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.
![Simon Keenlyside As Wozzeck and Karita Mattila as Marie [Photo © ROH/ Catherine Ashmore]](http://www.operatoday.com/Wozzeck_ROH_01.gif)
The lustreless white tiles of the laboratory which forms the set of Keith Warner’s pitiless staging of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck offer little respite — cold, hard, rigid and severe, they are a material embodiment of the bleakness and barrenness of the tragic events which will be played out within the workshop walls (sets by Stefanos Lazaridis).
Only Marie’s small, shabby bedroom, to the front left, provide some respite from the unalleviated soullessness.
First seen in 2002, winner of an Olivier Award for Best New Opera Production in 2003, and revived in 2005, Warner’s staging asks much of its personnel. The institutional grimy white is transmuted only occasionally by a black triangular shape which descends from the flies, and by the mirrored wall onto which Wozzeck’s mysterious hallucinations are projected (lighting design, Rick Fisher); this single-set offers little assistance to the singer who must convey Wozzeck’s misery and oppression as, ever more humiliated and betrayed, his world shrinks to become a claustrophobic prison of mental confinement.
Buchner’s Wozzeck is deeply affected by the natural world, but here there are no external locales, no mists or rising suns, no eerie moonlight; the toad-stalls which so disturb Wozzeck — small, delicate rings, wondrously inscrutable beneath the arching, glittering constellations above — are here giant-sized, contained within one of four the clinical glass tanks in which the Doctor conducts his experiments.
In Warner’s concept we seem to be within Wozzeck’s own mind — a mind which is already unhinged at the start of the opera. It’s certainly the case that by the end of Berg’s opera we see, and hear, the world through Wozzeck’s perspective: the lullaby which the bar maid sings to Wozzeck when he stumbles into the tavern after his horrific act; the deafening, hysterical cries of the crowd, ‘Blood! Blood!’, when his crime is discovered; the rising parallel scales as Wozzeck sinks to his depths of the pool of water in which he strives in vain to rinse the bloodstains from his hands — all of these musical details present us with a world seen through Wozzeck’s eyes, a world distorted by his own obsessions and fears. But, we need the context to appreciate this warped subjective vision. The grotesques with which Berg presents us are not simply caricatures, or abstractions of cruelty, they are representatives of the selfish, heartless ruling class, one that subjugates the less fortunate, forcing them into financial and moral impoverishment. This is the society that defeats the humble Wozzeck, a member of the oppressed under-class, who is driven to commit murder by his poverty and powerless.
Simon Keenlyside as Wozzeck and John Tomlinson as Doctor
Baritone Simon Keenlyside is an experienced veteran in the title role - this year alone he has already performed the part in Vienna, Madrid and Munich - but in some ways he might be thought too physically suave and composed to convince as the mentally ravaged soldier. But, Keenlyside showed us the psychological rawness while maintaining the essence of Wozzeck’s humanity, the beauty of the vocal lines drawing us into his confusion, the variations of colour and nuance revealing the depth of that bewilderment. The lightness of his baritone contrasted effectively with the Doctor’s deep bass, emphasising further Wozzeck’s defencelessness; progressively dehumanised, rendered ever more inarticulate, Keenlyside evoked a powerful sense of Grimes-like alienation from those around him. His interactions with his child, played with acuity by Sebastian Wright, were painfully poignant.
Keenlyside’s voice is essentially lyrical and herein lies a small misgiving though, for the eloquence of the vocal lines was sometimes at odds with the primitive brutality of the experience. The baritone, in common with virtually all the cast, doesn’t make much of the Sprechstimme but some vocal ‘roughness’ is needed to project the tragedy of this “psychotic anti-hero” (Derek Jarman). The contrast of lyrical and half-spoken utterance can be deeply expressive, as in the drowning scene in Act 3 when, as he desperately searches for the murder weapon, Wozzeck’s Sprechstimme ‘All is still and dead’ contrasts with his ferocious shouts of ‘Murder’. ‘Who cried?’ he wonders, then realises that it was he himself who spoke; the different vocal idioms reveal a destructive fragmentation of both body and psyche, one which is made more poignant when Wozzeck then sings tenderly over Marie’s dead body: ‘Marie! What is that crimson necklace you’re wearing? Was that well-earned, or sinful, just like the earrings?’ Has he really forgotten what he has done?
Singing the role of Marie for the first time, Karita Matilla sang with typical fearlessness and passion. However, though dressed in a cheap floral frock and hiding her own blond hair beneath a grubby brown wig, Matilla perhaps retained rather too much of her natural poise and grace, her tone too consistently sensuous and alluring for a rough and ready adulteress. The silky high notes in her prayer scene were truly beautiful though, and in Act 3 Matilla’s declamations were full of urgency and anguish.
