‘A brief history of song’ is the subtitle of the 2020 Oxford Lieder Festival (10th-17th October), which will present an ambitious, diverse and imaginative programme of 40 performances and events.
‘Signor Piatti in a fantasia on themes from Beatrice di Tenda had also his triumph. Difficulties, declared to be insuperable, were vanquished by him with consummate skill and precision. He certainly is amazing, his tone magnificent, and his style excellent. His resources appear to be inexhaustible; and altogether for variety, it is the greatest specimen of violoncello playing that has been heard in this country.’
Eboracum Baroque is a flexible period instrument ensemble, comprising singers and instrumentalists, which was founded in York - as its name suggests, Eboracum being the name of the Roman fort on the site of present-day York - while artistic director Chris Parsons was at York University.
‘There could be no happier existence. Each morning he composed something beautiful and each evening he found the most enthusiastic admirers. We gathered in his room - he played and sang to us - we were enthusiastic and afterwards we went to the tavern. We hadn’t a penny but were blissfully happy.’
When soprano Eleanor Dennis was asked - by Ashok Klouda, one of the founders and co-directors of the Highgate International Chamber Music Festival - to perform some of Beethoven’s Scottish Songs Op.108 at this year’s Festival, as she leafed through the score to make her selection the first thing that struck her was the beauty of the poetry.
“At the start, one knows ‘bits’ of it,” says tenor Mark Padmore, somewhat wryly, when I meet him at the Stage Door of the Royal Opera House where the tenor has just begun rehearsals for David McVicar’s new production of Death in Venice, which in November will return Britten’s opera to the ROH stage for the first time since 1992.
“Trust me, I’m telling you stories …”
When British opera director Nina Brazier tries to telephone me from Frankfurt, where she is in the middle of rehearsals for a revival of Florentine Klepper’s 2015 production of Martinů’s Julietta, she finds herself - to my embarrassment - ‘blocked’ by my telephone preference settings. The technical hitch is soon solved; but doors, in the UK and Europe, are certainly very much wide open for Nina, who has been described by The Observer as ‘one of Britain’s leading young directors of opera’.
“We need to stop talking about ‘diversity’ and think instead about ‘inclusivity’,” says Bill Bankes-Jones, when we meet to talk about the forthcoming twelfth Tête à Tête Opera Festival which runs from 24th July to 10th August.
The young Hong Kong-born British composer Dani Howard is having quite a busy year.
For Peter Sellars, Mozart’s Idomeneo is a ‘visionary’ work, a utopian opera centred on a classic struggle between a father and a son written by an angry 25-year-old composer who wanted to show the musical establishment what a new generation could do.
“Physiognomy, psychology and technique.” These are the three things that determine the way a singer’s sound is produced, so Ken Querns-Langley explains when we meet in the genteel surroundings of the National Liberal Club, where the training programmes, open masterclasses and performances which will form part the third London Bel Canto Festival will be held from 5th-24th August.
“Sop. Page, attendant on the King.” So, reads a typical character description of the loyal page Oscar, whose actions, in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, unintentionally lead to his monarch’s death. He reveals the costume that King Gustavo is wearing at the masked ball, thus enabling the monarch’s secretary, Anckarstroem, to shoot him. The dying King falls into the faithful Oscar’s arms.
A mournful Princess forced by her father into an arranged marriage. A Prince who laments that no-one loves him for himself, and so exchanges places with his aide-de-camp. A melancholy dreamer who dons a deceased jester’s motley and finds himself imprisoned for impertinence.
‘Aloneness’ does not immediately seem a likely or fruitful subject for an opera. But, loneliness and isolation - an individual’s inner sphere, which no other human can truly know or enter - are at the core of Yasushi Inoue’s creative expression.
What links Wagner’s Das Rheingold, Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Cavalli’s La Calisto? It sounds like the sort of question Paul Gambaccini might pose to contestants on BBC Radio 4’s music quiz, Counterpoint.
Though she won praise from the literary greats of her day, including Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound and Siegfried Sassoon, the Victorian poet Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was little-known among the contemporary reading public. When she visited the Poetry Bookshop of Harold Monro, the publisher of her first and only collection, The Farmer’s Bride (1916), she was asked, “Are you Charlotte Mew?” Her reply was characteristically diffident and self-deprecatory: “I’m sorry to say I am.”
“It lives!” So cries Victor Frankenstein in Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein on beholding the animation of his creature for the first time. Peake might equally have been describing the novel upon which he had based his 1823 play which, staged at the English Opera House, had such a successful first run that it gave rise to fourteen further adaptations of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novella in the following three years.
It sounds like a question from a BBC Radio 4 quiz show: what links Handel’s cantata for solo contralto, La Lucrezia, Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, and the post-punk band Joy Division?
The first two instalments of the Academy of Ancient Music’s ‘Purcell trilogy’ at the Barbican Hall have posed plentiful questions - creative, cultural and political.
Kathleen Kelly is an internationally renowned pianist, coach, conductor, and master teacher. She was the first woman and first American named Director of Musical Studies at the Vienna State Opera.
While there, she was the recitative accompanist for new productions of Mozart's Don Giovanni and Le nozze di Figaro. She has curated recital series at both the Vienna State Opera and Houston Grand Opera. Last year she joined the faculty of the University of Michigan as that school’s first Coach and Conductor of Opera. She will conduct Cosi fan tutte there in March 2016.
MN: Kathleen Kelly, does one call you Maestra or Maestro?
KK: I prefer Maestra. Either word means teacher. When I was studying, the convention was to call every conductor “Maestro.” “Maestra is what you call your elementary school teacher!” said one of my mentors. Well, not if that teacher is a man! In my opinion, that old convention was a way of saying that men should not be teachers of little children, and women shouldn’t be on the podium. Old sexism was reflected in the language, but the language itself doesn’t make the sexism. The Italian word for teacher is a noun that shows gender, nothing more. And my gender is female, so I’m proudly Maestra Kelly.
