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.
Twenty years ago stage director Christopher Alden introduced Rossini’s then forgotten comedy to Southern California audiences in a production that is still remembered. In Aix Alden has revisited this complex work that many critics now consider Rossini’s greatest comedy.
A revitalized Rossini world has emerged over the past several decades, the difficult if astonishing tragedies find occasional productions, the famous comedies find ever tighter mise en scènes, and singers have reached for an ever more refined Rossini technique and style. So when a conductor comes along who can enter the Rossini ethos, and this is not often, a sort of operatic nirvana can be achieved.
Director Alden’s Turco at the Long Beach Opera is remembered as one of these rare operatic moments. While the musical resources of a small opera company are limited, and American operatic resources twenty years ago were more enthusiastic than accomplished the Long Beach Turco succeeded not because of conducting but because of the staging. Alden’s heroine, trapped in her drab existence, found escape in the movies (like many of us in the 1950’s), and imagined herself swept of her feet by a handsome guy in a white suit with an accent. Finally, of course, real life prevailed and real love won the hearts of everyone.
This simple concept anchored three hours of singing, and made the very high artifice itself of the brilliant Rossini style the emotional crux of this fantasy of fulfillment.
Twenty years later Alden has now envisioned Rossini’s comic masterpiece as an intellectual game, much like Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. Alden has made Rossini’s playwright Prosdocimo the protagonist of the opera, not just a benevolent facilitator of an intrigue about to happen (librettist Felice Romani had enriched a commonplace operatic comedy with the conceit of an author looking for a story). Alden’s Prosdocimo is an omnipresent troublemaker in perpetual conflict with his characters.
Prosdocimo possesses a Pirandello era (or so) typewriter on which he actually performs the Rossini score — clackity clack, clackity clack — in lively sync with the sounds coming from the pit. Well, until the heroine Fiorella grabs the typewriter to write her own script for a while. Alden makes his concept work flawlessly, with business between the author and his characters happening every second. Few if any moments are spared for us to savor the human dimensions of the story while we admire this interplay of wills.
Cecelia Hall as Zaida, Olga Peretyatko as Fiorella. Set design by Andrew Lieberman
Alden and his set designer Andrew Lieberman know that less can be more, therefore they endeavored to keep the surroundings as simple as possible. The set is a floor that is stuck upon what would be the back wall of the stage climbing onto what would be the ceiling — a mind-boggling vaulted floor. It is the floor of an unidentified room, maybe the floor of the Korean evangelical church the pair used for their Berlin Aida a few years back. There was a church basement coffee urn in one corner of the Aix set, a reference certainly foreign to the French audience.
Alden furthered his early-twentieth-century-theater concept with an extravagant overlay of theatrical tricks discovered by Pirandello’s contemporary Bertolt Brecht. The staging was indeed an amusing primer in Brecht's so-called Epic Theater, notably the half curtain, here movie palace green with a gold fringe. Set and costume changes were Brechtian a vista — we got to see a few of France’s intrepid intermittants actually at work (these are seasonal theatrical technicians about to loose their favored unemployment compensation who had gone on strike to prevent the premiere of Il turco from occurring as scheduled). All this Epic Theater served as smart business to intensify the mind games.
Lighting designer Adam Silverman provided an initial blast of stark white light emanating from a stage-wide hanging line of institutional lights, then at times he used only a part of the line to indicate a reduced acting area within the extreme width of the Archevêché theater. As well much use was made of exaggerated side lighting (a side wall deftly slide back to admit this strong yellow gold light), not to mention changing the color of the huge back wall floor to rose or light green from time to time, and the surprising moment when a strip, stage wide, of lights embedded into the floor burst into in brilliant upward light. Like the staging and the design, the lighting too was virtuoso.
The prow pole of a classic sailing ship, replete with the sumptuous breasts of its carved female figurehead, was the Brechtian image for the Selim (the Turco). He was Romanian bass Adrian Sampetrean who was purely and simply machismo incarnate. Vocally he delivered raging coloratura cleanly and in full voice and displayed a confidence of character that was appropriately intimidating. Russian soprano Olga Peretytko, a regular at the Pesaro Rossini Festival, made a cheap and sassy Fiorella, well able to delightfully embody the caricature of a tacky Hollywood sex queen. Unfortunately by this penultimate performance (a run of seven) she was unable to find the vocal brilliance and stability that would equal her exquisitely defined character.
American soprano Cecelia Hall was Zaida, the Turco’s original love now in competition with Fiorella, She was costumed, like the Turco (whose only Turkish mark was a beaded fez), in homely, 30’s or 40’s drab everyday western clothes. The costume designer was Kaye Voyce, like Lieberman and Silverman, a frequent Alden collaborator. She managed a huge variety of vividly defined costumes — gypsy-like skirts for the six women extras who accompanied the drab Zaida (so we would know she is a gypsy even though she was not dressed like one), not to forget the transparent, filmy, fancy ball gowns the eighteen male choristers donned to create the masquerade party.
All this theatrical brilliance on the stage would have been more effective and more meaningful had there been a brilliant Rossini pit. As it was there were Les Musiciens du Louvre Grenoble, an original instrument orchestra (instruments of the time a piece was composed) founded 30 years ago by its now famous conductor Marc Minkowski. Perhaps, though doubtfully, a Rossini orchestra actually sounded like a wheezy reed organ, but this is not the sound needed to support a conceptually and theatrically complex contemporary opera production.
Conductor Minkowski never reached the Rossini boil that propels the listener into musical euphoria. The only true Rossini moment of the evening was achieved by tenor Lawrence Brownlee who gamely portrayed Don Narciso (an additional suitor of Fiorella) as an trench coat covered spastic. He lay in front of the half curtain and delivered “Tu seconda il mio disegno” in high style to earn the biggest, and the only real ovation of the evening.
Italian buffo Pietro Spagnoli ably fulfilled the task of bringing Alden’s high energy Prosdocimo to life for the duration of the long evening, and baritone Alessandro Corbelli found his match as the duped, defeated Don Geronio, the long-suffering husband of Fiorella.
Michael Milenski
Casts and production information:
Selim: Adrian Sâmpetrean; Fiorilla: Olga Peretyatko; Don Geronio: Alessandro Corbelli; Narciso: Lawrence Brownlee; Prosdocimo: Pietro Spagnoli; Zaida: Cecelia Hall; Albazar: Juan Sancho. Chœur: Ensemble vocal Aedes; Orchestre: Les Musiciens du Louvre Grenoble. Conductor: Marc Minkowski; Mise en scène: Christopher Alden; Décors: Andrew Lieberman; Costumes: Kaye Voyce; Lumière: Adam Silverman. Théâtre du l’Archevêché, Aix-en-Provence, July 19, 2014.