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.
![Albert Einstein, 1921 [Source: Wikepedia]](http://www.operatoday.com/Einstein_1921_portrait.gif)
Any performance of Philip Glass’ epic Einstein on the Beach (1976) is a major event. The work’s duration is around five hours and it is directed to be performed without interval (although see below — we had one).
Members of the audience are invited to come and go as they please (and some went and didn’t then come back, arguably with some justification). The programme for the event is high-class in itself, lavishly illustrated and includes the libretto, itself remarkably succinct, and a host of other information. None of which helps, really.
The booklet is adorned by a single shaft of white light against a black background— actually from the segment ‘Bed’, in which the shaft moves ever so slowly (tortuously, one might say) towards and upright position before it ascends. All very symbolic— but of what?. The answer is to drop the search for meaning and enjoy the ride and, as a sequence of beautifully executed dances (there is far more dancing than singing) and comedic soap operas (the Trial Scenes, in which one character bore a spooky resemblance to Margaret Thatcher), it works a lot better. Or rather it works differently, for to drop the search for meaning means either to let it all wash over you, or to open a gateway to the subconscious. Injecting Glass into your brain in that way (pardon the pun) might work for some (and probably worked a whole lot better thirty-odd years ago), but alas these days it all comes out as rather dated.
And that sequence of whats— of what?, in what?, to what?— is one that hovers over the entire evening, culminating, at least immediately, in a huge ‘so what?’. Glass’ music rarely moves the listener, except to induce a state of trance, perhaps. So at the end of this sequence of scenes (narrative trajectory really isn’t the point here)— one leaves the Barbican Theatre in a state of some frustration. Just like when you can’t sleep but you know you’re achingly tired. That sort of frustration.
Glass worked with Robert Wilson to produce this minimalist behemoth, taking a series of drawings by Wilson and adding his own characteristic music. There is a sort of willful obfuscation that runs through the piece, and Glass and Wilson seem to make this explicit through the image of a clock running backwards— here, truly, nothing is as it seems.
That it was even longer than it should have been only added to the problems. There was a hiatus (I don’t really want to call it an interval) of what was promised to be ten minutes and ended up being some twenty. This was to fix a succession of glitches that had affected the production, from bits of set really not being where they should be to stage hands with torches in full visibility wondering around, looking as baffled as the audience probably was about the production anyway. It was Wilson himself that came out to apologise— and also to tell us that figures in the final scene wouldn’t be flying around as originally intended.
The standard of performance was remarkably high, as one would perhaps expect from Glass specialists. Antoine Silverman, as Einstein, was jaw-droppingly good. Dressed as Einstein and sitting on the corner of the stage, his violinistic pyrotechnics were magnificent. One shudders to think how long it must have taken to learn Glass’ horribly fast repetitions— one also has to ask was it worth it though. The scenes which were good, were good— the Knee Plays (Helga Davis and Kate Moran) were dispatched with a superb sense of fascinating detachment. The chorus, too, was exemplary, as were the seasoned instrumentalists. But it was the dancers that impressed most— it was impossible to take one’s eyes off them, whether whirling around the stage like dervishes or in stylized movement that evoked Noh theatre.
Einstein on the Beach is the first of three operas Glass wrote on historical figures (the other two are Akhnaten— memorably staged in the 1980s by ENO and centering on the Pharoah who introduced monotheism a long time before Christians jumped on the bandwagon— and Satyagraha, based on the life and teaching of Gandhi). In fairness, some of the excitement of this novelly-constructed work came through, but that was duet to the excellence of performance and dancing. And Glass still has the ability to refract time— in an analogous way to Wagner, for in both cases we experience time differently, yet in a different way (in Glass through mesmeric repetition rather than via Wagnerian extended harmonic plateaux). Try the Entrance Music for Trial 1 to see what I mean.
And yet, and yet … as I write some three days on from the evening of performance, there is the niggling feeling that, despite its shortcomings and frustrations, Einstein on the Beach has affected me ins some deep but as yet unlabelled way. Yes, it sounds like Glass should, but it also has a sound-aura all of its own. Images of the Trial Scenes, with their cutesy comedy, reappear and resonate. The impeccable dancers continue to cast a spell. Hence the frustration of the end of the experience slowly transforming itself over the course of the past few days. I’m not sure I’d like to hear it again in the near future, though. Perhaps in another thirty years?
Colin Clarke
