Opera Today

La concordia de’ pianeti: Imperial flattery set to Baroque splendor in Amsterdam

La concordia de’ pianeti was commissioned to celebrate the name day of Elizabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, mother of Empress Maria Theresa and grandmother of Queen Marie Antoinette of France. In November 1723 she and her husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, were returning to Vienna from Prague, where they had been crowned monarchs of Bohemia. During a stop in Znojmo, Moravia, Caldara, who was employed by the emperor, conducted the open-air premiere for the imperial couple. La concordia de’ pianeti is more of a secular cantata than a one-act opera. Its plot, such as it is, consists of the god Mercury persuading six other gods that “Elisa”, the empress, possesses qualities equal, or even superior, to theirs, thus deserving deification. Each of the seven gods and goddesses is associated with a heavenly body: Apollo with the sun, Saturn and Venus with the eponymous planets, and so on. Their final agreement on Elisa’s unsurpassable wonderfulness corresponds to the harmony of the spheres, hence the title. At one point the lunar goddess Diana scoffs that she’d like to see Elisa hunting boar and deer as skillfully as herself. Unfortunately, this tantalizing diversion in the plot never happens. As the gods concede Elizabeth’s supremacy one by one, the obsequious puffery reaches ridiculous proportions. The deities eulogize Elizabeth’s spotlessness, beauty and, most insistently, her fertility, ad nauseam. The empress, who was under immense pressure to produce a male heir, was pregnant with a boy at the time, but later had a miscarriage.

Given the qualitative chasm separating the words and the music, this performance by the Baroque ensemble La Cetra under Andrea Marcon, would have been better off without subtitles. But Caldara’s ornate score certainly deserved to be rescued from obscurity in 2014. Four trumpets and a set of timpani festoon the introduction. The laudatory choruses, plushly sung by the La Cetra chorus, set a celebratory mood. Conducting deftly but unhurriedly, Marcon maintained a festive pace throughout. The arias are eminently hummable, often danceable, the melodies set off with brilliant instrumental colors, and there were plenty of opportunities for the excellent musicians to show off their virtuosity. The two lutenists supplied springy rhythms and the principal trumpet elegantly dueled with Marte (Mars) in one of his arias. At full strength, the orchestra, with its warm and vibrant strings, threatened to swamp the smaller voices.

All seven soloists are to be commended for trying to inject some theatre into the empty, repetitive flattery, and succeeding to an extent by dint of their personalities. Vocally, they offered between them an impressive variety of qualities. Countertenor David Hansen sang Apollo, a role created by the star castrato Carestini, with a gauzy middle voice that opened up into a full, clarion top. Carlos Mena made an assertive Marte (Mars). Mena’s countertenor is idiosyncratic, with surprisingly dark low notes. He glided through the contrasting hues of his registers with agility and appealing swagger. Both Hansen and Mena had enough volume to hold their own against the orchestra, as did bass Luca Tittoto. As Saturno, Tittoto combined power with comely phrasing. Verónica Cangemi was a charmingly combative Diana. All the gods get two arias, except for Venere (Venus), who gets three, and Cangemi’s thin-topped soprano sounded at its best in her second aria, which made full use of its warm, upper middle band. Lovers of smooth, evenly produced voices could sit back and enjoy Emiliano Gonzalez Toro as Mercurio, Christophe Dumaux as Giove (Jupiter) and Delphine Galou as Venere. With modestly sized voices, they each spun out ribbons of unblemished coloratura. Galou’s mellow mezzo-soprano, Dumaux’s patrician countertenor and Gonzalez Toro’s bright tenor differentiated their characters in a way the stilted text never could. Above all, everyone on the podium projected great pleasure in performing this effulgent music, and the audience responded with appreciative enthusiasm.

Jenny Camilleri

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Cast and production information:

Venere - Delphine Galou, mezzo-soprano; Diana - Verónica Cangemi, soprano; Giove - Christophe Dumaux, countertenor; Apollo - David Hansen, countertenor; Marte - Carlos Mena, countertenor; Mercurio - Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, tenor; Saturno - Luca Tittoto, bass. Conductor - Andrea Marcon. La Cetra Barockorchester & Vokalensemble Basel. Heard at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, on Saturday, 28^th of April, 2018.

image=http://www.operatoday.com/Elisabeth_Christine_of_Braunschweig_Wolfenbuettel.png image_description=Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel [Source: Wikipedia] product=yes product_title=La concordia de’ pianeti: Imperial flattery set to Baroque splendor in Amsterdam product_by=A review by Jenny Camilleri product_id=Above: Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel [Source: Wikipedia]

Kathleen Ferrier Awards Final 2018

The six twenty-minute programmes were, naturally, eclectic and international though, ranging from Mozart to Mussorgsky, from Puccini to Poulenc, from Rossini to Ravel. Soprano Nardus Williams had the challenge of opening the proceedings, with accompanist Jȃms Coleman. Currently studying at the International Opera School at the Royal College of Music, where she is the sole recipient of the Kiri Te Kanawa Scholarship, this summer Williams will be a Jerwood Young Artist at Glyndebourne Festival Opera, before joining the Houston Grand Opera Studio in September. On this occasion, however, nerves seemed to get the better of her: she struggled at times to control her intonation and a rather fast, prominent vibrato made the tone somewhat shrill. Williams looked a little tense in her opening item, ‘Come scoglio’, and her delivery was rather four-square, though Coleman’s light-touch add some rhythmic vitality. Indeed, this seemed a rather ambitious choice as Williams doesn’t yet have the strength and focus at the bottom to convincingly assail the aria’s highs and lows with equal presence. Strauss’s ‘Cäcilie’ was more consistently sumptuous and I was again impressed by Coleman’s judicious accompaniment and sensitive dynamics.

Two French items allowed Williams to reveal the power of her voice, as she soared through the closing phrase of Fauré’s ‘Fleur jetée’ with sustained strength and crested the climaxes in Charpentier’s ‘Depuis le jour’ (from Louise) with a shimmering frisson. I’m not sure the French idiom is Williams’ natural territory though: the projection was a little too forthright and the diction less than clear. The soprano was most at home in Barber’s lyrical ‘Saint Ita’s Vision’, where she thoughtfully shaped both the declamatory recitative and the changing contours of the ensuing lullaby to convey the mother’s changing emotions, delicately supported by the gently placed spread chords of the accompaniment.

Bass-baritone Samuel Carl fairly bounded onto the Wigmore Hall platform and displayed a strong theatrical instinct throughout his programme with pianist Soohong Park. ‘I rage … O ruddier than the cherry’, from Handel’s Acis and Galatea, in which the smitten cyclops, Polyphemus, expresses both his jealousy and passion for the sea nymph Galatea, was strongly characterised and full of varied colours. Carl was attentive to the text, the gaping descent of his ‘capacious mouth’ prompting a chuckle from the capacity audience and the sincerity of his love captured by the floating glide with which he worshipped ‘Sweet Galatea’s beauty’. Park summoned an eerie darkness at the start of Mussorgsky’s ‘Trepak’ (from Songs and Dances of Death), in which the bass-baritone again used his voice to explore diverse moods, from sweetness to mystery, belligerence to indifference. The rhetoric was powerful but Carl wasn’t afraid to diminish his voice and make us listen hard.

Through these first two items, I wondered if at times the ‘theatricality’ wasn’t a little too ‘busy’, even distracting, and in John Ireland’s perennially popular ‘Sea-fever’ more stillness and focus would have been advantageous in capturing the effortless gentility of the folk-like idiom. Carl was in his element in Leporello’s ‘Madamina, il catalogo è questo’ (from Don Giovanni), flourishing a ‘little red book’ from his inside pocket to taunt the imagined Elvira, but while he certainly inhabited the character and drama, Carl paid insufficient attention to the rhythmic tautness and to the shaping of the phrase endings. Overall, though, this was a confident, entertaining and engaging sequence.

The finalists are required to include at least one song in English. Contralto Stephanie Wake-Edwards tackled three, beginning with ‘Never so weary’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which Hermia, her pride wounded by Helena’s insults and her heart pained by Lysander’s apparent betrayal, wanders alone in the wood before sleep overcomes her. I was impressed by the manner in which Wake-Edwards used her rich, well-focused contralto to immediately establish character and mood, and the ensemble between the contralto and pianist Thormod Rønning Kvam in the recitative was flawless. Well-centred intonation and carefully crafted phrasing created a somnolent ‘strangeness’ in the ensuing aria. The warm flowering of harmonic colour in the piano accompaniment at the start of Richard Strauss’s ‘Das Rosenband’ was welcome after the cool intimacy of Britten’s nocturnal woods and although Wake-Edwards didn’t always have the full measure of the expansiveness of Strauss’s melody, there were signs of an incipient Straussian plumpness and flush, particularly at the close when ‘Paradise bloomed about us’.

Wake-Edwards returned to Britten with Lucretia’s ‘Flower Song’ from The Rape of Lucretia, written for Kathleen Ferrier who performed the title role at Glyndebourne in 1946. The aria is sung by the shamed Lucretia the morning after she has been raped by Tarquinius. Ronald Duncan’s text presents the rather questionable proposition that while flowers are always ‘chaste’, all women are ‘debauched’ by ‘vanity or flattery’: ‘Women bring to every man/The same defection’. Dubious tenets aside, the aria is one of beautiful melodic sincerity and here the piano bass line provided a sure anchor for Wake-Edwards clean, round vocal tone. She certainly acts with her voice, but here and in Elgar’s ‘Sea slumber-song’ which closed her programme, I felt that at times the contralto pulled the words around a little too much, distorting and elongating vowels into somewhat odd shapes. However, she made a good attempt to capture the languor of the French prose in Ravel’s account of the innate regality of the peacock, as he awaits his bride, in Ravel’s ‘Le paon’ from the musical menagerie, Histoires Naturelles. Kvam made much of Elgar’s wonderful piano sonorities and gently rocking lilt, and if I’d have liked Wake-Edwards to make more of the dynamic contrasts and deepen the shine of the melodic line, then she demonstrated that her contralto certainly has a secure and wide compass, as she plummeted resonantly, ‘on the shadowy sand’.

After a short interval, soprano Josephine Goddard and pianist Elliot Launn invited us on a journey, opening their programme with a gorgeous and utterly absorbing performance of Duparc’s ‘L’invitation au voyage’ in which the soprano spun the high line with a silvery gleam above Launn’s delicately trickling accompaniment. Here, again, was the vocal elegance I admired when I saw Goddard perform the role of Adolfo in the 2017 London Handel Festival production of Faramondo , and the well-shaped melodism that Goddard demonstrated as Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Royal College of Music earlier this year was again in evidence in Mimì’s ‘Donde lieta uscí’ in which strength of line was complemented by an appealing ‘freedom’ in the voice. Goddard controlled both dynamics and tone effectively, injecting a lovely flush of colour at the close, when the dying Mimì offers Rodolfo her pink bonnet as a memento of her love.

Launn’s steady, precise and gently articulated piano chords contributed greatly to a well-structured rendition of the ‘Nocturne’ from Britten’s 1937 song-cycle On this Island, in which the simple melodic line was expertly controlled and shaped creating a wonderfully serene image of the world sleeping as the globe spins ‘through night’s caressing grip’. Goddard coolly negotiated the sometimes surprising harmonic twists of the song, making much of the dissonance at the close, ‘Calmly till the morning break,/ Let him lie,’ before slipping easefully into the final cadence, ‘then gently wake’. Written for Peter Pears, and more commonly sung by the tenor voice, this song perhaps acquired even greater serenity from the sweetness of Goddard’s soprano. Rosalinde’s homeland reminiscences, from Johann Strauss junior’s Die Fledermaus), swept us from soothing slumber to champagne-fuelled masquerade. The aria ranges high and deep, but the soprano soared smoothly and evening through the melodic arcs. Goddard’s German was also excellent, and she paced the growing exuberance of the Csárdás perfectly, gradually ratcheting up the tempo and allowing the ‘Hungarian Countess’s’ high spirits free rein at the close. The Wigmore Hall audience loved it.

William Thomas (bass): Kathleen Ferrier Awards 2018, First Prize.

William Thomas and pianist Michael Pandya adopted a more sombre tone at the start of their sequence of Russian, French, Italian and English songs, but the dark whispering of the Dawn to the Heavens - ‘I love thee well’ - at the opening of Rachmaninov’s ‘Utro’ (Morning) was no less striking. Thomas has a ‘real’ bass voice: full and ringing right at the bottom; layers of colour that blend smoothly and thickly; sonorous roundness without heaviness. Rachmaninov’s vocal line is quite austere in this early song, but Thomas injected interest into the fairly narrow melodic compass and limited gestures, capturing the gravity which derives from the careful intonation of the language and the intensity of the text’s romantic imagery. Pandya cherished the delicate pianism. In Poulenc’s ‘Mazurka’ from Mouvements du Coeur the duo offered a masterclass in how to build through a strophic form. Thomas displayed evenness across the range and a lyricism which brought depth of character to the melodic lines which present a series of disparate images.

Thomas demonstrated his adaptability and diversity in Don Basilio’s ‘La calunnia è un venticello’ (from Il barbiere di Siviglia), capturing every ounce of Basilio’s delight in cruelly baiting Bartolo with tales of Rosina’s faithlessness, of his suave self-confidence as he admires his own chicanery, and of his inflated egoism as he imagines the whirlwind of vicious gossip he will conjure and the resulting apocalyptic downfall of his intended victim. There was no loss of musicality as the patter picked up pace, once again showing intelligent appreciation of the architecture of the form, and the text was consistently idiomatic and clear.

Thomas proved himself not just a good actor, but a persuasive storyteller too, in Mussorgsky’s setting of Mephistopheles’s ‘Song of the flea’, delivering a darkly devilish account of the lavish attention bestowed by a king on his pet flea, to the detriment of his court and at the expense of his aristocratic courtiers’ comfort. Pandya’s accompaniment was full of drama, too, adding to the quasi-operatic scale. And, in the final item, Katie Moss’s ‘The floral dance’, the slightest freedom in the placement of the second beat in the triple-time lilt creating a lovely carefree air fitting for this bucolic celebration of spring’s arrival. With a skilfully controlled accelerando, Thomas conveyed the genuine ardour of youthful passion as every Cornish lad grabbed a girl by the waist and whisked her off, kissing and dancing: ‘Up and down, around the town/ Hurrah! For the Cornish Floral Dance.’

Catriona Hewitson and Eleanor Kornas had had a long wait, but the Scottish-born soprano and her accompanist made a confident start to their programme with Annette’s ‘Einst träumte … Trübe Augen’ from Weber’s Der Freischütz. Hewitson crafted the arioso effectively and her light, clean soprano had a thrilling glossiness as Annette recounted her cousin’s fervent prayer: ‘Susanna, Margaret! Susanna, Margaret!’ The running passages of the ensuing aria were unforced and free, and Kornas’s lively responsiveness contributed to a very communicative performance. Supported by the piano’s soft textures and gentle lilt, the effortlessness of Hewitson’s vocal ascents in Schumann’s ‘Stille Tränen’ was impressive; she floated to the top easily and with gracefulness, though I’d have liked her to have made more of the text.

Two songs by Poulenc were beguilingly idiomatic though. The title of ‘C’, or Cé’, is taken from the name of a commune in France, ‘The Bridges of Cé’, which had been the site of many historic battles - something that was surely in Poulenc’s mind when he set Louis Aragon’s text during WW2. Hewitson and Kornas had the full measure of the song’s shifting complexities of harmony and rhythm - which match the historic sweep encompassed by Aragon’s surreal sequence of images - and the challenging pedalling and dense accompanying chords proved no impediment to limpidity. The quiet wistfulness at the close was broken by the more bitter chain of absurd images - ‘pimps in kits’, ‘sly fellows hindered by long noses’, ‘drowned corpses that float beneath bridge’ - which depict life during the Nazi Occupation, in ‘Fêtes galantes’. A lighter spirit was evoked by Mozart’s ‘Deh vieni, no tardar’, in which Susanna, in league with the Countess, sings a seductive song to lure the Count to a nocturnal meeting. The artless simplicity of the vocal line was beautifully captured by Hewitson, but though the light clarity was fittingly enticing, this aria is many-layered, and the innate passion in Susanna’s pleas was missing. For Figaro has learned of the planned assignation and is listening in; and Susanna knows it - her promise to ‘wreathe your brow in roses’ is both a tease and a vow, and the sincerity of the latter needs to be felt too. But, Hewitson’s directness and lightness was just perfect for Liza Lehmann’s ‘If no one ever marries me’ which closed the Competition with delicately wry humour.

The six young singers all acquitted themselves well and provided considerable musical pleasure. No doubt we will be seeing much more of them in the future. The Jury - Elaine Padmore OBE, John Mark Ainsley, Malcolm Martineau OBE, Joan Rodgers CBE and David Syrus - awarded the following prizes.

First Prize: William Thomas
Second Prize: Josephine Goddard
Ferrier Loveday Song Prize: Catriona Hewitson
Help Musicians UK Accompanist’s Prize: Michael Pandya

Claire Seymour

Nardus Williams (soprano), Jȃms Coleman* (piano): Mozart - ‘Temeraro! … Come scoglio’ (from Così fan tutte ); Barber -‘Saint Ita’s vision’; Fauré - ‘Fleur jetée’; Charpentier - ‘Depuis le jour’ (from Louise); R. Strauss - ‘Cäcilie’

Samuel Carl (bass-baritone), Soohong Park (piano): Handel - ‘I rage … O ruddier than the cherry’ (fromAcis and Galatea); Mussorgsky - ‘Trepak’ (from Songs and Dances of Death); Ireland - ‘Sea-fever’; Mozart - ‘Madamina, il catalogo è questo’ (from Don Giovanni)

Stephanie Wake-Edwards (contralto), Thormod R ønning Kvam* (piano): Britten - ‘Puppet? Why so? … Never so weary (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream); R. Strauss - ‘Das Rosenband’; Britten - ‘Flowers bring to every year (from The Rape of Lucretia); Ravel - ‘Le paon’ (from Histoires Naturelles); Elgar - ‘Sea slumber-song (from Sea Pictures)

Josephine Goddard (soprano), Elliot Launn* (piano): Duparc - ‘L’invitation au voyage’; Puccini - ‘Donde lieta uscí’ (fromLa bohème); Britten - ‘Nocturne’ (fromOn this Island); J. Strauss II - ‘Klänge der Heimat’ (from Die Fledermaus)

William Thomas (bass), Michael Pandya* (piano): Rachmaninov - ‘Utro’ (Morning); Poulenc - ‘Mazurka’ (from Mouvements du Coeur); Rossini - ‘La calunnia è un venticello’ (from Il barbiere di Siviglia); Mussorgsky - ‘Pesnya Mefistofelya o blokhe (Song of the flea)’; Moss - ‘The Floral Dance’

Catriona Hewitson (soprano), Eleanor Kornas* (piano): Weber - ‘Einst tr äumte … Trübe Augen’ (from Der Freischütz); Schumann - ‘Stille Tränen’ (Zwölf Gedichte von Jusinus Kerner); Mozart - ‘Giunse alfin il momento … Deh vieni, no tardar’ (fromLe nozze di Figaro); Poulenc - ‘C’, ‘Fêtes galantes’ ( Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon); Lehmann - ‘If no one ever marries me’ (from The Daisy Chain)

* denotes pianist competing for the Accompanist’s Prize

image=http://www.operatoday.com/Ferrier%20Award%20winners%202018.jpg image_description=Kathleen Ferrier Awards 2018, Wigmore Hall product=yes product_title=Kathleen Ferrier Awards 2018, Wigmore Hall product_by=A review by Claire Seymour product_id= Above: Catriona Hewitson, Josephine Goddard, William Thomas and Michael Pandya (Kathleen Ferrier Award prize winners, 2018)

Affecting and Effective Traviata in San Jose

Violetta Valery is regarded as an Everest of operatic soprano roles and Amanda Kingston proved more than up to the climb. Ms. Kingston has a supple, agile, alluring instrument that is more than capable of meeting the legendary challenges of the part, namely the flights of impetuous coloratura in Act I; the midrange conversational passages that give way to spinto outbursts in Act II; the weighty pathos and then the limpid lyricism of Acts III and IV. Vocally, the singer has all these effects in her arsenal, and she has a lovely presence that is majestic and assured. The San Jose public has been blessed to have an artist of her caliber on their opera stage this season.

