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."
The morning sickness, miscarriage and maundering wraiths are still present, but Katie Mitchell’s Lucia di Lammermoor, receiving its first revival at the ROH, seems less ‘hysterical’ this time round - and all the more harrowing for it.
There were no pre-show warnings, as in 2016 , that the production contains scenes depicting ‘sexual acts’ and ‘violence’ - it’s hard to think of a nineteenth-century dramma tragico that doesn’t feature sex and violence - but while the dead bodies on the billiard table are still piled high, there seems rather less gore than I had remembered: neither blood vessels nor bathtub overflowed with such gruesome abandon. Lucia and Alisa still show an unhealthy enthusiasm when stabbing and asphyxiating the unsuspecting Arturo who, blindfolded by his apparently compliant new wife, is probably anticipating pillow games of a rather different nature. But, the leg-twitching of Arturo’s death throes was less exorbitantly prolonged, his fairly quick demise avoiding the uncomfortable guffaws prompted by last year’s extravagant expiration.
Vicki Mortimer’s detailed set remains divisive in several senses. Even the programme book synopsis is set out in two separate columns to delineate what is going on stage left and right, as the action unfolds in the public and private domains of the partitioned set, but there is still too much to take in in one visual sweep. There is always a sense that one is missing something, the scribbling of a letter, the fleeting suggestion of a ghostly presence, at the far edges of the production. And, I still found the mimed ‘business’, while visually embodying implied off-stage events, to be distracting. Lucia and Alisa, for example, are perennially preoccupied with changing Lucia’s clothing, whipping off frocks, tugging on trousers, adjusting corsets or hoops, pulling on dressing-gowns. It’s quite a ‘relief’ when Lucia is ‘stripped’ down to her bloodied night-dress, and the costume carousel is over.
The shallow set, its recesses quite dimly lit by Jon Clark, has a tendency to become crowded in the ensembles. The ROH Chorus are once again in tremendous voice, but they can do little more than position themselves like statues - around the graves in the crypt, behind the banqueting table and billiard table. Their Act 3 cry of horror, ‘We are frozen with terror’, prompted the thought that they hadn’t actually moved during the entire opera.
Christopher Maltman (Enrico) and Konu Kim (Arturo). Photo credit: Stephen Cummiskey.
Despite these prevailing misgivings, though, this really was a tremendous performance, the principals offering stunning individual performances and responding to each other with absolute conviction and coherence. As the obsessive, unforgiving and over-bearing Enrico Ashton, Christopher Maltman thundered with dark-toned authority; it was no wonder that Lucia cowered and collapsed in the face of such ruthless intimidation. Occasionally Enrico’s pompous indignation veered dangerously close to ‘cartoon baddie’ territory, but Maltman’s clarion vocal clout was balanced with subtlety and nuance. The clarity of his characterisation also brought the political context neatly to the fore, without the historic grievances between the two Scottish clans ever intruding fussily upon the unfolding personal tragedies; we understood, and perhaps forgave at least in part, the driving rationale behind his domination of his sister and his determination to control her fate. The Wolf Crag confrontation between Enrico and Edgardo bristled and burned with the unresolved conflicts of the past.
Andrew Tortise’s Normanno matched Enrico for vengeful resolve, but Michele Pertusi’s Raimondo was a calmer complement. Pertusi’s Act 2 plea for Lucia to sacrifice herself for the good of her family and for heavenly reward, ‘Al ben de’ tuoi qual vittima’, was beautifully crafted, each phrase carefully measured. Raimondo’s evident sympathy increased our own.
Rachael Lloyd (Alisa) and Lisette Oropesa (Lucia), framed by the ghosts of the murdered girl (Sacha Plaige) and Lucia’s mother (Sarah Northgraves). Photo credit: Stephen Cummiskey.
The phantoms of Ravenswoods and Ashtons past seemed to me to be even more omnipresent. The murdered girl inserted herself between the embracing Lucia and Edgardo, in the latter’s family crypt - though this was an improvement on the couple’s cliched carnality in 2016 - and appeared at precisely the same time as Edgardo at the wedding banquet, and the ubiquitous apparitions enhance our impression of Lucia’s derangement and mental distress.
