‘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.
Lise Lindstrom, who made a notable splash in the opera world (debuts at La Scala and at the Met) with her portrayals of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, has recently undertaken the still more demanding role of Salome.
San Diego, whose opera lovers saw her Turandot last year, will have the good fortune to see and hear her Salome this season. I had the opportunity to speak to Ms. Lindstrom about these roles at the San Diego opera during a lunch break from her Salome rehearsals. The soprano is tall, about six feet, slim, blonde, thoughtful, articulate and wonderfully quick to laugh. At 1PM she is eating soup, which she assures me will sustain her through the end of her rehearsal at 5 PM. Though she has specialized in Turandot, Ms. Lindstrom could almost claim a birthright to the role of Minnie in Puccini’s Fanciulla del West. Born in California’s Bay area and raised in Sonora, its gold country, with two grandmothers named Minnie, I suspect Lindstrom is capable of galloping to the rescue of her operatic lover. And as a Puccini fan, she would be happy to do the role. “Not everybody feels Puccini.” she is quoted as saying. “One must surrender oneself to it in order to feel it. There is something so inherently passionate and alive in the writing that encourages me to find the living, breathing heart of the character.”
Although Lindstrom had not previously sung on the Met stage, or had even tried on Turandot’s elaborate Oriental costume before her unexpected debut, the New York Post reported that “the tall, slender Lindstrom wielded the icy glamour of a ‘30s film star, working the trains and veils of her elaborate costumes with the panache of a runway model.” I was surprised to learn from the soprano, who has appeared in over thirty productions of Turandot throughout the world, that despite Puccini’s use of “Chinese harmonies” and of the exotic Ping,Pang and Pong threesome, the opera is not always set in China. “I did one in the German republic recently,” she said, “who knows where it was set! It was very modern, very bland. In fact,” she added, “the Americans tend to set it in China and the Europeans hardly every do.”
Wherever she has sung the role, it has showcased her insights into Turandot’s surrender to love, as well as a unique ability to demonstrate that surrender vocally. Writing in Opera News, Scott Barnes recalled that Lise Lindstrom, “was the first Ice Princess I could actually sense melting, vocally and physically; it was as if the color worked its way from her fingertips to her cheeks until she appeared to be consumed by fever.”
But while the frigid Turandot’s heart is softened by love, the lusting Salome’s explodes in a paroxysm of passion. Both women are man killers — decapitators. “I have issues,” Lindstrom laughs when we broach this subject. Turandot has every potential lover who cannot answer three riddles killed, until an unknown prince answers the riddles in Act Two. By the time Turandot finally senses the meaning of love, having been persuaded by the intensity of the prince’s love for her and of a slave girl’s love for the unknown prince, the curtain is about to descend on Act Three.
Salome kills only one man. And she does it in one Act. The man is Jochanaan, John the Baptist, who has refused to look at her, and who is the prisoner of her step-father Herod. After acceding to Herod’s request that she dance for him, Salome’s lust for the prophet suddenly turns homicidal. She insists that Herod give her Jochanaan’s head so that she can kiss him.
Whereas Turandot melts slowly over three hours. Salome is a one and a half hour show in which Salome is constantly on stage, dances for ten minutes, and sings over the blaring dissonances of Straussian orchestration. Birgit Nilsson feared that Turandot might be a voice killer. Opera lore has it that Salome did eventually destroy Ljuba Wellitsch’s voice. When I ask Lise Lindstrom about the toll these roles might take, her response is lengthy and considered. “Everyone has an opinion about that. There’s no doubt that singing — period — takes a toll on a body and a voice because it’s a physical act. But singers need to be smart about how they use their instruments. If the voice responds positively or negatively, then the singer has to be smart enough to know how to deal with that — not do the role as often — not do the role again — or do it all the time if it works well. Turandot doesn’t cost me a whole lot, which is fantastic because I tend to do it a lot. Salome is a very different role and it is something that is more challenging to me, but it’s because physically it’s a much more demanding role. This is opera on steroids. It is condensed it is intense. There isn’t a gesture, a minute, a second where anybody, including the audience gets a chance to take a deep breath.”
Marie Wittich, Strauss’s first Salome, refused both to dance and to kiss the prophet’s severed head. “I’m a decent woman,” she explained. Many subsequent Salome’s were not capable of doing their own dances. Like most present day Salome’s Lindstrom will do her own dance. “I am the dancer in Salome,” she laughs, adding, “I find it more interesting and also more collaborative particularly, to do the dance that’s interesting to the director because then it’s within the production, the same fabric of the production.”
I’ve heard various interpretations as to why Salome suddenly asks for Johkanaan’s head.
One theory has to do with sight of the blood of the young soldier, Narraboth, who kills himself when he realizes that Salome is infatuated with the prophet. When I raise the question with Ms. Lindstrom, she rephrases it before answering. “The sight of Narraboth’s blood is what brings the idea of how to exert that power? I think that it’s possible. But.” she continues, “I think really that she’s a young girl who’s been raised in a very strange environment and I imagine her experience is she has seen people beheaded. I imagine she has seen what happens to people that say “no” And this is what happens to the people who say no.”
Lindstrom’s Turandot was a woman who changed even vocally, and I wondered about her Salome.
“I’m always looking for a transformation,” she observes, “some sort of journey for the character, and for me too. I think ultimately what’s compelling about Salome, perhaps not about Turandot, is that Salome…in the very end realizes that it wasn’t a good idea. Trying to control the environment in that way is not the way it works. “
What makes her say that?
“Well, the last page of dialogue where she [Salome] says, ‘Oh, I kissed your mouth. There’s a bitter taste. Was that the taste of blood, no maybe that’s love. They tell me that love has a bitter taste.’” Lindstrom’s voice is now a whisper, “’But what does that mean?’ And she asks, ‘what does THAT mean?’ And then,” Lindstrom continues, “I think she realizes, in that moment when she repeats that question. ‘Allein was tut’s.’” Whispering again “ ‘Was tut’s?’ What does it mean? And she realizes then that she has really gone all the way down the wrong path.”
“Is there a way to show that on stage? To reflect that? “I ask.
“I try. You’ll have to tell me.” Lise Lindstrom leans back in her seat and smiles.
Estelle Gilson