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’.
‘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’.
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.
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.
Probing Bernstein and MacMillan double bill in Amsterdam
The Opera Forward Festival (OFF) in Amsterdam is about new things: new compositions, rediscovered works and new faces. This year’s program included a double bill produced by Dutch National Opera’s talent development wing. Leonard Bernstein’s portrait of a miserable marriage in affluent suburbia, Trouble in Tahiti, was the contrasting companion piece to James McMillan’s Clemency, a study of the sinister side of religious belief.
Probing Bernstein and MacMillan double bill in Amsterdam
Clemency is based on an episode in Genesis in which three strangers visit Abraham and Sarah. They promise that Sarah, who is childless and past her climacteric, will bear a son within a year, but also announce the obliteration of the sinful cities Sodom and Gomorrah. In Trouble in Tahiti, Sam and Dinah already have a son, Junior, and everything else they could wish for, but they can’t seem to muster any patience or tenderness for each other, let alone love. Both one-acters deal with barrenness, emotional and biological, and director Ted Huffman stages them symbolically in an empty swimming pool. For Trouble in Tahiti the well-lit pool is cluttered with furniture, accessories and everything money can buy. The soft pastels are then replaced by Clemency’s dim interior. All the stuff is gone, and the bottom of the pool is lined with leaves. Alex Brok lights Abraham and Sarah’s dining table with beams from above, as in paintings depicting visitations from heaven. Set and costume designers Elena Zamparutti and Gisella Cappelli use clean lines and make marked statements with color. Like the rest of the production team and cast, they are young artists with great promise.
In the pit, Duncan Ward conducted the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra with alertness and dash. Musically, the two works are worlds apart. Bernstein uses a wide orchestral palette for his feather-light jazzy tunes and swelling lyricism. MacMillan’s string-only orchestra sounds like an augmented string quartet. His dark, threatening score is imaginatively crafted, with frequent tempo switches and harmonies that toss and turn as in a fever. Perhaps because MacMillan’s chamber opera is the more operatic piece, Clemency was more musically successful. Both the musical theatre idiom and the language of Trouble challenged the singers, most of whom are not North American. Even the orchestra, despite some very accomplished playing, did not sound completely free. In particular, the singers in the jazz Trio that provides a running commentary on suburban vapidity seemed to be working a little too hard. They bravely aimed for, but missed, the called-for powder-puff, breathy effect.
Theatrically, they fleshed out the plot by playing the invisible characters in the opera, such as Dinah’s psychiatrist. Dressed as clowns, they remained constantly onstage, ineffectually trying to direct Sam and Dinah to act like an American dream couple. Sebastià Peris i Marco sang Sam with a lovely, soft-grained baritone. A more assured attack on the words would have given his character more defined contours, especially in Sam’s anthem for alpha manhood and jockhood “There’s a law”. Soprano Turiya Haudenhuyse gave a winning performance as Dinah. Haudenhuyse is not only an expressive singer, but also an inherently natural actress who easily takes possession of the stage. Richly colored at the center and pliant throughout, her voice is a special instrument. For the hit number “What a movie”, Huffman put her on a flower swing, the visual high point of the evening. He dealt with the cultural appropriation and misattribution in Dinah’s plot summary by labeling the scene “Mom sees a racist movie”. The staging was chock-full of such entertaining and insightful touches, but was marred by live black-and-white video of the performers, distractingly out of sync with their movements. Whether this was on purpose or not, the video was superfluous. The libretto makes it clear enough that the silver screen is, for Sam and Dinah, both an ideal to strive for and a form of escapism.
Everything worked in Clemency and it will be among the best productions of DNO’s current season. Resonant bass-baritone Frederik Bergman hijacked the public’s attention with the first, full-bodied notes of Abraham’s Chant, and the rest of the performance followed suit. The orchestra rendered the tense score with horrific splendor. The five excellent soloists, whose voices blended with and overlaid each other perfectly, moved with studied purpose. Soprano Jenny Stafford was a penetrant Sarah, a heroine in a psychological thriller falling to pieces bit by bit. Lucas van Lierop, Stefan Kennedy and Alexander de Jong were the Triplets, the polite visitors who turn out to be suicide bombers on their way to destroy the Twin Towns, an echo of the Twin Towers. Taking his cue from MacMillan’s dissonant warnings, Huffman reveals the travelers’ ambivalent nature much earlier. Their annunciation plays out as a macabre ritual as they put Sarah on the table and lay their hands on her intrusively. From then on the tension started mounting and never let up.
Jenny Camilleri
Cast and production information:
Leonard Bernstein: Trouble in Tahiti
Dinah: Turiya Haudenhuyse; Sam: Sebastià Peris i Marco; The Trio: Kelly Poukens, Lucas van Lierop and Dominic Kraemer; Junior (Actor): Jasper Fleischmann.
James MacMillan: Clemency
Sarah: Jenny Stafford; Abraham: Frederik Bergman; The Triplets: Lucas van Lierop, Stefan Kennedy and Alexander de Jong.
Director: Ted Huffman; Set Design: Elena Zamparutti; Costume Design: Gisella Cappelli; Lighting Design: Alex Brok; Video: Pierre Martin; Conductor: Duncan Ward. Netherlands Chamber Orchestra.
Seen at the De Meervaart Theatre, Amsterdam, on Thursday, 22nd of March 2018.
