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.
The Sixteen continues its exploration of Henry Purcell’s Welcome Songs for Charles II. As with Robert King’s pioneering Purcell series begun over thirty years ago for Hyperion, Harry Christophers is recording two Welcome Songs per disc.
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.
In February this year, Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho made a highly lauded debut recital at Wigmore Hall - a concert which both celebrated Opera Rara’s 50th anniversary and honoured the career of the Italian soprano Rosina Storchio (1872-1945), the star of verismo who created the title roles in Leoncavallo’s La bohème and Zazà, Mascagni’s Lodoletta and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.
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.
Collapsology. Or, perhaps we should use the French word ‘Collapsologie’ because this is a transdisciplinary idea pretty much advocated by a series of French theorists - and apparently, mostly French theorists. It in essence focuses on the imminent collapse of modern society and all its layers - a series of escalating crises on a global scale: environmental, economic, geopolitical, governmental; the list is extensive.
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.’
Amongst an avalanche of new Mahler recordings appearing at the moment (Das Lied von der Erde seems to be the most favoured, with three) this 1991 Mahler Second from the 2nd Kassel MahlerFest is one of the more interesting releases.
‘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.’
If there is one myth, it seems believed by some people today, that probably needs shattering it is that post-war recordings or performances of Wagner operas were always of exceptional quality. This 1949 Hamburg Tristan und Isolde is one of those recordings - though quite who is to blame for its many problems takes quite some unearthing.
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."
‘Stay away from doctors; they are bad for your health.’ This seems to be the central message of L’Ospedale - a one-hour opera by an unknown seventeenth-century composer, with a libretto by Antonio Abati which presents a satirical critique of the medical profession of the day and those who had the misfortune to need curative treatment for their physical and mental ills.
What is astonishing about this anonymous opera, which was rediscovered in the Marciana Library in 2003 by musicologist Naomi Matsumoto and superbly presented here by Solomon’s Knot baroque collective, is that Abati’s biting invective is so strikingly modern, and topical. With NHS junior doctors set to go on strike three times next month, issues such as the state funding of the health service, doctors’ pay and working hours, and patient waiting times have never been more hotly disputed in the UK. Moreover, the creeping privatisation, fragmentation and destabilisation of the NHS, in the guise of euphemistically termed ‘efficiency savings’, has brought the ‘profitability’ debate to the fore, and left many fearing that those unable to pay for healthcare will be vulnerable to growing health inequality. As Abati’s libretto asks, ‘Who can find a cure for poverty and desperation?’
The action takes place in an ospedale, a type of charitable institution which in seventeenth-century Italy formed part of the ‘welfare system’: ospedali were usually attached to churches, and they housed and treated those with ailments and social conditions that made them undesirable to the rest of society - such as lepers, syphilitics, abandoned children and orphans, prostitutes and the homeless. (Fittingly, one role of the ospedali was to educate their patients, and this involved musical education; musical ensembles, cori, were formed and these gave performances designed to raise funds and attract sponsors, with the result that in the in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the grandest of the ospedali were at the core of Venetian culture.)
In Abati’s shabby ospedale, four patients languish amid squalor, seeking cures for their varied ailments: unrequited love, professional disappointment, mental deficiency and poverty. (It says much for the potency of the purse in quelling the wealthy hypochondriac’s neurosis that it is only the last of these four ailments which proves truly incurable.) They await the arrival of a new doctor whose medications and remedies will, they hope, restore them to health; but the charlatan’s idiosyncratic treatments have unexpected and unwished-for side-effects, and the sufferers risk losing more than their money.
This is Solomon’s Knot’s first fully staged production. Director James Hurley’s staging updates the action to the present, as immediately confirmed by a supplementary Prologue in which we seem to be eavesdropping on a disingenuous circumlocution by the Minister for Health to the House of Commons, as he justifies the need, in this age of austerity, for reductions to the health budget, and calls for greater efficiency within the NHS as well as an enlarged role for the ‘Big Society’ in order to alleviate the potentially adverse effects of the government’s reforms. (The Minister returns in an Epilogue, to announce his resignation in the light of the first-rate achievements of professional medics.)
