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."
800 years ago, every book was a precious treasure - ‘written on skin’. In George Benjamin’s and Martin Crimp’s 2012 opera, Written on Skin, modern-day archivists search for one such artefact: a legendary 12th-century illustrated vanity project, commissioned by an unnamed Protector to record and celebrate his power.
Under the neon-glare of laboratory strip-lights, the scientists and literary archeologists rout through the relics, scrape away palimpsests, shatter the printing presses, and uncover a shocking tale of violence, sex, suicide and cannibalism. ‘Strip the cities of brick,’ they cry; ‘Cancel all flights from the international airport.’ Yet, despite its ‘distance’ - both historical and aesthetic - this disturbing juxtaposition of innocence and monstrosity unsettles and seeps into our modern consciousness, like ink staining parchment.
Crimp’s spare, harrowing, unsettling libretto - replete with deliberate artifice - adapts a medieval Occitan legend about the Catalan troubadour Guillem de Cabestany, a tale previously treated by such diverse authors as Boccaccio and Ezra Pound. Cabestany was the lover of the wife of Raimon of Castell Rosselló; when their adulterous treachery was discovered, Cabestany was murdered and his heart was cooked and fed to his beloved Seremonda. On learning of the derivation of her feast, she threw herself from the window to her death.
In Crimp’s hands, the troubadour is transformed into an illustrator. The Protector considers his obedient, illiterate wife to be his ‘property’, but the Boy’s words, like magic, offer her a personal narrative and a voice of her own. Psychological vivified and sensuously ignited, she asks the Boy to supplement his two-dimensional drawings with the invention of a ‘real woman’. He obliges and the ensuing erotic tumult races unrestrainedly and unstoppable towards tragedy.
Ironically, while the words and images which are etched by the Boy onto vellum and into Agnès’ spirit are indelible, and their effects irrevocable and permanent, all else in Benjamin’s and Crimp’s shifting world is permeable and fluid - like ink which never dries. Time and space ebb and flow: the Boy has a vision of the future, in which ‘this wood and this light’ will be ‘cut through by eight lanes of poured concrete’. The archivists become Angels as the opera fuses modern and medieval, sacred and secular; interior and external worlds amalgamate - literally, as a forest springs up within the Protector’s medieval hall. Crimp’s mannered elegance sits alongside mundane pragmatism - reference to car parks, shopping malls puncture the poetic conceits.
Similarly, narrative leaks into the dramatic. Characters serve as third-person commentators - ‘said the Boy’ - or explain their actions, ‘The Boy takes from his satchel an illuminated page.’ So compelling is the story that the archival researchers resurrect that they are sucked into its unfolding events, finding themselves serving as supernumeraries, rearranging or removing props, or finding a costume.
Photo credit: Stephen Cummiskey.
Vicki Mortimer’s two-tiered set compartmentalises various rooms and time zones, but these periods and locations oscillate with quasi-hallucinatory equivocation; they converge but never quite coalesce. Jon Clark’s vivid lighting juxtaposes the earthiness of the medieval world - all warm ochres and browns - against the monochrome coolness of the present.
Mortimer and director Katie Mitchell offer many striking images: not least, Agnès’ slow ascent of the white stairwell in the opera’s closing moments is impressed in my mind. There is a lot of personnel movement - or perhaps one should say ritualised slow motion; and the purpose of the stage business within and betwixt the compartmentalised chambers is not always clear, and can be distracting. It is therefore sometimes hard work to connect the musical discourse to the theatrical niceties.
Composer George Benjamin conducts this London revival. The words most commonly used to describe Benjamin’s music include ‘meticulous’, ‘fastidious’, ‘exquisite’, but all sound far too precious and passionless for a score which has sensuousness at its core. Benjamin has given us a vibrant, glowing musical illumination, albeit one undercut by dark undertones: an aural image which gleams with the lucidity and brightness of a medieval Book of Hours, and as dense a coloristic canvas as an Impressionist masterpiece. Even more impressively and wondrously, the details cohere to form a grand dramatic sweep.
