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.
![Christian Thielemann [Photo by Matthias Creutziger]](http://www.operatoday.com/7923-thielemann_christian_1__matthias_creutziger_.png)
One of the things I love about the Philharmonie in Berlin, is the normalcy of musical excellence week after week. Very few venues can pull off with such illuminating star wattage. Michael Schade, Anne Schwanewilms, and Barbara Hannigan performed in two concerts with two larger-than-life conductors Thielemann and Rattle. We were taken on three thrilling adventures.
In the first concert, Christian Thielemann led four soloists and a choir in Bruckner’s Third Mass with an unexpected light result. Before the intermission, Gidon Kremer performed In Tempus Praesens, Sofia Gubaidulina’s second concerto for violin and orchestra. In the Saturday Late Night concert, Barbara Hannigan joined Simon Rattle and several Berliners in a sensual performance of Gérard Grisey’s apocalyptical Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil.
Fascinated, I witnessed the vastly different, but equally persuasive, styles of Thielemann’s slight aggression in his artistically authoritarian ways as opposed to Rattle’s inviting and democratically inclusive approach.
Kremer appeared to have a Herculean task in Gubaidulina’s enchanting cosmos of extremes. When you see her for the first time, you cannot help but be surprised by her tiny frame as the vessel for such fiery music. She channels her coarse, instinctive energy through an uncompromising intellectual curiosity that makes her compositons sound extreme, yet familiarly approachable.
Gidon Kremer [Photo by Paolo Pellegrin]
Sophie Ann Mutter and Rattle premiered the work at the Lucerne Festival ten years ago. Then, it was perceived as a nurturing work, but tonight Kremer infused it with an inexhaustible rawness emanating from his aged musicality. Highly dramatic and elaborate, it was not what I expected from the legendary violinist. In fact, tonight’s rendition would have suited the horrors of humanity of a Stanley Kubrick film. Absolutely thrilling!
As if his life depended on it, Mr. Kremer turned into a technical wizard on the violin. The Latvian soloist thrived in Gubaidulina’s states of frenzy, as he crevassed up and down her icy hot spikes. He had few moments where he could catch his breath. In an exhilarating crescendo, passion flowed as Emmanuel Pahud quarrelled with Kremer back and forth on the flute, producing one of the orchestral highlights of the evening. During the cadenza Kremer sustained razor sharp focus. He turned his play into a thirty-minute sprint, rather than a steady marathon.
Containing the violent outbursts from the percussion and the horrifyingly shrieking edges yelped by the trombones, Thielemann kept clear tempi for Gubaidulina. His tight control created a serrated edge to the Berliner sound. In a disorienting novelty, reverberating overtones seemed to dampen each other creating unusual pockets of deafness.
In Bruckner, Thielemann let himself shine as he disclosed his inner-artistic exuberance. The Mass No. 3 in F minor for soloists, choir, and organ was performed with Paul Hawkshaw’s 2005 edition. It includes Robert Haas’s sonorous organ passages. The brilliance and depth of the Berliner strings burned in the “Credo” as they repeated their motifs, a typical building block of Bruckner’s industrialism. Christian Schmitt guested on the organ, his vibrations grounded the Mass, adding heavy depths underneath the light tone of the orchestra.
In the beginning, the Bayreuth soprano Anne Schwanewilms seemed to phone in her performance. She did not hit her stride until the Benedictus, and ultimately proved her worth and then some with the final verse “dona nobis pacem”. Michael Schade’s tenor voice sounded sturdy and decent, but he just did not seem too involved.
On the other hand, Franz-Joseph Selig’s bass charmed with character as an ameliorating contrast to Schade’s missing. And one must not forget, Wiebke Lehmkuhl’s alto role! With her tree trunk of a voice, she grounded Bruckner with an earthy gravitas. When she sang, she became a backbone to the voices, connecting all the branches, bringing about a determined sense of cohesion.
Above all, the Rundfunkchor Berlin prepared by Gijs Leenaars, proved vital. As one breathing organism of Bruckner’s vocal brilliance, this tremendous choir blew me away. In the Gloria and Credo their voices induced a thrilling current in Thielemann’s momentum. Fortissimo and pianissimo, these singers provoked skin crawling effects over my arms throughout the evening.
Now without baton and much more instinctual, Thielemann basked Bruckner in glory. He conducted with both hands free. While leaning back like a painter observing his work in progress, his other hand curved slight nuances on his orchestral canvas. He was clearly more at home in Bruckner than Gubaidulina.
With all the noise from Bayreuth over Thielemann’s reign, the conductor came across much less stolid than I had anticipated. Although in his violently incisive gestures I recognised an authoritarian, I also detected a surprisingly warm heartedness that effectively permeated through the BPO. Thielemann elucidated the many virtues of the BPO, especially from the brilliant brass in the Gloria that might as well have reflected the splendour at Heaven’s Gate.
David Pinedo