Violetta, like Carmen, is a complex persona, sometimes enigmatic, often unpredictable, and endlessly malleable to the interpreter’s individual gifts. Amanda’s two strongest assets are her rock solid, searing flights above the staff that filled the auditorium with plangent, vibrant sound; and her heart-breaking pathos with which she imbued the self-sacrificial moments. She clearly understands and communicates the text, and there is not a note out of place in here secure technique that is even from top to bottom.

If there is one thing I wish this fine artist could invest in her already accomplished portrayal it is a method of communicating the heroine’s extreme physical frailty. Moments of temporary (and ultimately fatal) physical lapses were a bit too robustly ‘present’; intelligently rendered but missing that final tragically hollow color that can haunt the viewer’s heart. I have no doubt that the prodigiously talented Amanda Kingston is capable of this final dimension, which will further enhance what is already one of the best sung Violetta’s on display anywhere.

Violetta (Amanda Kingston) is comforted by Flora Bervoix (Christina Pezzarossi) and Sr. Grenvil (Colin Ramsey).

Dane Suarez is perhaps the most effortlessly boyish Alfredo I have yet seen, and he communicates his helpless romantic (and sexual) infatuation with Violetta with honesty and abandon. His fresh faced, puppy dog approach made him stand out from the other jaded men in Violetta’s circle, and made us understand why Violetta might be attracted to his impetuous sincerity and handsome naiveté.

Mr. Suarez has an appealing, substantial tenor, which he deployed with considerable nuance. Although he sang sturdily throughout the evening, he found his most solid vocal footing in the sardonic phrases and recriminating outbursts in Act III, where he poured out highly charged high notes that were riveting in their intensity. When Dane affected the boyish sweetness earlier on, the gears were sometimes on display as he worked (albeit successfully) to reign in his sizable tone, and to color it youthfully. In the future, he might pay attention to not letting his voice get off the breath since some crooning phrase ends drooped just under the pitch. Still, his total emotional investment in pursuing and later, comforting Violetta proved heart rending.

Veteran baritone Trevor Neal was an imposing Giorgio Germont, his physical stature and orotund baritone impressively illuminating the character. Verdi gives Germont some of the opera’s best music and a wonderful theatrical arc, and Mr. Neal took full advantage of the opportunity. His sonorous, mellifluous delivery was marked by beautifully shaped phrases and incisive theatrical insights. Although Trevor’s secure instrument is otherwise totally hooked up, he uncharacteristically had a few passing encounters with a bit of a rasp on topmost G-flats. Small matter, when this fine interpreter dominated his every scene.

As usual, OSJ invested the smaller roles with its usual high standard of meticulous casting. Mason Gates put his fine lyric tenor to good service as Gastone. Baritone Philip Skinner was a memorable, firm-voiced Baron Douphol. Christina Pezzarossi made a notable impression as Flora, with her resonant, smoky mezzo providing ample pleasure. Erin O’Meally’s poised, silvery soprano was well suited to Annina’s gentle phrases. Baritone Babatunde Akinboboye was agile of voice and playful of demeanor as a cavorting Marchese d’Obigny. In true luxury casting bass-baritone Colin Ramsey, who has successfully assumed a number of major roles at OSJ, was a firm-toned Doctor Grenvil.

In the pit, Dennis Doubin whipped up a sprightly, propulsive reading, after the shimmering strings opened the performance with a luminous reading of the prologue. Maestro Doubin led a secure, idiomatically correct rendition that eschewed indulgence in the oom-pah segments of this middle-Verdi opus. Conversely, he luxuriated in the expansive melodies that comprise much of the work. The conductor elicited a cleanly detailed account of Verdi’s masterpiece, even as he lived the drama in admirable collaboration with his vocal soloists. Andrew Whitfield’s well prepared chorus proved a considerable asset in the evening’s success.

Director Shawna Lucy has staged an efficient, cogent presentation that pushes all the right buttons, managing the large populated scenes with skill and imagination, highlighting select minor dramas played out between choristers. She also creates meaningful interactions with her principals, and underscores all the major emotional beats. Shawna gets excellent results from the chorus, and the re-imagined gypsy and toreador choruses in Act III were fresh and topical. The #metoo movement was even meaningfully evoked when, late in Act III, the chorus courtesans suddenly reject male domination in solidarity with Violetta, and forcibly extricate themselves from unwanted relationships. Ms. Lucy was assisted by choreographer Michelle Klaers D’Alo

Eric Flatmo has designed a workable unit set that consists of a raked platform stage left, with a sunken playing space stage right, all of which gets repurposed each act, with telling different set pieces and looks. A large picture window upstage reveals the Eiffel tower, with the exception of Act II when a pastoral setting is projected. Beginning with a copper toned look, this paneled environment's shifting appearance proved a highly effective playing space.

Elizabeth Poindexter’s lavish and character specific costumes provided a sumptuous visual component, abetted by Christina Martin’s comprehensive wig and make-up design. Pamila Z. Gray devised a moody and comprehensive lighting design, with good use of area washes and designated specials.

As this memorable season comes to an end, Opera San Jose has announced their varied slate for 2018-2019 which includesThe Abduction from the Seraglio, Pagliacci, Moby Dick and Madama Butterfly.

James Sohre

Verdi: La traviata

Violetta Valery: Amanda Kingston; Flora Bervoix: Christina Pezzarossi; Annina: Erin O’Meally; Alfredo Germont: Dane Suarez; Giorgio Germont: Trevor Neal; Gastone: Mason Gates; Baron Douphol: Philip Skinner; Marchese d’Obigny: Babatunde Akinboboye; Doctor Grenvil: Colin Ramsey; Giuseppe: Kevin Gino; Guest: Noah DeMoss; Messenger: Lazo Mihajlovich; Conductor: Dennis Doubin; Director: Shawna Lucey; Choreographer: Michelle Klaers D’Alo; Set Design: Eric Flatmo; Costume Design: Elizabeth Poindexter; Lighting Design: Pamila Z. Gray; Wig and Make-up Design: Christina Martin; Chorus Master: Andrew Whitfield

image=http://www.operatoday.com/chorus%20of%20revelers%20surrounds%20Flora%20Bervoix.jpg image_description=San Jose Opera, La traviata product=yes product_title=San Jose Opera, La traviata product_by=A review by James Sohre product_id= Above: The chorus of revelers surrounds Flora Bervoix (Christina Pezzarossi) in Act III

Brahms Liederabend

That set came last in this Wigmore Hall recital from Goerne and Alexander Schmalcz. Whilst it is difficult to imagine anyone having been seriously disappointed by the performance heard, I do not think it came close to matching a performance I heard last year in Salzburg from Goerne with Daniil Trifonov . Before hastening to judgement, however, I should caution that the fault did not necessarily lie with the pianist. Here, as indeed throughout, Schmalcz gave estimable accounts of Brahms’s musical structures, duly suggestive of both how they complement and how they do not the ways of the verbal texts. ‘Denn est gehet dem Menschen’ was perhaps the strongest performance here, offering a true sense of having reached the beginning of the end, finality clear even in the fury of its central stanza; ‘Es fährt alles an einen Ort…’. Echoes from Ein deutsches Requiem, always apparent, were perhaps more than usually so here. However, during the second and fourth songs in particular, a hectoring quality to Goethe’s performance, sometimes apparent earlier too, seemed to go a little too far in the role of the verbal Preacher (be it that of Ecclesiastes or St Paul). In the latter and final song, ‘Wenn ich met Menschen,’ there was a sense of the music never quite having settled; it seemed unduly complicated, as if minds of singer and pianist had not truly come together.

The Neun Lieder und Gesänge, op.32, fared much better. Why we do not hear these songs more often I really do not know. Perhaps it is simply that Brahms is still thought of more as an instrumental than a vocal composer. Surely the autobiographical element – Graham Johnson once suggested considering the set as a Komponistenliebe sequel to Schumann’s Dichterliebe – should attract. Above all, though, the sheer musical – and musico-dramatic – quality should. Wagner’s was not the only way. Schubert often hovered in the background, more oppressively than benignly, the opening ‘Wie raft ich mich auf in der Nacht’ suggestive almost of a retelling of the night of ‘Der Doppelgänger’, from a different, related person’s standpoint, several years later. Indeed that fabled ‘lateness’ of Brahms, however much it may stand in need of deconstruction , seemed, not inappropriately, present throughout this dark night’s proceedings. That is not to say that darkness was unvaried; it nevertheless predominated, still more so in the following ‘Nicht mehr zu dir zu gehen’. ‘Ich schleich umher’ offered different forms of repression, repression remaining the operative word, however. Two August von Platen storms ensued, prior to a true sense of reckoning in another setting of that same poet, ‘Du sprichst, dass ich mich täuschte’, almost as if this were the cycle’s – if indeed a cycle it be – peripeteia. Hafiz, translated by Georg Friedrich Daumer followed, in three songs, the first two exquisitely bitter in their ‘Süsse’ (‘sweetness’, as the first has it) – or should that be the other way around? Blissful in its quiet ecstasy, ‘Wie bist du meine Königin’ seemed to hark back to Schubert’s ‘Du bist die Ruh’, without abdicating its ‘late’ knowledge that it would prove impossible to return.

Five Heine settings came in between. (There was no interval.) ‘Sommerabend’ benefited from especially fine piano voicing, as if shadowing the vocal line, a Doppelgänger to it, which in a way it is, yet not only in a ‘purely musical’ way. ‘Mondenschein’ proved in turn a moonlit Doppelgänger to its predecessor. The exquisite drowsiness of death and recollection, quite without hope of an after-life or any other ‘beyond’, came to us in the deathly ‘Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht’. An intermezzo-like reading – from both artists – of ‘Es schauen die Blumen’ was followed by a somewhat hectoring ‘Meerfahrt’. Perhaps that was the point – up to a point. Sometimes, however, as Heine might have advised, there are other forms of preparation than rage.

Mark Berry

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Programme:

Neun Lieder und Gesänge , op.32; Sommerabend, op.85 no.1; Mondenschein, op.85 no.2; Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht, op.96 no.1;Es schauen die Blumen, op.96 no.3; Meerfahrt, op.96 no.4; Vier ernste Gesänge, op.96 no.4. Matthias Goerne (baritone)/Alexander Schmalcz (piano). Wigmore Hall, London, Thursday 26 April 2018

image=http://www.operatoday.com/Goerne.jpg image_description=Matthias Goerne product=yes product_title=Brahms Liederabend product_by=A review by Mark Berry product_id=Above: Matthias Goerne

Angel Blue in La Traviata

However rising American superstar soprano Angel Blue, notably marking her Canadian debut with Manitoba Opera from April 14^th -20 ^th, 2018 also ensured that the timeless classic became a lesson in nobility and grace even against the dying of the light, as witnessed through the lens of her ill-fated heroine Violetta.

The 45-year old company closed its season with Giuseppe Verdi’s three-act masterpiece sung in Italian (with English surtitles), based on Francesco Maria Piave’s libretto, in turn inspired by Alexandre Dumas's play, La Dame aux Camélias. MO principal conductor Tyrone Paterson led the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra throughout the 19 ^th century composer’s iconic score with aplomb.

Last staged here in 2008, the 170-minute show (including two intermissions) directed by Montreal’s Alain Gauthier (MO debut) is notably the first offering co-produced by a consortium of five Canadian opera companies, including: MO, Edmonton Opera, Pacific Opera Victoria, Vancouver Opera and L’Opéra de Montréal, with the (mostly) re-cast production slated for each of the five respective cities throughout next season.

Typically set in the 1850s, this particular staging transports the story to 1920s Paris, with Violetta’s character, originally a courtesan dying of consumption, a.k.a. tuberculosis, inspired by real-life American cabaret dancer Josephine Baker, whose risqué performances lit up the “City of Light” during the Roaring Twenties.

However in the end, this noble premise ultimately becomes a moot point (albeit the decadent, art-deco sets and fringed flapper costumes created by Christina Poddubiuk, and built by Edmonton Opera and Pacific Opera Victoria, respectively, provide serious eye candy). Any allusion to Baker quickly slips away, with the Los Angeles-born Blue, a protégé of Placido Domingo praised by the New York Times as “the clear star” during her Metropolitan Opera debut as Mimi in Puccini’s La Bohème last September (and also sings the lead character with Toronto’s Canadian Opera Company in April 2019), and performs Violetta during her Royal Opera House Covent Garden premiere in January 2019, firmly stamping this role as her own.

Her luscious vocals were immediately apparent as she made her first grand entrance down the sweeping, wrought iron staircase, bathing the ear in shimmering beauty while always perfectly controlled and consistent throughout her expansive range, including her knack for shading her uppermost notes to a barely-there pianissimo.

But Blue’s vocal gifts are matched equally by her innate acting skills, with her nuanced portrayal seemingly growing more luminous with each passing scene. She begins her emotional trajectory as a bon vivant who gaily sings of life’s pleasures, morphing before our eyes into a woman of honour who sacrifices her own happiness in the name of love.

Her delivery of opera’s quintessential ode to freedom, “ Sempre Libera” nearly stopped the show with her character growing more defiant, even punctuating her own vocal line by slamming her champagne bottle at one point, that provided fascinating sub-text. She capped her aria with an enthralling final high E-flat; made even more astounding when delivered lying nearly horizontal on her velvety chaise longue while swilling bubbly.

Another highlight – of many – came during Act III, in which her Violetta grows increasingly desperate as death whispers at the door. Her heartrending “Addio del passato,” sung while tenderly cradling her former cabaret bustier like a babe in arms, followed by a deeply moving duet “Partigi, o cara” sung with Newfoundland-born tenor Adam Luther’s Alfredo elicited sobs in the opening audience, as further testament of her empathic compassion for her character.

Luther in his MO debut also possesses magnetic stage power, as dashing as a matinée idol unafraid to dig into his role, crafted as a passionate hothead in love with Violetta. He also proved a real-life hero for soldiering on despite being under the weather on opening night (as announced from the stage after the first intermission), that nonetheless played havoc in his upper range during Act II’s “ De' miei bollenti spiriti...O mio rimorso,” and did not allow him to fully project at all times.

Despite these challenges, Luther still displayed buttery smooth phrasing in Act I’s “Un dì, felice, eterea" sung with Blue including ringing high notes, and it’s a credit to his artistry he can still sound so good when not at his vocal best. And in a curious, “life-imitates-art way,” his subdued vocals mirrored the dying Violetta’s faltering utterances, viscerally bonding their characters as organically, simpatico lovers.

Another standout proved to be Canadian baritone James Westman as Alfredo’s father Germont, with his booming voice immediately establishing his imperious character during Act II’s “ Di Provenza il mar, il suol,” as well as showcasing his resonant, expressive vocals. He then proceeded to peel back the emotional onion layers of his character, showing us he is not a villain, but hapless victim of societal norms and expectations, until finally wracked by remorse at the end as he realizes Violetta’s inner goodness.

The all-Canadian cast – save for Blue – also included Violetta’s faithful dresser Annina sung by mezzo-soprano Shannon Unger (MO debut), who made every moment of her relatively brief stage time count, as did tenor Michael Barrett’s Gastone and baritone Andrew Love’s eye-patched Baron Douphol, who squires Violetta to Flora (mezzo-soprano Barbara King, MO debut), and the Marquis d’Obigny’s (baritone Howard Rempel) party.

It’s a joy to see Winnipeg baritone David Watson back onstage – this time as Doctor Grenvil - who always adds gravitas whether performing comedic or tragic fare.

The 40-member Manitoba Opera Chorus proved in its usual fine fettle, prepared by chorus master Tadeusz Biernacki notably celebrating his 35^th year with MO, including their rousing opening number, “ Libiamo ne’lieti calici,” popularly known as “The Drinking Song” sung with gusto.

Several curious directorial choices included having the female chorus members, garbed in their flapper finery, performing unison choreography that evoked more a country line-dance hootenanny than free-spirited gypsy twirls during Flora’s party scene. The women’s subsequent donning of bullhorns to their male counterparts’ puffed-up, machismo matadors (wearing crisp tuxedos) also just felt plain bizarre – with any presumed parallels attempted to being made between gay Parisian nightlife and life-and-death bullrings lost in translation. Designer Kevin Lamotte’s unusually dim lighting during this scene helped mitigate the oddness of it all, and once we got past this section, proved highly effective, including several stunning, stylized lighting effects highlighting Blue and her series of white costumes visually underscoring her character’s purity of heart.

Just as there is inherent risk involved when offering edgy new contemporary operas – and this company has been there, done that – there’s also peril when producing an audience-pleasing favourite that can teeter towards predictability. This production happily marries a fresh take with a more traditional approach, but in the end, it is Blue’s show – surely one of this generation’s great opera artists in the making - with Winnipeggers now able to proudly boast, “I saw her when.”

As expected, the artists received a standing ovation with loud cries of bravo and prolonged applause by the clearly moved crowd.

Holly Harris

image=http://www.operatoday.com/Angel-Blue-%28Violetta%29%2C-MB-Opera%2C-La-Traviata%2C-2018%2C-Photo---R.-Tinker.png image_description= product=yes product_title=Angel Blue in La Traviata product_by=A review by Holly Harris product_id=Above: Angel Blue as Violetta

Photos by R. Tinker

Matthias Goerne and Seong-Jin Cho at Wigmore Hall

But, this programme at Wigmore Hall, simultaneously a paean to and epitome of the spirit of late-Romantic ‘sehnsucht’ - aching yearning, wistful sorrow, poignant reminiscence and bitter-sweet loss - threatened to not just to take one’s breath away but to transport one away to a world where the static emotional weight might overwhelm and consume the very spirit of life.

Goerne and his young accompanist, Seong-Jin Cho, opened their recital, ten minutes after the advertised start time, with Hugo Wolf’s Drei Gedichte von Michelangelo (1897). These were among Wolf’s last compositions and the three songs are suffused with the weary melancholy of unattainable love - as the celebrated painter, sculptor and poet works by candlelight and reflects on the painful disjuncture between the artistic creativity which bestows fulfilment and longevity, and human relationships that are fractured by failure and loss.

At times, such as at the close of ‘Wohl denk’ ich oft’ (I often recall), Goerne summoned oratorical grandeur - ‘Genannt in Lob und Tadel bin ich heute/ Und, dass ich da bin, wissen alle Leute!’ (Today my name is praised and censured, and the entire world knows that I exist!) - and there was quiet resignation as the voice plummeted at the close of ‘Alles endet, was entstehet’ (All must end that has beginning). Moreover, though the tempi were languorous and the spirit laden - ‘Ziemlich getragen, schwermütig’ (sombre and depressed), ‘Langsam und getragen’ (slow and grave), and ‘Sehr langsam und ruhig’ (very slow and calm) being Wolf’s instructions - an angry energy whipped through ‘Fühlt meine Seele’ (Is it the longed-for light of God) when the poet-speaker’s memories were stirred by rays from heaven which storm the heart.

But, the prevailing mood, here and throughout the recital, was one of weary defeat. In these Wolf songs, Goerne’s baritone was decidedly bass-baritonal in register and colour, and Cho complemented these hues with dark, sombre, intensely responsive introductions and postludes.

Immediately apparent, also, was the intense sensibility and strong independent voice of Cho - whose international career was kick-started by his Gold Medal success at the 2015 Chopin Competition in Warsaw. The two-bar unison which prefaces the first song was remarkably and compellingly nuanced; the low semi-tonal murmuring of the second lied evoked both mystery and fear. Cho isn’t afraid to take his time; nor to eke every ounce from a mezza voce line. Though the lid of the Wigmore Steinway was fully raised, not once did Cho make his presence improperly felt. It was to his credit that, while such painstaking expressivity might have further burdened the music with torpid solipsism, the effect was in fact invigorating - the piano preludes, postludes and dialogues injecting light and life into the sober sequence of lieder.

Seong-Jin Cho. Photo credit: Harold Hoffmann.

