English Touring Opera are delighted to announce a season of lyric monodramas to tour nationally from October to December. The season features music for solo singer and piano by Argento, Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich with a bold and inventive approach to making opera during social distancing.
This tenth of ten Live from London concerts was in fact a recorded live performance from California. It was no less enjoyable for that, and it was also uplifting to learn that this wasn’t in fact the ‘last’ LfL event that we will be able to enjoy, courtesy of VOCES8 and their fellow vocal ensembles (more below …).
Ever since Wigmore Hall announced their superb series of autumn concerts, all streamed live and available free of charge, I’d been looking forward to this song recital by Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper.
Although Stile Antico’s programme article for their Live from London recital introduced their selection from the many treasures of the English Renaissance in the context of the theological debates and upheavals of the Tudor and Elizabethan years, their performance was more evocative of private chamber music than of public liturgy.
Evidently, face masks don’t stifle appreciative “Bravo!”s. And, reducing audience numbers doesn’t lower the volume of such acclamations. For, the audience at Wigmore Hall gave soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn and pianist Simon Lepper a greatly deserved warm reception and hearty response following this lunchtime recital of late-Romantic song.
For this week’s Live from London vocal recital we moved from the home of VOCES8, St Anne and St Agnes in the City of London, to Kings Place, where The Sixteen - who have been associate artists at the venue for some time - presented a programme of music and words bound together by the theme of ‘reflection’.
'Such is your divine Disposation that both you excellently understand, and royally entertaine the Exercise of Musicke.’
‘And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven … that old serpent … Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’
There was never any doubt that the fifth of the twelve Met Stars Live in Concert broadcasts was going to be a palpably intense and vivid event, as well as a musically stunning and theatrically enervating experience.
‘Love’ was the theme for this Live from London performance by Apollo5. Given the complexity and diversity of that human emotion, and Apollo5’s reputation for versatility and diverse repertoire, ranging from Renaissance choral music to jazz, from contemporary classical works to popular song, it was no surprise that their programme spanned 500 years and several musical styles.
The Academy of St Martin in the Fields have titled their autumn series of eight concerts - which are taking place at 5pm and 7.30pm on two Saturdays each month at their home venue in Trafalgar Square, and being filmed for streaming the following Thursday - ‘re:connect’.
The London Symphony Orchestra opened their Autumn 2020 season with a homage to Oliver Knussen, who died at the age of 66 in July 2018. The programme traced a national musical lineage through the twentieth century, from Britten to Knussen, on to Mark-Anthony Turnage, and entwining the LSO and Rattle too.
With the Live from London digital vocal festival entering the second half of the series, the festival’s host, VOCES8, returned to their home at St Annes and St Agnes in the City of London to present a sequence of ‘Choral Dances’ - vocal music inspired by dance, embracing diverse genres from the Renaissance madrigal to swing jazz.
Just a few unison string wriggles from the opening of Mozart’s overture to Le nozze di Figaro are enough to make any opera-lover perch on the edge of their seat, in excited anticipation of the drama in music to come, so there could be no other curtain-raiser for this Gala Concert at the Royal Opera House, the latest instalment from ‘their House’ to ‘our houses’.
"Before the ending of the day, creator of all things, we pray that, with your accustomed mercy, you may watch over us."
The doors at The Metropolitan Opera will not open to live audiences until 2021 at the earliest, and the likelihood of normal operatic life resuming in cities around the world looks but a distant dream at present. But, while we may not be invited from our homes into the opera house for some time yet, with its free daily screenings of past productions and its pay-per-view Met Stars Live in Concert series, the Met continues to bring opera into our homes.
Music-making at this year’s Grange Festival Opera may have fallen silent in June and July, but the country house and extensive grounds of The Grange provided an ideal setting for a weekend of twelve specially conceived ‘promenade’ performances encompassing music and dance.
There’s a “slide of harmony” and “all the bones leave your body at that moment and you collapse to the floor, it’s so extraordinary.”
“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.”
The hum of bees rising from myriad scented blooms; gentle strains of birdsong; the cheerful chatter of picnickers beside a still lake; decorous thwacks of leather on willow; song and music floating through the warm evening air.
The Princeton Festival brings a run of three high-quality opera performances to town each summer, alternating between a modern opera and a traditional warhorse. John Adams’ Nixon in China has been announced for next summer. So this year Princeton got Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, for which the Festival assembled an impressive cast and delivered a polished performance.
