02 Feb 2012
Jonathan Harvey’s Wagner Dream
British composer Jonathan Harvey’s Wagner Dream came to London four years after its premieres at the Holland Festival and in Luxembourg.
Recently in Performances
ETO Autumn 2020 Season Announcement: Lyric Solitude
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.
Love, always: Chanticleer, Live from London … via San Francisco
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 …).
Dreams and delusions from Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper at Wigmore Hall
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.
Treasures of the English Renaissance: Stile Antico, Live from London
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.
A wonderful Wigmore Hall debut by Elizabeth Llewellyn
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.
The Sixteen: Music for Reflection, live from Kings Place
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’.
Iestyn Davies and Elizabeth Kenny explore Dowland's directness and darkness at Hatfield House
'Such is your divine Disposation that both you excellently understand, and royally entertaine the Exercise of Musicke.’
Paradise Lost: Tête-à-Tête 2020
‘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.’
Joyce DiDonato: Met Stars Live in Concert
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.
‘Where All Roses Go’: Apollo5, Live from London
‘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 're-connect'
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’.
Lucy Crowe and Allan Clayton join Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO at St Luke's
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.
Choral Dances: VOCES8, Live from London
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.
Royal Opera House Gala Concert
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’.
Fading: The Gesualdo Six at Live from London
"Before the ending of the day, creator of all things, we pray that, with your accustomed mercy, you may watch over us."
Met Stars Live in Concert: Lise Davidsen at the Oscarshall Palace in Oslo
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.
Precipice: The Grange Festival
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.
Monteverdi: The Ache of Love - Live from London
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: Rowan Pierce and Christopher Glynn at Ryedale Online
“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.”
A Musical Reunion at Garsington Opera
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.
OPERA TODAY ARCHIVES »
Performances
How satisfying to see such a full Barbican Hall for the UK premiere of Jonathan Harvey’s opera Wagner Dream. The premise of the opera is at once simple but devastatingly effective: a group of actors play Wagner and the people who surround him in his final hours, and they play out their parts on the uppermost level of the stage; as Wagner dies after a row between himself and Cosima about Carrie Pringle, an ex-Flower Maiden and ex-lover, he sees the events we see on the middle level, the opera Die Sieger (“The Victor”) that Wagner had planned. This is the Buddhist story of Prakriti, her love for the monk Ananda and the consequences of that thwarted love (Tristan, anyone?). The Buddha is able to explain Prakriti’s actions via references to her previous lives, but there is dissent when it is suggested that Prakriti join the previously male-only Buddhist order, mainly from the Old Brahmin. The Buddha accepts her; the action shifts back to Wagner’s time; the worlds collide though when it is Vairachana that guides him towards the next life (the dying Wagner himself had been seeing the characters throughout — none of the people around him, Cosima, the Doctor and so on, could).
Harvey’s grasp of drama is impeccable. The work lasts one and three quarter hours (there is no interval) and thanks to Harvey’s pacing, there is no sense of longeur. There is a sense, however, of underlying timelessness. Staging is sparse, but effective: the Wagners and their floral interloper have an austere table and chairs. The conception of austerity chimes perhaps with the overall feeling of ritual, underlined by pillars of smoke that emanated from both sides of the stage as the audience entered. The players of the BBCSO processed on stage as if about to begin a holy act (and perhaps they were). Surtitles were used, but only after the onset of the Buddhist story.
The vast stretch of Harvey’s available compositional resources was impeccably utilised. Tonal sections made great effect (a lullaby, for example) and yet did not jar in the slightest, instead appearing as just one element in the composer’s palette. The music shares with Wagner’s an ability to take the listener out of temporal time into the composer’s expanded time, and, as with Wagner, the time spent experiencing this piece seemed somehow telescoped, as one became intimately involved with the events and their musical realisation. One one level it felt as if we had been there years; on another, it was a mere moment.
Harvey’s use of electronics is by now ingrained into his mode of discourse, and the electronics emerged as the logical extension of the sound of the orchestra, taking their sounds and manipulating them not only timbrally, but in space as well. The inclusion of a choral concert the previous evening meant we were able to hear the ensemble passages linking back to that, a stylistic equivalence underlined by the programming of the weekend. Yet it was the moments of almost unbelievable beauty that Harvey was able to conjure up from his forces that will linger long in the memory, perhaps most notably his setting of Prakriti’s significant words “Love is strength, Love is beauty”.
While the acting was excellent, it was the singing that truly impressed. As the all-important Prakriti, the experienced Clare Booth excelled, her voice miraculously pure. As seductress, one has to ask if she is a Harvey equivalent to Kundry. Interactions with the creamy-voiced Hilary Summers (Mother) were a joy, and Harvey’s disjunct lines posed no problems to the vocalists. Only Andrew Staples’ tenor was, initially, disappointing — rather on the nasal side. Yet he seemed to relax into the role. Matching Booth for top accolades was Roderick Williams as the Buddha. Williams has a voice of gold. His declamation and presence were simply stunning.
Bass Richard Angas has lost none of his authority, and he projected the Old Brahmin, so stuck in the old ways’ rules, with real strength and conviction, while bass-baritone Simon Bailey made a fine fist of Vairochana. Martyn Brabbins’ conducting was beautifully confident, and the BBCSO responded by reminding us all why they are without parallel in demanding contemporary music. Alas, illness prevented the composer himself from attending. But there is no doubting that this weekend confirmed Harvey’s status at the head of British music, and similarly there is no doubting that this performance of Wagner Dream was the highlight of this mini-festival.
Colin Clarke