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.
Dutch National Opera’s Khovanshchina’s finest asset was Anita Rachvelishvili’s vocally ravishing Marfa. The darkly opalescent Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra came in a close second.
Modest Mussorgsky’s byzantine Khovanshchina fictionalises historical power struggles from which Tsar Peter, later the Great, emerges as the victor. Its plot, a series of episodic scenes, centres around Prince Ivan Khovansky’s attempt to topple the Romanovs and put his son Andrey on the throne. His muscle are the Streltsy, elite guardsmen who have degenerated into a drunken, plundering menace. The Khovanskys oppose the progressive movement, represented by Prince Vasily Golitsin, who supports Peter’s reforms towards a Westernised Russia. As leader of the Old Believers, the enigmatic Dosifey also opposes religious and political reform, but abhors the Streltsy’s excesses. Inhabiting an ambiguous moral landscape, these characters’ motivations are often clouded, making them both intriguing and difficult to fathom.
Director Christof Loy’s production opens with a tableau vivant of a painting by Vasily Surikov called the Morning of the Streltsy’s Execution (1881), which depicts Peter’s barbaric annihilation of the insurgent militia, an event that occurred outside the opera’s time frame. Saturated in golden light, as in the original, the figures in the painting doff their historical costumes and become our contemporaries. The golden light ebbs away and returns only when the painting is pieced together again at the end. The concept lucidly connects the 17th century to our time, but relies heavily on strong singing actors. Once the painting dissolves, the sets consist of starkly lit monochrome walls, and three hours is a long time to be looking at vacant walls.
Anita Rachvelishvili (Marfa), Maxim Aksenov (Vorst Andrej Chovanski), Koor van De Nationale Opera [Photo by Monika Rittershaus]
Burdened with sustaining dramatic interest, not all the singers met the challenge. It was the insistent surge in the orchestra, who poured out delicate and mysterious tinctures, which unfailingly kept up the tension. Conductor Ingo Metzmacher beautifully captured both the heady Eastern perfume and the groundswell of ancient tides in Dmitri Shostakovich’s orchestration of the score, which Mussorgsky left unfinished. A reinforced brass section provided excellent military display. In the stupendous choral scenes, the Dutch National Chorus was on its best form when mixed. All-male numbers lacked a Slavic full-toned bass and the women’s chorus entertaining Khovansky was marred by strident top notes. In their best scenes, however, most notably as the Old Believers, the chorus matched the orchestra in highly evocative soundscapes.
Transplanting the action to the present worked only partially. Khovansky’s harem as a nightclub, where underage sex slaves are coerced into a clumsy Dance of the Persian Slaves, was compellingly disturbing. On the other hand, a group of supposedly illiterate office workers bullying a Scribe, portrayed with avid self-importance and reedy tenor by Andrey Popov, into reading them a notice board, is the kind of incongruence that causes a mental short circuit. Some symbols remained unclear, maybe on purpose. Did the pigtailed little girl instrumental in Khovansky’s assassination personify Russia’s innocence?
The cast was more satisfying than the staging. Well-sung supporting roles included the orotund-voiced, boisterous soldiers of Vitali Roznyko and Sulkhan Jaiani. Acting credibly as the drunken Strelets Kuzka, Vasily Efimov wielded a puzzling tenor, with a breathless, small middle range and brawny loud notes. Bass Dimitry Ivashchenko, announced as suffering from a cold, sang Ivan Khovansky full-bodiedly and securely, but needed to tread carefully, sacrificing a degree of expression. As his son Andrey, tenor Maxim Aksenov started out with faltering pitch, but improved later on. Orlin Anastassov gave a frustrating performance as the sect leader Dosifey. His luxurious bass fitted the role like a glove, but he alternated splendid singing and vivid moments with gurgled vocalism and monotony. In the end, his Dosifey lacked the dark charisma that would persuade his disciples to commit mass suicide.
Bass Gábor Bretz’s first appearance as the pro-Romanov nobleman Shaklovity was vocally prepossessing but rather featureless. Fortunately, he caught dramatic fire in his great aria bemoaning Russia’s suffering. The other incendiary performances came from tenor Kurt Streit as the agitated Golitsin, his bleached high notes registering rising panic, and the three women. Svetlana Ignatovich left a radiant impression in the short role of Emma. Some shrillness in her high notes suited the character, who was being set upon by the lecherous Andrey. Olga Savova was equally arresting as the judgmental Susanna. Her confrontation with fellow Old Believer Marfa was a theatrical peak. In fact, every scene with Anita Rachvelishvili in it set off the dramatic seismograph. Her fascinating Marfa was complex in voice and action, and completely mesmerising, longing for Andrey in gorgeous mezza voce, and terrifying Golitsin in her quaking fortune-telling scene. With her voluptuous contralto base from which her voice curls smokily up the scale, Ms Rachvelishvili was born to sing this role. Whether she stood in front of a black or white wall, when she sang the whole stage was aswirl with colour.
Jenny Camilleri
Cast and production information:
Prince Ivan Khovansky— Dimitry Ivashchenko, Prince Andrey Khovansky — Maxim Aksenov, Prince Vasily Golitsin — Kurt Streit, Boyar Fyodor Shaklovity — Gábor Bretz, Dosifey — Orlin Anastassov, Marfa — Anita Rachvelishvili, Emma — Svetlana Ignatovich, Susanna — Olga Savova, Scribe — Andrey Popov , Kuzka — Vasily Efimov, Varsonofiev — Roger Smeets, Streshnev — Morschi Franz, First Strelets — Vitali Roznyko, Second Strelets — Sulkhan Jaiani, Prince Golitsin’s Servant — Richard Prada, Principal Dancer — Gyorgy Puchalski, Conductor — Ingo Metzmacher, Director — Christof Loy, Set Designer — Johannes Leiacker, Costume Designer — Ursula Renzenbrink, Lighting Designer — Reinhard Traub, Choreographer — Thomas Wilhelm, Dramaturge — Katja Hagedorn, Dutch National Opera Choir, New Amsterdam Children’s Choir, Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra. Seen at Dutch National Opera & Ballet, Amsterdam, Saturday, 27th February 2016.