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.
![ENO The Pearl Fishers, Sophie Bevan [Photo by ENO/Mike Hoban]](http://www.operatoday.com/ENO_PF_01.gif)
Writing in a programme article to accompany this first revival of her 2010 production of Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, director Penny Woolcock remarks upon the opera’s ‘plethora of beautiful arias, duets, choral and orchestral music … and catchy tunes that spawn earworms’.
Certainly, the opera is more than a one-hit wonder, and its celebrated ‘lollipop’, the tenor-baritone duet ‘Au fond du temple saint’, is one of many melodic gems in a sumptuous score.
It’s what holding them together that’s the problem. Cormon and Carré’s flimsy tale of the forbidden love of two best friends for one High Priestess suffers from one-dimensional characterisation and a generous dose of the nineteenth-century French obsession with ‘the Orient’ — the armchair traveller hoping for an authentic Eastern sojourn has to wade through such nonsense as the notion of the ancient Ceylonese venerating Hindu gods with European music.
Woolcock’s solution is a visual one; and in places it works. Designer Dick Bird’s opening image of elegant divers swooping and plunging with astonishingly balletic grace to scoop pearls from the ocean bed is arresting (although it was a pity that conductor Jean-Luc Tingaud did not coax a similarly exotic aural kaleidoscope from the pit during the rather lacklustre overture). Later, billowing silk evokes the ebbing moonlit waves, and these swell in the storm sequence into a raging video tsunami which surges and heaves, threatening to over-spill into the auditorium.
John Tessier as Nadir, Sophie Bevan as Leïla and George von Bergen as Zurga
Jen Schriever’s lighting enhances the fantasy: the colours evoke the opulent emeralds and aquamarines of the omnipresent waters, and the burnished ochres and oranges of the tropical sun. The change from day to night — as the dockside dwellings fade into shadow, beneath the glint and shimmer of distant hillside lights — is magical.
In an attempt to inject some realism into the orientalist schmaltz, Woolcock and Bird transfer the action to modern Sri Lanka and construct a chaotic shanty-town of corrugated shacks, the barbed wire and concrete jumble suggesting an ideological slant relating to global warming and/or western commercial exploitation. I wondered for a moment whether the be-suited Westerners wandering through the hovels were corrupt pearl-factory owners, but as they disappeared after the opening act I assume they were simply goggle-eyed tourists.
While these are worthy touches, they are not sustained; static mise en scènerather than enlivening dramatic threads. Kevin Pollard’s costumes lean towards cliché and, more importantly, Woolcock offers the cast almost no direction. It doesn’t matter what they are singing or in what context — making eternal vows of loyalty, swearing undying devotion, threatening revenge — there is scarcely any physical or visual interaction between the principals who stand, sit or lie stock still, facing the audience. Only in the fight sequence between Leila and Zurga in Act 3 is there any sense of choreographed dynamism.
One problem is that the set is cramped; there is just room enough for the chorus to assemble collectively amid the staggering lean-tos and for the principals to walk to the front of the stage, or climb the side-stairs. The result is that the ENO chorus looks rather ‘amateur’, although after a slightly hesitant start, they are on cracking musical form. ‘Brahma divin Brahma!’ at the close of Act 2 was fervent and resounding.
A scene from The Pearl Fishers
A pre-curtain announcement warned us that Sophie Bevan was suffering from a virus but it didn’t seem to affect her performance as the High Priestess Leila too adversely, although perhaps there was initially a sense that she was saving her brightest sparkle for the big moments. ‘Comme autrefois dans la nuit sombre’, when Leila reflects on her past secret assignations with Nadir, was persuasive and charming, and Bevan bloomed in the lovers’ passionate Act 2 duet. In Act 3, despite being thrown around by an enraged, vengeful Zurga, her voice was characteristically accurate and vivid.
As Nadir, John Tessier made good use of his attractive tenor in his Act 1 aria ‘Je crois entendre encore’: the phrasing was flexible, the tone appealing and the upper register unforced as Tessier conveyed both Nadir’s rapturous devotion and his essential honour. But, his voice is quite light-weight and he didn’t quite have the resonance to carry the long, arching lines in the duet with George von Bergen’s Zurga. Von Bergen had more punch and power, and his diction was superb; the Act 3 aria ‘L’orage est calmé’ was full of feeling as Zurga expresses his remorse for his angry condemnation of Nadir. But, both men needed more variety of colour to compensate for the lack of psychological complexity provided by the librettists. Barnaby Rea was a full-voiced Nourabad but his dreadful costume was a hindrance to any notable dramatic impact.
After their uninspiring start, the ENO instrumentalists shone in some exquisite solos, with horn and flute particularly impressive, but Tinguad never quite drew playing of sufficient lyric passion from his players. Martin Fitzpatrick’s rather staid translation added scant fire or frisson to the mix.
Dissatisfaction with the ending — Bizet’s own and that of the critics — resulted in various versions and no clear picture of the composer’s preferred form. Woolcock leaves us with the depressing image of suffering children being carried from the all-consuming flames of the burning ghat, the pyre ignited by Zurga in order to facilitate the lovers’ escape; a somewhat dispiriting end given the selfless nature of Zurga’s sacrifice.
Claire Seymour
Cast and production information:
Leïla, Sophie Bevan; Nadir, John Tessier; Zurga, George von Bergen; Nourabad, Barnaby Rea; Director, Penny Woolcock; Conductor, Jean-Luc Tingaud; Set Designer, Dick Bird; Costume Designer, Kevin Pollard; Lighting Designer, Jen Schriever; Video Designer, 59 Productions Ltd; Choreographer, Andrew Dawson; Translator, Martin Fitzpatrick. English National Opera, London Coliseum, Monday 16th June 2014.