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."
What links Franz Xaver Süssmayr, Brian Newbould and Anthony Payne? A hypothetical question for University Challenge contestants elicits the response that they all ‘completed’ composer’s last words: Mozart’s Requiem, Schubert’s Symphony No.8 in B minor (the Unfinished) and Edward Elgar’s Third Symphony, respectively.
Will we add Anoushka Shankar/David Murphy to the Trivial Pursuit card-pack in future years? For they have guided and shaped Ravi Shankar’s last musical thoughts and sketches to fruition: the result being the opera, Sukanya, which has been performed on its premiere-tour in Leicester, Salford, Birmingham and finally here at the Royal Festival Hall in London.
When sitar-player and musical guru Shankar died in 2012 at the age of 92, he left behind sketches of an opera. A coincidental meeting of the personal and mythological had triggered the eighty-year-old musician’s operatic imagination. He discovered that his third wife, Sukanya Rajan (the mother of his daughter Anoushka Shankar, a renowned sitar-player in her own right) shared her name with a character in one his favourite tales from the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Mahābhārata, which recounts the story of a young woman who accidentally blinds an old sage, Chyavana, with whom she then falls in love and marries, and to whom she stays faithful despite the advances of two envious, roguish demi-gods. These Aswini Twins struggle to understand how a decrepit mortal can appeal to such youth and beauty. They put Sukanya to a test which she passes, and which proves redeeming.
Alok Kumar (Chyavana). Photo credit: Bill Cooper.
Shankar’s sketches have been assembled and posthumously fleshed out by Anoushka Shankar and composer-conductor David Murphy. One can see that autobiographical resonances may have drawn Shankar to this tale but this staging of the work is anything but intimate. Director Suba Das’s sweeping, triple-staircase design raises and brings to the fore the soloists, dancers and Indian musicians, who make for a feast of colour against the black-clad BBC Singers ranged on the side-stairs and the London Philharmonic Orchestra nestled on the left and right of the stage below.
Rukmini Vijayakumar. Photo credit: Bill Cooper.
Visually, the collaborative outcome is a veritable feast. 59 Productions, led by Akhila Krishnan, and choreographer Aakash Odedra ensure that light, colour, movement - by turns sensuous and subdued - stimulate and provoke our sensual appetites. The kaleidoscopic diversity of the Indian sub-continent is conjured in all its mystery: from softly lit, pastel landscapes of rose pink and dusky grey, to jungles of emerald green and sun-drenched ochre plains whose colours blaze and dazzle. Digital animations seductively transport us from land to sky to sea, from the historic Mahābhārata to the present day.
Photo credit: Bill Cooper.
The performance was described as ‘semi-staged’ but with so many bodies on stage the responsibility for conveying the progression of narrative mood was largely born by the silk-draped, be-jewelled dancers whose captivating whirls and leaps were astonishingly athletic, and whose elaborate hand and facial gestures were enchantingly expressive. The combination of classical Indian movement motifs and the evocative timbres conjured by the five Indian musicians (M. Balachandar, Rajkumar Misra, Parimal Sadaphal, Ashwani Shankar and Pirashanna Thevarajah) was by turns magical and invigorating. The opening sitar improvisation, penetrating the semi-darkness, immediately erased the present time and place; there was some remarkable rhythmic explosiveness from the tabla - enhanced by konnokol (percussive vocal singing), while the shehnai oboe injected an elegiac wistfulness.
Michel de Souza and Njabulo Madlala (Aswini Twins). Photo credit: Bill Cooper.
The playing of the LPO was superb and David Murphy calmly and clearly held the large forces together. I was less convinced by the score itself though; and, it was difficult to know where Shankar ended and Murphy began. Some of the well-crafted orchestrations were effectively atmospheric and the familiar classical gestures and styles moved suavely along; but, West and East were placed side-by-side rather than integrated, and while the Indian elements seemed pungent and zestful, the Western fabric onto which the former were etched were harmonically and temporally repetitive. I appreciate that Murphy has striven to respect the conventions of raga in which improvisation on a set of given notes creates atmosphere and meaning through emphasis and articulation. But, the result was frequently somewhat banal minimalist mood-painting, occasionally enlivened by folk-inflections - at times, I was put in mind of Michael Nyman’s score for The Piano and of Enya’s multi-vocal fusion of Irish folk music and Rachmaninov-like Romantic rapture.
Keel Watson (King Sharyaati). Photo credit: Bill Cooper.
More problematic still is Amit Chaudhuri’s libretto. I struggled to find the professed allusions to ‘Shakespeare, Tagore, T.S. Eliot and beyond’ amid its uncomfortable mix of poetic self-awareness and prosaic mundanity. It wasn’t helped by some awkward text-setting and unnatural verbal rhythms, though there were moments were word and music came together to create poignancy and honesty - as when Chyavana explains the mysteries of raga to Sukanya.
Fortunately, the cast offered strong vocal performances which pushed some of my misgivings temporarily aside. Bass-baritone Keel Watson was imposing and resonant as King Sharyaati while Njabulo Madlala and Michel de Souza, as the unscrupulous Aswini Twins, provided some much-needed mischief and lightness. Tenor Alok Kumar was convincing as Chyavana but it was soprano Susanna Hurrell who shone most brightly, her soaring lines glowing and warm, the pure tone blending beguiling with the Indian musical elements.
Susanna Hurrell (Sukanya). Photo credit: Bill Cooper.
Sukanya has had a long gestation: Shankar’s earliest ideas for the work date from the mid-1990s and excerpts were presented at the Royal Opera House with the London Philharmonic Orchestra - with whom Shankar enjoyed a long relationship - in 2014. This premiere tour has taken the opera from The Curve in Leicester, to Symphony Hall Birmingham, to the Lowry in Sheffield, finally arriving at the Royal Festival Hall. The many musicians, artists and administrators who have collaborated to bring Sukanya to the stage are to be greatly credited and thanked.
In his work with the LPO - who followed the first European performance of Shankar’s Sitar Concerto No.2 in 1982 with the world premiere of his Symphony in 2010 - and in his historic collaborations with Yehudi Menuhin, Shankar never aimed for ‘fusion’. Indeed, the recording that he made with Menuhin is entitled ‘West Meets East’: Shankar aimed for interplay not amalgamation, and it was the conversation between idioms which was so spellbinding.
But, opera implies ‘synthesis’ and in Sukanya I did not feel that text and tone came together in expressive union. The layering of different aural and visual worlds was exciting, the result a vibrant, shifting, often mesmerising, mosaic. But, at the end my senses felt paradoxically over-stimulated and unsatisfied: it was hard to determine whence ‘meaning’ lay. This performance at the RFH was certainly a ‘spectacle’; I’m not so sure it was an opera.
Claire Seymour
Princess Sukanya - Susanna Hurrell, Chyavana - Alok Kuma, King Sharyaati - Keel Watson, Aswini Twins - Njabulo Madlala & Michel de Souza, Sukanya’s friend - Eleanor Minney; Director - Suba Das, Conductor/Arranger - David Murphy, Design - 59 Productions, Choreographer - Aakash Odedra, Lighting Designer - Matt Haskins, Aakash Odedra Dance Company, BBC Singers, London Philharmonic Orchestra.
Royal Festival Hall, London; Friday 19th May 2017.