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.
![Susan Bullock as Queen Elizabeth I [Photo © ROH / Clive Barda]](http://www.operatoday.com/GLORIANA-130617_1631.gif)
A glance at the ROH programme which accompanies this new production of Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana reveals a striking number of ‘role débuts’; evidence that, since its Coronation-commissioned revelation in 1953, this opera has had a relatively quiet 60 years - hyperbolically announced as ‘one of the great disasters of operatic history’ at its troubled opening.
Now, in 2013, as our reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, celebrates a lifetime devoted to her realm, director Richard Jones transports us back to the beginning, to a village hall - the Jubilee Hall, Aldeburgh? - reconstructing (deconstructing?) the opening night of the opera which announced a new Elizabethan age with a re-visitation of the first regal Elizabeth’s glories and shortcomings.
Initially we are confronted with the simple exterior of a theatre. A dignitary paces impatiently beneath the royal crest and flag which adorns the façade, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the royal party; Queen and consort enter, slightly bemused by the cultural offering bestowed in their honour. The ‘fourth wall’ is lifted to reveal an unsophisticated platform; prompter, janitor, curtain hoister and bell-ringer loiter with anticipation in the wings. The orchestral prologue commences, visually illustrated by a perfectly choreographed reverse parade through British monarchical history - faultlessly in keeping with current Conservative-party educational policy - until we arrive at the first age of Elizabethan magnificence and mal-contentment. In a brisk sweep - reminiscent of the gallery of ancestral portraits illuminated by the Prologue to Owen Wingrave - Richard Jones makes a virtue of the opera’s potential cause for irritation - its whimsicality and twee ‘Merrie England-ishness’.
Henceforth, all sentimental, mawkish, am-dram naff-ness is viewed through a knowingly ironic filter - which, in fact, perfectly complements the parodies and self-parodies of Britten’s score. Thus, the Act 1 joust presents a pantomime horse, dipping and diving, as a disgruntled Earl of Essex (Toby Spence) enviously espies the equestrian triumphs of Lord Mountjoy (Mark Stone) - soon to be reveal resplendent in eye-watering Queen-Bee zig-zags - by peering over a mock-brick wall at the ceremonial contest. As the imperial Elizabeth progresses through her realm, the various venues which receive the regal company are signposted by a gaggle of grey-uniformed public school-boys, whose thrust-aloft placards announce our successive locations.
Ultz’s designs and the eye-watering complementary colour schemes of Mimi Jordan Sherin’s lighting scheme emphasise both power and transience, from the outsized wooden throne placed centre-stage, to the iconographical pictorialism of the inner chamber - all skulls, scrolls, leather-bound learned manuscripts and lutes.
Amid this symbolic landscape, the cast are uniformly outstanding in presenting a narrative of conflicting loyalties and self-destructive betrayals.
At the heart of it all is Susan Bullock’s Gloriana, magnificently divine yet painfully human, every word of text used with intelligence and creativity to simultaneously win our sympathies and earn our censures. Exposed in Act 3 by Essex’s untimely and improper arrival and intrusion, balding, dishevelled and defenceless, she retains an essential dignity. Lonely and unaided, bullied by the unequivocal pronouncements of her courtiers into signing the death warrant of her paramour, Bullock’s Gloriana agonisingly disintegrates, much like Grimes or Vere; all that remains to console are fragments and memories, as the curtain which slowly closes on the isolated monarch announces her alienation and mortality. The spoken text powerfully announces her diminution and creative diminishment and defeat.
Kate Royal as Lady Rich, Toby Spence as Essex, Patricia Bardon as Countess of Essex, Mark Stone as Lord Mountjoy
Toby Spence makes a credibly sympathetic figure of the solipsistic Essex, full of a vigorous vitality which is undermined by maudlin melancholy. After serious health concerns, Spence is almost back to his best. Albeit weak and unpredictable, Essex’s devotion to the Queen is not in doubt. By turns tender, ebullient and defiant, Spence’s Essex is petulant, querulous but also truthful, winning our heart with his delicately expressive, self-revelatory second lute song, ‘Happy were we’, while arousing our distrust by - a theatrical masterstroke by Jones - surreptitiously and presumptuously usurping the unoccupied throne, when the royal party has departed after the ceremonial entertainments which close Act 2. The rapid blackout exacerbates our unease regarding his audacious intentions.