The title role of Cho-Cho-San, the 15-year old geisha whose naïve love for an American sailor ends in suicide, belongs among the most challenging in the Italian repertoire. Any singer who dares to tackle this role requires the stamina to remain on stage nearly continuously through almost three hours, singing with a full range of dynamics, emotions, and textual nuances. Puccini’s heroine is driven from child-like innocence in Act I, to pious determination in Act II, and to wrenching anguish in Act III.
Yulia Lysenko, a Ukrainian-trained soprano but now living in the US, approached the role with vocal virtues common among the great mid-20 th century exponents of this role: technical security, perfect intonation, and a credibly child-like timbre. Her characterization was heart-felt, believable and consistent—if sometimes a bit unsubtle and not always ideally alert to the text. As essentially lyric singers of this type often do, she struggled a bit with weightier utterances that lie lower in her voice.
Matthew White, a recent competition-winning tenor from Virginia still finishing up at the Academy of Vocal Arts, brought to the role a small and well-formed young voice. His penetrating and slightly metallic tone, fine intonation and secure high notes matched Lysenko. Yet his is most decidedly not (yet?) the type of instrument appropriate to the role of Pinkerton. Musically, even the reduced orchestra sometimes buried him and, dramatically, he struggled to convey Pinkerton’s self-serving, cowardly, arrogant and yet irrepressibly outgoing character. Even in the days when lighter tenors like Beniamino Gigli, Giuseppe di Stefano and Cesare Valletti customarily sang this role—something rarer today—they did so with greater warmth and ebullience.
The smaller characters consistently excelled. Rising young American baritone Paul la Rosa, a Juilliard graduate with an extraordinary resume of operatic and concert performances, sang Sharpless with style, full resonance and true stage presence—save for some thinner top G’s. Janara Kellerman brought a resounding mezzo voice, clear diction and convincing passion to the role of Suzuki. Her Puccini sounds like Verdi and Wagner, in the best sense of the comparison. Wei Wu, a native of China climbing making his way up in the US opera world, sang the Bonze, a small gem of a Puccini role, with strength and directness. Anthony Webb showed a typical character tenor to best advantage while hamming his way through the role of the marriage broker Goro. Chad Armstrong and Kathleen Monson were solid as the suitor Prince Yamadori and Kate Pinkerton. The latter, who is largely silent while on stage, looked the part of the ice queen.
Festival Director Richard Tang Yuk led a reduced orchestra in a technically assured performance. The conducting—while it could have been lighter, quicker and more varied, especially in Act I—was as good overall as has ever been heard at the Princeton Festival.
Prima la musica! Opera has always been—and should remain—mostly about the music. Yet opera is a multi-media art form, and stage directors have recently gained prominence. Though Puccini sentimentalized the plot of Butterfuly in many respects, it offers more opportunities to probe beneath the surface than La Bohême, Tosca, or Turandot. Some productions return to the harsher realism of the short story and the play on which the libretto is based. Others invoke classical Japanese drama to stylize the action, as does the MET’s current Butterfly. At the very least, some accentuate the theme of cultural clash by presenting Pinkerton as stereotypically American in his bluff but callous manner, and Cho-Cho-San’s suicide as a return to the dignity and pride of Japan’s deeper civilization.
Princeton’s production team chose none of these options, hewing instead to the lowest common denominator. The production suggested that this was all just a misunderstanding: a romance gone bad between two rather confused young people. In this interpretation, Pinkerton seemed a bit dim-witted: his constantly perplexed persona clashed with the jovially impatient and authoritative naval officer of the libretto. Cho-Cho-San also seemed clueless from beginning (where it makes some sense) to end (where it does not). Most objectionable was the opera’s final moment, when she fell dying into Pinkerton’s arms and tried to kiss him. After three years of suffering, had she really learned nothing?
Sets and costumes accentuated the superficial mood. While competent enough, were the cute little house of wood and paper, a decorative garden bridge, and garish pink sunsets borrowed from a production of Mikado? And does it take a professional dramaturg to note something amiss when Cho-Cho-San approaches her wedding tatami singing about her garment of “lily white” yet is dressed in sparkling light blue chiffon? (Thus spoiling a lovely triple-entendre in Italian that is encapsulates the entire plot: the world Butterfly uses, “candido,” means not just pure white, but also “clean” and “honest.”) Surely, a bit of serious thought about what is in the libretto could have fixed all this—without costing a dollar more.
With all its strengths and weaknesses, the final performance of Madama Butterfly played to a nearly full auditorium, which responded with a standing ovation.
Andrew Moravcsik