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.
![Joyce DiDonato as Romeo and Nicole Cabell as Giulietta [Photo by Cory Weaver courtesy of San Francisco Opera]](http://www.operatoday.com/12--Capuleti.png)
Give me good verses, I’ll give you good music, said Bellini to his librettist Felice Romani. Give me a good director and I’ll give you good opera surely thought San Francisco Opera general director David Gockley.
Not just good opera but great opera took stage at the last night in San Francisco, adding new found artistic luster to the brutal conflicts of the Capulets and the Montagues. The pretended death of Giulietta was exquisitely suffered both by Bellini’s Romeo and his rival Tebaldo, and ultimately emotional pain of monumental musical intensity and ineffable sweetness melted into the tragic release of the love-death. Near legendary mezzo Joyce DiDonato hand in hand with soprano Nicole Cabell walked triumphantly into the beyond.
It was real, this beyond. It was in fact the proscenium frame, at once the Romantic love-death itself and, Mme. DiDonato and Mlle. Cabell left standing in front of the fallen curtain, it was opera. The enraptured audience leaped to its feet and roared.
Giulietta, tragically denied true love (this is pristine Romanticism), had literally climbed the wall. Standing on a sink, the lone symbol of a physical world, balancing herself eerily on one foot, she reached up towards an unattainable suspended image of entwined lovers and floated vocal lines that soared and fell with suspended emotion in what seemed a musical eternity (uhm, this is high, very high Romanticism).
These scenes, the tragic ones, occurred in a space with a mirrored floor negating all sense of physical gravity. There was no reference to defined space save one vertical line that created a sort of metaphysical reality, a line that was always the same and never the same, clothed in an infinity of changing color, the ebb and flow of love. The stage, drawn by French designer Vincent Lemaire and lighted by Italian designer Guido Levi, provided an abstract space for love, may we say, with the Romantics, the most abstract world of them all.
In these scenes director French Vincent Broussard used an almost framed painting, though with vaguely defined, mostly abstract images that suspended the search for specific reference. However in the larger scenes with public meaning he completed the proscenium frame across the bottom of the stage making it the fully formed image of a physical painting. It became a real space with a background of infinitely ascending steps on which brilliantly colored and lighted courtiers spread themselves, and later the elaborately clothed, now disheveled women descended, remnants of the unseen defining battle. Mr. Broussard landed squarely on a descriptively minimalist language that could elevate this simple story to Bellini’s metaphysical world of music.
Nicole Cabell as Giulietta
The most astonishing scene was Giulietta’s passage in her underclothes across the sharp and treacherous lower edge of this worldly frame as she sought to resolve her plight, and did so finally with the help of Lorenzo, the family physician (Felice Romani was far more practical that Shakespeare who complicated matters by appointing a priest to this task). Or was it Romeo’s address to the sleeping Giulietta, now no longer laid out on her wedding dress but frozen upright facing Joyce DiDonato who was fully possessed vocally and physically by Bellini’s music.
There was no separation between the pit and the stage, the changing stage pictures themselves almost seemed the black printed notes of Bellini’s score made into extraordinarily beautiful sounds by Italian conductor Riccardo Frizza and the San Francisco Opera Orchestra. This maestro achieved the exquisitely delicate and felt Romanticism that makes Bellini the epitome of such difficult, elusive and rare operatic art.
It was a nearly phenomenal achievement in bel canto. Like all great opera it was a collaboration of huge forces. The fine Albanian tenor Saimir Pirgu gained vocal security during the evening to viably take on the incomparable Joyce DiDonato in their confrontation. The brilliant Nicole Cabell as Giulietta in her defining long black wig found an unerring vocal balance that did not falter in confronting the extraordinary directorial demands of this role.
Joyce DiDonato as Romeo and Saimir Pirgu as Tebaldo
The high-style costumes designed by famed French couturier Christian Lacroix forcefully etched heightened supernatural character with a sophisticated sense of once-upon-a-time. The actual set became a canvas on which lighting designer Levi detailed mood after mood, choosing momentary detail that rose to the emotional surface in the shadowy supra-rational state of consciousness, never permitting a face or voice to destroy the complex metaphysical tonalities of the production.
It was an enthralling evening at the War Memorial Opera House, the ovations were enormous. And, yes, metteur en scène Vincent Broussard braved exuberant booing at his curtain call. Go figure.
Michael Milenski
Cast:
Giulietta: Nicole Cabell; Romeo: Joyce DiDonato; Tebaldo: Saimir Pirgu; Lorenzo: Ao Li; Capellio: Eric Owens. San Francisco Opera Chorus and Orchestra. Conductor: Riccardo Frizza; Stage Director: Vincent Boussard; Set Designer: Vincent Lemaire; Costume Designer: Christian Lacroix; Lighting Designer: Guido Levi. War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco. September 29, 2012