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.
On January 30, 2018, Arizona Opera and the Tucson Desert Song Festival presented a recital by lyric soprano Lisette Oropesa in the University of Arizona’s Holsclaw Hall. Looking like a high fashion model in her silver trimmed midnight-blue gown, the singer and pianist Michael Borowitz began their program with Pablo Luna’s Zarzuela aria, “De España Vengo.” (“I come from Spain”).
It’s text by Antonio Paso and Enrique García Álvarez searches for acceptance within the native country. Since Tucson is located near the Mexican border, the audience understood the emotions portrayed in this song despite the fact that it was written early in the last century.
Oropesa is a lyric soprano with a sizeable voice and the technique of a coloratura. It’s a powerful combination that allows her to sing fiendishly difficult roles like Konstanze in Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio with the utmost authority. A perfectionist when it comes to the technical aspects of coloratura singing, Oropesa also saw to it that no one in the audience could fail to understand her songs. In the program, she printed not only the words to each selection in the original language, but their translation as well. She also left the lighting high enough for any necessary reading while she was singing.
Oropesa and Borowitz then performed three Mozart lieder: “As Luise Burned the Letters of Her Untrue Lover,” K 520; “Evening Feeling,” K 523; and “Be Thou my Consolation,” K391. She made everyone in the audience feel Luise’s pain as she remembered the contents of the letters she burned. Oropesa touched many emotions when she sang about the words of love having been written to another young girl as well as Luise. Oropesa and Borowitz then reminded the audience of the beauty of night. It was especially appropriate on this late January evening as we knew that outside we would be greeted by the second full moon of the month, a large, reddish-colored globe that would later follow us north to Phoenix. Singer and pianist painted a cool aural picture of night and its respite from the heat of a desert day. They finished the Mozart group with a paen to living the solitary life, by choice or otherwise. Oropesa has a seamless technique. Her tones were bathed in pastel colors as they evoked the emotions of her words.
Leonard Bernstein’s 1949 “Two Love Songs” tell of a love that is stronger than life and can weld two souls together so that they sing a single melody. Oropesa’s butter cream tones were completely unified with Borowitz’s shimmering melodic strains. She finished the first half of the recital with an exquisite rendition of the “Vocalise” that Camille Saint-Saens wrote on a visit to Egypt in 1901. It is a wonderful text-free song that allows the coloratura to use some of her most intricate and difficult maneuvers. For Oropesa, it was a pièce de résistance.
After the intermission, Oropesa returned with “Four Songs” that Samuel Barber wrote between 1937 and 1940. In the first song, which has a text by British Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, a young woman looks for a peaceful life of contemplation in the convent. Would she find it in this melodic ambience? “The Secrets of the Old” seemed very much to the point because Oropesa sang to an audience that included many of the university’s voice teachers. Most of them had been performers who retired to teach in the warm climate of Southern Arizona. “Sure on this Shining Night” has become one of Barbers popular works. Oropesa and Borowitz put their own shine on its cachet before finishing the group with the sweet and chromatic "Nocturne."
Following the Barber, Oropesa and Borowitz performed two songs by Georges Bizet from his Op. 21, “Twenty Melodies.” He wrote them between 1838 and the year of the Carmen premiere, 1875. In “Chant d’amour,” the lady entreats her lover to enjoy the beauty of summer out of doors. The second, “The Arabian Hostess’s Farewell,” spoke of unrequited love and the sorrow of parting from someone who will never return. Oropesa and Borowitz rendered each song with a full quotient of emotion in a seemingly effortless manner.
Because it is the 100th anniversary of Leonard Bernstein’s birth, almost every opera company seems to be presenting his Candide. Not to be outdone by the sopranos singing the show’s best known aria, “Glitter and be Gay,” Oropesa sang it wearing at least ten sets of Mardi Gras beads which she threw to the audience at the song’s finale. It was a fine ending to a lovely concert, but their public would not let these artists go without an encore. From Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, Oropesa sang “Prendi, per me sei libero” to a smiling crowd that exited the hall humming the lovely melodies they had heard from these wonderful artists.
Maria Nockin
Program:
LUNA: El Niño Judio, “De España Vengo.”
MOZART: “Als Luise die Briefe ihres ungetreuen Liebhabers verbrannte;” “Abendempfindung;” “Sei du mein Trost. “
BERNSTEIN: Two Love Songs: “Extinguish My Eyes;” “When My Soul Touches Yours.”
SAINT-SAENS: Vocalise “Le Rossignol et la Rose.”
Intermission
BARBER: Four Songs “A Nun Takes the Veil;” “The Secrets of the Old;” “Sure on This Shining Night;” “Nocturne.”
BIZET: From Twenty Mélodies “Chant d’Amour;” “Adieu de l’hôtesse Arabe.”
BERNSTEIN: Candide “Glitter and Be Gay.”