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.
![Sara Mingardo as Penelope [Photo by Lucie Jansch ]](http://www.operatoday.com/Penelope.png)
‘Erotic oratorio’ is the odd-sounding definition devised by modern scholars, such as Howard E. Smither, for those pious music dramas employing sex-laden plots from the Bible, the Apocrypha or the lives of Saints in order to give the audience moral instruction in a quasi-operatic, if generally unstaged, form.
Judith, Esther, Delilah, Bathsheba, Mary Magdalen, Saint Cecilia, Saint Agatha and their companions were the favorite heroines of those stories, inasmuch their feminine charms, and their dangerous influence on men’s behavior, were often graphically described in the librettos.
Manuscript title page of Oratorio di Giuditta © Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna
La vedova generosa [The Generous Widow] is the recently identified subtitle for Giuditta, one among the several dozens oratorios written by the Rimini-born composer Antonio Draghi (1634/35-1700) for the Habsburg imperial court at Vienna. One may scent therein a tribute to Draghi’s generous employer, the empress dowager Eleonora Gonzaga, whose musical household in Vienna was second only to that of her stepson, the music-avid (and amateur composer) emperor Leopold I. Both Eleonora and Leopold were devout Roman Catholics, much Italianate in their taste for music drama. Besides opera proper, they invested a good amount of their time and financial resources on oratorios, a musical entertainment originally devised by St. Philip Neri to keep people off the dangerous enticements of secular theaters, but soon transformed into a “perfect spiritual melodrama”, as abate Arcangelo Spagna, a theorist, put it in 1706.
Thus the subject of Judith, the ‘generous’ Jewish widow who delivered her people from the Assyrian chieftain Holofernes by means of unorthodox sexual warfare, could not escape Eleonora’s attention, nor the one of an ambitious court composer. Just months after the premiere performance, which arguably took place some time between Lent 1668 and Lent 1669, Draghi was promoted from the Empress’ to the Emperor’s service, with a substantial raise in his salary.
Rimini, Ensemble Seicentonovecento in Draghi’s Giuditta [Photo by Fabiana Rossi]
So much for the historic background. As to the music itself, Draghi’s Giuditta stands mid-way between the earlier, Cavalli-style, Venetian opera and the progressive Neapolitan school launched by Alessandro Scarlatti during the following decade. The prevailing syllabic recitative is largely peppered with elaborate florid passages, and most cadenzas soar to eloquent ariosos in triple time, sometimes with a dance-like lilt. Although just two numbers are formally labeled “aria” in the manuscript score, there are actually a few more. While only the final ensemble for the four soloists (Judith, her maid Abra, Holofernes and the Narrator) brings the caption “da capo”, two arias for Abra - somewhat of a comic character - are clearly set in the the ‘modern’ ternary form A-B-A`, a daring experiment for the times. However, the centerpiece is a long and articulate conversation scene between Holofernes and Judith, totalling nearly one fourth of the entire work. It’s a red-hot skirmish between the lusty chieftain and his would-be victim; the former voicing his desire enhanced by heavy drunkennes, the latter pretending to reciprocate but determined to cut his head as soon as he falls asleep.
Every manner of compositional devices are employed here, from secco recitative, through arioso, to outright aria (particularly compelling is “In dolce calma” for Holofernes, accompanied by a pair of gambas). Minutes before accomplishing her brave deed, Judith fulfills the dearest expectation of any early opera-goer: a lament on a descending chromatic tetrachord, the time-honored emblem for grief and supplication (“Pietà Signor”).
Such a precious rediscovery was presented in Draghi’s native city as a special project within the 62.nd installment of the Sagra Musicale Malatestiana, a major festival series attracting visitors from several countries. For the third year in a row, Italian and Austrian institutions joined forces to celebrate Draghi, hitherto an injustly neglected composer of the Baroque era. Contrary to the current fade for oratorios, the Rome-based Ensemble Seicentonovecento led by Flavio Colusso didn’t arrange a fully staged production. The venue, a large 18th-century Jesuit church in downtown Rimini, offered visual attractions enough. No props, very few movements from the singers, and passages from period sermons delivered by actress Silvia De Palma shaped the performance as close as possible to the original conditions: half private entertainment, albeit in fashionable court circles, and half act of religious worship. Of course, most credit for the success goes to the music department. A scanty yet energetic ensemble of two violins, theorbo, organ and harpsichord accompanied a quartet of vocal soloists conversant both with the dramatic subtleties of recitar cantando and the virtuosic coloratura of late 17th-century bel canto. Two recognized specialists as sopranos Gemma Bertagnolli (Giuditta) and Elena Cecchi Fedi (Abra) were complemented by the up-and-coming bass Luigi De Donato (Oloferne) and by the male alto Antonio Giovannini, a beginner who seems poised for great things.
