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."
Unconventional to the last, Diamanda Galás tore through her Barbican concert on Monday evening with a torrential force that shattered the inertia and passivity of the modern song recital. This was operatic activism, pure and simple. Dressed in metallic, shimmering black she moved rather stately across the stage to her piano - but there was nothing stately about what unfolded during the next 90 minutes.
Now 61 years of age, the voice is as powerful, as cyclonic and ferocious as it was when I last heard her over a decade ago in Defixiones, Will and Testament. If anything, the mezzo layer of the voice is even more deeply impressive; she bevels her vocal range so masterly to the lowest mezzo F and beyond but it’s as solid as steel; you have to return to the recordings of some of the greatest Wagnerian mezzos to find comparable depth. The projection remains fabulous - though this is a voice as brilliantly and uniquely human as it is one that is filtered through microphones and some digital processing. That it never seems micro-managed, but a genuinely kaleidoscopic prism of the extremes of the human voice remains a formidable achievement (the difference being what is possible for Galás is impossible for others). Her stunning octave range remains as secure and formidably exact as before, though with that unique hard edge, like a saw against metal, that seems in part more Bel Canto than purely lyrical.
It’s only when you come to the folk song O Death (which some might know from the Coen Brothers) towards the end of the concert that the sheer vocal range and the extended techniques make an unforgettable impression. Many will never forget the thrilling sound of her floating long phrases - absolutely Straussian in their beauty - and the pyrotechnic vocal somersaults that enshrine the psychodramatic narrative that slices like a scythe through sonics crackling like a current of electricity or a semi-tuned radio. If this wrenching performance made you feel like glass is being crushed under a lethal stiletto or gravel is being fed down the throat until you howl - then it’s because that’s exactly how she sings it. There’s no question that this is still a voice that empowers women in a starkly dramatic way, though as so often is the case with this singer sentimentality is eschewed.
This concert showcased her two new albums, her first for almost a decade: All the Way, a songstress’s reworking of mid-Twentieth Century Thelonius Monk, Chet Baker, BB King and others whilst In Concert at Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem highlights death songs from artists like Jacques Brei (Fernand) and Albert Ayler ( Angel). The two albums are strikingly different, and playing works from both in an alternative layering of them until you get a fusion of different styles proved unsettling, but inspired. The opening line of her poem Morphine (which she read so devastatingly), “There is no cure for loneliness/But itself” is in part the spiritual lacuna of these song cycles, one that has preoccupied Galás for decades. Loneliness, dispossession, death, disease are private declarations of suffering, but Galás sees them in a wider universal struggle of suffering. Mental and physical states are in decay, fragile to the extent they are at breaking point. Those who take their own life are celebrated. Galás challenges head-on the orthodox teachings of all churches and religions, even if the anguished madness and warrior-like anger at the principles of religion that guided works like Plague Mass is no longer so heavily articulated. The song Artemis, for example, is in part borne of personal tragedy - the death from AIDS of her brother, Philip, examined in her towering, ritualistic work Plague Mass - but grief is transposed into a global rite of collective tragedy that is entirely inclusive. The voice is everything here as it assaults the senses - or, as Galás herself once said: “My voice is an instrument of inspiration for my friends, and a tool of torture and destruction to my enemies”.
Likewise, the Italian poet Cesare Pavese, who hovers over some of this cycle, is an implicit point of reference, not just for the theme of loneliness but for some of the figures in this singer’s gallery of untouchables. There are the dispossessed, like prostitutes, and the isolated. When you read Pavese’s poetry the unescapable conclusion is that the loneliest of all his characters is himself, and this seems doubly true of Galás herself. Ferdinand Freiligrath, the other poetic inspiration for this cycle, gets the Galás treatment in a powerful performance of Die Stunde kommt (The Hour Comes). Freiligrath encapsulates both the exotic and the political - two Galás themes in her work - but Die Stunde kommt is co-morbid to the longer thematic reach of this cycle. Freiligrath writes of love, but also of graves and grassy cemeteries; Galás interprets it with all the monolithic darkness of the human experience.
If the death poem settings are more virtuosic, the familiar songs are given with a reshaping that is startling. This is a rebirth. The voice can be both lush and rumbling, but it can also use a vibrato that shakes like a siren. The pitch is perfect. Language is something that is torn from its linguistic roots - whether it be French, German or Greek. The irony of not necessarily understanding what she is singing needs no subtitles; her message is a universal one that is charted through the emotions of the voice. From the depths of her sepulchral mezzo through to the vertiginous, cascading high notes that pierce the ears the meaning is always apparent. It’s often noticeable that when she is thundering out bass chords on the piano the voice is flirting at the other end of the scale; likewise, when the keyboard is typed out at the higher registers, the voice is often resonant and percussive.
These albums are in some ways a move towards the past, something which Galás’s previous work doesn’t so obviously do. But the past is uncomfortable and not a place for reflection or safety. With just a piano (some of her previous concerts have been more instrumental) she cuts a lonelier figure than ever. That we can empathise with this condition and feel part of it is one of the positives from this concert. The operatic pervades it, but this isn’t opera. In the past, the theatricality of a Galás performance might have been more evident: the body swathed in blood. Today, it’s the keyboard of her piano that is more obviously streaked with the sweat, broken fingernails and blood from her hands that gives power to the staging. There are nods towards Bellinian madness, Berg’s cathartic power, or Schoenberg’s sprechgesang. But the opera singer is reinvented. Bathed in smoky light, the voice often becomes inseparable from the torch-like beams. As the voice becomes more hysterical and ecstatic light is used like Morse code. That the music can at one minute seem entirely never-ending, with those long notes floated for an eternity but not tapering off into an ending, contrasts with the ephemeral nature of the recital platform. It’s the very nature of some music, and singers, that it does indeed achieve the status of ephemerality. Whether she intends or not, Galás makes a concert unforgettable.
Marc Bridle
The Barbican, London; 19th June 2017.