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.
For almost thirty years, summer at the Concertgebouw has been synonymous with Robeco SummerNights. This popular series expands the classical concert formula with pop, film music, jazz and more, served straight up or mixed together. Composer Leonard Bernstein’s versatility makes his oeuvre, ranging from Broadway to opera, prime SummerNight fare.
Last Friday’s splendid Bernstein bonanza with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra will surely be one of this year’s festival highlights. Besides Bernstein’s soundtrack for the 1954 Marlon Brando movie On the Waterfront, there were extracts from Candide and West Side Story, and solos and duets from the musicals On The Town, Wonderful Town and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The first fearless bars of “New York, New York”, arranged as a duet for tenor Julian Ovenden and baritone Nadim Naaman, tipped the Amsterdam audience that it was in for an outsized musical theatre experience. One of the top orchestras in the world in bold, swinging mode and a deluxe quartet of entertainers – it’s a formula that could hardly go wrong. But it was conductor John Wilson, straight-backed and outwardly cool, who seamlessly piloted this evening of sass and glamour, repeating a similar success he had at the 2015 BBC Proms with his own band, the John Wilson Orchestra. With laconic gestures he kept rhythms clean and urgent and performed dynamic sorcery. Transformed into a super big band (with five percussionists!), the RCO never upstaged the singers. Scarlett Strallen’s vocally fragile lullaby from Peter Pan, “Dream With Me”, quivered on soft, lush strings. When Julian Ovenden sang an ardent yet intimate “Maria” from West Side Story, the musicians followed his lead, flooding the hall with sound as his shiny tenor opened up, and slinking to a whisper with his final, beautifully sustained piano.
On their own, the RCO turned the obligatory overture to the operetta Candide into a light and sparkly frolic. In the symphonic suite from On the Waterfront Wilson hammered out the climaxes with accurate savagery. The elegiac solo themes rang out with primeval beauty, the horn solo, placed offstage, particularly haunting. Heard live, the piece reveals its debt to the rhythmic structure of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, but also Bernstein’s quintessentially American originality. The orchestra visibly enjoyed the lively musical numbers. When it was their turn to play “The Dance At the Gym” from West Side Story several orchestra members rocked uninhibitedly to the infectious mambo and cha-cha beats. Every deserving musical score should get such a 24-carat orchestral treatment once in a while. The vocal performances, varied in mood and style, were just as exhilarating. Nadim Naaman sang “Lonely Town” with winning melancholy. After her tentative lullaby, Scarlett Strallen was absolutely charming in “A Little Bit In Love”. Her showpiece, “Glitter and Be Gay”, was a brilliant send-up of an operatic aria. She exaggerated coloratura notes with glottal chugs and crashed downward scales hilariously into a guttural chest register. Glittering of gown and voice, she securely pinned all the high C’s, D’s and E flats and earned herself a huge applause.
Contrasting with Strallen’s diamond-point vocalism, Kim Criswell lent her turbine-driven voice and huge personality to a gallery of feisty women. As touching as she was in the ballad “Take Care of This House”, from Bernstein’s last composition for Broadway (and famous flop), 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it was her pizzazz in assertive, jazzy numbers that set the stage on fire. Both taxi driver Hildy’s imperative seduction catalogue “I Can Cook Too” and writer Ruth’s sardonic “One Hundred Easy Ways To Lose A Man” were irresistibly vivid. With unerring phrasing and a chameleon-like persona Criswell draws characters so rich that she makes you forget you’re listening to musical numbers out of context. From the robust top notes to the chocolate bourbon chest voice, her instrument is a dazzling vocal carousel. Her shifts though the various musical idioms – jazz, musical, operetta – seemed effortless. An intuitive comic, she sang the Old Lady’s Tango from Candide with a hyperbolic Spanish accent and full, throbbing tone. In “Island Magic” from the opera Trouble in Tahiti Criswell’s arms were as eloquent as her voice as they traced Dinah’s mockery of, and submission to, escapist silver screen entertainment. Supported by the other soloists as the trio, she was utterly magnetic, painting the scenography with her hands and swaying to her mighty Polynesian vocalise.
Criswell and Strallen ended the official program with a bouncy “Wrong Note Rag”, but the delighted audience naturally wanted more. They got two encores, the philosophical resignation quartet “Some Other Time” from On The Town and the “Tonight” quintet from West Side Story as a quartet. “Anita’s gonna get her kicks tonight”, sang Criswell. And she was not the only one who got them.
Jenny Camilleri
Performance information:
Kim Criswell, soprano; Scarlett Strallen, soprano; Julian Ovenden, tenor; Nadim Naaman, baritone. Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Conductor: John Wilson. Heard at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, Friday, 7th July 2017.