Mitchell has declared her intent to make a ‘real woman’ of Lucia, one whose credible physical suffering prompts rebellious reaction and ultimately mental breakdown. There’s still ambiguity, though, whether the pallor and faintness that Lucia and the other characters draw attention to in Act 1 results from her morning sickness or from her brother’s threats and deceptions. Mitchell and Mortimer update the action to Donizetti’s 1830s, the decade which (she noted in 2016) was ‘a very important period for feminism with the Brontës and all those amazing women like Mary Anning who were early feminists, fossil-hunters and scientists’ - a nascent feminism which is further asserted by Mary Evans’ programme article for this revival. But, Cuban-American soprano Lisette Oropesa was appropriately tentative initially, capturing Lucia’s trepidation as she reflects on the ghostly glimmers which haunt her and the water of the fountain which turns blood-red.
Oropesa’s glinting soprano is fairly light but it grew warmly and expansively as Lucia’s distress deepened, and the crystalline precision and limpidness which I had admired at Glyndebourne this summer were again in notable evidence. As the sometimes cruel Norina in Mariame Clément’s Don Pasquale, Oropesa was a woman firmly in control of her own destiny but despite Mitchell’s avowal to make Lucia more feisty than faint-hearted, however much she wishes to challenge Enrico’s callousness Lucia’s destiny is undeniably ordained. She can ‘escape’ only into madness. In the ‘mad scene’, Oropesa was utterly broken but, to the soprano’s and Mitchell’s credit, this Lucia’s melodic meltdown was not an abstraction of disembodied madness but the terrible disintegrated of a real woman for whom we, and the stage witnesses, feel terrible sadness. Oropesa’s vocal purity returned Lucia to childlike vulnerability and victimhood.
Charles Castronovo (Edgardo). Photo credit: Stephen Cummiskey.
Returning to the role of Edgardo, Charles Castronovo impressed even more than in 2016, his tenor glowing first with ardency and a flawless legato, and then, in the banquet scene, with reproachful anger. His disruption of the wedding banquet was theatrically thrilling, and when he struck Lucia, for her imagined betrayal, it was hard not to flinch.
As Arturo, Konu Kim pushed his tenor a bit hard at the start, but he ironed out the occasional rough edge and gained more urbane control of the phrasing and line. Rachael Lloyd, returning as Alisa, displayed vocal evenness that was an appealing match for Oropesa’s clean sound.
Conductor Michele Mariotti carefully delineated the score’s detail. The woodwind, seated to the far left of the pit, made an eloquent, expressive contribution, and the melodism of the cellos’ and basses’ frequent pizzicato passages was emphasised. The lack of hyperbolic heft in no way diminished the emotional power of the orchestral delineation and commentary.
Castronovo’s ‘Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’ali’ stole the show last time round, but in this revival there was more genuine and tensely affecting feeling between Edgardo and Lucia, and while the romantic throbbing of the final scene was just as electric (and now undisturbed by histrionic wrist-slashing from Lucia), it seemed fitting that Edgardo should rise and rush to her side in her dying moments, so that their last breaths could be taken together.
Lucia di Lammermoor continues on selected dates until 27th November .
Claire Seymour
Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor
Lucia - Lisette Oropesa, Edgardo - Charles Castronovo, Enrico - Christopher Maltman, Normanno - Andrew Tortise, Arturo - Konu Kim, Alisa - Rachael Lloyd, Raimondo - Michele Pertusi, Enrico’s Servants - Abe Buckoke and Remi Rachuba, Ghost of Murdered Girl - Sacha Plaige, Ghost of Lucia’s Mother - Sarah Northgraves; director - Katie Mitchell, conductor - Michele Mariotti, designer - Vicki Mortimer, lighting designer - Jon Clarke, movement director - Joseph Alford, fight directors - Rachel Bown-Williams and Ruth Cooper-Brown, revival dramaturg - Cordelia Lynn, Orchestra and Chorus of the Royal Opera House (chorus director - William Spaulding).
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London; Wednesday 8th November 2017.