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.
![Prince Pao and Haitang falling in love [Photos copyright Jean Louis Fernandez courtesy of the Opéra de Lyon]](http://www.operatoday.com/3-LeCercleDeCraie2-%C2%AEJeanLouisFernandez020%203.png)
Not the 14th century Chinese play nor its 1832 French translation, but a 1931 operatic re-creation by Alexander Zemlinsky of a 1925 German translation by “Klabund,” staged just now in Lyon by French stage director Richard Brunel.
Der Kreiderkreis or The Chalk Circle or Le Circle de Craie in French (1931) is the seventh of Zemlinsky’s eight operas (A Florentine Tragedy [1916] is the fifth, The Dwarf [1921] is the sixth, the unfinished Le Roi Candaule is the eighth). This Lyon production is the French premiere of The Chalk Circle.
Zemlinski’s The Chalk Circle is realized in masterful musical strokes, the late Romanticism and its destruction that surrounded Zemlinsky is fully assimilated into a finished style that floats faultlessly from the grotesque to the sublime, through cruelty and hopelessness to generosity and redemption. The.exotic tones of the ancient Orient and the new American world plus extended tracts in the actual spoken language finished the sophisticated soundscape of this tumultuous German political era. It was a unique music that mesmerized the opening night audience.
Director Richard Brunel found this sound world in ephemeral white images that merely suggested architecture. He dressed his actors in colors and periods that spoke to and of the wealth, power and corruption of the early twentieth century and to our current moment and to these early moments of the Chinese twenty-first century as well. He dissolved morality play abstractions into very specific and intense human scenes incorporating a large number of silent actors and even a live horse. The horse was white of course, and as the white snowflakes of the full stage snowstorm it too purified the heroine Haitang in her impossible plight.
Ma’s number one wife Yu-Pei overhears Haitong’s reunion with her brother Ling and hatches her plot to frame Haitang for infidelity.
The story is simple. A maiden sold into sex slavery is saved first by a villain she then purifies by giving him an heir. Accused of killing this husband by his number one wife she is again saved, now by the emperor of China himself who discerns her purity when she refuses to inflict violence on her child by wrenching it from a circle drawn by chalk. Among the splendidly staged scenes was her initial house of joy encounter with the young noble who later became emperor. It made startling effect indeed as circles of white light moved and bounced in pleasure and innocence.
Director Brunel knows however that such purity and innocence is doomed. He is not duped by the happy morality of the Chinese play. Brunel’s heroine we learn in the split second before final blackout has only imagined this happy ending. This extended delirious love duet with the emperor was but a flash in the moments before she is executed by the forces of an unjust world.
It was a production of purely human dimension executed in exquisite theatrical taste.
The cast, primarily Germanic language singers, was perfection, physically and vocally finding the depths of purity and depravity in the humanity of the characters of this ancient morality play. Conductor Lothar Koenigs created a vibrant presence for Zemlinsky’s score.
Haitang (in red) refuses to subject her child to the violence of a physical struggle. The emperor in light tan coat looks on.
Soprano Ilse Eerens beautifully exploited every nuance of emotion felt by Haitang, convincingly traversing Zemlinsky’s quick shifts through fear, resolve, tenderness and ecstasy. Her first love, Prince Pao, the young noble later emperor sung by Stephan Rügamer, was of stentorian tone, her brother Tschang-Ling, sung by baritone Lauri Vasar was, as Haitang, a voice of sweetness and human understanding. Haitang’s husband Ma, a tax collector, sung by bass Martin Winkler was rough and raspy. His divorce lawyer Tchao, sung by baritone Zachary Altman matched the menacing warmth of his lover mezzo soprano Nicola Beller Carbone who as Ma’s number one wife was the opera’s villain. As the judge, Tchou-Tchou, at the murder trail character tenor Stefan Kurt gave terrifying presence to the corruption of power as character singer Paul Kaufman created the shocking depravity of German cabaret as the Chinese house of joy.
The French production team was metteur en scène Richard Brunel; set designer Anouk Dell’Aiera; costumer Benjamin Moreau; lighting designer Christian Pinaud and video by Fabienne Gras.
Michael Milenski
Opéra Nouvel, Lyon, January 20, 2018