The Wolf songs were followed by eight songs by Hans Pfiztner (1869-1949), a composer whose opportunistic relationship with the Nazi regime has probably attracted more attention that his music. The lieder presented here certainly demonstrated Pfitzner’s Schumann-esque sensitivity to text. But, despite Goerne’s ability to heighten individual words and phrases - ‘Ich liebe dich’, first intensified then, at the close, diminished in ‘Sehnsucht’ (Longing); ‘Doch schöner ist deiner Augen Schein’ (but prettier still are your shining eyes) in ‘Es glänzt so schön die sinkende Sonne’ - the overwhelming mood was one of a down-dragging lethargy. Admittedly, this allowed us to enjoy the grainy beauty of Goerne’s lower, bassy, register - as in the final stanza of ‘Ist der Himmer darum im Lenz so blau?’ (Is the sky so blue in spring?) - alongside his effortless elision of the musical phrases.

Again, Cho was an independent voice; the piano part did not so much complement or enhance as articulate its own strong narrative. Surges upwards from the bass in ‘Sehnsucht’; exquisite textural clarity in ‘Wasserfahrt’ (Sea voyage); wonderful expansiveness at the opening of ‘Es glänab so schön die sinkende Sonne (The setting sun shines so prettily); fluent third-based movement in ‘An die Mark’ (To the March of Brandenburg), which expressed the wonder of the speaker, ‘dreaming like dark eyes, in an eternal yearning for spring’s realm’. These features gripped one’s attention just as the light-fingered but niggling clarity of the postlude to ‘Stimme der Sehnsucht’ (Voice of longing) was affecting.

After the interval, Goerne returned to songs he knows well: Wagner’s Wesendock Lieder which are more commonly heard sung by the female voice, but for which the baritone made a compelling case for transposition. If in ‘Der Engel’ (The angel) Goerne’s ‘fervent prayer’ conjured an airy expansive which lifted him and us heavenward, then Cho’s delicate accompaniment and playout was truly celestial. There was a vocal strength and urgency in ‘Stehe stille!’ (Stand still!) which was balanced by the piano’s self-regarding busyness, and which transmuted to a transfiguring pianissimo as with remarkably purity and earnestness, Goerne proclaimed, ‘Erkennt der Mensch des Ew’gen Spur/ Und lost dein Rätsel, heil’ge Natur! (then men perceives Eternity’s footprint, and solves your riddle, Holy Nature!).

The meandering of ‘Im Treibhaus’ (In the greenhouse, a study for Tristan and Isolde) was delicately shaped, Goerne’s middle range effortlessly focused, the lower part of his voice viscerally affecting. The clarity of line and immaculate intonation at the close was stunning. ‘Schmerzen’ (Agonies) opening with a bitter-sweet smear of harmonic and vocal anguish; in ‘Träume’ (Dreams, study for Tristan and Isolde) Cho’s accompaniment pulsed through the harmonic sequence before extinguishing itself in dissonance with astonishing delicacy, and the slightest sequence of expressive ‘delays’ in the piano postlude spoke of an exquisitely alert sensibility.

Five songs by Richard Strauss - again these lieder are more often associated with the female voice but were convincingly transposed here - moving from youthful dreams to fading dusk, closed the recital. In ‘Traum durch die Dämmerung’ (Dream into dusk) the ‘lilt’ was just sufficiently present to be persuasive, and Goerne floated the final phrase into the divine light - ‘blaues, mildes Licht’ - of heaven’s glow. Cho’s delicate arpeggiated chords at the start of ‘Morgen!’ (Tomorrow!) offered both hope and poignant resignation, and the oscillating dissonances of ‘Ruhe, meine Seele!’ (Rest, my soul!) were paradoxically troubling; here, Goerne’s strengthening, then softening, of the voice was expertly controlled, as was the translucent beauty of the image - ‘Und ich geh’ mit Einer, die mich lieb hat’ (I walk with one who loves me) - at the heart of ‘Freundlich Vision’ (A pleasant vision).

I’m not sure if it was his intent, but in compiling this idiosyncratically undeviating and unalleviated programme, Goerne almost seemed to be issuing a sombre challenge to his audience: if you want to experience the beauty and truth of these songs, then listen, come, follow me into the hinterland where this ‘truth’ exists. He beckoned us into the a strange world - a world of shadows, sensibility, quietude, sweet sorrow - never more so than in the final lied, ‘Abendrot’ from the Four Last Songs (1948). The gleam and frailty of Cho’s extended postlude was otherworldly.

But, I’m not sure that we were entirely transported. This was a strangely ‘distanced’ performance, in which the communication that is at the essence of a lieder recital was both tantalisingly and teasingly present, but just out of reach. Goerne read many of the songs from the printed scores positioned on a music stand to his right, and his gaze was at other times directly into the belly of the piano, to the floor, towards an imagined horizon. At the close, he stood still and silent as Cho’s piano postlude trickled away. For a moment, I imagined that the audience might simply, silently creep away, leaving Goerne and Cho transfixed in that hinterland to which they had summonsed us - the musicians, like Keats and all the Romantics poets, subsumed within an artistic immersiveness which is both necessary and dangerous.

But, no; the frames which, as Virginia Woolf knew, separate, so frustratingly, art and life, were re-established. Goerne’s fractional glance towards his accompanist served, like Keats’s ‘Forlorn! the very word is like a bell/ To toll me back from thee to my sole self!’, to bring us all back to the present. The spell was broken, the applause began. But the slight disquiet lingered.

Claire Seymour

Matthias Goerne (baritone), Seong-Jin Cho (piano)

Wolf - Drei Gedichte von Michelangelo; Pfitzner - ‘Sehnsucht’ Op.10 No.1, ‘Wasserfahrt’ Op.6 No.6, ‘Es glänzt so schön die sinkende Sonne’ Op.4 No.1, ‘Ist der Himmel darum im Lenz so blau’ Op.2 No.2, ‘An die Mark’ Op.15 No.3, ‘Abendrot’ Op.24 No.4, ‘Nachts’ Op.26 No.2, ‘Stimme der Sehnsucht’ Op.19 No.1; Wagner - Wesendonck Lieder; Richard Strauss - ‘Traum durch die Dämmerung’ Op.29 No.1, ‘Morgen’ Op.27 No.4, ‘Ruhe, meine Seele’ Op.27 No.1, ‘Freundliche Vision’ Op.48 No.1, ‘Im Abendrot’ from Four Last Songs.

Wigmore Hall, London; Tuesday 24^th April 2018.

image=http://www.operatoday.com/Goerne.jpg image_description=Matthias Goerne and Seong-Jin Cho at Wigmore Hall, London product=yes product_title=Matthias Goerne and Seong-Jin Cho at Wigmore Hall, London product_by=A review by Claire Seymour product_id= Above: Matthias Goerne

Maria Callas: Tosca 1964: A film by Holger Preusse

This disc might well be worth the price alone just to see the film of Act II, still rather grainy, but sounding rather better than I have heard it before, because it is just such an extraordinary artistic achievement. The Zeffirelli/Callas/Gobbi Tosca is, like Schnabel’s Beethoven or Gericault’s Raft of Medusa, imperfection in art raised to the level of genius.

Renzo Mongiardino’s sets and Marcel Escoffier’s costumes - which have been so influential in dictating the historical settings of so many Tosca’s since, not least Jonathan Kent’s at Covent Garden, last staged this January - give an epic, Romantic realism to the opera that are fundamental to its success, and quality, as opera on film. In lesser hands, it might come across as melodramatic; in fact, the combination of Zeffirelli, Callas and Gobbi gives us something that is searing, powerful and often ravishing. Beyond its value as art, the film is important because it preserves one of the very few examples, and certainly the most significant visual document, of Maria Callas in a staged performance.

Callas’s voice, even in her prime in the early 1950s, was never particularly prone to beauty, but she was often mercurial - and she totally absorbs the role of Tosca. There is no denying that there is unevenness at the very top of the register but, as Jürgen Kesting points out in the documentary about this legendary production, Callas spends much of Act II “permanently screaming her lungs out”. “Doing that with calm reason, or cold precision, requires extraordinary self-control”, Kesting adds, and this is the apotheosis of Callas’s Tosca. Callas’s darker voice, the steadiness of her mid-tones and lower register, the deeper psychological impact her singing conveys, the humanity that is a hallmark of her vocal complexion, the brilliance of the coloratura, makes her Tosca more haunting than is usual. It’s often suggested that Maria Callas disliked the role of Tosca; there is some truth in this, though I’ve always thought it was closer to suggest she approached the part with the darkness and despair she brought to Verdi heroines like Lady Macbeth, Desdemona or Elisabetta. I think if one’s keystone for a performance of a great Tosca is a sumptuous vocal legato and a ravishing top-note, one should probably ignore Callas altogether and opt instead for Caballé or Leontyne Price.

Tito Gobbi, too, has had his detractors over the years. Some find his assumption of Scarpia, especially vocally, to be hectoring and loud, though even a decade after his recording with Maria Callas and Victor de Sabata he was still capable of astonishing vocal power and had lost none of his Italianate elegance when it comes to phrasing. This is by no means the subtlest performance of the role - the voice is huge, even cavernous - but I find the seismic, stentorian power of his baritone compelling and even in 1964 much of the part of Scarpia was still very comfortably within his range. I have heard many singers take on the role of Scarpia who are under-powered, or bass-baritones who struggled with the upper range of the role - and none who would probably use their bare hands to extinguish smouldering flames because his Tosca got too close to a candle, as Callas did during one of the 1964 performances. Perhaps only Taddei, Raimondi and Ramey have come close to embracing Gobbi’s domination of the part of Scarpia since the early-to-mid 1960s, though even these great singers struggled when their Tosca wasn’t a great one.

Holger Preusse’s documentary, Maria Callas: Tosca 1964 is, in many ways, a peculiar film. It tries to be two things and doesn’t really succeed in being either. On the one hand, it’s a critical commentary on the performance of Act II itself; on the other, it is a sociological documentary on the themes of fame, marriage, love, gossip - a Greek Tragedy whose subject has become the narrative for a celluloid piece of tabloid newsreel. The problem I had with much of the film is that editorial decisions resulted in people being interviewed either being asked the wrong questions (or, no questions at all) resulting in opinions that were either meaningless, or plain bizarre. Rufus Wainwright’s statement that Act II “is my favourite music in the opera” tells us everything about Wainwright but nothing about Callas. I found completely pointless the German fashion designer, Wolfgang Joop, suggesting that were Callas alive today she would be “resurrected” as Lady Gaga rather than Madonna. It’s the kind of statement, once heard or read, that one can’t, unfortunately, erase from the mind. The narrative of Callas’s failed relationship with Aristotle Onasis, her mental and physical decline, her struggle with weight loss, and withdrawal from the opera stage are recycled ad nauseum - though offer nothing new. As Brian McMaster reminds us, people queued in the freezing January weather, even taking to sleeping overnight outside Covent Garden for almost a week, to get hold of tickets - much as they had done over a decade earlier for Toscanini’s Philharmonia Orchestra concerts at the Royal Festival Hall. The Internet has rather changed the functionality of booking for opera performances today - but even if it hadn’t, I can’t imagine there are artists with the selling-power to turn the pavement of the Royal Opera House into a make-shift shelter.

More interesting are the musical insights into Act II. Jürgen Kesting is surely right to suggest that the “second act is torture chamber music”, something which Thomas Hampson alludes to as well, particularly in his succinct description of the role of Scarpia as almost definitively captured here by Gobbi. I think there is a general consensus that both Callas and Gobbi were beyond their best - but it matters not the slightest. Kristine Opolais views this as the greatest Tosca she has ever seen and go beyond the individual criticisms of the singing and focus on the bigger picture and it’s difficult not to reach the same conclusion.

Anna Prohaska’s comment that Callas’s voice “goes beyond the outer limits of beauty” is echoed by Rolando Villazón who, perhaps more critical than most of those interviewed here, described Callas’s technique as “not at all impeccable”. He’s just as critical of Gobbi - but concedes that the “fusion” of these two unique singers together brings out an unusual humanity. Thomas Hampson describes the magic between them both as “magnetism” and adds: “What they had in common (Callas and Gobbi) was that you listened to the people - characters - they were singing”. For Antonio Pappano the magic of Callas and Gobbi had less to do with their vocal command of the roles and more with their stage presence. “Great singers sing through their eyes - Callas and Gobbi sing through their eyes as well their physical movements”. It’s one of the more revealing comments because this is a Tosca you simply become drawn into watching; the chemistry between these two artists is so spellbinding. Jürgen Kesting draws attention to the lascivious gesture of Gobbi caressing Callas’s arm with his quill and states, quite correctly, that it is “beautifully acted by them both”. McMaster is still astonished today by the sight of Gobbi stamping his feet, with the cellar door suddenly opening and Cioni’s heroic tenor emerging from it. Half a century after it was staged, everything about this Tosca is as fresh and compelling as the day it was first seen.

There is no information suggesting the film of Act II has in any way been remastered for Blu-ray - and I’m not sure I really detect any improvement over picture quality in the DVD copy I already own. It does, however, continue to have a distinctive vintage feel to it, with darkness and shadows depicted intuitively, and the heavily “Gothic” nature of the production - or “lurid”, as Antonio Pappano describes it - still magnificently captured, even if it clearly feels much older than the year in which it was filmed. It’s hugely atmospheric, however, the black and white film perhaps doing so much more than colour would have for the billowing grey tones of the smouldering fire place and the shadows cast by the multiple candles. Whether a major opera company would even get away with a production that looks such a fire risk as this one is highly debatable today. I do think there is some minor clarity in audio, however, and this is really only noticeable in the tonal range of the voices.

Whether the documentary will be of much interest will really depend on your enthusiasm for all things Callas. I’m not sure it adds much to our understanding of the singer, and only marginally to the production and performance of Act II itself.

Marc Bridle

Maria Callas: Tosca 1964

A Film by Holger Preusse; filmed in HD. Picture Format: 1080i, 16:9. Sound Format: PCM Stereo; Subtitles Documentary: English, German, French, Korean, Japanese; Subtitles Opera: Italian (original language), English, German, French, Korean, Japanese; Region Code: 0; Total Time: 97 minutes [Documentary: 52 minutes/Opera 45 minutes]; C Major 745104 Blu-ray;

Bonus: Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924): Tosca (Second Act)

Maria Callas (Tosca); Renato Cioni (Cavardossi); Tito Gobbi (Scarpia); Robert Bowman (Spoletta); Dennis Wicks (Sciarrone); The Orchestra and Chorus of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden; Conducted by Carlo Felice Cillario; Stage Designer and Director, Franco Zeffirelli; Costumes, Marcel Escoffier; Scenery, Renzo Mongiardino; Lighting, Franco Zeffirelli and William Bundy; Filmed at Covent Garden 9^th February 1964. image=http://www.operatoday.com/Callas.jpg image_description=Maria Callas: Tosca 1964; a film by Holger Preusse product=yes product_title=Maria Callas: Tosca 1964; a film by Holger Preusse product_by=A review by Marc Bridle product_id=

Philip Venables: 4.48 Psychosis

Not until Bellini’s I Puritani and Donizetti’s Lucia Di Lammermoor did the gender disparity between the more masculine mania and the feminisation of the melancholic become obscured. It was only at the beginning of the Twentieth Century that opera ceased to treat madness and insanity as the apex of the operatic mad scene, and more the full-scale development of its psychological development throughout the entire span of an opera, as we get in Strauss’s Elektra and Berg’s Wozzeck. With Strauss and Berg, the psychological opera is born.

Philip Venables’s 4.48 Psychosis, drawn from the final full-scale play of Sarah Kane, is something of a mythological beast. Of all Kane’s dramatic works, it is the one that comes closest to opera because, of all her theatrical pieces, it is the one that least fits the description of a modern play. Written without a dramatis personae, it appears on the page as a monologue, often seeming to fully scale the heights of stream of consciousness in the way the words drench the pages. It’s unusually poetic, too. The words have a soaring, literary beauty to them that are muscular, but intensely musical: “the capture/the rupture/the rapture/of a soul… a solo symphony”.

4.48 Psychosis has often been viewed, because Kane killed herself so soon after it was completed, as a suicide note - and the unusual structure of the work has probably cemented this idea as much as any other. However, this is a piece of drama that blazes with historical awareness of its art form, much as Venables’s treatment of the text does so as music. Just as Kane embraces the Theatre of the Absurd of Artaud and Ionescu, and even Beckett, so Venables looks to the example of a composer like Berg: there are the veins of palpably dense serialism for the violas, the sudden orchestral flare-ups on the baritone saxophones, the stark, yet rather tenebrous, orchestration, the symmetry of two spatially separated percussionists. The threads of this music can be surprisingly dark, almost as if they are describing the moment a mind fragments. Venables has been careful to create a symbiotic balance between the music and the words of Kane’s canvas - so, the percussionists tap out their notes like Morse code, but there is a rhythm and tempo to the music that frames the meaning of the text. Every part of Kane’s vast monologue is composed for - so even full-stops and question-marks are given a musical equivalent, such as a buzzer or a bell. There are hammers and saws which articulate the inner voices of a psychotic mind in its bleakest moments of despair.

Kane herself said that “performance is visceral” and the experience of seeing 4.48 Psychosis, I think, need not necessarily be wedded to one’s own experience of mental illness; for many, however, it will resemble it. Whilst it is primarily about psychiatric disintegration, it is also about love, albeit the loss of love: “cut out my tongue/tear out my hair/cut off my limbs/but leave me my love”. Psychosis is an internal civil war, and this production doesn’t shirk from confronting that conflict. The use of an ensemble cast - often singing in unison - seeks to define psychosis through multiple voices and personalities, but it also somewhat catalyses mental illness into distinct sections. You watch from the point of view as the victim, as the lover, as a doctor. That love should be unrequited is connected to the depression experienced: “I cannot go on I cannot fucking go on without expressing this terrible so fucking awful physical aching fucking longing I have for you. And I cannot believe I feel this for you and that you feel nothing. Do you feel nothing?” That “love” is in some respects a bond between the patient and their doctor - and it is certainly implied as such in this production where the role of a doctor figure is given some prominence. But Kane is scathing about the relationship - and of modern medicine. Zopiclone, Melleril and Lofepramine are prescribed to restore sanity, but are withdrawn because of the side-effects; in the end, they simply become the tools of suicide.

Gweneth-Ann Rand. Photo credit: Stephen Cummiskey.

Given the power of Kane’s source material - and the sheer beauty of her prose - so little needs to be done to develop the libretto for dramatic purposes. It rather stands on its own. From a musical point of view, the monologue and fragments of speech probably assume greater vocal colour and describe more devastatingly the unrelenting despair and “black snow” of mental decline if taken by an ensemble of voices than if by a single voice - as they are in Erwartung, for example. Culturally, mania, insanity and suicide are often questionable - but here the production embraces them, even if the salient effects of it are to present it in traumatic terms. Ted Huffman’s production, with its slabs of grey and nakedly-shone glass doors, is almost entirely vacant - like a mind that has already collapsed into despair. Colours are entirely neutral. Against the grey walls are typed out parts of Kane’s play. Despite the utter barrenness of the production, which works on its own terms, it constantly threw up literary allusions: Biblical words, and references to Judaism, recalled Sylvia Plath’s lampshades made of skin, and the final scene with the body lying on the table reminded me of TS Eliot’s “When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table” from The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. Neither Plath, nor Eliot, escaped the devastation of mental illness either.

Lucy Hall, Gweneth-Ann Rand and Lucy Schaufer. Photo credit: Stephen Cummiskey.

I don’t think one can praise the singing of the Gwyneth-Ann Rand enough. She sang not only beautifully, but with considerable power and raw emotion. When she sang “I REFUSE I REFUSE I REFUSE LOOK AWAY FROM ME” you really believed in her complete isolation and her rejection. It was an utterly devastating moment. She was ably supported by Lucy Schaufer, Rachel Lloyd, Susanna Hurrell, Lucy Hall and Samantha Price - all of whom, as an ensemble, were superbly well-matched. The hive-like nature of the singing, with the singers rotating the roles of the patient and doctor, gave added complexity to the voice shadows. Richard Baker, conducting CHROMA, who were on outstanding form, brought a huge amount of kaleidoscopic detail to the score. This is music that is deceptively well-balanced - constrained enough, given the unorthodox orchestration, not to overwhelm the singers, but powerful enough in scenes such as the 100-steps, where the music takes on the sounds of computer game music, to be both gripping and sound menacing. That this music should sound both so rhythmic and yet so flexible was something of a bonus.

