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."
An operatic work by an esteemed composer, with a libretto adapted from a great author’s story, staged in an intelligent and well-designed production, featuring singers of the top caliber and a conductor with a deep commitment to the composer’s music, leading a chamber-sized group of his orchestra’s best players — magic in the opera house, right?
Ann Murray as Mrs. Grose and Ashley Emerson as Flora
As seen on March 17th, Los Angeles Opera’s second performance of Benjamin Britten and Myfanwy Piper’s The Turn of the Screw (adapted from Henry James's short novel), with Patricia Racette, Ann Murray and William Burden in the lead roles and James Conlon in the pit, turned out to be less than the sum of its parts. The easy answer as to why would be to note the work’s origin as a chamber piece, more suited to a hall much more intimate than the 3000+ seat Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. But that would fail to give credit to the admirable job Conlon did in producing a full but not grandiose sound from his small group of musicians, and it would also mean slighting the brilliant design work of Paul Brown. Brown’s sets, created for Glyndebourne Festival Opera, bring in the sides of the proscenium, with a deeper stage perspective and a wonderfully silky and quiet turntable easily bring action from the rear to the front, allowing voices to always project out.
Tamara Wilson as Miss Jessel
The set also manages to be sparse in its design elements and then flexible enough to rearrange the key features to effortlessly change scenes. A huge glass-latticed wall hangs suspended, twisting, rising and lowering as needed to close off and open up the action. Two huge bare tree trunks, twisted with dead branches, also drift down and up to evoke both the literal outdoors and the spooky “otherworld” of the ghosts. Director Francesca Gilpin gets an astonishingly poised performance from young Michael Kepler Meo as Miles, but the director deserves praise as well — to be shared with the performer, of course — for matching young Miles with the adult Ashley Emerson, almost eerily believable as Miles’s young sister. Meo has performed this role elsewhere; obviously he will outgrow it at some point, but the talent he displays gives promise of a very interesting career ahead. Emerson looks to be at the start of such a career.
Ashley Emerson as Flora, Ann Murray as Mrs. Grose and Michael Kepler Meo as Miles
The more mature adults in the cast live up to the promise of their well-known names. Patricia Racette may be simply too healthy to elicit any fearful sympathy on the part of the audience for her Governess faced with troublesome wards and ghostly emanations. Her singing, however, found her in fine voice — secure in intonation and able to modulate her volume appropriately to the setting. The one key fault, and one not unknown for sopranos, was her inability to always project comprehensibly the English text. When tenor William Burden sang, for example, there was never any need to glance up at the super-titles. Burden also proved himself an extremely fine actor — briefly appearing in the prologue as an unidentified but apparently “normal’ man relating the story as handed down through the Governess’s writings, and then dominating the evening as the progressively creepier ghost of the manor’s groundskeeper, Peter Quint. Britten wrote some fairly athletic music for Quint, and Burden proved himself more than up to the eerie runs.
As Peter Quint’s ghostly companion Miss Jessel, Tamara Wilson brought a solid but attractive soprano, one surely capable of many more challenging roles. A fairly large woman, Ms. Wilson was dressed by the designers in black and had wet hair lying flat, so that she should looked a bit like a plus-size version of the ghost in the movie The Ring. Miss Wilson proved herself a very brave performer at one point — lying down flat as the suspended glass lattice slowly descended upon her, stopping just short of crushing her — if a ghost can be crushed…
William Burden as Peter Quint, Michael Kepler Meo as Miles and Patricia Racette as the Governess
Racette’s Governess interacts mostly with Mrs. Grove, sung by Ann Murray. Miss Murray has retained, at this point in her long career, a good amount of voice and a strong stage presence. Somehow, however, these scenes were the most problematic of the evening. Neither woman could sing her lines with consistent comprehensibility nor convey the growing apprehension and fear key to the success of a more psychologically-oriented story such as this.
In other words, this was not a very scary The Turn of the Screw — and without being scary, the material can come awfully close to being pointless, if not silly. Nonetheless, the opportunity to hear Britten’s intelligent, evocative score performed by excellent musicians and singers shouldn’t be overlooked. A less than full house gave all the performers a warm ovation, but the inevitable standing ovation was quite slow in developing, and in the end, it included a fair number of people rising to make their way to the exit. With Britten’s Albert Herring programmed for the next season, Los Angeles Opera might do well to consider what sort of publicity will help fill the Dorothy Chandler for those performances — or finding another venue more appropriate to the scale of that piece as well.
Chris Mullins