Recently in Performances
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.
Performances
![Barbara Hannigan [Photo by Elmer R. de Haas]](http://www.operatoday.com/4893-b_hannigan_elmer_de_haas.png)
03 Jan 2017
It’s the end of the world as we know it: Hannigan & Rattle sing of Death
For the Late Night concert after the Saturday series, fifteen Berliners
backed up Barbara Hannigan in yet another adventurous collaboration on a modern
rarity with Simon Rattle. I was completely unfamiliar with the French composer,
but the performance tonight made me fall in love with Gérard
Grisey’s sensually disintegrating soundscape Quatre chants pour
franchir le seuil, or “Fours Songs to cross the
Threshold”.
With society bursting at its seams and our civilization at the edge of an
abyss without a catcher in the rye, Grisey’s final work serves as a great
foreshadowing composition at the end of the second millennium, but nobody
seemed to be listening twenty years ago. It certainly resonates now!
Mr Rattle briefly introduced the piece, emphasizing the four different
deaths. He also alluded to the current worldly chaos. He usually doesn’t
speak about the music, but this clearly added to the performance's urgency. In
retrospect, this unnerving, but sultry performance proved itself more an
ominous premonition of future tidings. Especially after what happened a week
later at the Christmas Market attack.
Gérard Grisey emerged from the spectralist school that produced some
fascinating soundscapes. He carries on the lineage of Tristan Murail and
Messiaen; though, Grisey distanced himself from such labels later in life. He
completed this work just before his own passing in 1998.
Grisey’s masterpiece in four segments eerily depicts the deaths of an
angel, civilization, voice, and mankind destroyed by nature. The “Death
of an Angel” text was taken from Christian Guez-Ricord’s “The
Hours of the Night”, heavy on Judeo-Christian images. “Death of
Civilisation” Grisey based on Egyptian Sarcophagi, while 6th
Century B.C., Greek poet Erinna originated the lyrics for “Death of
Voices”. Finally, The Epic of Gilgamesh serves as the
basis for the apocalyptical “Death of Mankind by Environment”.
Even though the concept seems terribly depressing, Grisey’s colourful
and invigorating soundscapes full of saxophones and nonconventional uses of
brass and strings really enlivened the auditorium. The depth dimensions in his
composition really thrived in space. Without the theatrical vocal craft of Ms.
Hannigan, this work might have a troublesome delivery.
The three percussive masters performing with an endless array of instruments
must have had a field day with their exciting pulses and rhythms. They
performed clearly inspired by Rattle, who of course, started out as a
percussionist. Each movement was connected by the soothing scrubbing of what
seemed like sandpaper on drum. These interludes created an otherworldly
ambience, adding to eerie foreboding nature of this piece.
In a fabulous black spiderwebbed outfit, Hannigan shared the stage with Sir
Simon revealing an intimate display of mutual respect. Spitting, regurgitating,
and swallowing the syllables ever so elegantly through Grisey’s vocally
acrobatic composition, Ms. Hannigan’s thrilling vocal expulsions, Mr
Rattle dare not contain, but he must! They seemed superlatively in tune to each
other with a symbiotic synergy one doesn’t often encounter.
Barbara Hannigan made her voice fluctuate and erupt with the languidness of
boiling magma in a simmering volcano. Long vocal lines melted with the
elongated curves of the trumpet’s calls, whose name I did not catch, but
delivered the most memorable trumpet tones. His curves melted into Ms. Hannigan's
voluptuous bends and turns.
In the end, the penetrant, disorienting sounds resulted in a lavish,
arousing, but still fearful atmosphere. I hear you thinking ‘oh how
dramatic’, but the sense of impending doom created by Hannigan and Rattle
certainly fed into my political and environmental panic of what comes next?
The young audience yelled many bravi, while the applause continued for quite
some time, but this was not a piece you could to which you could give an
encore. I left the Philharmonie, thrilled, slightly unnerved by the sensual and
exhilarating closure to this extravaganza... Berlin never ceases to
disappoint.
David Pinedo