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.
![Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet as Elektra [Photo by Christian Dresse courtesy of Opéra Municipal de Marseille]](http://www.operatoday.com/Elektra_Marseille.gif)
Sadistic revenge and sadistic challenge in equal parts. You know the story — if Oreste had not slaughtered his mother Elektra would have. And did over and over in nearly two hours of raving about killing her mother. Elektra is one of the repertory's more beloved operas.
Elekta’s sadistic fantasies are surely equaled by the sadistic torture of the soprano by Richard Strauss. American soprano Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet (born in New Orleans) inhabited the cutaway basement of a soaring Mycenaean palace for the nearly two hour stint of vocal abuse.
There were no surprises in this restaging of Opera de Marseille’s 2003 Charles Roubaud production. There was no metaphor save image derivation from the first moments film art, this new medium at one with the distortions of reality mined by the new century’s exploration of psyche. Twisted psyches in particular. Set designer Emmanuelle Favre provided a greatly exaggerated double perspective in black and white, and costume designer Katia Duflot worked both in black and white and in color with an art nouveau richness though not tone. It was a simple and effective mise en scène by its producers.
Nicolas Cavalier as Orest and Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet as Elektra
Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet reads as an appropriately young Elektra, physically and vocally. She projected the degradation of physical beauty brought on by depressive obsession, and she evoked our basic sympathy for such a sad creature. She raged in big, pure tones that were sometimes beautiful and sometimes ragged, and sometimes we feared for her stamina only to be reassured and then put on edge again. Her dance finished, dead on the floor, la Charbonnet had convinced us she was a real Elektra, not simply a soprano who could sing it, more or less.
The conducting did hold surprise. Veteran maestro Pinchas Steinberg imposed a very measured pace that offered startling insight into the softer, even tender moments of Straussian expressionism. This when it did not threaten to stall all emotional flow. The Oreste and Elektra scene was of spectacular beauty and tenderness and still very brutal. Oreste, bass Nicolas Cavallier (an actor turned singer) exuded the not-so-subtle sexual satisfaction Elektra feels as her fantasies slowly and carefully moved toward climax.
The coup de grace of the afternoon was however the screams, possibly amplified, of the murdered Clytemnestra, sung screams rather than the usual extended gut grunt. Mezzo-soprano Marie-Ange Todorovitch offered a well sung, through sung version of this complex, tragic personage that revealed in fact a much larger and far more complete personage than the usual half-voiced monster. Mme. Todorovitch made her scene with Elektra maximally vivid, reveling in the shattered exposition of her fears, exquisitely costumed in black gown with a platinum blond wig.
German soprano Ricarda Merbeth provided big, luminous tones non-stop as Chrysothémis, costumed in colorful flowers befitting her maidenhood (Mme. Merbeth sings Salome as well). This fine singer succeeded in projecting the larger attitudes of her character without plumbing the vocal and histrionic depths of this character antidote to sister and mother.
Marie-Ange Todorovitch as Clytemnestra adn Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet as Elektra
Patrick Raftery retains sufficient voice to deliver a pallid Aegistus, the limit of the role for Strauss and metteur en scène Roubaud. The overseer and maid servants, train bearer and confidant were appropriately rendered (no small compliment), who with a number of strikingly costumed supernumeraries made sick and lively stage pictures from time to time on the upper levels of the soaring set.
The Opéra de Marseille deployed seventy-six musicians. That seemed not quite enough, particularly when the maestro needed huge string sounds to develop the voluptuous moments of the Strauss score. The baignoires on both sides of the pit each housed a partial number of the eight timpani Strauss requires, rendering the great climaxes in stereo — maximally powerful! Boxes further above housed percussion and harps whose sounds floated eerily in the higher reaches of the hall with an acoustic appropriateness to the psychic pings of the Strauss drama.
It was a fine afternoon.
Michael Milenski
Cast and Production
Elektra: Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet; Chrysothémis: Ricarda Merbeth; Clytemnestre: Marie-Ange Todorovitch; First Servant: Lucie Roche; Second Servant: Christine Tocci; Third Servant: Simona Caressa; Fourth Servant: Bénédicte Rousseno; Fifth Servant: Sandrine Eyglier; Overseer: Anne-Marguerite Werster; Aegisthe: Patrick Raftery; Oreste: Nicolas Cavallier; Précepteur d’Oreste: Erick Freulon; Young Servant: Avi Klemberg; Old Servant: Christophe Fel. Chorus and Orchestra of the Opéra de Marseille. Conductor: Pinchas Steinberg; Mise en scéne: Charles Roubaud; Scenery: Emmanuelle Favre; Costumes: Katia Duflot; Lighting: Marc Delamézière. Opéra de Marseille. February 10, 2013.