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.
Luisa Miller sits on the fringes of the repertory, and since its introduction into the modern repertory in the 1970’s it comes around every 15 or so years. Unfortunately this 2015 San Francisco occasion has not bothered to rethink this remarkable opera.
Remarkable because it is not the Giuseppe Verdi of his masterpieces, but it is a transitional Verdi who was leaving behind the blood and thunder of political strife to embrace the social tensions brought about by the revolutions of 1848!
Luisa Miller is a play by Friedrich von Schiller premiered in 1784, as was, by the way, Beaumarchais’ Le Mariage de Figaro — speaking of social tensions. Note that only later Schiller’s play was renamed Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love), the title under which it is now obsessively studied as a theatrical masterpiece.
Luisa Miller by Verdi is not a theatrical masterpiece, nor is it even competent theater. Schiller’s dense play was reduced by Verdi’s librettist Salvadore Cammarano (who returns later this SFO season as the librettist of Lucia di Lammermoor) to a series of commonplace operatic situations that are easy to sing about but very hard to construe into a comprehensible story much less constitute a Figaro-like social document.
You do hear the Verdi of Traviata and Rigoletto, even some Boccanegra but mostly you hear the thunder of Nabucco, Attila and Macbeth (or maybe just now it was the conducting). It is music that in itself is foreign to the Verdi’s emerging dramatic interests, enthusiasms hardly supported by this poor libretto. Nonetheless it is Verdi and this a priori makes it great music waiting for a production that might at least try to make it make dramatic sense.
It is an essentially bel canto libretto thus Luisa Miller is about singing. Unfortunately the San Francisco Opera bar was set very high back in 1974 when Luisa was sung by Katia Ricciarelli (a prompter from La Scala was brought in for these performances remarked “che scuola! “ or “what stylish singing” about la Ricciarelli). Furthermore the Rodolfo was the young Luciano Pavarotti.
Leah Crocetto as Luisa, Michael Fabbiano as Rodolfo
For this Luisa Miller SFO cast its Verdi soprano prodigal daughter Leah Crocetto who acquitted herself very well and sang a quite beautiful “Tu puniscimi, o Signore.” Miss Crocetto has little spinto (push) therefore little drama in her voice, and I missed the soprano voice sailing over the top of the opera’s almost magnificent finales. Rodolfo aka Carlo was the Met’s prodigal tenor son Michael Fabbiano whose lighter lyric voice makes him choose his Verdi roles carefully. I would have wished for a somewhat larger and richer voice capable of more colors to relieve the vocal monotony of this long role.
Both Mr. Fabbiano and Miss Crocetto are fine, well prepared singers who embellish their performances with lots of acting. Here the acting seemed more like flailing as there was no apparent context. Ukrainian baritone Vitaliy Bilyy was Miller, Luisa’s father (in Schiller he is a musician, in Verdi an old soldier). Mr. Bilyy too is a quite fine singer who did only what he is supposed to do — sing! He offered little musical or dramatic personality, nor was any evidently expected or needed in this production.
Bass Andrea Silvestrelli sang Wurm who along with baritone Daniel Sumegi as Count Walter were the villains of the opera. Mr. Silvestrelli’s black colored voice and threatening presence have established him as the perfect Sparafucile (Rigoletto). As a bel canto villain I would have wished for a smoother, more beautiful voice. Russian mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Semechuk was the villainess Federica, the production itself made little demand of her and musically she was trounced by the conducting.
San Francisco Opera music director Nicola Luisotti was in the pit imposing his usual extreme tempos. He gave no freedom to his singers for stylistic expansion, thus he was free to drive his musical points, points that were in fact seldom singerly. As usual his finales were noisily magnificent, but by then it was hard to care.
Production by Francesca Zambello, Set design by Michael Yeargan
San Francisco Opera revived the fifteen year old production (2000) created by Francesca Zambello and designer Michael Yeargan. Both Mme. Zambello and Mr. Yeargan have had long careers in which they have perused virtually every passing fashion to the degree that it is hard to identify an individual style for either of them.
In the case of this Luisa Miller designer Yeargan created a hard edged, highly artificial environment in which Verdi attempts to challenge long established social mores. It is hard to know if the long, thin aluminum truss thrust towards the audience was the rigid arm of an antiquated social structure, or what. It is hard to know if the vertical and horizontal separations effected from time to time in the cyclorama were fissures that portended change, or what. The horse? It was all lovely to look at, but Luisa Miller is hardly a lovely opera.
Michael Milenski
Cast and production information:
Luisa Miller: Leah Crocetto; Rodolfo: Michael Fabiano; Miller: Vitaliy Bilyy; Count Walter: Daniel Sumegi; Federica: Ekaterina Semenchuk; Wurm: Andrea Silvestrelli; Laura: Jacqueline Piccolino; Peasant: Christopher Jackson. Chorus and Orchestra of the San Francisco Opera. Conductor: Nicola Luisotti; Production: Francesca Zambello; Associate Director: Laurie Feldman; Set Designer: Michael Yeargan; Costume Designer: Dunya Ramicova; Lighting Designer: Mark McCullough. War Memorial Opera House, September 16, 2015.