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."
It’s hard to imagine that Peter Maxwell Davies’ dramatic monologue, Eight Songs for a Mad King, can bear, or needs, any further contextualisation or intensification, so traumatic is its depiction - part public history, part private drama - of the descent into madness of King George III. It is a painful exposure of the fracture which separates the Sovereign King from the human mortal.
Full credit, then, to director Olivia Fuchs, conductor Sian Edwards and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group for this imaginative, thoughtfully programmed and highly engaging contextualisation of the work - one which gave us not only eight songs for a mad King, but also the songs of the deluded monarch: the music that rings and rages through his mind, heart and soul; real or imagined.
Librettist Randolph Stow explains in the score of Eight Songs that the text was inspired by ‘a miniature mechanical organ playing eight tunes, once the property of George III’. A scrap of paper sold with the organ stated: ‘This organ was George the third for Birds to sing.’ Stow describes how disturbing it was to imagine the King ‘in his purple flannel dressing-gown and ermine night-cap, struggling to teach birds to make the music which he could so rarely torture out of his flute and harpsichord. Or trying to sing with them, in that ravaged voice, made almost inhuman by day-long soliloquies’.
Davies’ score incorporates fragments and allusions to early eighteenth-century and mid-twentieth century popular songs, and so the BCMG’s programme comprised music from the same periods, and contrasted the freedom offered to the soul by the sounds of nature with the constriction and suffering resulting from disruptive human relationships and illness.
Throughout the programme, our Mad King - baritone Marcus Farnsworth - was present at the foot of the concert platform of Wilton’s Music Hall. Strait-jacketed, emitting occasional twitches and moans, he was by turns delighted, distracted and distressed by the sounds he heard. Alone, vulnerable and exposed, this lonely figure seemed to charge us with the same voyeuristic pleasure that his contemporaries took in his fall from grace.
The extended narrative was presented as a continuity, although some disruption and interruption resulted from necessary re-arrangements of the stage. These slight hiatuses, though, did not detract from either the persuasive wholeness and striking intensity of the concept, or the skilfulness of its execution.
Book-ending and infiltrating the ‘prelude’ to Eight Songs - which begins with George in his aviary attempting to teach his birds to sing - was Alaskan-based John Luther Adams’ multi-layered soundscape, songbirds. Perched in the gallery, percussionists Julian Warburton and Steve Gibson provided percussive cracks and rumbles to accompany Tony Robb’s piccolo trills and flutters.
Adams’ work was composed in the 1970s, at which time Messiaen had of course been taking inspiration from birdsong for several decades. Adams has noted that with ‘the self-consciousness of the self-styled young iconoclast’ he deliberately set out to eschew Messiaen’s influence, and we were able to judge for ourselves, for an example of the latter’s own orni-morphism followed. Le merle noir (The Blackbird), composed in 1951 for the Paris Conservatory, explores the way the bird’s song can be not simply portrayed or mimicked but actually grounded in the mechanism and implementation of an instrument itself. Pianist Mark Knoop exploited the composer’s divergent registers to establish the tremulous mood at the start, before flautist Marie-Christine Zupancic delicately crafted the diverse detail of the bird’s ‘cadenzas’.
Though our King had seemed entranced by Adams’ ‘Morningfieldsong’, during Le merle noir his head was bowed and clutched; a figure emerged and seated herself at the front of the stage, wrapping herself in Wilton’s generous red velvet curtain - a figure who, judging from her purple lace, frizzed hair and kohled eyes, had wandered straight from Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. Soprano Jennifer France’s subsequent rendition of the anonymous ballad ‘Mad Maudlin’s Search for Her Tom O’Bedlam’ was highly theatrical. Accompanied by Tom McKinney’s paradoxically elegant guitar, France’s soprano rolled richly around the text. In fact, the latter is almost surreal in its imagery and fragmentation: what are we to make of Mad Maudlin’s claim to have ‘cut mince piece from children’s thighs’, ‘boiled ten thousand harlots’ in a cauldron and ‘beaten The Man in the Moon to powder’.