There is enough black humour in this production (though it’s sometimes hard to see it) to offset the impression its subject matter might be otherwise. In part, the assumption has always been that 4.48 Psychosis is Sarah Kane’s bleakest work because it is so inextricably linked to her own suicide. It is certainly the case that internal dimensions of the play’s narrative, such as they are, define the very premise of manic psychosis - and in particular, Kane’s description of madness from waking up repeatedly at 4.48, morning after morning. Venables and Huffman have given us a very different perspective on this work than one might expect to see in the theatre; though, if nothing else, Venables’s 4.48 Psychosis is simply the most recent, and perhaps most graphic, example of psychological opera.

At Lyric Hammersmith 26^th, 28^th, 30^th April, 2^nd, 4^th May 2018

Marc Bridle

Philip Venables: 4.48 Psychosis based on the play by Sarah Kane

Singers: Gwyneth-Ann Rand/Lucy Schaufer/Rachel Lloyd/Susanna Hurrell/Lucy Hall/Samantha Price

Conductor: Richard Baker/CHROMA; Director: Ted Huffman; Designer: Hannah Clark; Lighting: D.M.Wood; Video: Pierre Martin; Sound: Sound Intermedia

Royal Opera Production at Lyric Hammersmith; 24^th April 2018.

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Photo credit: Stephen Cummiskey

Hubert Parry and the birth of English Song

New from SOMM recordings, the second volume from Hubert Parry's English Lyrics. Between 1874 and 1918, Parry wrote 74 songs in twelve collections, all titled "English Lyrics", two sets of which were published after his death. As Jeremy Dibble, Parry scholar and biographer writes,"The generic title of English Lyrics symbolised more than purely the setting of English poetry (but) also an artistic manifesto and advocacy of the English tongue as a force for musical creativity shaped by the language's inherent accent, syntax, scansion, and assonance".

German and French composers were quick to recognise how poetry could develop art song, and even set a great deal of Shakespeare (in translation and adaptation). Parry's interest in English lyrics opened new frontiers for British music. The prosperity of late Victorian and early Edwardian London fuelled the growth of audiences with sophisticated tastes, many of whom travelled and were up to date with music in mainland Europe. The splendid art nouveau interior of the Wigmore Hall attests to this golden age. Until 1914, it was the Bechstein Hall, connected to the Bechstein piano company who supplied pianos - and European music - to audiences beyond the choral society/oratorio market.

The first SOMM volume of Parry English Lyrics focused on settings of Shakespeare, Herrick, Beaumont and Fletcher, Sidney et al (Please read more here). In this second volume, the emphasis is on poets of the 19th century, some of whom were "modern", ie contemporaries of Parry himself. A thoughtful choice, for this reinforces the connection to art song in Europe. Parry's setting of Percy Bysshe Shelley's O World, O Life, O Time respects the declamatory nature of the poem, well expressed by Sarah Fox. There are two settings of Lord Byron When we two were parted and There be none of Beauty's daughters, the latter inspiring a particularly rich piano lovely vocal complemented by a rich piano part, which sets off the crispness in the vocal line, ideal for the distinctive "English tenor" style, highlighting consonants, eliding vowels, sharpening impact.

Not all English tenors are "English tenors" but here we can hear how the style connects to syntax and expressiveness. In Bright Star!, a setting of John Keats, James Gilchrist rolls his "r's", and breathes into longer phrases like "or else the swoon of death" shaping each word carefully in the line. Listen to the way he sings "swoon", drawing out the vowel, the sound of which is echoed by the piano, played by Andrew West. In Dream Pedlary, (If there were dreams to sell) to a poem by Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Gilchrist's voice curls around the words, adding magical frisson.

Harry Plunket Greene who was to become Parry's son-in-law, premiered many of Parry's songs for baritone. Perhaps Parry created these songs for Plunket Greene's agile voice and down-to-earth delivery. It's certainly no surprise that Roderick Williams is easily the finest baritone in English song, since he sings with a natural directness which communicates almost as if singer and listener were in conversation, which is ideal for English song, where the floridness of, say, an Italianate style would not work. Also, his voice is not pitched too low, but lends itself to flexiblity and brightness, which suits the English syntax. It's almost impossible to know English song without having heard Williams, whose experience in this field is unequalled. Compare Williams in two songs: Thomas Ford's And yet I love her till I die, an early 17th century air, and Love is a bable, a quasi-folk song. In the first Williams is correct and courtly, in the second, his innate warmth adds sincerity to the wry humour in the song. In Parry's two settings of poems by George Meredith, Marian and Dirge in the Woods, Williams captures the rollicking, open air energy in the songs. In What part of dread Eternity?, to a text which may be Parry's own, Williams's voice darkens forcefully, taking on the solemn tone of the poem.

This recording includes the whole ninth set of Parry's English Lyrics, (1908) settings of seven songs by Mary Coleridge (1861-1907). If the poems are fairly slight, Parry's treatment makes the most of what Jeremy Dibble has called their "lack of ostentation". The songs are simple but dignified homilies. Sarah Fox sings them with lucid purity, reflecting their almost Brahmsian reserve. Elsewhere on this recording, she sings lyrical pieces like Proud Maisie (Walter Scott) and A Welsh Lullaby (John Ceiriog Hughes), a poet popular in 19th century Wales.

Anne Ozorio

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Soprano Nadine Sierra Wins the 2018 Beverly Sills Artist Award

The $50,000 award, the largest of its kind in the United States, is given to extraordinarily gifted singers between the ages of 25 and 40 who have already appeared in featured solo roles at the Met. The award, given in honor of Beverly Sills, was established in 2006 by an endowment gift from the late Agnes Varis, a managing director on the Met board. In 2009 Sierra became the youngest ever winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and has gone on to make her mark at the Met with memorable performances in Verdi’s Rigoletto, and Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, Idomeneo and Don Giovanni. In the Met’s 2018-19 season, Sierra will reprise the role of Gilda in Rigoletto.

Met General Manger Peter Gelb presented Sierra with the award today, saying: “Nadine is a most deserving recipient. I’m sure that Beverly would have been pleased with our choice.”

The Sills Award was created to help further recipients’ careers, including funding for voice lessons, vocal coaching, language lessons, related travel costs, and other professional assistance. Sills, who passed away in 2007, was well known as a supporter and friend to developing young artists, and this award continues her legacy as an advocate for rising singers. The 29-year-old Sierra is the 13^th recipient of the award, following baritone Nathan Gunn in 2006, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato in 2007, tenorMatthew Polenzani in 2008, bass John Relyea in 2009, soprano Susanna Phillips in 2010, mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard in 2011, soprano Angela Meade in 2012, tenor Brian Hymel in 2013, tenor Michael Fabiano in 2014, baritoneQuinn Kelsey in 2015, sopranoAilyn Pérez in 2016, and mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton in 2017.

Nadine Sierra said: “This award is a true gift to singers because it honors not only a beautiful artist in Beverly Sills, but treasures the legacy she left behind. It's not enough to say that I'm honored to be receiving it, but more that I feel incredibly humbled. Opera can and should belong to anyone who has the pleasure of witnessing its timeless beauty. I believe Ms. Sills, through all of her achievements and generosity of sharing this music with people around the world for many decades, would certainly agree. I'm very thankful to the Metropolitan Opera for selecting me as the recipient of such a meaningful and empowering award.”

Nadine Sierra made her Met debut in 2015 as Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto. She followed that with three Mozart roles at the Met: Zerlina in Don Giovanni, her role and Live in HD debuts as Ilia in Idomeneo, and earlier this season, her role debut as Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro. She made her professional debut with Palm Beach Opera while still a teenager, in her home state of Florida. She studied in New York at Mannes College of Music and was an Adler Fellow with San Francisco Opera. She made her debut at San Francisco Opera in 2011 as Juliet/Barbara in the world premiere of Christopher Theofanidis'sHeart of a Soldier. Recent engagements include Gilda in Rigoletto (La Scala, Milan, Chorégies d'Orange, Opéra Bastille, Seattle Opera), Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor (La Fenice, Venice, San Francisco Opera, Zürich Opera), Zerlina inLe Nozze di Figaro (Paris Opera), Tytania in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Norina in Don Pasquale (Valencia), Musetta in La Bohème, Countess Almaviva in Le Nozze di Figaro and Pamina in Die Zauberflöte (San Francisco Opera), Flavia Gemmira inEliogabalo (Paris Opéra) and Nannetta in Falstaff (Staatsoper Berlin). In June she sings the role of Norina in Donizetti's Don Pasquale (Paris Opéra). She is the winner of the Marilyn Horne Foundation Vocal Competition, the 2017 Richard Tucker Award Winner, and has recently signed a record contract with Deutsche Grammophon/Universal.

Contact: Lee Abrahamian / Tim McKeough

(212) 870-7457 labrahamian@metopera.org / tmckeough@metopera.org

image=http://www.operatoday.com/Idomeneo_2328-s.png image_description=Nadine Sierra as Ilia in Mozart's Idomeneo. Photo: Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera product=yes product_title=Soprano Nadine Sierra Wins the 2018 Beverly Sills Artist Award product_by=Press release by Metropolitan Opera product_id=Above: Nadine Sierra as Ilia in Mozart's Idomeneo. Photo: Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera

European premiere of Unsuk Chin’s Le Chant des enfants des étoiles, with works by Biber and Beethoven

Any connections between the first and second halves were not necessarily explicit; this was not an overtly didactic programme (nothing wrong with that, of course). Nevertheless, I fancied I could hear certain pitches, certain turns of phrases, perhaps even certain rhythms, in both; and even if I could not, contrasts fascinated enough.

There was no doubting the avant-gardism of either of the first two composers. Biber’s Battalia opened in lively fashion, soon displaying the composer’s seventeenth-century extended techniques – ‘extended’, by the standards of many a twentieth-century composer too – with col legno playing and foot stamping in its opening ‘Sonata’. Members of the Philharmonia under Esa-Pekka Salonen offered a splendidly cultivated, non-puritanical sound. (Certain journalists, having learned of a thing called ‘performance practice’ do not like that. They need rules to help them deliver a ‘verdict’.) Then, to take us all by surprise, lest we latter-day Friends of Karajan were becoming too pleased with ourselves, an ‘older, more ‘fiddling’ sound catapulted us back through time to the bizarre, Ivesian quodlibet of ‘Die leideriche Gesellschaft von allerley Humor’, horribly hilarious in its ‘wrongness’. (Would we think so, though, if we had been told it were twenty-first-century music?) Virtuosic solo passages for Mars – Martian?! – a slow aria whose twists surprised as if they were Purcell’s, a battle in which the post-Montverdian stile concitato (and again Purcell) came to mind, and a touching final lament for ‘Verwundten Musquetirer’: these and much more were presented with a relished concision suggesting that Webern had better look to his laurels – that is, had the concert-going public ever permitted him to collect them in the first place.

I freely admit that I had not previously found Salonen’s Beethoven to my taste, nor, perhaps more to the point, to my understanding. This performance of the Second Symphony, also of course in D major, proved very different, making me keen to hear more. Where previously I had longed for a more modernistic approach such as I suspected might have been his, here it was: not for its own sake, but emerging from score and programming alike, almost as if a Michael Gielen for our times. The opening chord struck me with its rasping natural trumpets; otherwise, there was nothing – thank goodness – especially ‘period’ about this. Salonen even showed that it is perfectly possible to hear dialogue between first and second violins without placing them on opposite sides of each other. The first movement was lively in a different way from Biber, yet suggestive nevertheless of some sort of kinship. Most notable of all was the real sense of return at the onset of the recapitulation, of joy in a Haydnesque, even Handelian manner. The sheer character of the coda made me smile, as it stormed the heavens in a twenty-first century remodelling of ‘tradition’.

The second movement struck an excellent balance between neo-Mozartian flow and the ‘late’ Brahmsian future. Gorgeous, never narcissistic, richness to the inner parts proved an especial joys; as often with the Philharmonia, I could not help but notice the playing of the viola section in particular. Mystery and tension in the minor mode were palpable. This seemed very much a precursor to the ‘slow’ movement of the Eighth, even though I am not sure that it actually ‘is’. The scherzo was sprightly without tending towards brutality, as too often it can (say, in the worst of Karajan). Its musical roots were in Haydn, whilst the Trio peered forward, more ‘modern’ in material and formal instantiation. The finale proved more brazen even than in Gielen’s hands. Yet it still had plenty of time to display woodwind charm and colour. It had space and impetus – which brings us to the second half.

Chin’s Le Chant des Enfants des Etoiles, jointly commissioned by the LOTTE Group and the Philharmonia, had received its world premiere in 2016 from the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra and Myun-Whung Chung, to whom it is dedicated. Written for children’s choir (here the outstanding Trinity Boys Choir), mixed choir (Philharmonia Voices, also on excellent form) and large orchestra, it reflects and even perhaps, whatever her intention or not, ‘expresses’ the composer’s longstanding interest in physical cosmology, setting related poems from writers ranging from Henry Vaughan (roughly contemporary with Biber, be it noted), through Blake, Octavio Paz, Shelley, to Edith Södergran, Fernando Pessoa, Juan Ramón Rimenez, Eeva-Liisa Manner, and others. The approach is not so literal-minded as to set them chronologically, but the work itself seemed both to reprise the exploratory historical path announced in the first half and to take it further, in dialogue with and yet not bound by those poems. Tension builds and eventually subsides, perhaps not unlike the life in each of us, every one a piece of stardust – or even of a star itself.

There was no doubting Chin’s grateful writing for voices, nor the intelligibility of most of the words. When one could not immediately discern them, it seemed that that was the point – or at least that intelligibility was not the priority. I was put in mind from time to time of Britten’s ability to write for a range of performers, not all of them professionals, not that, a prominent harp solo notwithstanding, the music sounded like his. Insofar as I could tell, the singers relished their task; such, at any rate, was the performative impression. I wondered whether the earliest sections trod water a little, but perhaps that was more a matter of my ears and mind taking time to adjust; having looked at the score since, I could not tell you why. At any rate, once the shimmering stardust really took flight – at least in my ears – it never looked back. An almost Messiaenesque ecstasy – not as pastiche, yet in spirit – was to be felt as well as heard. An organ cadenza seemed to usher in a world of experimental Gothic Romanticism: Prometheus unbound, or Unbound? Bells, a battery (Biber?) of percussion, gorgeous harmonies took us to climax, prior to a retreat, or perhaps better a twilight, the trebles intoning ‘M’illumino d’immenso’ in the final ‘Matin’. Was this work, was the programme as a whole, more than the sum of its parts? I am not entirely sure, and why should I be, after a single hearing? I tend, however, to think so. I should love to hear both again, if not to find out, then to further my thoughts on the subject. For art, like cosmology, is surely there to broaden our horizons, to stimulate us, not to provide an answer, nor to be ‘correct’.

Mark Berry

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Programme:

Biber: Battalia à 10 in D major; Beethoven: Symphony no.2 in D major, op.36; Unsuk Chin: Le Chant des enfants des étoiles (European premiere). Trinity Boys Choir (director: David Swinson)/Philharmonia Voices (director: Aidan Oliver)/Philharmonia Orchestra/Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor). Royal Festival Hall, London, Sunday 15 April 2018.

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Rising Stars in Concert 2018 at Lyric Opera of Chicago

From the start the selections were performed with dedication and with attention to both text and music. The scene including a solo aria for the role of Robert in Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta was delivered with a practiced style by Takaoki Onishi. His neatly controlled forte notes and ease at diminuendo added to the overall effect of his character. Comedy and sustained lyricism were cleverly blended in the duet for Nemorino and Dr. Dulcamara as performed by Mario Rojas and Alan Higgs. The two subsequent numbers from Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann, featuring Lindsay Metzger and Alec Carlson were notable for the fine diction observed by both singers, while they acted out the sentiments of the imaginative protagonist convincingly.

The excerpt from Catalani’s La Wally, “Ne andrò lontana,” was an opportunity to hear the excellent range of soprano Ann Toomey. Her penetrating voice, when producing high, forte pitches, is clear and emphatic yet capable of shading to a sudden diminuendo as she equates her own departure to the ceasing of a bell’s toll. Verdi’s I masnadieri is a rich musical trove for various vocal types as here exemplified by the duet for tenor and bass sung by Mr. Carlson and Patrick Guetti. Both singers respond urgently to the dramatic needs of this moment in the score. Guetti’s distinctly colored bass exudes power while expressing emotional touches of familial devotion. Extended notes held at the close by Guetti echoed impressively. The gavotte from Massenet’s Manon was staged delightfully with Diana Newman as Manon surrounded by various of her male colleagues singing collectively as suitors. Ms. Newman sings and acts comfortably in this character’s range, her sense of lyricism punctuated by repeated, decorative top notes securely on pitch. In the final selection from the first half of the program, the quartet from Rossini’s La scala di seta, Ms. Newman demonstrated these qualities further and at a more frenetic pace. She was joined, among others, by the first appearance of Josh Lovell, whose sumptuously developed, lyric tenor will be a major addition to productions of works from the Baroque and bel canto repertoire. Lovell’s secure top notes, expressive line, and clear decoration in rapid passage work helped transform this Rossinian gem into a fitting first conclusion.

The second part of the concert opened with an instrumental excerpt, two movements from Ravel’s Trio for piano, violin, and cello. Madeline Slettedahl, current resident pianist in the Ryan Opera Center, demonstrated amply her skills in conjunction with Robert Hanford and Barbara Haffner. Vocal excerpts took a dramatic turn when contralto Lauren Decker performed the aria for Marfa from Khovanshchina. There were sustained tensions at first dominating the voice as Decker sang of a “mysterious force” and the power of “those departed.” A sudden dramatic outburst was followed by exciting low pitches before she foretold the secret of the Prince’s destiny. Toward the conclusion Decker’s commanding upper range was revealed in piercing appropriate notes equating the Prince’s life with hardship. Two additional excerpts from works by Rossini added to the delights of the concert’s conclusion. In the second-act trio from Il barbiere di Siviglia Metzger and Lovell were encouraged repeatedly by O’Hanlon’s Figaro to prepare for a hasty departure; the lovers ignored such warnings while decorating their lines with the glory of closer acquaintance. Lovell’s impressive runs and top pitches call for further Rossinian contributions while Metzger’s low pitches and comparable decoration would suggest the same. In the quartet ensemble from the first act of L’italiana in Algeri Decker and Guetti demonstrated their technique in a lighter repertoire. As Isabella and Mustafà both sang their pointed lines with seamless, decorative beauty and a firm sense of comic involvement. The evening concluded with the entire company participating in “Make Our Garden Grow” from Bernstein's Candide.

The individual and ensemble performances were impressive throughout the evening and speak well for the future of vocal arts as supported by this exemplary company.

Salvatore Calomino

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Arizona Opera Presents a Glittering Rheingold

Director Brian Staufenbiel’s production was first seen two years ago at Minnesota Opera. He placed the orchestra on stage with platforms for the singing actors in front of the instrumental musicians.

Rheinmaidens Katrina Galka as Woglinde, Lacy Sauter as Welgunde, and Stephanie Sanchez as Flosshilde, swam in and out of the otherwise-empty orchestra pit. They could not always be seen, but if they were in real water they would sometimes have been invisible as well. As the overture began, projections by David Murakami sprayed across a scrim that provided a background for the Rheinmaidens and Alberich. Water poured down from every angle and Lighting Designer Nicole Pearce’s reflections of sunlight pointed out the precious gold. Costumer Designer Matthew LeFebvre dressed the women in light colors and the men in dark leather.

The green-clad Rheinmaidens worked hard at appearing to swim and dive in the water while singing in exquisite harmony and bantering with Alberich. High soprano Galka is fast becoming a leading lady, and it will be interesting to follow her career. The Alberich, Richard Paul Fink, has been a star performer for many years and it was a joy to watch his keenly-honed interpretation of the dwarf, one of the few creatures who may live on at the end of the final Ring opera, Götterdämerung. Fink sang with dark chocolate tones that made his character seem the embodiment of greed.

The Rheinmaidens

Onstage almost the entire evening, was Rodell Rosel as the tricky fire demigod, Loge. Like fire itself, Loge never stopped moving, changing, and jumping from one place to another. Even his fingers were constantly in motion. A visual artist as well as a fine character tenor, Rosel was a Loge to remember.

