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.
![Scene from Trouble in Tahiti [Photo by Hans Joerg Michel]](http://www.operatoday.com/Trouble%20in%20Tahiti_03_FOTO_Hans%20Joerg%20Michel.png)
Of all the places in Germany, Oper am Rhein at Theater Duisburg staged an intriguing American double bill of rarities. An experience that was well worth the trip to this desolate ghost town, remnant of industrial West Germany.
Now it feels like a ghost town. Still, a strange place for this staging of rarities: Carter’s What’s Next? and Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti.
Two completely different operas that complimented each other through their extremes. Oper am Rhein offered two new directors their yearly “Young Directors” platform, giving new talent the possibility to shine. It was a delight to hear them well sung, conducted, and inventively staged by two new young talents Tibor Torell and Philipp Westerbarkei.
Since Germany was playing Italy that evening (they won), the auditorium was empty save for some youthful enthusiasts, an American delegation of American conductors, and a scattering of curious elderly couples. It strangely created an intimate chamber opera like setting that suited the one-Act operas.
Scene from What’s Next?
His only opera, Carter’s What’s Next? premiered in 1999 under Daniel Barenboim, when the composer was still alive. In this short, unsettling, metaphysical work, a bunch of people lose their memory after a car crash. They then appear as infants, adults, and elderly on stage. The singers have fallen through a hole in the road. They need to find a way to move on. Starry space video added a timeless dimension to Torell’s staging. With very little, he managed to create a lot of ambience.
In what amounts to atonal acrobatics, the singers had to manoeuver their voices through Carter’s shrill and pointy score. Highly complex, the performers seemed to crash into each other vocally. Singing without being heard and understood. As with most of Carter’s otherworldly creations, at a certain moment you become entranced by his cosmos of twinkling dissonance. With it unnerving overtones, this concise composition had uprooting neurotic effects.
Leading the Duisburger Philharmoniker (DP), Jesse Wong kept strict tempi, sustaining a highly charged suspense up to the intense climax. His focus was impressive and necessary with the challenging, cacophonous sounding, score. Percussion served up many disruptive, energetic surges. Later they added their strange effects from stage with stereophonic effects. Wong, a conductor at the beginning of his career, impressed technically--especially considering Barenboim premiered the piece with his Berliner Staatskapelle. The young audience applauded with boisterous Bravos.
The sad story notwithstanding, Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti sounded like the most joyous music after Carter’s universe. Bernstein wrote the score and libretto--perhaps inspired by his parents’ unhappy marriage. Set in the Fifties the drama has marriage themes similar to Mad Men. Westerbarkei kept Bernstein’s time and place. His staging was timely stylish and complimented Bernstein’s music. Nothing too outrageous, just elegant in its simplicity.
Three kitchens divided by elevating walls on a reduced proscenium make up the set. The middle is the shared family kitchen. In the left kitchen, the wife sees the shrink; the right, the husband has an affair with the secretary. The son plays baseball, at which the father used to be the best. The unhappy marriage is in crisis, as they stick to social conventions. The director establishes an impressive illusion of happiness with vibrantly colourful lighting in the social settings. When the singers are alone, the set remains grim and grey.
Bernstein’s work is not a happy piece, but he still keep his momentum fast-paced. He uses the theatrical aspect of the marriage to include upbeat boisterous music. Full of swinging passages, compared to the discontinuity in the eerie dissonances of Carter, this opera flies by. Conducting the DP, Patrick Francis Chestnut brought out the pulse and rich colours of Bernstein’s score with its jazzy syncopations and rhythmic currents. The early stages of the composer’s mature style from On the Town, West Side Story, could be detected. Ramona Zaharia (Dinah the wife) and Thomas Laske (Sam the husband) convinced with their accentless singing of this America music.
With the interesting risks Oper am Rhein takes with young artists, and both these productions looking and sounding exceedingly sharp, I wouldn’t mind traveling back to Duisburg for another rarity.
David Pinedo