Soprano Jennifer France and guitarist Tom McKinney perform Mad Maudlin's Search for Her Tom O'Bedlam. Photo credit: Mark Allan.
It certainly added to the disorientating strangeness, and the sense of ‘oddness’ continued in Rebecca Saunders’ Molly’s Song 3 - shades of crimson which adds four radio sets to its ensemble of alto flute, viola and steel-stringed acoustic guitar. The music is derived from Molly Bloom’s inner monologue at the close of Joyce’s Ulysses ; in an explanatory note in the score, Saunders explains that Molly’s Song 3 ‘seeks to sustain a musical energy strong enough to with stand the assaults of a succession of destructive events’. It’s certainly fraught and dramatic, the viola player (Christopher Yates) in particular being asked to produce an astonishing array of timbres.
Some soothing balm was administered by France’s charming rendition of Alminera’s aria ‘Augelletti che cantate’ from Handel’s Rinaldo (in 1711 Handel arranged for the release of real birds in the theatre at this point in the opera). She traced a mellifluous line - convincing the King that he had re-gained his Queen - while the flute swept through its virtuosic song.
But, the picture of pastoral peace and emotional reunion was but a cruel illusion. In the closing stanza, France confined the King to his strait-jacket once more. The musicians took their places for Eight Songs, for Davies and Stow intended that the players should be visually present performing music which is both diegetic and non-diegetic, and an exteriorisation of the King’s neuroses.
Much of the work requires the players to improvise from graphic notation and the synchronisation and precision of the BCMG was remarkable, always confident and taut as they moved between pointed unisons and strident dissonances, but bursting with energy too. Even the ‘out-of-phase’ rhythmic disintegrations and fragmentations sound ‘just right’, as the players depicted the dissolution of the King’s mind. In the third song, ‘The Lady -in-Waiting (Miss Musgrave’s Fancy), King and flute duetted in chirrups and tweets with playfulness and freedom. In the climactic ‘Country Dance (Scotch Bonnet)’, after the piano’s opening cocktail bar ‘smooch’, the piano and bass drum hammered terrifyingly as the King grabbed Alexandra Woods’ violin and violently smashed it to smithereens.
The role of the Mad King encompasses more than four octaves and asks the performer to deliver a range of multi-phonics. Farnsworth’s groans, bellows, screams, whispers, gargled phonetic gestures, Sprechstimme and, occasionally, song vividly conveyed the King’s torment. After a brief disappearance, he returned for the ‘Country Dance’, his long-johns and night-shirt now decorated with red feather boa, his lips rouged, for a flamboyant melisma, ‘Comfort Ye’ - a sardonic allusion to Handel’s Messiah, a particular favourite of George III’s - before descending to a disturbing, rasping ‘my people’. Flamboyance was followed by frenzied wrath when the King, unable to join in with the musicians, exploded with frustration; the shattered, forever to be silent violin was a poignant embodiment of his own impotence and irrelevance.
Farnsworth recited the ‘Review’ of his regnum with dignity, but he was a haunting presence, his majesty already obliterated and forgotten. He marched around and out of the Wilton’s auditorium to a merciless, whipped drum-beat - punished, disregarded, elapsed. The empty stage was a reminder of the ‘gap’ between the King’s powerful and pitiful selves, a ‘gap’ into which the King, his two ‘selves’ estranged, plunged into nothingness.
Claire Seymour
Proms at … Wilton’s Music Hall: Jennifer France (soprano), Marcus Farnsworth (baritone), Tom McKinney (guitar), Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Sian Edwards (conductor), Olivia Fuchs (stage director).
John Luther Adams - songbirdsongs (Morningfieldsong); Olivier Messiaen - Le merle nori; Unknown - Mad Maudlin's Search for Her Tom O'Bedlam; Rebecca Saunders - Molly's Song 3, shades of crimson; Georg Frideric Handel - Rinaldo (‘Augelletti, che cantata’); Adams - songbirdsongs (Meadowdance); Peter Maxwell Davies - Eight Songs for a Mad King
Wilton’s Music Hall, London; Saturday 2nd September 2017 (3pm)