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."
It was the fifth Proms Chamber Music concert at Cadogan Hall this season, and we were celebrating Shakespeare’s 400th. And, given the extent and range of the composers and artists, and the diversity and profundity of the musical achievement inspired by the Bard, we could probably keep celebrating in this fashion ad infinitum.
On this occasion, the vocal ensemble Stile Antico and the viol consort Fretwork joined forces to present music by Shakespeare’s contemporaries and settings of Shakespeare old and new. Once the two groups of performers had adapted to the venue, and to performing with each other, they communicated a striking sensitivity to Elizabethan sensibility, iconography and poetic conceits as embodied in musical forms and language. And, they captured the era’s notions of fluent artistry which deliberately, and sometimes ostentatiously, displays both its own grace and its complexity.
But, we began with light spirits: Thomas Morley’s ‘It was a lover and his lasse’ the text of which is drawn from As You Like It (V.iii). It’s interesting to reflect on whether Morley and Shakespeare knew each other: they both lived in Bishopgate in the late 1590s, and the contemporary artistic community embraced poets, actors, musicians and composers. Morley’s madrigal is a jovial, springy - and slyly bawdy (‘with a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonny no’ foregrounds a contemporary euphemism!) - madrigal which describes a loving couple’s ‘roll in the hay’. Originally for three voices, it was arranged here by Andrew Griffiths for three groups of four unaccompanied voices for each of the first three stanzas, with the twelve voices joining together for the final verse. And, although there was an attempt to conjure the relaxed intimacy of domestic music-making of the period, Stile Antico offered a fairly innocent reading! It took them a little time to settle though, and the various vocal groups struggled to find a balance that appropriately foregrounded the upper voice, which carries the melody, the dark colours of the lower voices tending to out-weigh the buoyancy of the sopranos, though the text was clearly conveyed.
There were some intonation hiccoughs in Byrd’s ‘O Lord, make thy servant, Elizabeth’, as the voices struggled to accord their timbre with that of the five viols of Fretwork, but by the concluding, elaborate ‘Amen’ these problems had been ironed out and in the subsequent, ‘Why doe I use my paper, inck and pen?’ tenor Benedict Hymas worked fluently with the viol counterpoint - underpinned by Richard Boothby’s expressive and mobile bass line. The text was written by Henry Walpole on the occasion of the execution of Edmund Campion, and Byrd - who had established himself as one of Queen Elizabeth’s favourites - was nevertheless taking a few risks: the only previous attempt to publish the poem had resulted in the torture and execution of the publisher! We would not have sensed this danger, though, from Hymas’ tone, which had the effete lightness of Nicholas Hilliard’s Young Man Among the Roses; but occasionally as the phrase rose high, though the sound was sweet, the line was not sustained. The tierce de Picardie close was beautifully poignant, though: ‘An Angel’s trump were fitter to sound/Their glorious death, if such on earth were found.’
Thomas Tomkins’ ‘Be strong and of good courage’, sung by seven singers, was marred by some untidy interaction between voices and viols, and by the occasion tendency of the sopranos to push sharp-wards - which was noticeable at the final cadence. Robert Ramsey’s ‘Sleep, fleshly birth’, however, was stunning. Ramsey, director of music at Trinity College Cambridge, is probably a name less familiar to us than that of Morley, Byrd, Tomkins et al: his dramatic madrigal in six movement, Dialogues of Sorrow upon the Death of the Late Prince Henry, is only partially extant, but ‘Sleep, fleshly birth’ is almost certainly a tribute to the Prince. Stile Antico milked the chromatic piquancy for all it was worth, without the slightest hint of mannerism, and this performance has sent me scurrying to find recordings of Ramsey.
The twelve singers of Stile Antico showed intelligent awareness of the formal procedures of the music of the period in Robert Johnson’s ‘Full Fathom Five’, a setting of The Tempest (I.ii) in which ascending modulations in the first part are countered by a descent in the second, suggestive of the rise and fall of currents from the ocean floor, and the resurrection and laying to rest of the father’s spirit to the repetitions of ‘ding-dong bell’.
The programme also included two modern settings of Shakespeare. The first, Huw Watkins’ ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ (2014), is wonderfully responsive to the rhythmic energies and formal implications of the language. The twelve voices signalled loudly the opening command, ‘Let the bird of the loudest lay,/On the sole of the Arabian tree,/Herald sad and trumpet be’, establishing an animated momentum which burst through the sprung rhythms of motifs such as the ‘death-defining swan’. They later gave way, though, to quieter reflection allied with twisting dissonances which recalled the false relations of the Elizabethan madrigal. In slower, homophonic episodes the bass’s long pedals served as a reliable anchor for chromatic inflections, particularly in the final prayer-like section where the triple-time reflects the three-line stanzas. This text, which describes a funeral for the Phoenix and Turtledove, emblems of flawlessness and devotion respectively, has been described as one of Shakespeare’s most obscure poems, and one of the first metaphysical poems.Stile Antico, and Watkins, made it perfectly accessible. The close was magical: after a deliberating treat and pause, ‘For these dead birds’, the upper voices were released to ‘sigh a prayer’.
The lower voices in Nico Muhly’s ‘Gentle Sleep’ (2015) ululated like a primordial lullaby while tenor and soprano alternated in offering pronounced statements against this paradoxically soporific yet energised texture. The isolation of the silvery soprano, set against lively movement of the alto and tenor viols within the counterpoint, and the static low voices, was scintillating.
Fretwork offered some Fantasias and In nomines between the vocal works. Byrd’s Fantasia a 5 - ‘Two parts in one in the fourth above’ - was typical of the way the ensemble balanced timbral blend with the animation of individual instrumental lines, with once again Boothby’s bass line giving direction to the more dance-like episodes. The pacing of Byrd’s Browning a 5, ‘The leaves by green’ was well-conceived, particularly given its strangely truncated ending. Orlando Gibbon’s In nomine a 5 No.1 in D minor perhaps most wonderfully captured the era’s blend of melancholy, measure and mellifluousness.
John Wilbye’s ‘Draw on, sweet night’ brought the programme to a close, the delicious, and brave, diminuendo in at the close - ‘And while thou all in silence dost enfold’ - giving way to new animation in the final insistence: ‘I then shall have best time for my complaining.’ This was a perfectly constructed programme, delivered with a real sense of engagement with the ethos of the works performed and the texts set. We didn’t really need an encore of Gibbons’ ‘The Silver Swan’, but who would complain?
Claire Seymour
Proms At … Cadogan Hall
Stile Antico and Fretwork
Thomas Morley, ‘ It was a lover and his lass’; William Byrd, ‘O Lord, make thy servant Elizabeth’, ‘Why do I use my paper, ink and pen?’; Huw Watkins, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtl’e’, William Byrd; Fantasia a 5 - ‘Two parts in one in the fourth above’; Thomas Tomkins, ‘Be strong and of a good courage’; Robert Ramsey, ‘Sleep, fleshly birth’; William Byrd, Browning a 5, The leaves be green’; Robert Johnson, Full fathom five’; Nico Muhly, ‘Gentle sleep’; Orlando Gibbons, ‘In nomine a 5 No.1 in D minor; John Wilbye, ‘Draw on, sweet night’.
Cadogan Hall, London; Monday 15th August 2016.