The production was sung in Italian with English surtitles, and I found myself wishing that my own Italian was less rudimentary so that I might have a better appreciation of how far the double (even triple), entendres were evidence of Amati’s wit, or were the result of the ‘transcriptions, translations and workshop projects’ which Solomon’s Knot have undertaken during the past two years to bring the opera ‘back to life’. Either way, the satire was certainly au courant, the gags inventive, and the polemic provocative.
Wilton’s Music Hall was the perfect venue. Situated in the historic East End, it is the world’s oldest music hall. For many decades the Hall has been afflicted with damp and dereliction; a flyer for a 1997 production of The Wasteland, directed by Deborah Warner and performed by Fiona Shaw, advised mid-winter visitors to the unheated hall to ‘please dress warmly’, to which a journalist added ‘wear hard hats’. But, despite the welcome completion in September this year of long-running renovations, the makeover has retained the genuine historic fabric and, sitting in the dimly lit, smoke-filled hall (lighting by Ben Pickersgill) it was easy to imagine oneself in an insalubrious infirmary - historic or modern. Rachel Szmukler’s set consisted of a curtained hospital bed, towering piles of orange garbage bags containing medical waste (and new ‘inmates’’ personal belongings), and a trolley laden with urine samples. The harsh glare of strip lights and a glowing vending machine - peddling sugar foodstuffs unlikely to nourish the needy - spread an unforgiving glare. Performing in the round can have its pitfalls though, and while the sight-lines from my seat were superb, others seated on the opposite side of the arena may have found the frequent drawing of the curtain around the operating couch to be frustratingly obstructive.
The quack doctor - actually the disguised Minister for Health, undertaking secret scrutiny of his ailing health care system - attends to the four patients in turn. Rebecca Moon light, clear soprano conveyed profound depths of passion during Innamorato’s melodramatic tale of unreciprocated lesbian desire (presumably the role was originally sung by a castrato?); her lovelorn lament matched Monteverdi for rhetorical urgency, but the doctor was not touched by her distress, basically advising that she should ‘get over it’. Overlooked for career advancement, Cortigiano may be suffering from work-related stress, but tenor Thomas Herford did not let the City boy’s anxieties infect his own lyrical elegance. Countertenor Michal Czerniawski’s Matto was the embodiment of hyper-manic instability, fluctuating between insight and insanity, the latter moments enhanced by some inane shrieking. Nicholas Merryweather displayed characteristic dramatic confidence and vocal sureness as Povero, whose inability to pay the doctor’s fees exposes the latter’s avarice. Merryweather’s well-centred baritone made for a pleasing contrast with Czerniawski, and provided a strong foundation in the lively ensembles. As the fraudulent physician, Jonathan Sells showed considerable comic nous, while Lucy Page demonstrated a crystalline soprano as the put-upon hospital orderly, Forestiero.
The score alternates arias - madrigals, laments, balletti - arioso, ensembles and spoken dialogue, and is melodious, briskly energetic and inventive. To the mix were added two madrigals by Gesualdo, whose bitter-sweet dissonances and chromatic lamentations perfectly complemented the mood of emotional disturbance and anguish. James Halliday drew superb playing from the small instrumental ensemble: rhythmically alert, vigorous and colourful.
Music, medicine and madness are a potent mix. Indeed, my guest for the evening was a retired psychiatrist who has just published a study of operatic heroes who might be considered to exhibit a range of personality disorders (and who, ironically, undertook his training at the nearby London Hospital). This production by Solomon’s Knot perfectly balanced satire and silliness; it was an earnest critique of the medical profession, historic and modern, and also exuberant fun. It took risks, and while not all of them came off, it communicated directly and with thought-provoking candour.
Claire Seymour
Forestiero - Lucy Page, Povero - Nicholas Merryweather, Matto - Michal Czerniawski, Innamorato -Rebecca Moon, Cortigiano - Thomas Herford, Medico - Jonathan Sells; Director - James Hurley, Musical Director - James Halliday, Designer - Rachel Szmukler, Lighting Designer - Ben Pickersgill.