Daveda Karanas was a velvet-voiced, soft-edged Fricka who admitted wanting the new castle to bind Wotan closer to her. I wanted to see her ride in her ram-drawn cart, but she did not have one in this production. As the bass-voiced giants, Fasolt and Fafner, Harold Wilson and Zachary James filled the hall with their deep, cavernous sounds. As Erda, Dana Beth Miller did not have the plum-colored low notes often associated with her role, but she got her point of view across to a troubled Wotan.

Mark Delavan’s Wotan is a well known interpretation. He is much more human than any god should be and we love him for it. As the dwarf, Mime, Dennis Petersen was a conniving creature who would never be trustworthy. Bass-baritone Craig Colclough and tenor John Robert Lindsay as Donner and Froh added vocal pizzaz to the gods’ entrance into Valhalla.

The most interesting new voice in this production belonged to Laura Wilde who sang Freia. There is some history behind her role, too. Caroline Whisnant, who sang Freia in the Flagstaff Ring performances, has gone on to a major career singing leading roles in important European houses. Perhaps something like that will happen to Wilde.

Maestro Joseph Rescigno conducted the Arizona Opera Orchestra using the Gotthold Ephraim Lessing orchestral reduction of Wagner’s immense score and the overall sound was magnificent. Occasionally, there was a blip from a horn or a tuba, but these musicians who normally play Verdi, Puccini and Donizetti, rendered Wagner’s dense score with red-hot passion and constant emotional tension. I do hope this entree into the Ring will bring us other Wagner operas in the near future. There is an audience for them in Arizona.

Maria Nockin

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Cast and production information:

Wotan, Mark Delavan; Loge, Rodell Rosel; Alberich, Richard Paul Fink; Mime, Dennis Petersen; Fricka, Daveda Karanas; Erda, Dana Beth Miller; Fasolt, Harold Wilson; Fafner, Zachary James; Donner, Craig Colclough; Froh, John Robert Lindsay; Freia, Laura Wilde; Woglinde, Katrina Galka; Welgunde, Lacy Sauter; Flosshilde, Stephanie Sanchez; Conductor, Joseph Rescigno; Stage Director and Designer, Brian Staufenbiel; Projection Designer, David Murakami; Costume Designer, Matthew LeFebvre; Lighting Designer, Nicole Pearce.

image=http://www.operatoday.com/Loge_Mime.png
image_description=Loge and Mime. Rodell Rosel and Dennis Petersen [Photo © Tim Trumble]

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Photos© Tim Trumble

Handel's Teseo brings 2018 London Handel Festival to a close

I was rather surprised to read in the programme that this performance by David Bates’s La Nuova Musica and soloists from Royal Academy Opera aimed ‘to recreate the drama in the Perfection that would have been experienced by the audience in 1713 with scenes, decorations, flights and machines’. Okay, the columns, stained glass and reredos of St George’s are not without their architectural drama, but the idea that the sort of stage effects that Handel’s audiences enjoyed - Medea’s magic transforms a palace into a desert inhabited by horrid monsters, while she descends from a cloud in a chariot drawn by fire-breathing dragons - could be accommodated amid the narrow (and uncomfortable) oak pews and aisles would be stretching things somewhat.

I guess that this ambition was metaphorical and intended to be interpreted ‘in spirit’. Fortunately, no flames or thunderbolts flashed in the transepts, though the operations of Westminster Council Refuge Collection services and a few Harley Davidsons racing down St George’s Street towards Piccadilly Circus added some rumbles and reverberation to the proceedings.

However, there is sufficient fire in Handel’s setting of Nicola Francesca Haym’s libretto in five Acts - for the most part, as David Kimbell [1] was among the first to confirm, a translation of Philippe Quinault’s text for Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Thésée which was heard in Paris in 1675 - to keep the passions burning through the unfolding of a plot in which three couples ties themselves in romantic and political Gordian knots even more convoluted than the seria norm.

Let’s just say Medea has come to Athens as she expects King Egeo to fulfil his promise to marry her, so she is not best pleased when she learns that in fact he’d rather hitch up with Agilea, with whom he is obsessed, but who herself is not very enamoured of this proposition as she’d rather tie the knot with Teseo (Theseus, who returns her love, and who is the baby-son abandoned by Egeo in a far-off land - don’t fret about the reasoning or logic). Clizia and Arcane, confidants to Agilea and Teseo respectively, wish everyone would stop fussing so they can get wed, though Arcane is not averse to his own spot of jealous pique of his own, when he thinks Clizia has also fallen for Teseo’s charms. The plot is driven by Medea’s increasingly vengeful jealousy. When sorcery fails to serve up a satisfying resolution she stoops to an attempted poisoning of Teseo, but in the nick of time Egeo recognises his long-lost son and dashes the bitter chalice from his hand. The goddess Minerva intervenes to stop the enraged Medea from igniting a conflagration. All’s well that ends well.

My (minor) gripes first. The choreography of this performance was confusing. Though the da capo form predominates, many of the arias are quite short and there are an unusual number of duets. So, why place two individual members of a duo-number respectively in front of and behind the instrumental forces when they are supposed to be speaking/singing to each other? Why, for example, have Agilea tell Teseo that she longs for the day when she can ‘clasp you to my breast, O dearest!’ when she’d have to clamber over twenty instrumentalists to do so?

Then, tempi - which were, as is the way of things these days, fast. Now, no-one wants a three-hour-plus opera (not least when sitting in these back-breaking pews) to be dragged out to eternity, but there were moments here where Bates’s Tigger-ish impetuousness did not serve his soloists - a superb young cast - as well as more judicious (musical and dramatic) pacing might have done. And, as I commented in relation to La Nuova Musica’s performance of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at Wigmore Hall a week ago, Bates’s obsession (not unworthy) with instrumental detail - at times, here I feared he might slide off the piano stool as he veered left and right, up and down, circling his hands to generate vigour (when things were already fizzing along), punching out bass points - risked making the instrumental parts relentless rather than rhetorically supportive. In general, it all felt rather bass heavy and effortful, whereas in fact Handel has done all the work and the music should simply speak for itself.

That’s not to say that there wasn’t some splendid playing: the strings were charmingly robust but impressively unified in matters of ensemble and articulation; oboes were pungent, and Leo Duarte’s duetting the Agilea in ‘M’adora l’idol mio’ (My beloved adores me) almost stole the show, threatening to outdo the operatic theatricality, as voice and reed chased each other through Handel’s curlicues, up and down the scales and round the cadential corners. And, the accompanied recitatives were as startling as, surely, Handel intended, Medea’s summoning of the ‘Shades’ pierced by flawlessly tumbling unison strings and heart-churning pointed stabbings.

The RAO soloists made the back-breaking endurance unequivocally worthwhile. When I heard Ilona Revolskaya assail the flight-paths of the Air Traffic Controller in Jonathan Dove’s Flight last month - a production which inaugurated the opening of the Royal Academy of Music’s beautifully proportioned, acoustically advantageous new Susie Sainsbury Theatre, designed by Ian Ritchie - I admired the way she prowled along her raised perch and soared through the stratospheric vocal lines with equal imperiousness (Opera, May 2018). Here she was a stunning Agilea, her soprano by turns slicing through the air with ominous power and precision, and touching the heart with the poignant tones of self-sacrifice. Revolskaya has the ability to shape a lyrical line more enchanting than Medea’s magic, and ‘Deh v’aprite, o luci belle’ (Ah, open, lovely eyes) was beautifully enriched by obbligato recorders (Leo Duarte, Bethan White) - a wonderful and much needed moment of space and stillness amid the frantic proceedings, a drop of sweetness to assuage envy’s poison. ‘Amarti sì vorrei’ (Yes, I want to love you) was similar enhanced by Alex McCartney’s expressive theorbo.

I have admired Hannah Poulsom’s performances on several recent occasions, not least in Surrey Opera’s The Life to Come and though we had to wait until Act 2 to hear Medea’s passionate wrath, it was worth waiting for. The gravity with which Poulsom injected her mezzo - complemented by secure centring in the recitatives - captured all of the vengeful Medea’s frustration and anger. The rapid changes of mood proved more problematic, though, and Poulsom was not always able to marry the top and bottom of her voice; but, she was undeniably and winningly courageous and deserving of praise. Medea’s most fiery outbursts may have affected the intonation, but Poulsom effectively carried the drama, flashing blindingly at the top, snarling at the bottom, as required. One couldn’t fault her commitment and if it occasionally felt a bit too premature for her voice, then perhaps that’s what one-off student performances are for …

As Clizia, Alexandra Oomens’ diction was less clear than her peers, but she made good use of the rich colours of her mezzo and was very engaging dramatically: ‘Rispendente, amiche stelle’ (Beam down, friendly stars) seemed aflame with celestial heat, and her duets with Alexander Simpson’s Arcane were unfailingly alert and dramatic - and impressively off-score. Indeed, the precision and coordination of the duo’s cadential trills threatened to upstage the principals! Simpson’s countertenor occasionally seemed to lack supporting weight, but his voice is agile and the coloratura was accurate, especially in ‘Benché tuoni, e l’etra avvampi’ (Although it may thunder, and the sky become red) in Act 4.

Handel wrote the three male roles for soprano castrato (Teseo), alto castrato (Egeo), and female alto (Arcane), but here Teseo was taken by mezzo soprano Olivia Warburton, who characterised the role skilfully, from her first entrance from the rear of the nave. I was impressed by the way that Warburton showed appreciation of the way the Handelian rhythms can lighten the voice and convey heroic optimism and brightness. Moreover, the busy runs of ‘S’armi il fato, s’armi armore (Let fate take up arms, let love take up arms) caused no problem; equally, the simple lyricism of ‘Tengo in pugno l’idol mio’ (I clasp my idol) - noteworthy for some lovely interplay between solo violin and vocal line - was beguiling.

As Egeo, mezzo soprano Frances Gregory used her firm, rich sound impressively - always responsive and expressive - to convey regality and indignation in equal measure (one should note also Rodolfo Richter’s lovely violin obbligato in Egeo’s aria ‘Ricordati o bella’ (Remember, O fair one)).

Given the ceaselessness of the high voices, it was something of a relief when baritone Darwin Prakesh’s Sacerdote entered the raised pulpit in the closing moments, to bring us all down to earth in such warm, consoling and commanding fashion.

Claire Seymour

Handel: Teseo (London Handel Festival)

La Nuova Musica : David Bates (conductor/harpsichord)

Teseo - Olivia Warburton, Egeo - Frances Gregory, Agilea - Ilona Revolskaya, Clizia - Alexandra Oomens, Arcane - Alexander Simpson, Medea - Hannah Poulsom, Sacerdote - Darwin Prakash.

St George’s, Hanover Square; Saturday 14^th April 2018.

image=http://www.operatoday.com/Olivia%20Warburton.jpg image_description=Teseo: La Nuova Musica, 2018 London Handel Festival, St George’s, Hanover Square, London product=yes product_title=Teseo: La Nuova Musica, 2018 London Handel Festival, St George’s, Hanover Square, London product_by=A review by Claire Seymour product_id= Above: Olivia Warburton (Teseo)

Camille Saint-Saens: Mélodies avec orchestra

Though the songs for voice and piano have previously been recorded, this is the world premiere recording of the full orchestral versions, taken from a performance in Lugano in 2016 sponsored by Palazzetto Bru-Zane, champions in the promotion of French repertoire. In this landmark issue, distributed by Alpha classics, nineteen of the twenty-five orchestral songs in the composer's catalogue are included.

Saint-Saëns was only thirteen years old when he wrote L'Enlèvement, in 1848, first for piano and voice, orchestrating it very shortly afterwards. Aimons-nous was completed seventy years later, two years before the composer's death. Though Saint-Saëns’ reputation has been based on his larger works, he had a lifelong commitment to song. This is particularly significant given the dominance of Grand Opéra and symphonic works in mid-19th century France. Berlioz's Les nuits d'été was initially composed for voice and piano, the orchestrations only completed in 1856. Concert performances tended towards programmes of operatic arias or works for piano.

By orchestrating his songs, Saint-Saëns was making an artistic statement. In 1876, he wrote "The Lied with orchestra is a social necessity. If such things were available, people would not always be singing operatic arias in concerts, which often make a pitiful effect in those surroundings". As Sébastien Troester writes in his notes, "incongruous accents and faulty ceasuras and enjambments" could occur in popular works by composers whose native language was not French. Thus Saint-Saëns created orchestral song as art song as serious concert music, a synthesis of voice and symphony, building on the riches of French poetry. Orchestral form also allows for exotic colour and sensuality, making use, as Troester writes "of ancient modes, of ostinato rhythms that create a sensation of languor, of vocal melismas", distinctive and very Belle Époque.

The performances here are superb, the epitome of idiomatic style. Despite its richness, the beauty of Saint-Saëns music lies in its purity. The ornamenations exist to amplify ideas and structure. Poschner and the orchestra keep, the colours clear. "Hollywood excess" is not the way to go Elegance lies in articulation. Beuron and Chritoyannis phrase and shape so that the words can be heard clearly, without exaggeration, but with natural, flowing flair.

Angélus, to a poem by Pierre Aguétant (1890-1940) begins with the tolling of a bell, followed by shimmering strings. "Les clochers, souverains du soir", sings the tenor Yann Beuron, pacing the line with the deliberation of medieval chant. In the monastery, the monks are singing Angelus, and outside, the shepherds hear the sound on the air as if the wings of God were rushing past. Similar frisson in the strings introduces L'attente (Victor Hugo) but here the pace is swift, barely able to contain excitement. "Climb, squirrel, up the oak.... eagle, rise from your eyrie!" In Rêverie (Hugo) phrases in each strophe are repeated, with slight variation, the orchestra echoing the vocal line, the effect as lovers entwined. Beuron's wonderful diction warms words tenderly: "Mon coeur, dont rien ne reste, L'amour ôté ! "

Extended orchestral colour pays off handsomely in songs like La Brise from Saint-Saëns' Mélodies Persanes op 26 (1870) to a text by Arrmand Renaud (1836-1895). Swaying string lines suggest exotic dance, against dance rhythms based on percussion and bells. A clarinet suggests "oriental" woodwinds. The vocal line (Tassis Christoyannis) equally agile, with long, curving phrases. Similar felicities in Extase (Hugo) where the text itself repeats and changes in intricate patterns. Woodwinds "mobile et tremblante" suggest the falling leaves in La feuille de peuplier (Mme Amable Tastu, 1795-1885). A lilting woodwind melody lifts L'Enlèvement (Hugo) raising the song to heights few composers aged only 13 could hope to achieve. Woodwinds again in Les Fées (Théodore de Banville 1821-1891) suggest the movement of swallows in flight, as the vocal line soars upwards. The vocal line (Beuron) in Souvenances (Ferdinand Lemaire 1832-1879) dips gracefully, garlanded by the orchestra.

Flutes and strings shimmer in Les cloches de la mer to a text by the composer himself, but a much darker, more dramatic mood emerges, the orchestra surging tutti, suggesting the depths of the ocean. La splendeur vide from Mélodies Persanes op 26. describes "un merveilleux palais" filled with jewels (vividly evoked by the orchestra), but the glory masks despair. "Plus je suis tombeau", sings Troyannis, his voice descending to near whisper. The full orchestra surges again, horns ablaze, in Le pas d'armes du roi Jean (Hugo) a long ballad where the singer (Troyannis) has to characterise the different figures in the poem, while marking the short, clipped phrases in the text.

More mock medievalism in La cloche (Hugo) where Beuron floats the last line "dans le ciel" so it dissolves into silence. This prepares us for the fluttering delicacy of Papillons (Renée de Léché) where a pair of flutes duet, darker winds and strings adding texture. The song ends abruptly : butterflies die. Thus Pliante (Tastu), (1918) with strong chords of dark portent. "Ô monde ! Ô vie ! Ô temps!". In contrast, though written in the same period, Aimons-nous (Banville) where lovers embrace, peacefully, in death. In Au cimetière again from Mélodies persanes the two groups of strings are plucked, then bowed, suggesting the beat of a pulse and sighs of breath. The mood is hushed, yet enraptured. To conclude, Danse macabre op 40 but with a difference. This was originally written for voice and piano in 1872, then revised for violin and orchestra. Here, voice, violin and orchestra come together. It's a treat ! Christoyannis sings "zig-a-zig-za-zig le mort en cadence". Violin and voice locked in sinister dance. Méfistofeles having a laugh. Truly "et vive la mort et l'egalité!"

Anne Ozorio

image=http://www.operatoday.com/Poschner_Alpha_front.png image_description=Alpha-Classics: Alpha 273 [CD] product=yes product_title=Camille Saint-Saëns : Mélodies avec orchestra, Yann Beuron (tenor) Tassis Christoyannis (Baritone), Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, Markus Poschner. (conductor) product_by=A review by Anne Ozorio product_id=Alpha-Classics: Alpha 273 [CD] price=$17.43 product_url=https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01NALS9W0?ie=UTF8&tag=operatoday-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=B01NALS9W0

The Moderate Soprano

Now on its second run having been transferred to the Duke of York in the West End from Hampstead Theatre where it premiered in 2015, the play does so much more than just tell the story of the Sussex opera festival.

The man under the spotlight is of course John Christie, in a charismatic performance by Roger Allam, whose love of Germany, Wagner and his wife lead him in the quest for the ideal. Audrey Mildmay, the moderate soprano and John Christie’s much younger wife is delightfully played by the Olivier Award winner Nancy Carroll who is in many ways the true driving force behind the enterprise, ruling with grace and intervening with tact and diplomacy when artistic tensions rise. In the process, she also steers Christie into keeping the standards high: ‘If you’re going to spend all that money, John, for God’s sake do the thing properly!” she urges him.

(l-r) Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Nancy Carroll, Roger Allam, Paul Jesson and Anthony Calf in The Moderate Soprano at the Duke of York's Theatre.

For an opera festival which is now seen as quintessentially English it is no small irony that at its heart lay the talent of three Hitler refugees: Paul Jesson as conductor Dr. Fritz Busch, Anthony Calf as Professor Carl Ebert and Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as Rudolf Bing, who was later to become General Manager at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The story incorporates a penetrating account of the rise of Nazism and its effect on various opera houses across Germany in the early 1930’s—the realities of which many across Europe were slow to fully grasp.

In Hare’s portrait, Glyndebourne’s founder is a wealthy and eccentric landowner who has a peculiar fondness for ‘efficiency’ and praises Germany for its ‘flowers everywhere, perfect roads, good houses, clean streets, cultured people, perfect traffic control’. He is said to have attempted to establish a Ministry of National Conscience and, interestingly, saw opera as public service: ‘My fellow countrymen need cheering up!’, he utters—and he’s the man to do it. Not a view we should perhaps entirely dismiss today. His love of the art form is then beautifully captured in his impassioned speech on the virtues of the sublime and the purpose of art.

It all takes a very unexpected direction however when the theatre as built is found unfit for staging Wagner’s monumental works: ‘For a jewel box theatre, you need jewel box music’, the conductor informs us. Much to Christie’s (amusing) exasperation, the first season in 1934 does not open with Parsifal but with two operas, both by Mozart—a state of affairs which would continue in subsequent years. The opening night with the Marriage of Figaro was a resounding success and drew a full house to what was then a 300-seat auditorium. The following production of Così Fan Tutte was less of a triumph, with only 7 seats sold at first—a situation which was quickly remedied once they got on top of promoting the festival.

The sets are cleverly designed by multi award-winning theatre and opera designer, Bob Crowley, and include a beautifully decorated home interior and a fun take on the gardens at Glyndebourne. Skillfully directed by Jeremy Herrin, the play is a tribute to artistic vision and the love of an art form. It is also a piercing portrait of an era, an institution and a marriage—one that opera-goers should not miss.

