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.
![Anke Vondung as Dulcinea and Ferruccio Furlanetto as Don Quixote [Photo by Ken Howard]](http://www.operatoday.com/qix_0335a.gif)
This quotation from Cervantes was displayed before the opening of the opera’s final scene:
“The greatest madness a man can commit in this life is to let himself die, just like that, without anybody killing him or any other hands ending his life except those of melancholy.”
Is it not equally mad to let a great opera company like San Diego Opera die when it could live on with different leadership?
On Saturday night, April 5, 2014, San Diego Opera (SDO) presented what may be its last production, a revival of Jules Massenet’s Don Quichotte. On March 20, General Director Ian Campbell announced that the company would “shut down with dignity” on April 14. SDO is not out of money, but it can no longer afford the deluxe productions it has staged in the past. The move was a total surprise to the employees, but only one of the board members voted against the closing. At the Saturday evening performance of the Massenet opera, Campbell was booed unmercifully when he attempted to speak to the audience. Since his announcement of the closure, almost twenty-one thousand SDO fans have signed a petition to keep opera in San Diego. It can be found here. The Save the Opera Campaign can be found online here.
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza fight the giant windmills.
Don Quichotte (Don Quixote) is an opera in five acts that Jules Massenet composed to a French libretto by Henri Caïn. Although Massenet's comédie-héroïque relates to the great Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes, it is closer to Jacques Le Lorrain’s play Le Chevalier de la Longue Figure, which was first seen in Paris in 1904. The opera, written in 1909 for the Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin, was first performed early the following year at the Opéra de Monte Carlo. The composer may have also thought of himself as a Don Quixote, because at the age of sixty-seven, he was in love with his twenty-seven year old Dulcinea, Lucy Arbell.
Don Quichotte is a vehicle for a charismatic singer with a low voice. Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto is one of the truly great artists of our time and an opportunity to enjoy his interpretation of the character created by Cervantes is most welcome, even if the circumstances surrounding it are painful. In 2009, the opera was first staged in San Diego for Furlanetto. Both then and in 2014, his fully engaged character portrayal, his personal magnetism, and above all his glorious singing made the audience fall in love with the madly idealistic knight. San Diego has a large Spanish-speaking population and they were particularly in evidence for this French take on an author with whose work they are most familiar.
Keturah Stickann’s traditional production followed both Caïn’s libretto and Massenet’s music with great care, but added twenty-first century lighting and stagecraft. She told her story in a most creative manner and showed applicable quotations from the original Cervantes work in translation before each scene. The Windmill Scene was particularly memorable because the music seems to be turning the huge blades as they emerged from the fog. Conductor Karen Keltner, a specialist in French music, was at her best as she gave us a musically apt description of the mind of the ingenious gentleman from La Mancha. Missy West’s exquisite costumes and Kristina Cobarrubia’s colorful Flamenco dances added visual excitement to the production. The sets by Ralph Funicello combined with Marie Barrett’s lighting to show the bare bones landscape of rural Spain.
Flamenco Dancing in Don Quichotte
Eduardo Chama’s Sancho Panza was an amusing peasant who really cared for his master. Vocally, he seems to have lost some resonance since 2009, but his able portrayal of the character made up for it. Anke Vondung was a flirtatious but innately practical Dulcinea who sang with a chocolate cream voice. Hervé Blanquart was a frightening head bandit while Chad Frisque, Michael Blinco, Anthony Ballard, and Joseph Grienenberger were mean-looking thugs. Others in the cast who added much to the production as a whole were Joel Sorenson as Rodriguez, Simeon Esper as Juan, Michaëla Oeste as Pedro, and Susannah Biller as Garcias. Choral music is often important in French opera and this work is no different. Charles F. Prestinari’s group sang with precision as they floated their delicious harmonies out into the auditorium. It’s sad to think that they and their instrumental colleagues may have much less work after the end of this season.
Maria Nockin
Cast and production information:
Rodriguez, Joel Sorenson; Juan, Simeon Esper; Pedro, Michaëla Oeste; Garcias, Susannah Biller; Dulcinea, Anke Vondung; Don Quixote, Ferruccio Furlanetto; Sancho Panza, Eduardo Chama; Ténébrun Chief Bandit, Hervé Blanquart; Conductor, Karen Keltner; Director Keturah Stickann; Choreographer, Kristine Cobarrubia; Scenic design, Ralph Funicello; Costume design, Missy West; Lighting design, Marie Barrett; Chorus Master, Charles F. Prestinari; Supertitles, Ian Campbell.