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.
![Tamara Mumford as the Pilgrim [Photo by Ken Howard / Metropolitan Opera]](http://www.operatoday.com/Tamara-Mumford-as-the-Pilgrim.--Ken-Howard_Metropolitan-Opera-.png)
Opening night at the Metropolitan is a gleeful occasion even when the composer is long gone, but December 1st was an opening for a living composer who has been making waves around the world and is, gasp, a woman — the second woman composer ever to have an opera presented at the Met.
Kaija Saariaho is a composer fêted the world over and the United States has been a bit tardy in perceiving her charm. (The opera’s premiere was at the Salzburg Festival in 2000 and the Santa Fe Opera produced it in 2002, but Darmstadt, Bern, Bergen, Toronto and Quebec all beat the Met to the punch.)
Saariaho is Finnish and studied at the Sibelius Academy. She then struck out for the avant-garde study centers of Europe: Freiburg, Darmstadt and then Paris where she worked at IRCAM, Pierre Boulez’ famous institute for experimental music. At IRCAM she worked with composers who experiment with combining electronic sounds with acoustic music. The term spectral music was first used to describe the style by Hugh Dufourt, a philosopher and composer, in 1979, but recently the term has been resuscitated and Saariaho’s growing fame and popularity has brought the term to a popular frenzy.
The Met opera production by Robert Lepage is a visual masterpiece. Photos cannot convey the almost palpable illusion of water created by rows of LED lights. The show began with a total blackout — including the orchestra pit — then tiny lights appeared like small twinkling stars — then the dots of lights grew into shimmering lines of light which resembled ocean waves. A beautiful verse in Amin Maalouf’s libretto based on the history and songs of a twelfth-century troubadour Jaufré Rudel (sung by Philadelphia’s bass-baritone Eric Owens) has Jaufré ask of the Pilgrim (sung by mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford) “Why is the sea blue? Why is the sky blue?”
Eric Owens as Jaufré Rudel and Susanna Phillips as Clémence
Susanna Phillips, the soprano who plays Clémence, the Countess of Tripoli, the unrequited and unknown love of the troubadour, has lovely pure high notes and it is a good thing because that is mostly what she gets to sing. The part of the Pilgrim has a much more melodic score. Rudel’s first songs are quite hard to hear in the very lowest part of his range, but the score for his duets with the Pilgrim and with Clémence were clearer.
The program notes by Cori Ellison, a dramaturg at Glyndebourne Festival Opera and a member of the vocal arts faculty at Julliard School, contain some outrageous sentences like: “The dearth of apparent action through the opera’s two hours is mirrored in the illusion of musical stagnation, by now a trademark of Saariaho’s music.” Don’t let that scare you, I stayed awake for the entire show. Ellison also wrote the subtitles, which were interesting at best. Lines like “he is my outremer” kept appearing. (“Outremer” means overseas in French and I suspect the message was that Clémence’s fascination with Rudel was due to the fact that he was a foreign exotic.) The wordplay in the original libretto by Maalouf of the word “clément” and “Clémence” also came out rather awkwardly in English, but that would have been tough to render.
The orchestration was the highlight of the opera. Bassoon lines came through as wavy and oceanic, the oboe took the dreamy and twinkly phrases and the electronic sounds of the keyboard added mystery, as did the watery, pedaled notes on the piano. The strings were used to enhance the ethereality. There was little brass in the score, but the piccolo provided strategic punctuation.
Another coup for this production was to have a woman wield the baton. Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki, in her Met debut, managed to form a composite of the ethereal sounds and kept the pace as much as possible, although even she was challenged by the tediously long ending. The warm hug between female composer and female conductor on the Met stage was a historic moment for women in music. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Toscanini.
L’Amour de loin is a stunning achievement but I cannot help feeling that Saariaho’s chamber music seems more structured than her orchestrations. The performances of her string quartet Terra Memoria and her trio Mirage for soprano, cello and piano, each of which I heard at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, left a more indelible musical impression on me than L’amour, but the production is well worth seeing. Don’t worry about the dearth of action; it is the lot of most troubadours. Think of poor old Tristan.
Margaret Darby