It is quite a trial for the singers to bring credibility and roundedness to librettist William Plomer’s rather one-dimension ‘puppets’, but the cast rises impressively to the challenge. Jeremy Carpenter’s Lord Cecil is the emblem of gravity and stateliness; the guarded confidence between the Queen and her ‘trusty elf’ is complemented by a Machiavellian manipulation, most particularly in the Act 3 ‘Cecil’s Warning’, as the influential Lord cunningly persuades his monarch to repel her former devotee.
Mark Stone’s Lord Mountjoy is buoyantly self-congratulatory; yet, casting pride aside, he pleads sincerely for his rival, before Frances Devereux, Essex’s sister, (Patricia Bardon) gently but futilely beseeches the Queen to show clemency and compassion. Kate Royal is a convincing Lady Penelope Rich - opinionated yet without fraudulence, pleading desperately for leniency for Essex before a hostile and unforgiving monarch, before succumbing to more histrionic outpourings in the Epilogue. In the cameo role of the Blind Ballad-singer, Brindley Sherratt is ironically Beckmesserian.
There is no evading the fact that Britten’s episodic second Act lacks dramatic momentum. The pastiche, albeit clever and effortless, serves to flatter its creator’s facility rather than to further the drama (the former is foregrounded by, for example, the harpist’s visibility in the wings during the lute songs). The lengthy sequence of theatrical rituals and dances, while flamboyantly stylistic, are ultimately static and somewhat sterile. In this context, the villagers’ vegetable mosaic, designed to celebrate regal fruitfulness and profligacy, is appropriately humdrum.
Yet, Jones’ presentation of the masque of Time and Concord is, as rudimentary moon and sun are heaved aloft from the wings, elementary but honest; similarly, Lucy Burge’s choreography produces stylised but touching performances from dancers Lake Laoutaris-Smith and Giulia Pazzaglia. The choral dances which end the Act are vigorous and energising, Spence et al matching the lusty leaps and bounds of the professional athletes.
Off-stage or on-stage, the ROH chorus are splendidly resplendent and resonant. The idolatrous ‘Green leaves are we’ chorus which permeates the score is heartfelt and warming. Conductor Paul Daniel is well-served by his woodwind players, whose expressive nuances communicates the underlying drama with virtuosity and insight, just as the whole instrumental ensemble conjures both bright majesty in the scenes of public ceremony and dark unrest when their dynamic surges represented the inner turbulences of the troubled Queen.
Jones has totally captured the antagonistic energies of this opera. Unease and imbalance characterise both dynamic relationships and structural organisation, as public and private are opposed but never reconciled. Condemned as ‘not a Great Britten’ at its first appearance, Jones convinces us that - despite its flaws - this is a Glorious Gloriana.
Claire Seymour
Cast and production information:
Earl of Essex: Toby Spence; Henry Cuffe: Benjamin Bevan; Lord Mountjoy: Mark Stone; Elizabeth I: Susan Bullock; Sir Walter Raleigh: Clive Bayley; Sir Robert Cecil: Jeremy Carpenter; Recorder of Norwich: Jeremy White; Spirit of the Masque: Andrew Tortise; Time: Lake Laoutaris-Smith’ Concord: Ciulia Pazzaglia; Penelope Lady Rich: Kate Royal; Frances Devereux: Patricia Bardon; Blind Ballad Singer: Brindley Sherratt; Conductor: Paul Daniel; Director: Richard Jones; Designs: Ultz; Lighting Design: Mimi Jordan Sherin; Choreography: Lucy Burge. Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, Thursday 20th June 2013