Mahima Macchione

image=http://www.operatoday.com/Nancy-Carroll-and-Roger-Allam-in-The-Moderate-Soprano-at-the-Duke-of-Yorks-Theatre.-Credit-Johan-Perrson.png image_description=Nancy Carroll and Roger Allam in The Moderate Soprano [Photo © Johan Perrson] product=yes product_title=The Moderate Soprano product_by=A review by Mahima Macchione product_id=Above: Nancy Carroll and Roger Allam in The Moderate Soprano

Photos © Johan Perrson

The Spirit of England: the BBCSO mark the centenary of the end of the Great War

Such news made the evening’s concert, which had affectingly reminded one of the human and individual cost of war, seem even more poignant, and pertinent. After all, wherever or whenever the conflict, the ‘Unknown Soldier’ is always someone’s husband, father, brother or son - as Lilian Elkington so touchingly communicates in her little-known tone poem, Out of the Mist (1921), which her own programme note describes as a meditation on ‘the meaning of sacrifice’. The seven-minute work evokes the scene at Dover as the destroyer HMS Verdun emerged from the Channel mist, bearing home the coffin of the Unknown Warrior for state burial at Westminster Abbey the following day.

Elkington (1901-69), who studied piano and composition at the Birmingham Midland with Granville Bantock, would have been forever consigned to obscurity had not David J. Brown fortuitously come across the score and parts of Out of the Mist in a second-hand bookshop in Worthing in the early 1980s. It had been performed at the student concert in 1921, and subsequently in Harrogate and Bournemouth. But, marriage to Arthur Kennedy, a violin and viola player, in 1926 brought an end to any thoughts of a professional career as a composer or pianist - as was so often the case for women at that time. Though she remained involved in music, as an organist and choir mistress, when Elkington died in 1969 her husband remarried and destroyed all her scores and the programmes of her performances. But for Brown’s discovery, Out of the Mist would probably itself have remained unknown.

It deserves to be heard, as Davis and the BBCSO confirmed. The mysterious opening - murmuring pulses from horns and timpani against muted low strings and quiet cello eloquence - conjured the oppressive darkness of the ocean’s deep surge and swirling mist. ‘The ship feels her way through the murk’, wrote Elkington, and Davis conveyed the growing urgency of the forward movement, as the upper strings and woodwind solos brought some brief brightness, the tonic-dominant swings of the timpani pressing inexorably onwards. Davis captured the grandeur and solemnity of the concluding Largamente appassionato, in which, ‘with a burst of sad exaltation the representative of the nameless thousands who had died in the common cause is brought out of the darkness to his own’. The nobility is never verbose, the economy of means directly communicative and deeply expressive.

The World Was Once All Miracle (2016-17) by Hong Kong-born, London-domiciled Raymond Yiu was both more complex and more elusive - inevitably, perhaps, given that this six-movement orchestral song-cycle sets autobiographical texts by Anthony Burgess, the centenary of whose birth during the last years of the war it was commissioned to celebrate. ‘It takes a while to find the real person,’ says Yiu of his ‘sound-portrait’ of Burgess, and one senses this search in the score’s juxtaposition of contrasting idioms and musical quotations - one song even draws on a sketch by Burgess himself, who was the composer of more than 250 works in a plethora of styles - as well as Yiu’s own multi-cultural heritage.

Roderick Williams and Sir Andrew Davis, with the BBCSO. Photo credit: BBC/Mark Allan.

Baritone Roderick Williams, who premiered the work at the Manchester International Festival in 2017 with the BBC Philharmonic under Michael Francis, appeared entirely comfortable with the riddles, shifts, paradoxes and flights of both text and score, singing with characteristic ease and naturalness, articulating all of Burgess’s deliberately, playfully, pointedly abstruse lines with effortless clarity. ‘Sick of the sycophantic singing,’ he began, as, with no hint of irony, the frustrated repetition of the opening word was met with orchestral punches. Davis carved a rich sonic spaciousness as image piled upon image, of flames, forbidden flowers, a ‘shrill electric bell’ and shimmering light (tingling pianissimo xylophone), culminating in a ‘bloody thunderbolt’, then silence. In the slower songs, ‘For we were all caught in the shame of sleep’ and ‘You were there and nothing was said’, Williams’ attention to the details of the text was exemplary, the diction immaculate. In the former, harp and string solos beautifully conveyed nocturnal mystery and temporary calm; in the latter, percussive taps and slaps complemented the rhythmic fragmentation of the vocal line, before woodwind and horns formed sonorous sustained tonal clusters through which whimsical flourishes sputtered.

Ethereal string harmonics opened ‘I have raised and poised a fiddle’, wryly mocking ‘music’s model: The music of the spheres’. Textual references to Purcell and Arne triggered snatches of musical homage, and despite the dense complexity and the frequent placement of the vocal line in the middle range, Williams’ baritone spoke clearly. The haunting historic shadows of ‘One looks for Eden in history, best left unvisited’ were only partially pushed aside by the rollicking jazziness of ‘Useless to hope to old off’, in which Davis skilfully balanced restraint and exuberance, holding the cross-rhythms and splashes of colour coherently together. Eventually, he drew in the carefree miscellany to a point of stillness - ‘The final kiss’ - marked only by the harp, before a percussive burst mimicked the last line’s ‘Tight pressure of hands’. Quirky but never flippant, The World Was Once All Miracle makes a persuasive case for its quest.

Works by Edward Elgar framed the programme. To begin, soprano Emma Tring joined Williams in excerpts from The Starlight Express (1915). Elgar’s incidental music for Violet Pearn’s play, based on Algernon Blackwood’s fantasy novel A Prisoner in Fairyland, represents the composer’s most substantial work for the stage. Here, seven songs nestled within the instrumental fabric, beginning after the gentle orchestral introduction with the Organ-Grinder’s plea ‘To the Children’. ‘O children, open your arms to me,/ Let your hair fall over my eyes;’ sang Williams with gravity and earnestness, before showing the tramp’s derision for the adult world with a bitter flourish, ‘They laugh all my fancies to scorn’ , pointedly underlying the song’s depiction of the divergence between the worlds of adult and child. The instrumental waltz which followed sparkled like the stardust that the children in Blackwood’s tale collect from the constellations to sprinkle on the adults who have become ‘wumbled’ - and like the twinkle in the eye of ‘The Blue-Eyed Fairy’. Williams and Davis effected a perfectly judged rubato of wonder - ‘So if such a child you should chance to see …’ - before the spirit of carefree youth which the Fairy’s spell will bestow coursed towards the closing wave of the timpani’s magical wand.

A poignant violin solo, beautifully played by guest leader Igor Yuzefovich, preceded Emma Tring’s glossy, gleaming rendition of the dawn-song, ‘We shall meet the Morning Spiders’, as Davis’ fluttering fingers (he conducted the whole programme without a baton) conjured staccato featheriness from woodwind to depict the delicate nests of the ‘fairy-cotton riders’. Williams relished the text of ‘My old tunes are rather broken’, creating a powerful sense of whimsy, ‘When I caught the children dancing/ With the Sprites beneath the moon’, as the Organ-Grinder looks back with nostalgia. Tring and Williams came together for the Finale, ‘Hearts must be soft-shiny dressed’, the joyful ‘unwumbling’ of the adults - Haystack Woman, Sweep, Lamplighter, Dustman, Gardener - triumphing with the carolling organ, brass and bells of ‘The First Nowell’.

If The Starlight Express’s innocent fantasy of a world of mutual care and understanding between all people in offered Elgar a slightly indulgent, though entirely sincere, refuge from more disturbing realities, The Spirit of England (1915-17), which sets three poems by Laurence Binyon, more directly confronted and communicated the distress and loss of war. No one does Elgarian nobility and consolation more persuasively than Andrew Davis. Steeped in the English music tradition, he was able to draw forth both the blooming up-swellings of pride and the tender quietude of compassion from Elgar’s score; I was reminded why he was such a terrific conductor of the Prom’s Last Night celebrations during his tenure as the BBCSO’s chief conductor (he is now Conductor Laureate of the orchestra). Yes, here there was patriotism and pomp, but nostalgia and compassion too, and the musical arguments were always dominant.

The oscillations between the male and female voices of the BBC Symphony Chorus, and tenor soloist Andrew Staples, garnered excitement and courage, spurred by a driving bass line in ‘The Fourth of August’. Staples sang with ringing power and ardency, confidently astride the symphonic and choric textures, capturing the eternal human hopefulness represented by images such as ‘The see that’s in the Spring’s returning,/ The very flower that seeks the sun.’ The melismatic plea, ‘Endure, O Earth!’, rippled with embracing power.

Timpani, harp and pizzicato strings established a gentler courage at the start of ‘To Women’, but Staples missed no opportunity to vivify the text, impressing the image of hearts which ‘burn upwards like a flame/ Of splendour and of sacrifice.’ with a surge of vigour. The high tessitura was assuredly scaled: ‘For you, you too’ and ‘From hearts that are as one high heart’ reached fervently upwards, and such emphasis never disrupted the vocal lyricism. The interaction between soloist and choir was expertly shaped, creating a mood of resolution which lingered in the basses’ concluding pizzicato tread.

‘For the Fallen’ was sombre and dark, but never lost its underlying momentum, sweeping forwards vigorously as ‘They went with songs to the battle, they were young’, as Davis fingers slithered through the dotted rhythms of the march. With the poignant reminder that ‘They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old’, the BBCSC showed that they can sing with exquisite tenderness and well as stirring majesty; Staples’ avowal, ‘We will remember them’, was simple and true, echoed by the solo cello’s expressive affirmation.

The march of the concluding stanza lifted us from despair or melancholy, though, just as Elgar must have intended in 1916. While some of Binyon’s text must not have been entirely to Elgar’s taste - and images of the Germans as ‘prey to seize and kill’ and ‘Vampire of Europe’s waste will …’ feel awkwardly dated nowadays - The Spirit of England is a powerful articulation of the ruinous waste and painful aftermath of war. As present-day conflicts persist, we do well to remember its messages of both courage and compassion.

Claire Seymour

Elgar: The Starlight Express - excerpts; Raymond Yiu: The World Was Once All Made Miracle (London premiere); Lilian Elkington: Out of the Mist; Elgar: The Spirit of England .

Andrew Davis (conductor), Emma Tring (soprano), Andrew Staples (tenor), Roderick Williams (baritone), BBC Symphony Orchestra and BBC Symphony Chorus (chorus-master, Neil Ferris).

Barbican Hall, London; Friday 13^th April 2018.

image=http://www.operatoday.com/Williams%20and%20Tring%20Mark%20Allan.jpg image_description=BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Sir Andrew Davis (conductor), Barbican Hall, London product=yes product_title=BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Sir Andrew Davis (conductor), Barbican Hall, London product_by=A review by Claire Seymour product_id=Above: Roderick Williams, Sir Andrew Davis and Emma Tring with the BBC Symphony Orchestra

Photo credit: BBC/Mark Allan

Thomas Adès conducts Stravinsky's Perséphone at the Royal Festival Hall

Perséphone was commissioned in early 1933 by the dancer Ida Rubinstein and performed by her ballet company the following year (the score - for solo tenor (Eumolpus, the Priest), speaker-dancer (Persephone, the Goddess), mixed chorus and children’s chorus - was revised in 1949). An imperious and idiosyncratic patron - she also commissioned the painter Léon Bakst to arrange the flowers in her Parisian garden in boxes, so that the design could be changed every few weeks, and was reported to keep a black tiger cup and drink champagne out of Madonna lilies - she requested from Stravinsky a sung ballet based upon André Gide’s poem Perséphone, in which she would take the speaker-dancer role of the harvest-bringing goddess of fertility.

Gide’s text, based on Homer’s ‘Hymn to Demeter’ from the Iliad, gives the classical myth a Christian gloss - also fitting for this Easter month perhaps, but less successful in terms of ‘narrative’. In Gide’s libretto, Perséphone’s sacrifice is voluntary - she willingly and knowingly picks the fatal narcissus bloom - and the compassion she demonstrates, transfiguring. When rescued courtesy of the sudden appearance of Demophoön/Triptolemus she rejoices at being restored to her mother, Demeter, but accepts that her bond with Pluto cannot be broken. Gide closes his French text with the words of Jesus, as reported by Saint John, ‘Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’ (Il faut, pour qu’un printemps renaisse/ Que le grain consente a mourir/ Sour terre, afin qu’il repraraisse/ En moisson d’or pour l’avenir), thereby reconciling classicism and Christianity. One suspects Stravinsky’s interest in lay in more earthy rituals of sacrifice and renewal such as he had explored in The Rite of Spring.

Conductor Thomas Adès conjured the transparency and textural variety of the score with delicacy and clear direction in equal measure - I was reminded of Lily Briscoe’s vision, in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, of ‘the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly's wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral’. The London Philharmonic Orchestra produced tender sonorities and a beguiling sweetness; superb playing by the strings, piano and harp was enhanced by beautiful woodwind solos, nowhere more so than the flutes’ decoration of Perséphone’s final speech. Adès never allowed the large stretches of ostinato to inhibit the forward momentum and there was an underlying rhythmic impetus, and occasionally a dance-like sweep.

The ladies of the London Philharmonic Choir injected sensuality and mystery into the murmurs of the opening chorus, ‘Reste avec nous, princesse Perséphone’, as the nymphs entreat the goddess to stay, as her mother instructed, in their care, amid the flowers and birds, the tender embrace of the stream, the caress of the air. The lullaby, ‘Sur ce lit elle repose’, was beautifully shaped. Male and female voices came together sonorously in ‘Nous apportions nos offrandes’ (We bring offerings), the chorus in Part III (Perséphone Reborn) which swells with the spirit of Russian Easter music. The members of Trinity Boys Choir sat perfectly still for forty-five minutes before, singing from memory, they added a pure religiosity to the closing episodes.

In Eumolpus’ first rhetorical address to the goddess of a million names, ‘puissante Demeter’, Toby Spence’s tenor was rather overwhelmed by the vibrant orchestral forces and he seemed a little uncomfortable vocally. But, subsequently, particularly in the more declamatory, recitative-like passages Spence grew in sureness, stature and confidence; and the high-lying line certainly presented no difficulty - there was never a sense of strain at the top, and by the close there was considerable dignity.

Gide’s French verses are richly romantic: Stravinsky described such phraseology as ‘La brise a caressé les fleurs’ (The breeze has caressed the flowers), ‘Ivresse matinale’ (Morning intoxication) and ‘Rayon naissante, petale’ (Newborn sunbeam, petal), as ‘vers caramel’. Dame Kristin Scott Thomas conveyed both the perfume and the poise of the poetry. Not only was her French faultless, but her timing was impeccable too - no mean feat given that Stravinsky did not indicate in the score how the text should be synchronised with the music.

Such exquisite calm and control was all the more noteworthy and telling, considering the exuberance of the works performed in the first half of the concert. Gerald Barry’s Organ Concerto (receiving its first London performance) is a miscellany of memory, incorporating assorted aural remembrances from Barry’s childhood: a harmonium (a solo for which is more extensive and prominent than the writing for organ), Angelus bells, 21 metronomes, and more. It’s also a war-zone, reflecting Barry’s own inharmonious relationship with the Sacristan at a Catholic church outside Cologne where the composer once worked, and the early twentieth-century musical battle between tonality and atonality. Barry tells us the impetus to embrace the latter contest was prompted by a photograph of a Washington Square cat, Blue Gadoo, peering at a book called Sex and The Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde’: ‘By his expression I knew he was mourning the loss of atonality. So I put his fight for atonality against tonality into the concerto.’

If this sounds rather too consciously self-aware, then the resulting work is certainly combative. The stuttering trumpet initiates the antagonism that the organ (Thomas Trotter) then escalates until the initial splutters have become a cacophonous rampage - Stravinsky’s superimpositions, in The Rite, say, result in what might termed ‘organised chaos’, but I’m not sure that’s what Barry has is mind. After the storm, silence: a timpani tone row, rising step by step, initiates some quietude into which intrude tolling bells and ticking metronomes. ‘Resolution’ of a sort is attained through a final hymn in which the trumpets’ lovely circular melody sits asymmetrically atop pounding, harmonious tutti crotchets in 4/4 time. If with such concordance one felt one’s nerves finally relax, the knowledge that Barry titles this hymn, Humiliated and Insulted, might have tempered the relief offered by the final consonance.

Adès seemed to relish Barry’s battles, conducting with intellectual command and technical precision. He always has seemed able to assimilate a huge range of ideas and debates with utter command, and no lack of emotion or sensitivity, and this was exemplified in the work which opened the concert, his own - recently extended - orchestral suite from his 1995 ballet, Powder Her Face. Despite the huge forces employed and the hyperbolic emotions conjured, Adès ensured that we could appreciate the Stravinskian lucidity and quasi-classicism of the score, which, with pictorial episodes added to the original three dances, now encompasses more of a narrative. The LPO slinked through the slides, whoops, snide nasality and louche levity, as Adès, his gestures crisp and clear, the baton essaying pungent swipes at times, proved an exemplary guide through the nightmarishly complex rhythmic and temporal side-steps and sashays.

Despite all the virtuosity and variety on display, though, it was the purity - both Gallic and classical - essential lyricism and simplicity of Perséphone which seemed most profound.

Claire Seymour

Changing Faces: Stravinsky’s Journey
Thomas Adès: Powder Her Face Suite (UK premiere)
Gerald Barry: Organ Concerto
Stravinsky: Perséphone

Thomas Adès (conductor), Thomas Trotter (organ), Tonby Spence (narrator), Dame Kristin Scott Thomas (Perséphone), London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, Trinity Boys Choir.

Royal Festival Hall, London; Wednesday 11^th April 2018.

image=http://www.operatoday.com/DaihL5xW4AARQOm.jpg image_description=Changing Faces: Stravinsky’s Journey - LPO, Thomas Adès (conductor) at the Royal Festival Hall product=yes product_title=Changing Faces: Stravinsky’s Journey - LPO, Thomas Adès (conductor) at the Royal Festival Hall product_by=A review by Claire Seymour product_id= Above: Dame Kristin Scott Thomas, Thomas Adès, Toby Spence, London Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, Trinity Boys Choir

Photograph courtesy of Trinity Boys Choir

Dido and Aeneas: La Nuova Musica at Wigmore Hall

But, while my attention was drawn to freshening rhythmic gestures in the bass line or inner instrumental voices, and captivated by the enrichment provided by the varying continuo ensemble of theorbo (Alex McCartney (occasionally switching to baroque guitar) and Lynda Sayce) and harp (Siobhan Armstrong), I missed the essential simplicity and sincerity of the work in this lunchtime performance at the Wigmore Hall, where Dido was presented as part of the 2018 London Handel Festival.

I wondered how much time the talented young soloists and chorus members had had to consider and rehearse the practical matters of stage business. Although La Nuova Musica essentially played one-to-a-part and the chorus was formed largely from those taking small solo roles, the Wigmore Hall stage looked uncomfortably crowded. Principal soloists sat stage-right, moving centre for their arias; minor soloists, for the most part, moved to the front, negotiating the instrumentalists - and sometimes other singers - as they made their way to the fore-stage. Though Bates swept fluently from recitative to aria to chorus in a seamless musical continuum, it looked - and thus felt - a little clunky at times.

Singers dealt differently with the circumstances. While tenor Nick Pritchard fairly bounded forward to deliver the Sailor’s light-voiced, vigorous plea to his fellow tars to ‘Come Away’ from the shore-bound nymphs’ allurements and set forth with the impatient tide, bass Richard Bannon took two steps forward, through the viola da gambas, and forthrightly issued the Spirit’s decree that Aeneas must ‘forsake this land’ with statuesque and dark-hued weight.

After Anna Dennis had delivered Belinda’s slightly too frank and forte appeal to Rachel Kelly’s Dido to ‘Shake the cloud from your brow’ - for goodness sake stop wallowing in self-pity, for your solipsistic sorrow is making us all miserable, she seemed to infer - Kelly found herself directing her response, ‘Ah Belinda, I am press’d with torment’, to her conductor, as her companion-servant Belinda had retreated to her seat at the side. Subsequently, Kelly found herself ‘stranded’ onstage during ‘Fear no danger to ensue’ (Belinda, Second Woman and Chorus), and struggled to stay ‘in role’ (i.e. Dido has just sung of her fear that her pity for the distress of others will be her undoing) when tempted to smile at the beguiling quality of the choric assurance that Cupid has strewn Dido’s path with flowers.

But, these are, for the most part, tangential matters. The singing was characterful, and none more so than in the choruses which were invigorating, dramatic and lithe, always propelling the action forward - though the witches’ ‘Ho, ho, ho!’s were rather demure!

