‘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.
![Carmela Remigio [Photo Copyright Marco Rossi]](http://www.operatoday.com/carmela_remigio.gif)
Carmela Remigio is a Mozart specialist, having created Donna Elvira, Donna Anna, The Countess in Le nozze di Figaro, Susana, Ilia, Ellettra, Vitellia, Pamina and Fiordigli. She speaks to Mark Berry about her latest Donna Anna at the Royal Opera House.
MB: What are the greatest challenges and the greatest delights for you as an artist in singing the part of Donna Anna?
CR: My greatest challenge is to give Donna Anna a complex and faceted character. To let the audience feel how ambiguous and enigmatic she is. Passion and control at the same time. Musically, she is acrobatics every time she sings. A lot of high notes — maybe 35 natural A’s in just “Or sai chi l’onore”. A deep emotional strength is needed to play such a violent aria, so full of resentment, and a firm vocal control of all sounds as well. When I can reach this point, I am happy.
MB: Like Sena Jurinac, for instance, you have played both Donna Anna and Donna Elvira. Do you find that singing one role helps you understand the other? How would you characterise the differences between the roles, temperamentally and musically?
CR: Playing both roles has certainly helped me to better understand many aspects — how to interact with the other characters, what happens while I am off stage. Among the three women, Elvira is the most simple and clear. She is the one who had the wedding promise from Don Giovanni. They have had a three-day long passion, which is a lot for Don Giovanni …but he shirks, and she goes mad for being deserted, she runs after the fire but gets burnt and is devastated, until she decides she will not love any one any longer, and wants to enter a convent.
Anna is different. I like to imagine her meeting Giovanni at a masked ball. The two have an immediate feeling, maybe also an intellectual one. Mozart and Da Ponte do not describe Anna as a transparent woman. The words, the music are full of misunderstandings, agilities I see as emotional weaknesses, unexpressed uneasiness in the attitude she has to play, as a noble woman, towards a fiancé who does exist, and whom she probably loved a lot until she met Don Giovanni. But Giovanni is the passion, the woman’s mental perversion — which is what a fiancé will never represent.
MB: Donna Anna is the character who stands closest to the apparently ‘eighteenth-century’ world of opera seria, yet she also appealed strongly to the Romantics — ETA Hoffmann, for example. Do you see her as a character looking both backward and forward? Or do you think the balance lies more in one direction?
CR: I absolutely believe Anna is already the nineteenth century. Mozart is a genius. What he writes for Donna Anna is unique. “Non mi dir” reminds me of “Casta Diva”, and when singing it I must use the same legato and the same drama in the agilities.
MB: What desire, if any, do you think Donna Anna feels towards Don Giovanni? Is she just better at hiding her desire than Donna Elvira?
CR: Donna Anna lies. She does know her lover, and thus the one who killed her father, but…she has to lie. She has a fiancé, she cannot confess she betrayed him with her father’s killer. How many times in life you happen to lie to the man you love! I believe many women know this feeling of love and contempt for someone they long for and will never have. And they do not dare to tell their fiancé — who is actually loved as well — he is not the first in their hearts. This turmoil of thoughts is what places Anna higher than other Mozart women, and maybe the closest one to Don Giovanni for her emotional complexity.
MB: Donna Anna also has a very strong relationship with her father. Do you have any thoughts about the nature of that relationship and its implications for her actions?
CR: I have never thought Donna Anna’s problem being her father. Mourning suddenly comes and upsets her mind, but I do not see any particular relation with her father as crucial for her emotional balance.
MB: Do you feel pity for Don Ottavio? His role is so often described as ‘thankless’, and one might say that that characterisation has much to do with the way Donna Anna treats him.
CR: I feel tenderness and also love for Don Ottavio. What makes Anna suffer is her awareness to betray someone she loves. How can you detest a man who says “Dalla sua pace la mia dipende” (my peace depends on hers)?
MB: Do you think she has anything in common with other Mozart characters? Elettra and Vitellia, for instance, both of which seria parts you have sung?
CR: Mozart female characters can have something in common. They are all interesting women, but different one from the other. Mozart shows he knows women’s sensitivity, weaknesses and strengths very well. Feeling and reason must live together in the purity of their cantos.
MB: To take another of your Mozart roles, Susanna, does that require an entirely different approach, both in terms of acting and vocal characterisation?
CR: Difficult Susanna…always on stage, with everybody, always singing…and at the end of the opera you have sore feet! Joking aside, Susanna kicks her legs up along the whole opera. Then the universe becomes still…and she sings “Deh vieni non tardar”…The aria is charged with high sensuality, a unique example of musical mastery. It is a very beautiful role, but she is very transparent as a woman.
MB: Mozart is generally praised for his sympathy towards female characters; that sympathy is what helps make them so believable, so human. Is that your experience, in this and other Mozart operas?
CR: I am just in love with Mozart. I wish I was his wife to know which folly these masterpieces would come out!
MB: Are there any other Mozart roles you are keen to play, whether now or in the future? Perhaps something from one of his earlier works?
CR: I would love to continue playing all the Mozart roles I have interpreted up to know.
MB: The male singers with whom you are working on this particular production — Erwin Schrott, Alex Esposito, and Pavol Breslik — are all artists whom I have admired greatly in other productions I have seen of Don Giovanni. How much does it help your own performance to be working with such fine actor-singers, and to interact with them on stage?
CR: It may seem an obvious reply, and it is open-hearted instead. I am really happy to play with this team. We work hard during rehearsals, but always with the right mix of play, fun and laugh. This helps the artistic outcome in a very positive way. With them it is possible to explore the infinite nuances of interpretation — which rises from the common wish to well accomplish a work we love and try to make it interesting. With Breslik, my partner on stage, I have a special musical and theatrical feeling.
MB: You have played Donna Anna in a production conducted by Claudio Abbado and directed by Peter Brook. What did you learn from collaborating with such distinguished artists? And how did you find their approach to Mozart, and to Don Giovanni in particular?
CR: I learnt a lot from my collaboration with Brook and Abbado. I was young enough, 23 years old, and could absorb all that an artist has to learn after studying the vocal technique for years searching for perfection. From Abbado I learnt the interpretative musical rigour, the Mozart style that must be impeccable and cogent, but also rich in musical nuances and thousand of colours. And then the use of the word and the consonant in the recitative. From Brook I learnt a very important thing he would always repeat us during a whole year of Don Giovanni on tour performance: “Forget you are an opera singer”. I cried at this at the beginning, then I understood that by detaching from myself I would let the right space for the character to seize me, and the voice would come out more freely. Still now, when I am on stage, I am Donna Anna for three hours. I cry, I love, give way to despair as she would do. Finally…I come back to Carmela only in my dressing room. He taught me that Freedom is Truth on Stage. And this has to go through minimalism and simplicity.
Carmela Remigio’s great love is for Mozart, but she also sings lyric soprano roles in baroque bel canto and Verdi. For more details, please see her website.