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.
There are some concert programmes which are not just wonderful in their execution but also delight and satisfy because of the ‘rightness’ of their composition. This Wigmore Hall recital by soprano Carolyn Sampson and three period-instrument experts of arias and instrumental pieces by Henry Purcell was one such occasion.
Over half of the works presented were selected from the ‘Gresham Manuscript’, a book of songs mostly scribed by Purcell’s own hand which was compiled between 1692 and 1695.
A facsimile of the manuscript was published in 1995, Purcell’s tercentenary year; as its editors, Margaret Laurie and Robert Thompson, explain in their Introduction: ‘The purpose of the book is not clear, some believe that it was for Purcell’s own use as a singer, while others hypothesize that it was a “pupil’s” volume.’ In his interesting programme article, Andrew Pinnock notes recent research by Thompson that suggests that the Gresham manuscript was copied for Purcell’s pupil, Lady Annabella Howard, maid of honour to Princess (later Queen) Anne; the latter was an accomplished harpsichord and guitar player, and Annabella would have been expected to entertain the princess and perform alongside her. Pinnock suggests that the manuscript is ‘an idiosyncratic anthology reflecting Annabella Howard’s musical personality, allowing her to display her skills in performance and providing practice material of the highest imaginable quality’.
The Gresham manuscript contains the opening six items from Purcell’s The Fairy-Queen, which Princess Anne saw in Dorset Garden theatre in 1692; and it was with three numbers from this semi-opera that the recital began. ‘Come all ye songsters’ is a light dance for Titania’s revelling fairies, and Sampson’s pristine brightness and open sound affectionately evoked the sprites’ joyful merry-making. The busy accompanying textures of Elizabeth Kenny’s lute, Jonathan Manson’s bass viol and Laurence Cummings’ harpsichord added to the high spirits. In the instrumental playout of ‘Sing while we trip it’ each of the three accompaniments took primacy in turn, courteously passing on the musical baton with the courtly decorum suggested by the text, ‘Sing while we trip it upon the green; … Nothing offend our fairy Queen’. Sampson spun beautiful melodic arcs in ‘Ye gentle spirits of the air’, and the sunny repetitions of ‘appear, appear’ together with an enticing melisma, ‘Prepare’, would sure have tempted the spirits to ‘join your tender voices here’. The soprano demonstrated a relaxed flexibility and a warm lower voice, while her upper range carried beautifully.
The sparser accompaniment offered by Kenny’s lone theorbo highlighted the decorative melodic shapes of the opening lines of ‘The cares of lovers’ (from Timothy of Athens). Sampson summoned a vocal rhetoric to complement the subtle oppositions of major/minor tonalities, and was able to draw upon her varied palette of hues and excellent breath control to convey the erotic inferences of the text, ‘So soft, so gentle is their pain, ’Tis even a pleasure to complain.’ The vocal passagework and scuttling accompaniment at the start of ‘Fly swift, ye hours’ was clean and precise; but as the song expanded into a ‘mini-cantata’, Sampson deepened the dramatic intensity, bringing fervency to the poet’s plea to ‘Bring back my Belvidera’. The arioso section ‘Swifter than Time’ had a sweet lilt, but the recitative, ‘Soft peace is banish’d’, summoned great anguish. Sampson’s unhurried chromatic falls were perfectly tuned and the languid melismas exquisitely sighed. The sinking register of the final line evoked the poignancy of the poet’s pain as he ‘embrace[s] my chain’.
The florid anger of ‘Not all my torments’ shook us from our quiet reflections, while ‘From rosy bow’rs (from Don Quixote) thrilled with its unpredictability, sudden injections of pace and colour conjuring the cunning, feigned madness of Altsidora who tries, by presenting herself as a woman possessed by a frenzied passion, to lure Don Quixote from his beloved Dulcinea. Again, Sampson exercised masterly control over the song’s changeable rhetoric, by turns still then driven, accelerating towards the close with wild excitement. After the interval, ‘Let the dreadful Engines of Eternal Will’ from the same work similarly confirmed the soprano’s innate, well-judged theatricality, as she convincingly embraced the declamatory freedom of the music which shifts between arioso and recitative, intensifying the harmonic twists which evoke the mood swings of Cardenio, who has been deserted by Luscinda.
The light leaps of ‘I see she flies me’ ran on into the lamenting sighs of ‘What a sad fate is mine’. The ground bass of the latter was hypnotically entrancing, enhanced by delicate ornamentation and wonderfully expressive of the forsaken poet’s dilemma: ‘’Tis all I implore,/ To make me love less,/ Or her to love more.’ In ‘’Tis Nature’s Voice’ (from Hail, Bright Cecilia) Sampson showed how she could deepen the weight of her lower register and she used the chromatic contortions of the melismatic vocal line to express the power of the ‘mighty Art’ of music which ‘charms the Sense and captivates the Mind’. ‘Lucinda is bewitching fair’ (from Abdelazar, or The Moor’s Revenge) was free and full of declamatory vigour.
Instrumental pieces were interspersed between the vocal items. Purcell’s C major harpsichord suite was played by Cummings with delicate restraint: the initial simple-two part textures were lucid, while the bass line in subsequent more complex movements was used effectively to provide direction, and there were some engaging rhythmic emphases in the concluding jig. Kenny alternated dryness and richness in numbers from Princess Anne’s guitar book. And, there was music from Purcell’s contemporaries too: Giovanni Battista Draghi’s ‘Italian Ground’ was impressively played by Jonathan Manson, his bass viol strumming airily then crooning melodiously, while Kenny sustained the upper line of Francesco Corbetta’s Passacaille with salient limpidity.
We ended where we began, with The Fairy Queen, as Sampson entreated us to harken the ‘echoing air’. The text, as with many of these songs, is fairly mundane: ‘Hark! hark, the ech’ing air a triumph sings,/ And all around, pleased Cupids clap their wings.’ But, Purcell was equally inspired whether setting the words of the greatest poets of the day — Dryden, Congreve — or a banal ditty. Sampson sometimes promoted the beauty of sound and grace of line over the clarity of the text: for example, the consonants were lost in the rapid repetitions and scotch-snaps of ‘Sing while we trip it’, and blurred by the assonance of ‘Let the dreadful Engines’ — frequently I found myself having to follow or check the text in the programme.
But, an occasional clouding of the diction did not make this recital any less beguiling, and the bewitchment continued beyond the concluding song of the programme, with two encores — ‘I attempt from love's sickness’ and ‘Fairest Isle’ — of artless magic.
Claire Seymour
Performers and programme:
Carolyn Sampson, soprano; Elizabeth Kenny, lute; Jonathan Manson, bass viol; Laurence Cummings, harpsichord. Wigmore Hall, London, Tuesday 17th March 2015.
Henry Purcell — The Fairy Queen : ‘Come all ye songsters of the sky’, ‘Sing while we trip it on the green’, ‘Ye gentle spirits of the air appear’; The History of Timon of Athens: ‘The cares of lovers’; ‘Fly swift, ye hours’; ‘Not all my torments can your pity move’; The Comical History of Don Quixote: ‘From rosy bow'rs’, ‘Let the dreadful engines’; Aureng-Zebe, or The Great Mogul: ‘I see she flies me’; ‘What a sad fate is mine’; ‘Pious Celinda goes to prayers’; ‘Hail, bright Cecilia’; ‘’Tis Nature's Voice; thro' all the moving Wood’; Abdelazar, or The Moor’s Revenge: ‘Lucinda is bewitching fair’; The Fairy Queen: ‘Hark the ech’ing air!’