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.
Puccini and his fellow verismo-ists are commonly associated with explosions of unbridled human passion and raw, violent pain, but in this revival (by Justin Way) of Moshe Leiser’s and Patrice Caurier’s 2003 production of Madame Butterfly, directorial understatement together with ravishing scenic beauty are shown to be more potent ways of enabling the sung voice to reveal the emotional depths of human tragedy.
If Puccini’s aim was — in keeping with verismo ideology — to portray the grim reality of contemporary life then the story of Cio-Cio-San’s exploitation, abandonment and self-sacrifice must have seemed a fitting tale. John Luther Long’s eponymous short story — which since its 1904 publication has spawned many a Butterfly-derivation — was based on a real-life incident: here, then, was the opportunity for the composer to depict the catastrophic actualities of cultural and sexual exploitation amid human suffering, gritty pragmatism and stoic self-sacrifice in back-street Nagasaki.
However, Puccini was evidently more interested in verismo settings than its aesthetics and philosophies: perhaps the only ‘genuine’ verismo operas are Il Tabarro and Tosca, for even in La Bohème the emphasis is more on the captivating bohemian milieu than the sordid quotidian affairs of the common man and woman. The garrets of the nineteenth-century Quartier Latin may have posed as present-day normality but in fact they were just as remote and picturesque as the faraway harbour-shores of Nagasaki.
Brian Jagde as Lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton and Kristine Opolais as Cio-Cio-San
Thus, Madame Butterfly is less an exposure of racial, financial and sexual abuse than a tale of love, sacrifice and redemption — and one not so far from the ideals of German Romanticism. Puccini may have called Madame Butterfly a ‘tragedia giapponese’ but it is not Japanese in any naturalistic sense: indeed the French term Japonisme might be nearer to the mark, referring as it does to the mania for the East which followed the end of Japanese isolation from the West in 1854. In the pavilions of the world fairs held in Paris during the late-nineteenth century, the Occident discovered the Orient through displays of the latter’s art, plays and music — and it devoured what it saw.
This infatuation is thrillingly reflected in Christian Fenouillat’s subtle but penetrating set designs and the wildly glowing colours of Christophe Forey’s lighting scheme: Puccini’s orientalism is exotic mystery rather than naturalistic misery. So, Fenouillat presents us with a room whoseshoji screens decorously rise and slide to reveal glimpses of Nagasaki — a pale view of the hills — or an ornamental shūyū, the blue-pink mist which hazily bathes the ornamental garden making a fairy-tale of Butterfly’s entrance. These screens allow rays of yellow-green or orange light to slide across the set floor, emphasising the unfamiliar perspective of the world we view. It will not reveal all its secrets or admit interlopers: Kate Pinkerton appears first as a silhouette, ominous and alien, through the dividing screen. And, the flat backgrounds cut off figures and sakura trees at the edge of the frame; this is an asymmetrical world of juxtaposed angles, layers and colours. Japanese cherry blossom trees are traditionally associated with clouds, because of their weightless flowery mass, and when the ephemeral petals tumble to the floor at the end of Act 3, illumined by a ghostly moon-glow, the death of Butterfly’s airy dreams is painfully apparent.
All this beauty and symbolism might be mere superficial satisfaction for one’s sensibilities, if it were not for the dramatic insight and vocal distinction of Latvian soprano Kristine Opolais who truly appreciates, and communicates, that Butterfly’s tragedy is a personal one not a cultural one. Opolais may not convince as an ingénue or a teenage Geisha: she is too tall and her voice too sophisticated and knowingly mature to encapsulate the girlish immaturities of a giggling fifteen-year-old. But, her Butterfly is a ‘real’ woman of disturbing integrity and resolution, and this steely determination is gradually revealed by Opolais to be an unwavering willpower and honesty which will eventually destroy both herself and Pinkerton.
Gabriele Viviani as Sharpless
Opolais’s spinto glistens like gossamer thread but has an underlying strength; she sang with such seductive lyricism that, for once, one might empathise with Pinkerton’s infatuation. Her voice is not huge, though, and there were some places where it was overshadowed by the orchestral fabric; but, in the end-of-Act 1 love duet Opolais used a powerful chest voice to convey the shockingly deep passion which lays beneath her docile purity and the demure civilities of her culture.
In Act 2 she laid bare Butterfly’s emotional unpredictability: her haughty sulkiness when admonished or guided by Suzuki; her youthful excitability which irrepressibly bursts out, interrupting Sharpless’s reading of Pinkerton’s letter; her fiery anger when the US consul dares to suggest that she may never see Pinkerton again. In a pre-production interview in the Daily Telegraph Opolais said of the role: ‘Just to sing it with a good voice is not enough, it asks tears from your soul. I am very emotional on stage and the music is so tender that I suffer for real when I am singing it.’ This was nowhere more evident than in ‘Un bel dì’ where the wistful honesty of her singing totally explicitly and uncompromisingly revealed her despair.
Leiser and Caurier manage to keep their production on the right side of sentimentality, but here it was Opolais who imbued it with true tragic authority. It was a pity then that her final death throes were exaggerated and unconvincing: Butterfly’s destiny has been foreshadowed, for example in her prostrate figure at the close of Act 1, and once the ornate tantō has done its fatal work, one might have hoped for a less melodramatic physical collapse to convey Butterfly’s ultimately destructive passivity.
Opolais is well-partnered by Brian Jagde’s Pinkerton. The American tenor’s interpretation of the Yankee Lieutenant as an insensitive young buck whose crime is carelessness rather than malice is convincing, even if it doesn’t allow for much emotional range. Jadge’s tenor is bright and powerful, and although there were a few over-reaching rasps in Act 1, his aria, ‘Addio fiorito asil’, was deeply moving, full of shame and sorrow.
The rest of the cast were solid but somewhat overshadowed by Opolais’s intensity. Albanian mezzo-soprano Enkelejda Shkosa was a feisty Suzuki, strong and rich of voice, and Jeremy White’s white-faced Bonze cursed chillingly. Gabriele Viviani made a fairly bland impact as Sharpless, but Carlo Bosi’s Goro was wily and snakily persistent and the Italian tenor grabbed his dramatic moments.
The single performer who matched Opolais’s fearless commitment was conductor Nicola Luisottiwho drew incredible incisive playing from the pit, alternating searing, fervent climaxes — the instrumental introduction did not waste any time in setting out Luisotti’s intentions — with moments of pristine tenderness. Together with Opolais, Luisotti conveyed an essential truth: that Butterfly’s tragedy is not caused by external forces of pillage and corruption but derives from within, from her own misplaced love.
Claire Seymour
Cast and production information:
Cio-Cio-San, Kristine Opolais; Pinkerton, Brian Jagde; Sharpless, Gabriele Viviani; Goro, Carlo Bosi; Suzuki, Enkelejda Shkosa; Bonze, Jeremy White; Yamadori, Yuriy Yurchuk; Imperial Commissioner Samuel Dale Johnson; Kate Pinkerton, Anush Hovhannisyan; Conductor, Nicola Luisotti; Directors Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier; Set designs, Christian Fenouillat; Costume designs, Agostino Cavalca; Lighting design, Christophe Forey; Orchestra and Chorus of the Royal Opera House. Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, Friday 20th March 2015.