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.
![Scene from Death in Venice [Photo by Tristram Kenton]](http://www.operatoday.com/Death-in-Venice-010.gif)
‘Beauty is the one form of spirituality that we experience through the senses.’ In Thomas Mann’s, Death in Venice, Plato’s axiom stirs the hopes of the aging, intellectually stale poet, Gustav von Aschenbach, that he may rekindle his creativity.
In the event, it is Socrates whose words prove more germane: ‘beauty leads to passion, and passion to the abyss.’ Upon such tensions and apprehensions rests Aschenbach’s fate.
First heard 40 years ago, Britten’s setting of Mann’s novella remains a deeply troubling work. The intertwined threads linking beauty and annihilation, Hellenic love and ravaging disease are discomforting. Aschenbach falls prey both to his self-destructive yearning for the Polish youth, Tadzio, and, we presume, to bodily decline hastened by the rotten strawberries of the Venetian fruit seller and the cholera which is latent in the very waters which define Venice’s beauty. And, we cannot help but be aware, just as there were autobiographical origins to Mann’s tale, so the elderly, ailing Britten — by dramatizing the final days of an esteemed writer who finds his creative powers to be waning and seeks renewal through an encounter with a youth of exceptional loveliness — was to some extent telling his own tale, returning to a theme that had been latent in his work for so long. As one reviewer of the first production put it, ‘was Britten not risking self-parody?’
Uneasy yet seductive, Deborah Warner’s 2007 production manages to suggest both sumptuous exquisiteness and melancholy starkness. The stage is largely bare; all is suggested by movement and light. The black waters shimmer paradoxically; dreary mists hang low and damp, alleviated by sudden bursts of hazy, orange sun; shadowy gondoliers emerge and recede; drapes billow in breezes which drift through the Lido hotel. Austere greys predominate, but textures are rich and tactile. Set designer Tom Pye, lighting designer Jean Kalman and video designer Finn Ross have created a ravishing hinterland — hovering between land and sea, between dream and reality; and we traverse effortlessly through the external locale, just as we move through the inner landscape of Aschenbach’s psyche.
So much depends on the performance of the tenor prepared to don the mantle of Aschenbach. Present on stage for almost all of the opera’s two and a half hours, the considerable physical and musical demands of the role are exacerbated by the psychological weight of the ghosts of former Aschenbachs, particularly Peter Pears. As Ned Rorem wrote: ‘Pears is a thread of the score’s very fabric … To imagine another in the role is to imagine a harpsichord piece played on an organ.’
John Graham-Hall comprehensively refuted Rorem’s misgivings, inhabiting the role with convincing dramatic presence and unaffected sincerity. It was the part which won him the 2012 Franco Abbiati prize for best male singer from the Italian National Association of Music Critics, and one could see why. Tall and thin, introverted and self-contained, dressed in an Edwardian pale suit, as he crumbled and disintegrated under the burden psycho-sexual anxiety, Graham-Hall was a visual emblem of the confrontation between Bourgeois Convention and Bohemian Chaos identified within Britten himself by W.H. Auden in an oft-quoted letter of the 1930s.
The gulf between Aschenbach and the other travellers and hotel guests was emphasised by Graham-Hall’s meticulously conceived body language and physical mannerisms. Moreover, the writer, ubiquitous cigarette twitching nervously, was frequently isolated at the front of the stage, the passing crowds of holidaying families negotiating the bustling esplanades and foyers beyond him, in sight but forever out of reach. The suggestion was that these passing vignettes were simply hallucinations, projections of Aschenbach’s wishful imaginings and lurid fears.
Aschenbach’s roaming soliloquies were supple and intoned with clarity; surtitles were absent and for once not needed. [The decision to dispense with surtitles was an admirable one; this is English opera, set by a master of English text setting, in the current home of ‘English National Opera’. If one cannot rely on the singers to communicate clearly here, where can one? However, in practice, while Britten’s recitative-like declamation and other solo lines could be clearly discerned, at times in the cavern of Coliseum, the multiple voices in the choral numbers diffused the words, and the richer orchestral palettes obfuscated.]
