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."
Wigmore Hall was transformed into a musical menagerie earlier this week, when bass-baritone Ashley Riches, a Radio 3 New Generation Artist, and pianist Joseph Middleton took us on a pan-European lunchtime stroll through a gallery of birds and beasts, blooms and bugs.
The programme opened with a perennial favourite, Schubert’s ‘Die Forelle’ (The trout) and Middleton and Riches immediately made evident their concern, which was sustained throughout the recital, to communicate the narrative of their chosen songs - through motivic word-painting, vocal nuance, diversity of tone and dramatic presence. Middleton delicately conjured the slithering scales and flapping tail of the capricious fish, while Riches’ strong, forth-right projection conveyed the fisherman’s determination to land his catch.
This was beautiful and vivid characterisation. And, ‘Der Alpenjäger’ (The alpine huntsman) was similarly engaging. Riches relished, here and elsewhere, the opportunity to embody different characters and their energetic debates, aiming for comic contrast between the floating appeals of a mother who wishes her son to stay at home to tend the lambs and the insistent protests of the young adventurer who yearns to set out on his quest for the gazelle. Riches’ buoyant baritone brought to mind an image of the eager hazelnut gatherer in Wordsworth’s ‘Nutting’, sallying forth ‘in the eagerness of boyish hope … Tricked out in proud disguise of cast-off weeds’! The duo exploited the way Schubert’s rhythmic structure tells the tale, culminating in the stately pronouncements of the Spirit of the Mountain who intervenes - here with a sonorous gravity worthy of Sarastro - to protect the trembling gazelle. And, alert to every expressive dimension, Riches injected a little tenderness and pathos into the god’s final plea, ‘The earth has room for all; why do you persecute my herd?’ (‘Raum für alle hat die Erde,/Was verfolgst du meine Herde?’)
Riches works hard with his texts, and - as was evident during his vibrant performance in Purcell’s King Arthur with the Academy of Ancient Music at the Barbican Hall recently - he is not afraid to prioritise textual meaning over beauty of line to deepen the expressive meaning, though there is plentiful lyrical mellifluousness too. I was impressed by the directness and impact of his diction in the three German lieder. But, while he certainly took care (perhaps too much?) with the enunciation in the sequence of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Gallic songs that followed, his French is less idiomatic and this did affect the vocal phrasing, as occasionally Riches’ tendency to emphasise particular syllables disrupted the evenness of the syllabic scansion that is inherent in the language and reflected in the melodic and rhythmic settings.
I think, too, that this repertory is not Riches’ natural territory; his voice is full and strong, and while he did make a good attempt to ‘lighten’ the tone, the result did not feel entirely ‘natural’. The landscape of Fauré’s ‘Le papillon et la fleur’ (The butterfly and the flower) is a world away from Schubert’s forest foraging and it took Riches a little while to settle into the new terrain, but the wry reflections of the young man troubled by the contesting attractions of his lover’s lips and the rose-coloured ladybird resting on her snow-white neck, in Saint-Saëns’ ‘La coccinelle’, were engagingly delivered, Riches swooning into romantic reverie at the parodic close. Middleton’s atmospheric accompaniment added much to the sentimental hyperbole of Massenet’ quasi-operatic ‘La mort de la cigale’ (Death of the cicada), and here Riches exercised satisfying control during the extended vocal phrases and flowed lightly through the melismas of the central section.
One wonders why the French seem to have had such a ‘thing’ for insects, for Ravel, too, included an homage to the cricket (‘Le grillon’) in his Histoires naturelle (1906). Here, Middleton’s tremulous pointillism was delicately and delightfully evocative and what was really impressive about this song was the way the duo maintained rhythmic momentum, and a beguiling narrative, despite the fragmentary vocal line and seemingly ‘static’ piano gestures. It is the birds rather than the beetles that Ravel truly celebrates though, and none more than the peacock (‘Le paon’), whose pomp and pride rang from Middleton’s introductory bars with the brightness of the feathered eyes of the bird’s train, which was itself brandished with a startling pianistic flourish at the close. Some critics have suggested that Ravel is indulging in self-portraiture, here, painting a picture of the fin de siècle artist-cum-dandy, and this performance made that reading a convincing one. I admired Riches’ memory in this song - indeed, in all of Ravel’s set of five, for the texts are lengthy and often prosaic, with subtly shifting meters. He made a good effort to make the words ‘live’ in both ‘Le martin-pêcheur’ (The kingfisher), in which Middleton’s grave tone conveyed the bird’s regal status and demeanour, and in the account, in ‘La pintade’ (The guinea-fowl), of the quarrelsome nature of a farmer’s querulous hen.
Riches’ had shown his comfort and flair in the musical theatre idiom during the LSO’s Bernstein Anniversary celebrations at the Barbican Hall, before Christmas, when he was displayed a cocksure swagger and vibrant Yankee drawl in Bernstein’s Wonderful Town. And, while this recital did not, as then, end with Riches leading the audience in a conga down Wigmore Hall’s aisles, the final item of the programme, Vernon Duke’s Ogden Nash’s Musical Zoo, did give him liberty to don his Flanders-and-Swann hat, indulge his instinct for showmanship and celebrate the piquant wit of Vernon Duke’s musical embodiments of the brief portraits which form Ogden Nash’s bestiary. I have to confess that this repertoire is not really my cup of tea (I tend to the view that the poetry isn’t worth reading, let alone setting to music, but many will, for good reasons, disagree!). But, Riches rattled off the zoological roster with panache, and his poise and pronunciation were admirable. He couldn’t resist going down to the farm one more time: his encore, ‘I Bought Me A Cat’ from Copland’s Old American Songs was a noisy and nonsensical, and fittingly ‘natural’, end to a charming recital.
This recital can be heard for one month following the performance on BBC iPlayer.
Claire Seymour
Ashley Riches (bass-baritone), Joseph Middleton (piano)
Franz Schubert - ‘Die Forelle’ D550, ‘Die Vögel’ D691, ‘Der Alpenjäger’ D588; Fauré - ‘Le papillon et la fleur’ Op.1 No.1; Saint-Saëns - ‘La coccinelle’; Massenet - ‘La mort de la cigale’; Ravel -Histoires naturelles; Vernon Duke - Ogden Nash's Musical Zoo.
Wigmore Hall, London; Monday 19th February 2018.