Robert Wilson’s fans use to maintain that he deepens and actualizes the dramaturgy of those operas he happens to stage. In my opinion, either is hardly true, as the Texan director’s strategy apparently aims at sucking the life out of any particular opera, freezing down its dramaturgy deep below the zero point in the pursue of such ritual impassiveness as it was probably the case with the original Greek tragedy - and still is with the Byzantine church liturgy, the Japanese Nô, India’s Katakhali or Stockhausen’s Licht cycle. To be sure, all these theatrical or quasi-theatrical genres are indented in a respectable religious vision where issues of style, symbols and formality are paramount, but actualization is obviously ruled out, while deepths of emotion (if any) are the individual elaboration of their devout attenders. Whether about Parsifal or Aida, Gluck’s French Orphée or his Monteverdi forerunner Orfeo, each of Wilson’s productions closely resembles but Wilson, just as any Mass resembles another Mass, leaving aside such local details as the language of the sung texts and the music accompanying them.
The present Ritorno di Ulisse - being the middle panel of a Monteverdi/Wilson trilogy scheduled by La Scala in co-production with the Paris Opéra between 2009 and 2013 - sticks to the trend: neither reconstruction nor deconstruction of the Classic, rather an embalming of it as in a classy funeral parlour. In the Prologue, the curtain rises on a backdrop mirroring Poussin’s Le Printemps, an Arcadian landscape inhabited by cute Disney-esque animals and mimes embodying Love, Fortune, Time and Human Frailty; too bad that the corresponding singers are plunged in the pit to the disadvantage of audibility. The core action revolves within hollow spaces ‘representing’ the sea or the Olympus, while the royal palace at Ithaca, where Penelope is detained in self-imprisonment, is aptly surrounded with menacing black slates.
The Bow Contest scene [Photo by Lucie Jansch]
Deities and human beings, the powerful and the destitutes, the goodies and the villains, look equally unimpassioned and hieratic; static figures striking enigmatic poses with their white-gloved hands and their pale, heavily made-up, faces. Most of them, enclosed in Baroque parade armours, are donning lofty wigs or feathered bonnets. A déjà vu from the court pageants at Paris and Vienna during the mid 1600s, thus leaving the timeline near the 1640 premiere of the opera. What else? Colour-coded lighting schemes and sparse but effective props: Ulysse’s bow, the skeleton of a ship bottom, a Greek idol on a column.
Deaf to the minimal-chic mermaids of Wilson’s staging, Rinaldo Alessandrini offered a vibrant rendering of the score, despite the many uncertainties surrounding the actual completness of the unique Vienna manuscript (the critical edition he lately prepared for Bärenreiter underwent a few cuts as well as some educated guesses about the instrumental colours). The continuo players of his Concerto Italiano added authentic flare to a selection of strings from the Scala pit orchestra. Thus Monteverdi’s explicit concern for "affetti" (human passions) revived from Wilson's ritual fridge, also thanks to a company of all-Italian voices where Sara Mingardo and Furio Zanasi, both accomplished artists beyond strict specialist boundaries, towered as Penelope and Ulisse. Luca Dordolo made a graceful Eumete, Marianna Pizzolato a convincing Ericlea, Leonardo Cortellazzi’s Telemaco soared as the performance progressed. Among the double-bill cameos, basses Salvo Vitale and Luigi De Donato displayed remarkable panache. I only wonder what happened to brave Monica Bacelli, who for one time left aside her favorite breeches roles. Her Melanto, although allowed to display more acting liveliness than any other character in the show, betrayed an alarming vocal disarray. Hopefully just an off night.
Carlo Vitali
Cast Lists
Antonio Draghi: Oratorio di Giuditta (1668, libretto by anonymous)
Giuditta: Gemma Bertagnolli; Abra: Elena Cecchi Fedi; Testo [The Narrator]: Antonio Giovannini; Oloferne: Luigi De Donato. Ensemble Seicentonovecento (on period instruments). Flavio Colusso, conductor. Chiesa del Suffragio, Rimini, Italy. Performance of 20 September 2011.
Claudio Monteverdi: Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria (1640, libretto by Giacomo Badoaro)
Ulisse: Furio Zanasi; Penelope: Sara Mingardo; Eumete: Luca Dordolo; Telemaco: Leonardo Cortellazzi; Fortuna/Melanto: Monica Bacelli; Il Tempo/Nettuno: Luigi De Donato; a.o. Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala, with continuo elements from Concerto Italiano. Robert Wilson, director. Rinaldo Alessandrini, conductor. Teatro alla Scala, Milan, Italy. Performance of 28 September 2011.