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.
![Camilla Tilling [Photo courtesy of Harrison Parrott]](http://www.operatoday.com/Camilla_Tilling.png)
With its City of Light presentations, honoring Paris and French inspired music, the Los Angeles Philharmonic offered its public an extraordinary concert performance of a unique opera — Pelléas et Mélisande by Claude Debussy.
How unique was this performance? Well, if you missed this Pelléas et Mélisande, you missed the only production of the work in a major American house in the past two years. And none is projected here through 2018.
Pelléas et Mélisande is based on a play of the same name by Belgian born, Maurice Maeterlinck. It was first performed in 1893. Maeterlinck, a prolific and popular writer in his day, was a symbolist, as were many of France's greatest poets of the age including Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine and Rimbaud. These symbolist poets, who believed that music was the most direct route to the emotions, strove to write musical verse- and in fact their poetry inspired not only Debussy, but composers - Gounod, Ravel, Fauré and others - to create a new and enchanting age of French art songs, known as Mélodie What does symbolism in an opera look like?
Well, an outline of the story will help. Of course, there will be a love triangle. But the first thing to note in this opera is that first person we see and hear in the opening scene is a man, who, like Dante, in the first lines of the Inferno, suddenly realizes that smack in the middle of his life, he is lost in dark woods. This is Prince Golaud, who immediately hears weeping and encounters another lost person - Mélisande, a beautiful maiden with cascading golden hair. She has just dropped a jeweled crown, which an unknown “he” had given her, into a nearby pond. Still weeping, she tells Golaud that everyone in the distant land she came from has hurt her in some way. She refuses his offer to retrieve the crown, by threatening to leap into the water herself, if he does so. Golaud, who is widowed, eventually marries Melisande. The pair return to Golaud's homeland, Allemonde, where Mélisande, who has still not told Golaud anything about her past, will meet his mother, Geneviève, his blind grandfather King Arkel, his little son, Yniold and his younger half brother, Pelléas. Allemonde is a land of despair, poverty and famine. The castle is surrounded by dark gardens and endless forests, though the sea is visible from a nearby coast. Within the castle itself, Pelléas' father lies seriously ill. He will recover, but the mysterious young woman with cascading golden tresses will not bring hoped for joy and light to the castle. Its gloom will devour her.
Symbolism? Whereas Golaud and the young lovers, Pelléas and Mélisande suffer through experiences that every other operatic love triangle suffers: love, lost love, unrequited love, hate, rage, fear, betrayal - what makes this trio unique is that none of them seems to know where they are, who they are, what they want. They do not understand themselves, and certainly not each other, but seem suspended in some floating space. However, the chracters in this opera have some strangely interrelated characteristics. Whereas King Arkel is blind, Mélisande's eyes are never closed unless she's sleeping. In an early encounter Pelléas takes Mélisande to the once miraculous Fountain of the Blind, no longer valued because Arkel has lost his sight. The ability and inability “to see” in all its meanings is of primary concern to both Maeterlinck and Debussy. The word yeux, eyes is spoken nineteen times in this libretto, aveugle, blind, nine times.
And we come across strangely related interactions. In a rendezvous with Pelléas, Mélisande drops the gold wedding ring Golaud had given her into a deep well. At that very moment Golaud is thrown from his horse and injured.
Maeterlinck had an oft quoted credo “Art always works by detour and never acts directly. “ Apparently, the musical detour to Mélisande, a woman with no known background, proved puzzling to Debussy, who wrote to a friend of the difficulty of creating music from “nothingness”. Fortunately, he succeeded. Perhaps he had learned of a scholar's view of Maeterlinck's work, which asserts that Mélisande had been one of Bluebeard's wives, who escaped with a detested crown.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic has been daring in its attempts to present opera and other important vocal works in its theatrically-challenged space. Whereas the Mozart/Daponte operas sometimes seemed shoehorned into inadequate space, this Pelléas et Mélisande with a larger cast than Cosi fan tutte, was enhanced by the thoughtful restraints of its semi- staged concert presentation - which allowed the orchestra - the musical heart and voice of the opera - to carry Debussy's sensual score to the audience's heart.
The production, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and directed by David Edwards, was previously presented in London's Royal Festival Hall in 2014 with the same superb baritone leads. High baritone, Stéphane Degout was an ardent Pelléas and bass baritone, Laurent Naouri ranged superbly through Golaud's towering rages and sorrowful regrets. Camilla Trilling was a clear voiced, vulnerable Mélisande, soprano Chloé Briot, a captivating Yniold. Well known veteran artists, Dame Felicity Palmer and Sir Willard White, sang Geneviève and Arkel, respectively.
Director David Edwards added static nude blindfolded figures at the rear of Disney Hall to reflect the often voiced concerns about blindness, as well as to symbolize the devastation of the land. They enhanced both the depth of the stage and depth of despair in Allemonde and its castle.
But it was Eka-Pekka Salonen's command of the orchestra that illuminated the brilliance and mystery of this opera in new ways. It seemed as though Salonen was making a point of keeping an almost audible beat going beneath the restless wash of orchestral colors. Salonen, who has spoken of his love for this score, added a narrator to both productions, who read text drawn from Maeterlinck's writing. I'm not sure the words were helpful, but actress, Kate Burton's narration acted as a kind of frame, that helped set the tale unfolding behind her, in a land of make believe.
Estelle Gilson
Cast and production information:
Pelléas: Stephan Degout; Mélisande: Camilla Tilling; Golaud: Laurent Naouri; Arkel: Willard White; Geneviève: Felicity Palmer; Yniold: Chloé Briot; Physician: Nicholas Brownlee; Narrator: Kate Burton; Conductor: Esa-Pekka Salonen; Director: David Edwards; Lighting designer: Colin Grenfell.