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.
![Oliver Johnstone as Puck and Joan Iyiola as Hermia [Photo by Mark Douet]](http://www.operatoday.com/4-Garsington-Opera-RSC-Oliver-Johnstone-Puck-Joan-Iyiola-Hermia-credit-Mark-Douet.png)
Even by Shakespeare’s standards A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of his earlier plays, boasts a particularly fantastical plot involving a bunch of aristocrats (the Athenian Court of Theseus), feuding gods and goddesses (Oberon and Titania), ‘Rude Mechanicals’ (Bottom, Quince et al) and assorted faeries and spirits (such as Puck).
Its unique and compelling atmosphere has proved an irresistible magnet to generations of artists and to composers in successive centuries (Lampe,Mendelssohn and Britten inter alia).
On paper the concept of conflating Mendelssohn’s much-loved incidental music with an abridged version of the play itself must have appeared highly enticing, especially given the glorious woodland backdrop of Garsington Opera at Wormsley, and the participation of actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) as collaborators. In practice though the ‘wood magic’ was curiously muted and there was an over-riding sense of opportunities missed.
In part this may have been due to a pedestrian account of some of the best-known musical numbers, especially the Overture - a thing of wonder given that Mendelssohn was only 17 when he composed it - and the Scherzo and Wedding March. Curiously, some of the lesser numbers such as the Intermezzo and the various orchestral interjections worked rather better, but by then much of the hoped-for magic had been lost. However, the over-riding reason why the evening was so much less than the sum of its parts lay with the production itself.
Ross Armstrong as Lysander and Joan Iyiola as Hermia
Of course there is much to amuse an audience in A Midsummer Night’s Dream but to play it as largely undiluted slapstick as happened here is to miss the point. The antics of the “Rude Mechanicals” are undoubtedly slapstick pure and simple - and very good slapstick too - but the point is lost if all the characters are obliged to play to the gallery all the time. After all much of the play’s potency is generated by the juxtaposition of the imagined grandeur and mores of the court of Theseus (a place where girls face execution if they refuse to marry the man of their father’s choice) and the contrast with the earthy slapstick of Bottom, The Wall and the Lion, which was doubtless designed to appeal to Shakespeare’s ‘groundlings’. Add in the sub-plot of marital conflict between Oberon and Titania over her refusal to hand over an Indian boy page whom her husband lusts after and it will be pretty apparent that there is rather more to the play than mere comedy.
Oberon and Titania (David Rintoul and Marty Cruikshank respectively) are both fine actors with the required presence for these roles though not helped in Oberon’s case by being obliged to play the part bare-chested under a cream dinner jacket that made him look as though he had strayed in from the audience but forgotten his dress shirt. Oberon and Titania also double for Theseus and Hippolyta. The two young couples - Lysander (Ross Armstrong), Hermia (Joan Iyiola), Demetrius (Simon Manyonda) and Helena (Hedydd Dylan) who was the best of the quartet - were consistently obliged to ‘ham’ it up, rushing hither and thither across the bare stage like so many demented hamsters. Puck (Oliver Johnstone), also complete in evening dress, and looking for all the world like another slightly younger member of the full-rig audience, was obliged to cavort endlessly round the stage, even at times appearing to conduct the orchestra seated for no particularly obvious reason at the back of the stage.
Chris Lew Kum Hoi, Chris Nayak, Forbes Masson, Sophie Khan Levy, Jake Mann, and Timothy Speyer
The cast of ‘Rude Mechanicals’ Quince, Bottom, Flute, Snug and Starveling who double as the players in Pyramus & Thisbe are, of course, obliged to ‘ham’ it up quite mercilessly and they did so with utmost relish, especially Forbes Masson, the ‘Scottish’ Bottom who bore a passing resemblance to George Galloway.
Other missed opportunities. Leaving aside the complete lack of anything resembling a set and the almost obligatory muddle about costumes - basically anyone could wear anything they liked as long as it had nothing whatsoever to do with the period in which the play is set - a fundamental point about A Midsummer Night’s Dream is that most of it takes place in a dark wood. Garsington’s sliding stage doors open straight out onto the woods beyond but this was left unopened rather than used to embed the play in the surrounding landscape.
Finally, the music itself. There are particular problems to performing early romantic music - Weber, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Berlioz - on contemporary instruments because they are so different in power and especially in timbre. These are problems which have been addressed with some success by groups such as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment or the Orchestra of the New Queens Hall. Garsington’s dryish acoustic doesn’t help, especially when the orchestra is seated on stage. To be frank, on this occasion under Douglas Boyd some of the Garsington Opera Orchestra’s playing was distinctly rough and ready - surely it should be possible to get the Overture’s opening and closing chords together and in tune, neither of which happened here - whilst the Scherzo lumbered rather than levitating with a gossamer lightness and the Wedding March was hammered out with the kind of vehemence more appropriate to Mahler’s 5th (I was reminded of sitting in on a rehearsal for Schubert’s Unfinished with Kurt Sanderling who at one point turned to the trombones and said “Never, ever that sound in Schubert”). At least Garsington’s chorus and soloists Anna Sideris and Catherine Backhouse did well with the ‘Fairy’ chorus, “Ye spotted snakes” lulling Titania to sleep.
David Rintoul as Theseus, Forbes Masson as Bottom, and Marty Cruickshank as Hippolyta
Sadly, to this listener on this occasion the combination of abridged play and Mendelssohn’s music was unconvincing and a disappointment although in future I shall happily return to Shakespeare’s play, to Benjamin Britten’s opera, even to the ballet … and of course to Mendelssohn’s magical incidental music. There are few more memorable moment in all music than the end of the overture with the strings arching cantilena, a musical benediction made flesh, before those final four simple wind chords? Other people may feel very differently about this production and if they want to make their own minds up it will be repeated this coming week over several nights at the Southbank Centre’s QEH (22nd - 24th July) and then for a single performance at Stratford (26th July).
Douglas Cooksey