Not surprisingly, Benjamin’s conducting meets the requirements for both technical precision and expressive spontaneity. The score abounds with complex polyrhythmic interplay, yet despite the strict rein that is needed to coordinate such complexities, Benjamin still managed to create an impression of an impulsive sonic response to, and commentary on, the unfolding story. The deliberate artifices of the libretto never weaken the ever-mounting tension which, like an insidious inflammable liquid, seeps into the dramatic canvass until a conflagration is inevitable.
Iestyn Davies (The Boy). Photo credit: Stephen Cummiskey.
Delicacy and tempestuousness are juxtaposed. The brass chords of the opening bars cast a prophetic look at the drama’s conclusion, and though the soloists’ melodies - lyrical, naturalistic settings of the English text - are sensitively supported by carefully crafted instrumental groupings (and bass viol, verrophone and steel drums make their mark) the climactic moments appropriately unleash the full force of the ensemble. There is ‘poetry’ in Benjamin’s harmonic and orchestral medium: he is profoundly concerned with the essential implications and inferences of the harmonic and timbral qualities of his music in terms of their expressive, dramatic, ethical, and communicative meaning and effect.
Christopher Purves (Protector), Iestyn Davies (The Boy), Barbara Hannigan (Agnès). Photo credit: Stephen Cummiskey.
What I found most striking and stirring was that while Benjamin’s music - utterly absorbing and strangely disorientating - seldom possesses a strong pulse there is undoubtedly unerring forward momentum: towards an unstoppable tragedy but also lulling the listener towards catharsis. I felt as if I were floating between worlds, though the natural speech rhythms of the vocal lines provide some sort of anchor.
The cast of five included several of the opera’s role-creators. Christopher Purves was a startlingly compelling Protector, by turns aggressively belligerent and bunglingly inept; both mellifluous of voice and daringly forthright as the role lurched towards the upper reaches of the baritonal head-voice. Purves’ diction was superb: he blustered with bold machismo and blundered with anguished disquiet. He created a figure who was absolutely terrifying in both his lack of self-awareness and his compensatory vindictiveness.
Barbara Hannigan was wayward and headstrong as Agnès. The luminosity of her soprano implied both naivety and nascent passion; her vocal line conveyed and impaled emotion. Hannigan’s impassioned commitment to the final scenes was breath-taking. Informed of her cannibalistic indulgence, she declared with triumphant vigour and ascent: ‘Nothing I ever eat, nothing I drink, will ever take the taste of that boy's heart out of this body.’ But, troublingly, the listener was simultaneously assaulted by the gastric cogitations of the orchestra - a panoply of sliding, burbling digestive onomatopoeia.
Mark Padmore, Victoria Simmonds and Iestyn Davies. Photo credit: Stephen Cummiskey.
With Victoria Simmonds and Mark Padmore taking the roles of the Angel 2/Marie and Angel 3/John respectively, the vocal feast was similarly rich. But, it was Iestyn Davies, who sang the role of the Angel/Boy in Munich in 2013, who brought an utterly winning vocal contrariness to this production. It is hard to imagine a more perfect fit of voice and role. Davies’ pure tone suggests a figure who is untouchable and celestial but, paradoxically, the beauty of his voice and the directness of its communication are bewitchingly erotic. There was a magical glow to the duets between Agnès and the Boy, which was utterly compelling.
When Agnès has jumped to her death, the Angel - the murdered Boy - explains that he has transfixed her image in an eternal illumination. We, too, are left with a timeless message, or question. Since its premiere at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2012, Written on Skin has travelled to London, Amsterdam, Toulouse, Munich, Vienna and New York , accumulating five-star reviews along the way, and working its way unchallenged into the modern operatic canon.
Written on Skin might have been named Etched in Blood; it is chillingly refined and brutal. It carves its way disturbingly into one’s mind and memory, and is not easily - or willingly - eradicated.
Claire Seymour
George Benjamin: Written on Skin
Martin Crimp (librettist)
The Protector - Christopher Purves, Agnès - Barbara Hannigan, Angel 1/The Boy - Iestyn Davies, Angel 2/Marie - Victoria Simmonds, Angel 3/John - Mark Padmore; Director - Katie Mitchell, Conductor - George Benjamin, Associate director - Dan Ayling, Designer - Vicki Mortimer, Lighting designer - Jon Clark, Orchestra of the Royal Opera House.
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London