Dennis, after a somewhat resounding start - one might expect a slightly lighter voice embodying this impulsive stirrer - found the measure of the Hall, and her mezzo settled beautifully though she remained, to good effect, unafraid to lean on expressive textual details or emotive appoggiaturas. ‘Thanks to these lonesome vales’, sung within the tranquil grove, was bright, full and satisfying, the viola da gamba offering further comforting support. Emilie Renard was a Sorceress of supercilious eye-brow raising, sly smiles and sultry vocal tone, and Louise Kemény impressed as the Second Woman: her Act 2 number, ‘Off she visits this lone mountain’, was richly enhanced by the theorbos’ gentle charm and the contrasting animation of the viola da gamba.

I admired George Humphreys’ two embodiments of Cavalli’s Giove in 2016 (for English Touring Opera and for La Nuova Musica at Wigmore Hall (where I found his powerful baritone, ‘haughtily contemptuous as he surveyed the destruction wreaked on the mortals’ and that ‘his appealing tone captured Giove’s presumptuousness’), as well as the inspiring power and brightness that the baritone put to good use as Lieutenant Jenkins in WNO’s In Parenthesis that year. Humphreys has now joined the ensemble of Salzburg State Theatre and is no doubt destined for satisfying success. But the physical stature and vocal sonority which made his Demetrius so compelling at Snape Maltings in June 2017 made this Aeneas seem rather too big for his boots. One could not fault either technique or attention to textual detail, though; Act 3’s encounter with the Spirit was dramatically intense and engaging, the emotional twists and turns of ‘But ah! what language can I try/ My injur’d Queen to pacify’ being matched by diversity of tone, colour, dynamics, weight and pace.

My one disappointment was Rachel Kelly’s Dido, all the more so for the pleasure that her singing has brought on many other occasions. While the melismas bristled and shone, and she keenly communicated the moments of heightened emotional piquancy and distress, Kelly did not look entirely comfortable in the role of the deserted Queen. I missed a sure, smoothness of line; and the text was not always clearly enunciated, even when set with Purcellian naturalness. ‘Remember me’ is the appeal of the dying Queen … but, I’m not sure one would. I think it boiled down to ‘trying too hard’: vocal sophistication is not what is needed here, as I suggested at the start, it is simplicity and sincerity which make Purcell’s greatness, genius and musical generosity felt.

Claire Seymour

Purcell: Dido and Aeneas
London Handel Festival

Dido - Rachel Kelly, George Humphreys - Aeneas, Belinda - Anna Dennis, Sorceress - Emilie Renard, First Witch - Helen Charlston, Second Witch - Martha McLorinan, Second Woman - Louise Kemény, Sailor - Nick Pritchard, Spirit - Richard Bannan; La Nuova Musica - David Bates (harpsichord, organ, director), Anaïs Chen and James Toll (violins), Jane Rogers (viola), Jonathan Rees and Ibraham Aziz (viola da gamba), Alex McCartney and Lynda Sayce (theorbo), Siobhan Armstrong (harp).

Wigmore Hall, London; Saturday 7^th April 2018.

image=http://www.operatoday.com/Bates%20Staples.jpg image_description=Dido and Aeneas, La Nuova Musica at the Wigmore Hall, London Handel Festival 2018 product=yes product_title=Dido and Aeneas, La Nuova Musica at the Wigmore Hall, London Handel Festival 2018 product_by=A review by Claire Seymour product_id=Above: David Bates

Photo credit: Andy Staples

Bernstein's MASS at the Royal Festival Hall

Leonard Bernstein accepted that commission and the result was MASS , a ninety-minute ‘Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers’ which was premiered on 8^th September 1971, and which placed the Latin Catholic Mass at the core of an interrogation of faith.

Humphrey Burton, Bernstein’s biographer, suggests that Bernstein’s experience of performing the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony at the funeral of Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968, at which a Catholic Mass was said, inspired his decision to explore the historical and spiritual significance of a ritual which is at the heart of humanity’s relationship with the promises of Christianity. However, the Preface to the composer’s Second Symphony, composed twenty years earlier and titled The Age of Anxiety after W.H. Auden’s poem, states, ‘The essential line of the poem (and of the music) is the record of our difficult and problematic search for faith’, and it was a search which continued through Candide, the Kaddish Symphony and so many of Bernstein’s works, suggesting that the pursuit of theological meaning in his modern world was in fact Bernstein’s driving preoccupation and inspiration.

1971 was a moment of crisis and change for the US. Peace protests against the six-year-long Vietnam War were escalating, and images of the shooting by the National Guard of four protesting students at Kent State University were vivid in the minds of many. In the domestic field, December 1970 had seen the devaluation of the US dollar at the end of the most inflationary year since the Korean War: taxes and unemployment figures were high and climbing, and the Nixon administration’s new economic policy caused discontent at home and in Latin America and Cuba. Moreover, President Nixon announced his plan to visit China, hoping to end the long confrontation between the US and the People’s Republic.

MASS was thus certainly ‘of its time’. The question I asked myself as I took my seat in the Royal Festival Hall for the first of two performances, directed by Southbank Centre Artistic Director Jude Kelly and conducted by Marin Alsop, who studied with Bernstein, was: what messages - philosophical, spiritual, political, musical, artistic - does it have for our time?

In 1971, Catholic bishops condemned the work as blasphemy; in 2000, Pope John Paul II requested that Bernstein’s MASS be staged at the Vatican, a wish that was fulfilled in 2004. This performance was described as a ‘new staging’, updated for Bernstein’s centenary year; in fact, it was a re-working of Kelly’s 2010 staging, also conducted by Alsop, and to the projected images of the Kennedys, flower-power peace protestors and Martin Luther King were addended a roll call of recent presidential incumbents from the Bushes to Obama to Trump, and images of last month’s March For Our Lives rallies in the US, in which hundreds of thousands of student called for action against gun violence.

Strangely, this visual argument for ‘relevance’ made me ‘lose faith’: in the sense that it seemed to confirm that both the promise of theological doctrine and practice, and the human faith embodied by the believers, campaigners, leaders and followers whose faces flashed before our eyes, had been shown to be flawed or misguided, ending in failure.

Fortunately, the performance itself was more uplifting, involving more than 400 hundred young performers - representing the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, Chineke! Junior Orchestra, Finchley Children’s Music Group, Streetwise Opera, the Southbank Centre’s Voicelab, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and other community groups - who spread across the extended Festival Hall stage, danced on the central platform, looked down from the rear and side galleries, marched with their brass instruments blaring down the aisles, carried candles and assembled across the breadth of the Hall. Dressed in concert black, rainbow-hued ti-shirts, street-gear, vestments, they represented all worlds, all times.

I don’t know about faith, but if I’d been conducting such multitudes, I’d have been doing so on a wing and a prayer! Marin Alsop - a diminutive but authoritative figure on a podium stage-right, nestled among the members of a rock band, facing the orchestral wind players - in contrast, was a portrait of calm control. Tele-screens had been positioned in the orchestral ranks to overcome the obscured sightlines but those playing at the rear must still have had a difficult time, in the often dimly lit Hall, and it is a credit to their maturity, confidence and professionalism that the ensemble was so strong.

Alsop, a long-time advocate for MASS, repeatedly smiled encouragingly at the young performers. I feared that the quasi-anarchy of the rock-blues protest song which disrupts ‘Dona nobis pacem’ would overwhelm audience, performers and conductor alike, but, no: Alsop’s raised fist punched sharply to the floor, signally a remarkably instantaneous silence, as the frustrated, despairing Celebrant smashed his sacraments and hurled his chalice to the floor - a very human response to spiritual responsibility and frustration.

Bernstein’s generic eclecticism has inspired some vicious criticism. Writing in the New York Times, Harold C. Schonberg accused Bernstein of creating with MASS ‘a combination of superficiality and pretentiousness, and the greatest mélange of styles since the ladies’ magazine recipe for steak fried in peanut butter and marshmallow sauce’, while critic, musicologist and amanuensis to Stravinsky, Robert Craft, contemptuously condemned the work as ‘Mass, the Musical’.

The blues (in the Confiteor) sits alongside gospel (in the Gloria, interwoven with chant). Christian hymns jostle next to Hebraic intonations (‘In nominee patris’). Folk song (at the premiere, Bernstein is reported to have said to Aaron Copland, of the closing chorale, ‘That’s you, baby’) and musical theatre (finger-clicking straight from West Side Story) share the score with operatic a cappella (‘Almighty Father’ could have been lifted from Candide). Then, there are the alternations between pre-recorded music (representing the fossilization of faith, perhaps?) and live performance. The microphone balance was not always perfect in the Festival Hall. I confess I felt rather ear-beaten but the diversity, and by the occasional disjunct between stylistic levity and spiritual magnitude.

This registral mismatch is in evidence, too, in the libretto (by Bernstein in collaboration with Stephen Schwartz), which is as likely to thrown up a cliché as a clinching one liner such as ‘Living is easy when you’re half-alive’. The rhymes may be perspicacious at times - in the Gospel-Sermon ‘God Said’, the soloists sings an all-too-contemporary reminder, ‘God said to spread His commands/ To folks in faraway lands;/ They may not want us there,/ But man it’s out of our hands.’ - but the words of Auden kept surfacing in my mind: ‘“You cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables; and that is what art really is, particular stories of particular people and experiences, from which each according to his immediate and peculiar needs may draw his own conclusion.’

The only named solo role is that of the Celebrant, and Tony Award-winning Brazilian baritone Paulo Szot met every one of the role’s many challenges, encompassing the extensive tessitura effortlessly, projecting with a powerful urgency - of both hope and anger - and employing a sweet head voice which was superbly centred and controlled. Szot had the sensitivity to imbue the ‘Simple Song’ with pure sincerity and the stamina to negotiate the long soliloquy, ‘Fracture’, with compelling intensity. Every emotional ounce of the Celebrant’s trial, torment and reconciliation was communicated.

The Celebrant essentially represents ‘Christianity’ and is pitted against the ‘Street People’ who are unnamed, who challenge his assurances: ‘I believe in God, but does God believe in me’, cries a disillusioned rock singer. Those taking the principal, unnamed solo roles made convincing individuals of the protestors and hippies, creating effective narrative. The three treble soloists, Maia Greaves and Freddie and Leo Jemison, were similarly impressive, their composure, vocal accuracy and theatrical presence remarkable for their tender years. The dancers, clad in drab beige and cramped on the central platform, did not really have the opportunity to shine, however.

This is an exciting month for the Southbank Centre. This performance of MASS (which was repeated the following evening) initiated a Young People’s Weekend - comprising educational activities and wrap-around events including an education project with Year 9 students at Lilian Baylis Technology College - while next week witnesses the launch of Composers’ Collective, a new year-round initiative connecting composers at all stages of their careers with a variety of eminent composers. Moreover, Monday 9^th April will see the reopening of the newly-refurbished Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room. It’s good to be reminded of the need to have faith in music, in art and in the young people who are humankind’s cultural and spiritual future.

Similarly, whatever one’s misgivings about MASS’s ambitious striving for universality and plurality - in theological and musical terms - it’s good to be reminded too of the historical, perhaps inherent, relationship of faith and art. In ‘I believe in God’, Bernstein pushes home this relationship: ‘I believe in one God,/ But then I believe in three./ I'll believe in twenty gods If they'll believe in me./ I believe in F sharp./ I believe in G./ But does it mean a thing to you/ Or should I change my key?’ Candide and Cunegonde offer a response to such questions in the final chorus of Candide: ‘The sweetest flow’rs, the fairest trees/ Are grown in solid ground.’ Or, as Bernstein put it in the liner notes to the 1977 Deutsche Gramaphon recording of The Age of Anxiety: ‘Faith turns out to be in your own backyard … where you least look for it, as in this glass of orange juice I am holding in my hand. There is God in the orange juice, for sunshine is there, earth, vitamins …’

So, we must grow our own gardens, and our own faith. And, at the Festival Hall, Kelly, Alsop and the multitude of young performers reminded us that if we worship at the altar of music and art, the best of all possible worlds just might be attainable.

Claire Seymour

Leonard Bernstein: MASS

Conductor - Marin Alsop, Director - Judy Kelly, Celebrant - Paulo Szot, Treble soloists - Maia Greaves, Freddie Jemison, Leo Jemison, Lead Vocal Coach - Mary King, Designer - Michael Vale, National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, Chineke! Junior Orchestra, Singers (from Southbank Centre’s Voicelab, Avanti House Secondary School, The Choir With No Name, Finchley Children’s Music Group, Millennium Performing Arts, Streetwise Opera, Tring Park School for the Performing Arts, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, Woven Gold), Visuals (Yeast Culture & Lilian Bayliss Technology School).

Royal Festival Hall, London; Friday 6^th April 2018.

image=http://www.operatoday.com/Bernsteins_MASS%20Mark%20Allan%20Southbank%20Centre.jpg image_description=Bernstein’s MASS: directed by Jude Kelly, conducted by Marin Alsop, at the Royal Festival Hall, 6th April 2018 product=yes product_title=Bernstein’s MASS: directed by Jude Kelly, conducted by Marin Alsop, at the Royal Festival Hall, 6th April 2018 product_by=A review by Claire Seymour product_id=Above: MASS at the Royal Festival Hall

Photo credit: Mark Allan

Hans Werner Henze : The Raft of the Medusa, Amsterdam

In 1968, protesters disrupted the first public performance. Henze could not stop the mobs, but was excoriated by the press. Some performers, who should have known better, since the piece was dedicated to Che Guevara) turned on Henze. Please read Henze's own words on the situation HERE.) Fifty years after its premiere, you'd expect that one of Henze's keynote works would be received with a bit more comprehension. Why was there such frenzy ? Everyone knows Théodore Géricault's famous painting of the raft, where Jean-Claude waves a red piece of cloth ? Moreover, Géricault was painting when the wreck of the Medusa was still raw political scandal. The rich had left the poor to die. What Géricault depicted was not lost on audiences at the time. The real horror is that modern audiences refuse to connect, even though we're surrounded by images or war, destruction and refugees drowing at sea. Even if the press don't know Henze, which is bad enough, surely some might have the humanity to think ? Traumatized after the debacle of the premiere, Henze wrote Versuch über Schweine a heartfelt scream of agony which is even more valid now than it was then.

Henze's The Raft of the Medusa was a political oratorio, hence its structure, which draws from Greek tragedy and also from Henze's hero, Benjamin Britten (think Curlew River and The Rape of Lucretia). This determines Castellucci's abstract staging . He knows the composer and the music better than his detractors do. This is a drama of ideas, not realism, and certainly not light entertainment. In the Prologue, the facts, as known, are recited with the dry impartiality of a news reader. The narrator is Charon who, in Greek mythology, ferries the dead across the River Styx into the underworld. That's why he's seen on a blank stage, holding an oar, or pulling what appears to be a string of light, which later appears in abstract forms at certain points in the production. As Charon, Dale Duesing's spoken German isn't perfect, but that doesn't matter. He speaks with authority and the wisdom of one who has seen all too much suffering. His musical instincts bring out the music in the Sprechstimme passages, where his delivery is crisp and incisive. This is a drama where era and place don't count. The French ship was wrecked off the coast off Senegal, then a French colony. Now, millions risk death to escape to the west. Castellucci is wise not to make the connectioins too specific. It's enough that we see a video of an African swimming, endlessly, in a vast ocean. We can identify with him as Everyman, struggling in an alien and hostile environment.

Charon describes the stage directions, but we don't need to see them literally. Hearing disembodied voices call from the darkness is much more effective than clumsy movement on stage. In any case, we can hear the change of balance as the "dead" grow louder and more dominant, and the "living" fade. If we pay attention to the music, we can also hear the shift between winds (operated by human breath) to strings, something played with more wood than string. Henze's gift for writing for mixed voices builds the choral lines with sensitivity : high male voices and even higher female voices swirl against deeper timbres. We hear individual names, and use our imagination. Images of the waves, and half-glimpsed faces further serve to focus attention on the drama in the music itself. And what music this is ! Haunting textures, swirling and surging, like the ocean, rumbling undercurrents, passages where woodwinds fly brightly, suggesting light, hope, the freedom of seabirds. Henze himself conducted in 1968. Since the recording is based only on the reherasal, we really can't tell what it might have sounded like if the piece had time to breathe. Henze was too traumatized to return to it, though he made revisions in 1990. Metzmacher is thus conducting Henze's last words, so to speak, and from the perspective of long experience. Often, a good interpreter has more perspective than a composer. Henze was a good conductor and would have appreciated Metzmacher's perceptive approach.

One of the striking things about The Raft of the Medusa is the way Henze portrays the passage of time. Nights turn to day, hours drift by, and still the raft floats on a featureless horizon. The white lights in the production form as a horizontal line, suggesting the raft, teetering dangerously up and down on the waves, going nowhere. On the raft, the people are confined, without resources, and gradually die. Individual bodies are seen, falling into the darkness. Henze breaks the relentless monotony with the music. A woodwind solo fleetingly suggests hope, choral lines stretch, as if reaching into the distance. The density in the orchestration serves to evoke the teeming life and variety in the ocean and the world beyond, intensifying the contrast between life and death, and the helplessness of the shipwrecked people.

Henze concentrates his focus on one character, the mulatto slave Jean-Claude, who in Géricault's painting stands at the apex of the human pyramid on the raft, a subtle but pointed comment on the social pecking order, even in Géricault's time. While others succumb, Jean-Claude holds the red piece of fabric, in the hope that it will be seen by rescuers. And then he dies. When Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sang the part in 1968, the nobility of his delivery brought Christ-like pathos, which is fair enough, given that Jean-Claude sacrifices himself for his fellow man. But Christ isn't the only one to have done so : ordinary people do extraordinary things more often than we realize. Jean-Claude isn't necessarily Jesus, so Bo Skovhus's portrayal is probably much closer to Henze and to the secular, political character of the piece. Skovhus expresses the human side of Jean-Claude, who has probably suffered his whole life through, but doesn't give up, even if it means his last breath. Skovhus's delivery is authoritative without being over-elaborate. On a raft, adrift, being high status doesn't get you anywhere. Skovhus's Jean-Claude isn't rich or heroic, but he's a good man with honest common sense, which in a venal world confers its own sanctity. Lenneke Ruiten sang Madame La Mort, who, like the Moon, mentioned in the text and depicted in the music, is elegant but impassive. Ruiten stands apart from proceedings, as the Moon does, but observes. Here, she's seen in a sou'wester, as sailors wear, which is fair enough, and fits well with the maritime imagery. All in all, an exceptional experience, a shining beacon in an ocean of non-understanding, which will advance our appreciation of Henze, as composer and humanitarian thinker. Listen and watch Henze's The Raft of The Medusa HERE on arte.tv . Sixty years after its tumultuous premiere Henze's The Raft of the Medusa is powerfully vindicated.

Anne Ozorio

image=http://www.operatoday.com/JEAN_LOUIS_TH%C3%89ODORE_G%C3%89RICAULT_-_La_Balsa_de_la_Medusa_%28Museo_del_Louvre%2C_1818-19%29.png
image_description=Théodore Géricault : The Raft of the Medusa, 1818

product=yes
product_title= Hans Werner Henze : The Raft of the Medusa, Ingo Metzmacher, Ingo Metzmacher, Dale Duesing (Charon), Bo Skovhus and Lenneke Ruiten, with Cappella Amsterdam, the Nieuw Amsterdams Kinderen Jeugdkoor, and the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, 26th March 2018
product_by=A review by Anne Ozorio
product_id=Above: The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault [Public domain]

The Grand Tour: A European Journey in Song

International stars including Louise Alder, Sarah Connolly, Véronique Gens, James Gilchrist, Thomas Oliemans, Christoph Prégardien, Kai Rüütel, Carolyn Sampson, Toby Spence and Camilla Tilling, together with prize-winning young artists, take part in a wide range of concerts and related events.

Sholto Kynoch, founder and Artistic Director of the Festival, has just been been elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in the Academy’s 2018 Honours.

