changes. I saw this production when it was performed earlier this year, and I think it is going to be challenging for me, not really difficult as such. The singer has to do everything. The setting is very bare — just one large room, and the walls are quite stark. And, I know that I will have my ’mobile phone, my lap-top, my Starbucks coffee … so, there is a lot of responsibility on the singer. But, I am very excited to be singing with a wonderful cast of singers.”
Adamonytė comes across as modest, unassuming, and genuinely excited by the opportunities which are coming her way. She professes to feel incredibly privileged and lucky to have had such a relatively rapid rise, but one senses that, armed both with great natural talent and much common sense, she has made the most of her luck and opportunities.
The Marriage of Figaro opened on Monday 31st May, and continues for nine further performances until 3rd July.
Claire Seymour