15 Jul 2010
Dialogues des Carmélites from Hamburg
Poulenc’s only full-length opera is widely admired and not infrequently performed, but its claustral nature makes it tricky to stage.
Recently in Recordings
Henry Purcell, Royal Welcome Songs for King Charles II Vol. III: The Sixteen/Harry Christophers
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.
Anima Rara: Ermonela Jaho
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.
Requiem pour les temps futurs: An AI requiem for a post-modern society
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.
Ádám Fischer’s 1991 MahlerFest Kassel ‘Resurrection’ issued for the first time
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.
Max Lorenz: Tristan und Isolde, Hamburg 1949
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.
Women's Voices: a sung celebration of six eloquent and confident voices
The voices of six women composers are celebrated by baritone Jeremy Huw Williams and soprano Yunah Lee on this characteristically ambitious and valuable release by Lontano Records Ltd (Lorelt).
Rosa mystica: Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir
As Paul Spicer, conductor of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir, observes, the worship of the Blessed Virgin Mary is as ‘old as Christianity itself’, and programmes devoted to settings of texts which venerate the Virgin Mary are commonplace.
The Prison: Ethel Smyth
Ethel Smyth’s last large-scale work, written in 1930 by the then 72-year-old composer who was increasingly afflicted and depressed by her worsening deafness, was The Prison – a ‘symphony’ for soprano and bass-baritone soloists, chorus and orchestra.
Songs by Sir Hamilton Harty: Kathryn Rudge and Christopher Glynn
‘Hamilton Harty is Irish to the core, but he is not a musical nationalist.’
After Silence: VOCES8
‘After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.’ Aldous Huxley’s words have inspired VOCES8’s new disc, After Silence, a ‘double album in four chapters’ which marks the ensemble’s 15th anniversary.
Beethoven's Songs and Folksongs: Bostridge and Pappano
A song-cycle is a narrative, a journey, not necessarily literal or linear, but one which carries performer and listener through time and across an emotional terrain. Through complement and contrast, poetry and music crystallise diverse sentiments and somehow cohere variability into an aesthetic unity.
Flax and Fire: a terrific debut recital-disc from tenor Stuart Jackson
One of the nicest things about being lucky enough to enjoy opera, music and theatre, week in week out, in London’s fringe theatres, music conservatoires, and international concert halls and opera houses, is the opportunity to encounter striking performances by young talented musicians and then watch with pleasure as they fulfil those sparks of promise.
Carlisle Floyd's Prince of Players: a world premiere recording
“It’s forbidden, and where’s the art in that?”
John F. Larchet's Complete Songs and Airs: in conversation with Niall Kinsella
Dublin-born John F. Larchet (1884-1967) might well be described as the father of post-Independence Irish music, given the immense influenced that he had upon Irish musical life during the first half of the 20th century - as a composer, musician, administrator and teacher.
Haddon Hall: 'Sullivan sans Gilbert' does not disappoint thanks to the BBC Concert Orchestra and John Andrews
The English Civil War is raging. The daughter of a Puritan aristocrat has fallen in love with the son of a Royalist supporter of the House of Stuart. Will love triumph over political expediency and religious dogma?
Beethoven’s Choral Symphony and Choral Fantasy from Harmonia Mundi
Beethoven Symphony no 9 (the Choral Symphony) in D minor, Op. 125, and the Choral Fantasy in C minor, Op. 80 with soloist Kristian Bezuidenhout, Pablo Heras-Casado conducting the Freiburger Barockorchester, new from Harmonia Mundi.
Taking Risks with Barbara Hannigan
A Louise Brooks look-a-like, in bobbed black wig and floor-sweeping leather trench-coat, cheeks purple-rouged and eyes shadowed in black, Barbara Hannigan issues taut gestures which elicit fire-cracker punch from the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
Alfredo Piatti: The Operatic Fantasies (Vol.2) - in conversation with Adrian Bradbury
‘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.’
Those Blue Remembered Hills: Roderick Williams sings Gurney and Howells
Baritone Roderick Williams seems to have been a pretty constant ‘companion’, on my laptop screen and through my stereo speakers, during the past few ‘lock-down’ months.
Bruno Ganz and Kirill Gerstein almost rescue Strauss’s Enoch Arden
Melodramas can be a difficult genre for composers. Before Richard Strauss’s Enoch Arden the concept of the melodrama was its compact size – Weber’s Wolf’s Glen scene in Der Freischütz, Georg Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Medea or even Leonore’s grave scene in Beethoven’s Fidelio.
OPERA TODAY ARCHIVES »
Recordings
Nikolas Lehnhoff has devised a canny and imaginative strategy for making visual and dramatic sense of this opera, so lacking (until the end) in overt theatricality. Lehnhoff’s idea is to use a single set, unfurnished except with the absolute minimum of props, a big box with broad blue and black stripes, like gift wrapping seen from inside. The set is static, except that the black verticals can be lifted; this spare action can sometimes have real dramatic force. Both the house of Marquis de la Force and the convent are in effect prisons, whose bars sometimes make themselves conspicuous. This is appropriate to the police-state world of revolutionary France (and to Nazi Germany, where Gertrud von le Fort wrote, in 1931, the novel on which Bernanos’ play and Poulenc’s libretto are based). But there is more to the prison theme than an allusion to a political situation: to the religious, the whole earth is a kind of jail.
Lehnhoff makes good use of the physical properties of his set near the end of act 2, where the screens raise and the convent is suddenly permeable to the revolutionaries (costumed more like storm-troopers than like Jacobins); and at the end of act 1, when, at the death of the old Prioress, the convent is suddenly flooded with light, as if theological grace had itself descended. It is a beautiful moment: silent nuns stand between the bars, like the array of servants posed in Mélisande’s death chamber at the end of Debussy’s opera—the silent nuns foreshadow the arresting tableau in the execution scene, where the screens fall down, like guillotines, or even pile-drivers, as the nuns are beheaded one by one.
Still, the stage set, while good to think about, is still, too often, a bore: and its austerity is false to this non-austere opera about austerity. There are a few moments of overt gaiety, such as Sister Constance’s dancing, but also touches of wild, even surreal humor in many strange corners: in the first scene the Marquis remembers mob terror to a musical passage right out of Poulenc’s surrealist skit Les mamelles de Tirésias; and the nice commissaire at the end of act 2 gets comical music of the sort Strauss used for Aegisth in Elektra. These glints are also a manifestation, from Poulenc’s point of view, of the Holy Ghost, but are not realized in the relentless severity of this staging. T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, which Dialogues des Carmélites resembles in its concentration on martyrdom as an act of self-surrender rather than an act of self-aggrandisement, makes the low comedy that counterpoints the saint’s death still more striking; but I think that the director of the Poulenc opera also needs to attend to its subliminal zaniness.
Daniel Albright