Simon Keenlyside as Wozzeck and Endrik Wottrich as Drum Major
John Tomlinson’s Doctor was no cartoon-esque ‘mad scientist’, but rather a cruel, callous manipulator, for whom each and every man and woman is a potential medical specimen, ripe for merciless experiment, no more deserving of compassion that a shark in formaldehyde. Tomlinson acted the part of the obsessive maniac superbly, although the vocal performance was a little uneven.
The Doctor’s hideous duet with the Captain, Gerhard Siegel, was appropriately ghastly, a masterpiece of caricature, the magnification of abnormality verging on madness which they use to control and exploit Wozzeck. Siegel relished the Captain’s idiocies, formidably establishing his moral vacuity in the opening scene with Wozzeck, his tenor muscular and strong as he rambled interminably about his superior intellect and status, spouting empty-headed philosophical sound-bites.
Endrik Wottrich’s Drum Major sounded a little strained, but his steely tone suited the callousness of the abusive lecher, and he acted well. John Easterlin might have made more impact as Andres, Wozzeck’s companion; his folky huntsman’s song in Scene 2 should ideally contrast more strikingly with Wozzeck’s eerie Sprechstimme utterances, indicating the schism that separates these supposed friends. Allison Cook (Margret) and Robin Tritschler (Half-Wit) performed well in their cameo roles, and Jeremy White and Grant Doyle acquitted themselves ably as the First and Second Apprentice respectively. The ROH chorus were rather genteel for a crowd of soldiers, workers and revelers who have not yet had the life spirit syringed out of them by the Doctor.
One of the most discomforting and expressively provocative aspects of this production is that the blank desolation of the sets is completely at odds with the expressive richness of Berg’s score. And, in Mark Elder’s hands this disjuncture proved even more shocking as the conductor drew orchestral lines as incisive and piercing as a surgeon’s scalpel, dissecting the complex textures with clarity and power. Grating trombone rasps, the Dantesque dancing of the double bassoon, glistening harp sweeps, ghostly double bass col legno: the musical juxtapositions of distress and beauty did much to convey the discomposing confusion of Wozzeck’s world and mind. The fierce timpani hammer blows which cry out in fury at Wozzeck’s death were earth-shattering. Superb playing by the ROH Orchestra externalised the inner anguish of those on stage, literally voicing their suffering.
At the start, Wozzeck and Marie’s child sits alone at a desk studying a book; presumably scrutinising a copy of the annotated anatomical drawing of the human head which adorns the front-drop. What knowledge does he seek? The workings of the human mind? The causes of his father’s ‘madness’? The meaning of human existence? On-stage throughout, the child observes all, even witnessing his mother have brutal sex with the Drum Major — repulsively, the latter buys the child’s silence with a grubby coin.
Simon Keenlyside as Wozzeck
At the end, we wonder what the child has learned, as he stares into a tank of blood-stained water, transfixed by his father’s bloated body, while his mother’s corpse lies to the right, disregarded. Amplified voices echo from the auditorium. There are no children’s games of hopscotch, no one to speak to the child and tell him that his mother is dead; one word seems to sum up the painful drama that we have witnessed — meaninglessness. But, rather than existential disorientation, it seems to me that expressionist extremity is closer to the heart of Wozzeck. The violent distortions and heightening have an expressive purpose. At the close, should not pity and empathy accompany our feelings of horror and despair? After all, the composer’s own sympathy for his protagonist imbues the final orchestral interlude.
Warner’s staging is so remorseless that the danger is that we become impassive, shell-shocked observers; stunned and aghast yes, but not moved. Removed from his social setting and context, this Wozzeck is not a common man suffering at the hands of society and circumstance; rather, the tragedy which befalls him is determined by inner psychological compulsions, and yet he experiences no revelation and as such there is no opportunity for catharsis, through pity and fear.
That said, this is a production not to be missed. The cast perform with absolute commitment, and we are paradoxically enthralled by the dispassionate, abusive transactions depicted, even while we flinch from the horrors that the cast of soulless grotesques inflict and endure.
Claire Seymour
Further performances take place on 5th, 8th, 12th and 15th November.
Cast and production information:
Captain, Gerhard Siegel; Wozzeck, Simon Keenlyside; Andres, John Easterlin; Marie, Marita Katilla; Child, Sebastian Wright; Margret, Allison Cook; Doctor, John Tomlinson; Drum Major, Endrik Wottrich; First Apprentice, Jeremy White; Second Apprentice, Grant Doyle; Half-Wit, Robin Tritschler; Director, Keith Warner; Conductor, Mark Elder; Set designs, Stefanos Lazaridis; Costume designs, Marie-Jeanne Lecca; Lighting design, Rick Fisher; Royal Opera Chorus; Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, Thursday 31st October 2013.