New collaboration with the Bodeleian Library

In a new collaboration with the Bodleian Library, Oxford Lieder is co-hosting the Albi Rosenthal Fellowship: a three-month residency at the Bodleian, this year specifically for a composer. American composer Ross S. Griffey has been appointed and, as well as his residency at the Bodleian Library, in October he will lead a composition workshop at the Oxford Lieder Festival and give a talk on his research, with some of his existing work being heard. Following the residency, Oxford Lieder will commission a major new cycle - based on his research in the Bodleian - to be premiered at the 2019 Festival.

Oxford Lieder Young Artist Platform Winners

Oxford Lieder presents other events throughout the year, including a Spring Weekend of Song, as well as recitals across the country through the Oxford Lieder Young Artist Platform. Exceptional young professional duos apply for the Young Artist Platform, and this year’s winners - selected though 45-minute audition recitals at the Spring Weekend - are: Harriet Burns (soprano) and Michael Pandya (piano) and Jessica Dandy (contralto) and Dylan Perez (piano). They give a series of recitals in music clubs, societies and festivals nationally, as well as showcase recitals at the Festival in October.

Festival passes are already on sale from www.oxfordlieder.co.uk / 01865 591276
General booking opens on 1 June 2018.

image=http://www.operatoday.com/OFL%20logo.jpg image_description=The Grand Tour: A European Journey in Song, Oxford Lieder Festival 2018 product=yes product_title=The Grand Tour: A European Journey in Song, Oxford Lieder Festival 2018

Johann Sebastian Bach, St John Passion, BWV 245

More often than not, I had been in Germany, either for a Passion in Leipzig (most recently in 2011 ) or for Parsifal (most recently last year). A change is as good as a rest, though – sometimes, at least.

This proved an impressive, indeed moving, performance from a good cast of soloists, the chamber choir, Polyphony, the Britten Sinfonia, and conductor Stephen Layton. An eighteenth-century church, ‘Queen Anne’s footstool’, is a not inappropriate venue, of course; the warmth of the St John’s, Smith Square acoustic certainly helped balance a certain dryness in what one might characterise as an ‘period-ish’, rather English approach.

This was certainly not a Roman Catholic Bach in the vein of, say, Nikolaus Harnoncourt – but nor, after all, was Bach a Roman Catholic. Nor was it really a very German Bach we heard, or perhaps better, nor was it one of the many German Bachs we heard. What was more on my mind, than placing the performance within performance tradition, however, was the thorny matter of anti-Semitism. Such has, of course, been a preoccupation of British news reporting over the past few days. Moreover, having been working on the life and work of Arnold Schoenberg for quite some time now, musical and linguistic coding – as well as more overt violence – have been very much in my thoughts too. What do we do about a text, a sacred text no less, which, were it from anywhere other than the Bible, we might approach with greater apprehension? It is a particular problem with St John’s Gospel, and a particular problem within that, of the telling of the Passion. What, moreover, do we do about those turba choruses, in which Bach’s musical mastery, his extraordinary ability to characterise the crowd, add a further layer of discomfort? I do not know. I am certainly not saying that we should necessarily change the words, either of Bach’s work, or the Gospel; nor, however, am I saying that we should not at least consider making such changes on occasion. I do think, however, that, in a post-Holocaust age, in which the Church has been forced to confront long-standing anti-Semitism amongst its earthly sins, we cannot airily declare that there is no problem, that this is ‘just’ a work of art; nor indeed that a work of art, however ‘great’, is far too important to be implicated.

For those choruses truly proved the beating heart, Christian, (anti-)Semitic, or otherwise, of the drama that unfolded here. Taken generally, yet not unvaryingly, at quite a speed, there was fury in them? Whose fury, though? The (Jewish) crowd’s? Ours? If the latter, then what was our fury concerned with? Those who crucified Christ? And if so, what might that mean on earth as well as in theology? The changing role of Bach’s choir, after all, prompts us to consider our own relationship to it. When it sings the chorales – here, quite beautifully, and occasionally, arrestingly, a cappella – it seems to be ‘us’, as congregants and/or audience. We feel its pain, and/or it ours. It comments, like a Greek Chorus; and yet, also, like that Chorus, it participates. Not for nothing was it a crucial model, more so even than Handel’s oratorio choruses, for Schoenberg’s children of Israel in Moses und Aron .

Another particular strength, I thought, was a keen sense of soloists, almost as figures in an aural painting, coming on stage to portray and to reflect. That is what they do in their arias and other solos, of course, but it somehow came across both with particular differentiation and yet also interconnection on this occasion. I am not quite sure I can explain how or why; perhaps it was just that each of the soloists was on fine form. Lines were clean, yet far from un-emotional. There was, however, no attempt to impose ‘emotion’, least of all anachronistic or otherwise inappropriate, heart-on-sleeve emotion upon the music. All manner of approaches can work, of course, but this did – and it seemed, rightly or wrongly, to be something of a collective decision. Much the same can be said of the playing of the Britten Sinfonia, I think. I might sometimes have missed a little greater warmth, especially from the strings, but my ears adjusted soon enough, and I came to appreciate the performance very quickly for what it was, not for what it was not. Obbligato passages were always well taken, without a hint of narcissism. As voices seemed to emerge from the choir – even though they did not, at least literally so, in this case – so did instruments sound very much as if emerging from the greater instrumental collective. Guiding this all, with a determined dramatic presence, yet also due musical collegiality, were the wise presences of Nick Pritchard’s intelligent, finely sung Evangelist and, of course, Layton as conductor.

This was, then, not just an observance, insofar as a concert can or should be; it also made me think. And all the time, I kept returning to the turbulence of that seething opening chorus – as, I think, does Bach. Wagner himself never wrote a finer, more complete, more troubling instance of music drama.

Mark Berry

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Production information:

Evangelist: Nick Pritchard; Christ: Neal Davies; Anna Dennis (soprano); Helen Charlston (mezzo-soprano); Hiroshi Amako (tenor); Ashley Riches (bass); Polyphony/Britten Sinfonia/Stephen Layton (conductor). St John’s, Smith Square, London, 30 March 2018

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Easter Voices, including mass settings by Mozart and Stravinsky

Andrea Gabrieli’s Maria stabat ad monumentum functioned splendidly as an introit: Mary Magdalene weeping at the tomb, telling the angels ‘they have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid Him’. It cautioned us against the adoption of anachronistic models of ‘expressiveness’. This is no heart-on-sleeve lament, nor was it in performance. Britten Sinfonia Voices, under Eamonn Dougan offered a warm, nicely flowing account, the choral sound recognisably ‘English’, no doubt, but there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Who on earth, or indeed beyond, knows what the composer’s ‘intentions’ were here, in any case? The very question most likely makes no sense. He would surely have been astonished to hear that the piece was being performed in a London ‘concert hall’ in 2018, let alone that someone was writing about that on a ‘computer’, that writing soon to be posted on a noticeboard on which, in theory, anyone on God’s earth would be able to read it, although most would not.

The same, of course, would go for Mozart, and parts of it would at least have been a stretch for Stravinsky. Their music formed the twin pillars of this concert, the rest of the first half given over to Mozart’s F major Missa brevis, KV 192186f, introduced by and interspersed with short pieces by Stravinsky, the second half offering pieces by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Bruckner, and Gesualdo, leading up to a performance of Stravinsky’s Mass. Both masses were written, ‘intended’ for liturgical performance, although Stravinsky would not have been so greatly surprised to hear of concert performance, however much he might have affected to disdain it, or indeed genuinely done so.

His 1964 Fanfare for a New Theatre heralded ‘the start of the concert proper’, according to Dougan, quoted in Jo Kirkbride’s booklet note. Written for the opening of the New York State Theater, it proved, as ever, blazing, uncompromising, in its forty-second-odd, post-Webern character, whilst at the same time having one wonder: might that actually be a passing reference to Monteverdi? Probably not: one just thinks of Orfeo anyway. In any case, no one time-travels quite like Stravinsky; no one ever remains so much himself. Stravinsky’s Pater Noster and Ave Maria, following Mozart’s ‘Gloria’ and ‘Credo’ respectively, spoke, almost unmediated – or such was the trick. The composer would surely have approved. Choral blend was impeccable, the words highly audible. (Both were given in their later, Latin versions, as per their 1949 revision.) The former sounded a little more Russian, perhaps, as if a neo-Classical remembrance of the world he had left, the latter whiter still, with a strong sense of a musical ‘object’, a Stravinskian icon.

Stravinsky notoriously affected disapproval of Mozart’s early masses: ‘Rococo-operatic sweets of sin,’ he called them, having discovered some scores in 1942: ‘I knew I had to write a Mass of my own,’ he continued, ‘but a real one’. Give me a fake one any day – as well, of course, as Stravinskian ‘reality’. Classical sacred music, whether that of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, or others, less canonical, is woefully un-performed, with the signal exception of Mozart’s Requiem and perhaps, though only perhaps, the Mass in C minor. Granted, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis is not a work for every day. But many of Mozart’s and Haydn’s masses and other works are just that – or should be. Here we heard a small-scale performance of the Missa brevis: small choir, with soloists drawn from it, two violins, cello, double bass, chamber organ, and occasionally, those two Stravinskian trumpets. This was, not unreasonably, the sound world, if hardly the acoustic, of the church sonata, slightly augmented. It worked well in a small hall with nothing of the ‘Rococo-operatic’ to it. One can always go to Salzburg’s churches for that.

Performances were again generally warm, if occasionally less so – an interpretative decision, no doubt – from the solo strings. Words again were crystal clear. I especially liked the rich timbre of Tim Dickinson’s bass, but all solos and ensembles were well sung indeed; a fine balance between solo line and blend. The culminatory nature of the ‘Amen’ in the ‘Gloria’; the learned counterpoint of the ‘Credo’, whose contrapuntal tag has one think, whether one likes it or no, of the Jupiter Symphony; the nimble ‘Osanna’ music; and the darkness of the imploring harmonies of the ‘Agnus Dei’, which yet hung over the concluding ‘Dona nobis pacem’: such were just some of the highlights of a lovely performance, well shaped, without interventionism, by Dougan.

Salonen’s 2000 Concert étude for solo French horn, a homage to his teacher, Holger Fransman, offered an equally refreshing opening to the second half, not least given the outstanding, indeed mesmeric quality of Ben Goldscheider’s performance. It acted here almost like a wordless second introit, Messiaen heard from another, related world. The twin requirements of a single line and, at times, multiple voices (various extended techniques, including singing a line in addition to that played) were handled beautifully and, more to the point, meaningfully. The first of Bruckner’s two Aequale followed from the gallery, rooted in tradition and yet, in both melody and harmonic implications, unmistakeably Bruckner.

Gesualdo’s weird chromaticism – is that the best way to think about it at all? – stood out, without undue exaggeration, in carefully unfolding performances of ‘Omnes amici mei’ and ‘Vinea mea electa’. The former proved, perhaps, more of an object, almost in the Stravinskian sense, the latter more developmental, opening in chaster fashion, yet blossoming. Is this how such music, such words ‘should’ be performed? Who knows? Again, the question is hardly the right one to ask. One could certainly imagine what might have fascinated Stravinsky in this composer’s music.

And so to his ‘proper’ Mass, with its non-string, wind orchestra. I was interested to read Dougan speak of ‘the more lush sound world of the winds and brass in the Stravinsky’, as compared to Mozart’s strings. I hear it the other way around – and did again. Although this was anything but a cold performance, an austere, even angular quality, with roots in Symphonies of wind instruments nevertheless manifested itself. We all have our own Stravinskys, I suppose; yet, as Boulez, once put it, Stravinsky demeure (the title of his Rite of Spring analysis). Is there, was there, something ‘Oriental’, or at least ‘Orientalist’, in the opening wind and vocal arabesques of the ‘Gloria’? Or is/was that just Paris? Whatever it might have ‘been’, it was delightful. The ‘Credo’ perhaps spoke a little, yet only a little, more nostalgically, of a service from ‘home’ now once again viewed or heard as an ‘object’, its jangle of ecclesiastical Latin leading inexorably to a beautifully floated Amen. Intonation throughout was spot on, as it must be, truly permitting one to appreciate the originality of Stravinsky’s own heavenly host in the ‘Sanctus’ and the imploring qualities of the closing ‘Agnus Dei’. As a surprising encore, another object of fascination, we heard Mozart’s Ave verum corpus motet, with accompaniment from the wind orchestra on stage: Mozart and Stravinsky, perhaps, united at last.

Mark Berry

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Programme:

Andrea Gabrieli: Maria stabat ad monumentum; Stravinsky: Fanfare for a New Theatre; Mozart: Missa Brevis in F major, KV 192186f, interspersed with Stravinsky:Pater Noster and Ave Maria; Salonen: Concert étude, for French horn; Bruckner: Aequale no.1, for three trombones; Gesualdo: Two movements from Tenebrae Responsories for Good Friday; Stravinsky: Mass. Ben Goldscheider (French horn)/Britten Sinfonia Voices/Britten Sinfonia/Eamonn Dougan (conductor) . Milton Court Concert Hall, London, Wednesday 28 March 2018.

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Academy of Ancient Music: St John Passion at the Barbican Hall

So demanded the seventh article of the contract which the ‘Honorable and Most Wise Council’ of Leipzig presented to their new Cantor of the Thomasschule on 5^th May 1723. Johann Sebastian Bach duly placed his signature after the fourteen articles, avowing to ‘undertake and bind myself faithfully to observe all of the said requirements, and on pain of losing my post not to act contrary to them’.

Over the coming decades, plentiful quarrels between employer and employee ensued, over almost every aspect of the Cantor’s role - teaching, administration, the lack of musical talent among his pupils, Bach’s freedom of movement and, inevitably, money. However, while music of an ‘operatic’ nature may have been denigrated by the pious city council, one must presume that music of a ‘dramatic’ nature was acceptable, for towards the end of 1723 Bach began composing his St John Passion. Intended for performance at Good Friday Vespers in the St Thomas Church on 7 ^th April 1724, this sacred drama was presumably designed to impress his new employers and congregation. Moreover, the Evangelist’s narration of the story of Christ’s crucifixion, punctuated by vivid choral interactions, probing, poignant arias and contemplative chorales is operatic in ‘sweep’, if not in design - though there are many musical images and devices which would not have been out of place in the Baroque theatre, tempting several directors since to present staged versions.

Composed for a particular liturgical event, and a specific a place, Bach’s St John Passion received at least three more performances during the composer’s lifetime - in 1725, the early 1730s and in 1749 - and on each occasion Bach revised the score, adding, amending and excising numbers, and altering the instrumentation. A concert performance in the twenty-first century is unavoidably somewhat removed from the original context, but this presentation of the 1724 score (which can be reconstructed from the extant score and parts) at the Barbican Hall by conductor Riccardo Minasi and the Academy of Music did much to communicate the almost visceral monumentality of the Passion drama that one imagines the Leipzig congregation must have experienced four hundred years ago.

It’s hard to think of another tenor who can assume the Evangelist’s narrative mantle with more naturalness and persuasiveness than James Gilchrist. Never troubled by the sometimes quite high-lying recitative, Gilchrist was a compelling story-teller; he has sung the role countless times and seems to have absorbed every word and note into his heart and memory, for he barely glanced down at his score and seemed to sustain eye-contact with every one of the almost capacity audience in the Barbican Hall. Gilchrist moved effortlessly between expressive registers, singing with sudden energy and biting intensity when Pilate took Jesus and scourged him; with blazing strength when proclaiming the inscription written by Pilate on Jesus’ cross, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’; with startling ferocity when, after Jesus’ death, the curtain in the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom as the rattling tremolando of the orchestral bass instruments conjured the violent shaking of the earth; and, with almost painful sweetness when Peter, having denied Christ three times, remembered Jesus’s words and wept bitterly.

The contemplative arias were no less captivating, inspiring engagement and inward reflection. Interacting tellingly with the continuo bass and oboe in ‘Von den Stricken meiner Sünder’ (From the bondage of transgression), Iestyn Davies conveyed sobriety as his countertenor descended easily through the aria’s low ruminations. The extreme slow tempo of ‘Es ist vollbracht’ (It is accomplished) exacerbated the pained chromaticism of this lament: Davies shaped the elongated descents with stunning technical control and expressiveness, and the vocal line was enhanced by the soft exquisiteness of Reiko Ichise’s viola da gamba obbligato.

Replacing the indisposed Lydia Teuscher, soprano Mary Bevan gave a graceful rendition of ‘Ich folger dir’ (I follow thee) while the long flowing lines of ‘Zerfließe, mein Herze’ (Dissolve then, heart) were both beautifully polished and deeply expressive. As Christus, American bass-baritone Cody Quattlebaum presented a figure of gravitas and sincerity, displaying vocal sensitivity and nuance in his recitative interjections, and strong melodiousness in the arioso of ‘Betrachte, meine Seel’ (Consider, O my soul), in which the viola d’amore elaborations were given eloquent definition by violin section leaders Madeleine Easton and Bojan Čičić. This was the first time I had heard him sing, but I felt at times that Quattlebaum was holding back - the running lines of ‘Eilt, ihr angefochtnen Seelen’ (Haste, ye deeply wounded spirits) flowed lightly but might have had even more power and presence perhaps - and I look forward to an opportunity to hear the full capacity of his warm bass of which there were occasional enticing hints here.

In contrast, Jonathan Stainsby projected Pilatus’ questions and proclamations with vividness and might from the rear ranks of the AAM Chorus; Philippa Hyde (Ancilla) and Adrian Horsewood (Petrus) also made strong contributions. The tenor soloist was Ilker Arcayürek, from Turkey, another singer whom I have not previously encountered. ‘Ach, mein Sinn’ (Ah, my soul) was attractively dark in colour though it felt a little laboured, but in ‘Erwäge, wie sein blutgefärbter Rücken’) (Consider how his bloodstained back) Arcayürek’s phrasing was fluent and shapely, and the lyricism was richly communicative.

Historical records show that Bach had a minimum of sixteen singers in his Thomanchor, and though some period ensembles have adopted a one-to-a-part approach to the choral numbers, the AAM Chorus comprised twenty-one personnel on this occasion. There were times, though, when I’d have liked a few more. One imagines that Bach - who complained when he learned that the first performance was, at the last minute, to be transferred from St Thomas Church to the smaller St Nicholas Church, insisting that the council make additional room in the choir loft for his choir and musicians - intended the choruses to make a powerful sonorous impact. That’s not to suggest that the singing of the AAM Chorus was lacking in vigour, presence and drama - and the chorales swelled with dignity and calm assurance - but the Barbican Hall is a big space to fill.

The brooding ominousness of the first chorus didn’t have quite enough palpable punch for this listener. Also, the choral sound was sometimes too genteel to convey the shocking inhumanity of the crowd mentality, as when the onlookers fight over who should have the crucified Christ’s clothes in ‘Lasset uns den nicht zerteilen’ (Let us not rend it). The more contemplative choral numbers were skilfully crafted by Minasi, though, and the final chorus, ‘Ruht wohl, ihr Gebeine’ (Lie in peace, sacred body), swelled with consoling warmth.

Minasi was an animated presence, crafting elaborate curlicues with his baton-less hands, swaying with an invigorating lilt, whipping his arms left to right and pumping his hands up and down with such emphatic dynamism that at times I feared for his shoulder sockets. The musicians of the AAM responded with tastefully expressive tone and phrasing, ever alert to the articulation of the unfolding drama.

I had one small quibble about the proceedings. The stage choreography sometimes inhibited the dramatic impetus, as when Gilchrist, seated stage-left at the beginning of each Part, had to walk to the centre to continue the narrative. Moreover, while it’s a long sing and one would not necessarily expect the chorus to remain standing throughout, the incessant ups-and-downs of the AAM Chorus resulted in some frustrating pauses, most particularly before the chorales which I wished would flow directly from the Evangelist’s narrative. But, this was a minor dissatisfaction with a Good Friday Passion which was performed with intelligence, insight and intensity of feeling in equal measure.

Claire Seymour

J.S. Bach: St John Passion BWV 245 (1724)

Academy of Ancient Music: Riccardo Minasi (conductor)

Evangelist - James Gilchrist, Christus - Cody Quattlebaum, soprano - Mary Bevan, countertenor - Iestyn Davies, tenor - Ilker Arcayürek, Orchestra and Choir of the Academy of Ancient Music.

Barbican Hall, London; Friday 30^th March 2018.

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Photo credit: Philip Allen