Graham-Hall aimed for clear resonance and direct communication; there was no exaggerated darkness in the tone, the middle register was focused, the top quite light. But this made the moments of despair all the more telling. After watching a victorious Tadzio triumph in the Games of Apollo, Aschenbach’s realisation that his feelings are tainted followed a dynamic orchestral crescendo and was shocking in its ferocity— ‘I love you’. Subsequently, after the Dionysian nightmare in which Apollo battles to preserve the writer’s Classical soul, Graham-Hall’s simple, pure reminiscence of Socrates’ tender dismissal of Phaedrus, accompanied by gentle harp accompaniment, was poignant but never sentimental.
As the composite Mephistophelian figure who sows the seeds of the southern sojourn in Aschenbach’s mind and then pursues him on his journey with menacing alacrity, Andrew Shore was superb. Encountered in the cemetery, the Traveller’s ‘Marvels unfold’ was both alluring and intimidating; characteristically, Shore’s Barber’s patter was slick and satirical. The Elderly Fop’s strident falsetto was ridiculous yet also discomforting — and it was a nice touch to whip off his ill-fitting toupee, directly challenging Aschenbach to acknowledge his own impending dissolution. As a Charon-like gondolier, Shore was gruffly dismissive; as the louche Leader of the Players his raucous hoot, as he led a band of unpitched voices and percussion in a laughing song, was horridly raw.
The minor roles were accomplishedly executed. Tim Mead was a mellifluous Voice of Apollo and Anna Dennis a splash of brightness and refreshing ease as the Strawberry Seller.
My only slight misgiving concerned the innately problematic Tadzio and the opéra ballet episodes. Mann’s Tadzio is an emblem of innocent beauty, a silent ideal, and his realisation in flesh risks destroying his pure neutrality. The grace of the dancers, choreographed by Kim Brandstrup, certainly emphasised the reckless, careless abandon of youth, as opposed to the introverted self-absorption of old age. And yet, at times Sam Zaldivar’s Tadzio — a Grecian silhouette of corporal perfection — was too knowing, too aware of his physical prowess and attractiveness. There was a hint of solipsistic athleticism, in the odd twist of the torso or backward glance, almost as if Tadzio was seeking to ensure that Aschenbach was watching his lithe muscular display. Such overt exhibitionism is too actively assertive; Mann’s Tadzio remains unaware of the effect of his innocence.
Conductor Edward Gardner’s achievement was considerable. He crafted the network of motivic connections and symbols into an aural kaleidoscope of myriad hues. Primitive percussive energies exploded into glistening expansive vistas; dry, constrained fragments were relieved by the exotic resonances of vibraphone and woodwind. From the dipping viola figurations of the gondola’s lapping paddles, as Aschenbach embarks upon his journey to ‘Serenissima’, Gardner was alert to every aquaphilic nuance in the score. After the violence of the tuba’s plague motif which hypnotises the dying Aschebach, much as the melancholy fog horn lures Grimes to a watery grave, the Hymn of Apollo mingled with ringing cries of Tadzio’s name in an beautiful orchestral postlude which almost washed away the shame and debasement.
There are only a few more performances. Make sure you don’t miss them.
Claire Seymour
Cast and production information:
Gustav von Aschenbach: John Graham-Hall; The Traveller/The Elderly Fop/The Old Gondolier/The Hotel Manager/The Hotel Barber/The Leader of the Players/The Voice of Dionysus: Andrew Shore; The Voice of Apollo: Tim Mead; The Polish Mother: Laura Caldow; Tadzio: Sam Zaldivar; Two daughters - Mia Angelina Mather, Xhuliana Shehu; Governess: Joyce Henderson; Jaschiu, Tadzio’s friend: Marcio Teixeira; Hotel Porter: Peter Van Hulle; Strawberry Seller: Anna Dennis; Guide: Charles Johnston; English Clerk: Marcus Farnsworth; Strolling Players: Anna Dennis, Adrian Dwyer; Conductor: Edward Gardner; Director: Deborah Warner; Set Designer: Tom Pye; Costume Designer: Chloe Obolensky; Lighting Designer: Jean Kalman; Choreographer: Kim Brandstrup; Video Designer: Finn Ross. English National Opera, London Coliseum, Friday 14th June 2013.