02 Feb 2011
Bérénice, Carnegie Hall
Albéric Magnard, inspired to abandon the law for music by a visit to Bayreuth in 1886, was wealthy enough to ignore the public and go off on his own to compose.
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.
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.
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.
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.’
‘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.’
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."
The doors at The Metropolitan Opera will not open to live audiences until 2021 at the earliest, and the likelihood of normal operatic life resuming in cities around the world looks but a distant dream at present. But, while we may not be invited from our homes into the opera house for some time yet, with its free daily screenings of past productions and its pay-per-view Met Stars Live in Concert series, the Met continues to bring opera into our homes.
Music-making at this year’s Grange Festival Opera may have fallen silent in June and July, but the country house and extensive grounds of The Grange provided an ideal setting for a weekend of twelve specially conceived ‘promenade’ performances encompassing music and dance.
There’s a “slide of harmony” and “all the bones leave your body at that moment and you collapse to the floor, it’s so extraordinary.”
“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.”
The hum of bees rising from myriad scented blooms; gentle strains of birdsong; the cheerful chatter of picnickers beside a still lake; decorous thwacks of leather on willow; song and music floating through the warm evening air.
Albéric Magnard, inspired to abandon the law for music by a visit to Bayreuth in 1886, was wealthy enough to ignore the public and go off on his own to compose.
He was a virtuoso of his particular instrument: the later romantic orchestra in all its excess of size and sonority and varieties of color, and like many a virtuoso he tended to ignore other aspects of the compositions he worked on. When one is composing an opera, after all, one wants a clear story or at least clearly “musicable” (as Verdi put it) situations, and to have the music emerge from those situations and characters. Magnard’s Bérénice features long, powerful lead parts with rich orchestral accompaniment but very little of all its music (some three hours’ worth) is effectively theatrical or illuminates the famous play from which he drew his libretto.
In the days when classical culture meant something, the romance of Emperor Titus and Queen Bérénice was the very type of Noble Renunciation: Duty before Love. The lovers met when Titus commanded the Roman army besieging Jerusalem in 69 A.D.; Bérénice and her brother, Herod Agrippa II, took the Roman side against the Jewish rebels. When the war was over and the Second Temple destroyed, Bérénice followed Titus to Rome, where his father, Vespasian, had become emperor. For nearly ten years, older woman and younger man were the talk of Roman society—a Rome that had not forgotten Marc Antony and his loss of self-control, of empire, of life on account of another oriental queen. When Titus succeeded his father, he felt it to be his duty to send Bérénice away. This tragedy without bloodshed challenged Jean Racine, who made a drama out of the situation by adding a third character, a great friend of Titus who (unknown to the others) is also in love with Bérénice. All three, as Dudley Moore would put it, bemoan and bemoan and bemoan—and then separate for good. It is exquisite but, at five acts, a bit much for modern audiences. (Red Bull Theater, which specializes in Jacobean drama, gave a delicious staged reading of Racine’s play last winter.) Metastasio’s libretto on noble Titus, familiar from Mozart’s setting, begins on the day of Bérénice’s exile from Rome, therefore omitting her as a character. Magnard omitted the friend and reduced his cast to four, so that his hero and heroine would each have someone to argue with between love duets or recrimination duets with one another.
This was presented at Carnegie Hall by the American Symphony Orchestra led by Leon Botstein, who has a sweet tooth for neglected music, especially late romantic scores of more grandiloquence than substance (Le Roi Arthus, anybody? or Ariane et Barbe-Bleu? or Fervaal?), but who has rendered great services to New York opera-lovers by his explorations of obscure repertory (The Wreckers! Die Ferne Klang! Le Roi d’Ys! or Die Liebe der Danäe—which last, by the way, will be his staged offering at Bard this summer). From one hearing, one is inclined to place Bérénice in the former group, of worthy technical exercises low on appeal to those who like drama with their künst.
Enriching a full afternoon of music, however, was an exceptional cast of four singers worthily sinking their teeth into Magnard’s Wagnerian vocal lines. Michaela Martens, in the title role, calls herself a mezzo soprano. She has a voice that hovers between soprano and mezzo, if anything brighter and fuller on top than bottom, and might evolve to dramatic soprano heights in time. The Met has regularly miscast her in the tiny role of Alisa in Lucia di Lammermoor—where she not only outsings whoever the Lucia may be but, during the sextet, the entire remainder of the cast plus the chorus. She has been winning praise from Chicago to Graz in the arduous role of the Amme in Die Frau ohne Schatten—which, the Met being the Met, probably means she will be assigned Flora Bervoix there next season (Violettas, beware!), when a voice like this deserves Ortrud or Waltraute if not Didon. At Carnegie Hall, she demonstrated that she can indeed sing softly, though clearly, when required, murmuring of love or sinking into recriminations, but it is the fierce, brassy color and tireless, unwavering solidity of Martens’ voice that Wagnerians will find exciting. Margaret Lattimore gave a distinguished performance as Lia, Bérénice’s confidante.
Brian Mulligan, an effective Prometheus in the Los Angeles performances of Die Vögel, sang Titus. He is a baritone but, just as Magnard pushed Bérénice’s mezzo soprano limits, he pushed Titus to the top of a baritone’s comfort level; some of those present thought he must be a tenor. That he managed this music with so little audible discomfort was most impressive; on the other hand, his French diction was atrocious and calls for some heavy coaching if he considers other roles in that language. Bass Gregory Reinhart, as Mucien, the Voice of Duty (as it were), was sonorous, thrilling and a little scary—in a good way.
The Collegiate Chorale had very little to do but provide scenic “color” to scenes of the luxurious imperial court, rioting mobs and cheerful sailors. The ASO demonstrated its familiar aptitude for this sort of score, its swift changes of tempo, its tonal painting of scenes that all added up to a demonstration of technique without compositorial inspiration. Could one request Mr. Botstein to give us more Schreker or Zemlinsky or Smyth and skip the French dilettantes in the future? Or how about Janáček’s Osud, which he once presented at Bard but which has never been performed in New York? With the same composer’s Excursions of Mr. Brouček, that would make a double bill of most uncommon interest.
John Yohalem