Classical music is an inherently conservative art that preserves the music and traditions of former times. Maybe that is why change is so slow in our profession. But change does happen! I remember when I was ten years old, my Lutheran Church in Northfield, Minnesota had its first female pastor. I remember all the talk, pro and con, about her. Such a controversy—and now, a generation later, female pastors are everywhere. Classical music is slower than the Lutheran Church. Wrap your head around that!
MN: Tell me about how you got started as a musician.
KK: Growing up in Northfield was such an important part of my musical life. The first great music I heard was from the St. Olaf Choir. I loved its sound quality and the expressive way the singers used words. We moved to Phoenix, Arizona, when I was a junior in high school. After that, I attended Arizona State University from which I received my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in piano performance. I feel fortunate to have gone to college in the nineteen eighties when tuition was low. To support myself, I had the usual array of freelance piano gigs, voice lessons and church jobs. I always found myself drawn to work with singers.
MN: Are there some artists of the past whose work has influenced you?
KK: I’m joining a not-very-exclusive club when I say Leonard Bernstein. He commanded all styles. He was a fantastic pianist, a great musical theater composer, and a wonderful conductor of serious music. He was a renowned music educator. He wanted to bring knowledge of the repertoire that he cared about to everyone. He remains the great beacon of the classical tradition in American culture. Who does not hold him in front as a standard?
MN: Who were your most influential teachers?
KK: One was Patrick Summers, the artistic and general director of Houston Grand Opera. He was the very young music director of the San Francisco Opera Center when I joined that company as an apprentice. He was instrumental in introducing me to opera. I had always played for singers and I was a good pianist, but I didn’t know the opera repertoire or how to approach it as a coach. He was one of my most important mentors in that regard. He taught me how to study a score, study a language, and study a character. He showed me how to put it all in historical context. Also, I learned a great deal from Kathy Cathcart who directed the Center. Later, I worked with James Levine at the Met and learned even more from him.
Sylvia Debenport was the head of the opera workshop at ASU during the late seventies and eighties. I played for a couple of operas during my last year at that school. That is where the opera bug first bit me. Sylvia was a magnificent teacher and one of the most innovative that I have ever seen. She did not merely translate. She used specific coaching and acting techniques to consolidate a language into students’ bodies. A true taskmaster, she had very high standards. She was kind but exacting. I admired her enormously and she remains a model for me.
MN: Where do you now teach?
KK: Now I am very happy to be the first Conductor of Opera at the University of Michigan. I also coach at the Michigan Opera Theater’s new resident artist program, which is right in the university’s backyard. I’m also a regular guest coach for the Domingo-Cafritz Program at the Washington National Opera. I regularly make my way around to YAPs at Los Angeles Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, and Wolf Trap. Now I’m adding universities to that itinerary: Vanderbilt, Baylor, Western Ontario, Toronto. I love being the regular teacher in one place, and the visitor in many others. It keeps the blood flowing!
MN: What did you learn from your teachers that you are passing on to your students?
KK: I want my students to engage in a successful method of combining their text with its music. They need to understand how the composer was inspired by the story, the words, and how the words drove the musical line. Human beings have so many coloristic and expressive resources that are hard wired in us. Think of how much variety there is in the expression of human speech. We don’t plan that variety. It comes out as we are inspired by what we are saying as each of us follows our own creative spark. In a way, as re-creative musicians, we work backwards from the result to the inspiration. We replant it back into all those hard wired processes. What we want to have come out the other side should feel like a spontaneous creation. It’s hard work but it’s endlessly interesting. It’s the work of a lifetime. If I can help people engage in that, to me that is the essence of teaching and collaboration.
MN: How much work did you have to do to make Emmerich Kálmán’s Arizona Lady ready for performance by Arizona Opera?
KK: A lot! The premiere in 1953 occurred during a still-difficult time in post-war Europe. There were things to be addressed in the orchestration that certainly were addressed at the premiere but which weren’t reflected in the orchestral material. There were problems with making the piece ready for American audiences, too. The second act has a ton of dialogue and very little music. That can work in a small theater, with stars that are well loved by the audience, but in the big barns where we perform in the United States it could be deadly!
For Arizona, we consolidated some characters and eliminated others. We moved a duet from Act I to Act II and interpolated some music from the appropriate era into a party scene, much as many companies do with Die Fledermaus. I adapted almost all the dialogue and lyrics into English, but with the help of the poet and fellow ASU alumnus, Alberto Rios, we also had some dialogue and lyrics in Spanish for the Mexican characters, and left some in the original German for our heroine, Lona. All of this was done with the goal of helping the audience connect with the piece in a more personal way, which is part of the tradition of operetta.
MN: Do you have an anecdote from the “Opera Wars” for us?
KK: I don’t like to tell tales out of school! We’re so intimate in our work with one another, that we have the chance to see each other at our most vulnerable, and sometimes at our worst. A creative rehearsal space has to have room for that, and I feel strongly that we must protect this. I will take this opportunity to talk about one thing, which is the increased tightening of rehearsal time in our profession. Much of that is simply due to financial constraints. However, another factor is plain old boring money. Singers and conductors at the top of the profession, because they can draw audience, have the chance to fit as much work in as possible. They often join the rehearsal process late. This forces the music toward an ever more safe and conservative middle road. There’s no substitute for taking time to know each other, experiment, take chances, fail, and find the road. The world is a huge and diverse place and there are so many interesting artists out there. I hope we continue to invest in creating chances for their voices to be heard.