English Touring Opera are delighted to announce a season of lyric monodramas to tour nationally from October to December. The season features music for solo singer and piano by Argento, Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich with a bold and inventive approach to making opera during social distancing.
This tenth of ten Live from London concerts was in fact a recorded live performance from California. It was no less enjoyable for that, and it was also uplifting to learn that this wasn’t in fact the ‘last’ LfL event that we will be able to enjoy, courtesy of VOCES8 and their fellow vocal ensembles (more below …).
Ever since Wigmore Hall announced their superb series of autumn concerts, all streamed live and available free of charge, I’d been looking forward to this song recital by Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper.
The Sixteen continues its exploration of Henry Purcell’s Welcome Songs for Charles II. As with Robert King’s pioneering Purcell series begun over thirty years ago for Hyperion, Harry Christophers is recording two Welcome Songs per disc.
Although Stile Antico’s programme article for their Live from London recital introduced their selection from the many treasures of the English Renaissance in the context of the theological debates and upheavals of the Tudor and Elizabethan years, their performance was more evocative of private chamber music than of public liturgy.
In February this year, Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho made a highly lauded debut recital at Wigmore Hall - a concert which both celebrated Opera Rara’s 50th anniversary and honoured the career of the Italian soprano Rosina Storchio (1872-1945), the star of verismo who created the title roles in Leoncavallo’s La bohème and Zazà, Mascagni’s Lodoletta and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.
Evidently, face masks don’t stifle appreciative “Bravo!”s. And, reducing audience numbers doesn’t lower the volume of such acclamations. For, the audience at Wigmore Hall gave soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn and pianist Simon Lepper a greatly deserved warm reception and hearty response following this lunchtime recital of late-Romantic song.
Collapsology. Or, perhaps we should use the French word ‘Collapsologie’ because this is a transdisciplinary idea pretty much advocated by a series of French theorists - and apparently, mostly French theorists. It in essence focuses on the imminent collapse of modern society and all its layers - a series of escalating crises on a global scale: environmental, economic, geopolitical, governmental; the list is extensive.
For this week’s Live from London vocal recital we moved from the home of VOCES8, St Anne and St Agnes in the City of London, to Kings Place, where The Sixteen - who have been associate artists at the venue for some time - presented a programme of music and words bound together by the theme of ‘reflection’.
'Such is your divine Disposation that both you excellently understand, and royally entertaine the Exercise of Musicke.’
Amongst an avalanche of new Mahler recordings appearing at the moment (Das Lied von der Erde seems to be the most favoured, with three) this 1991 Mahler Second from the 2nd Kassel MahlerFest is one of the more interesting releases.
‘And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven … that old serpent … Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’
If there is one myth, it seems believed by some people today, that probably needs shattering it is that post-war recordings or performances of Wagner operas were always of exceptional quality. This 1949 Hamburg Tristan und Isolde is one of those recordings - though quite who is to blame for its many problems takes quite some unearthing.
There was never any doubt that the fifth of the twelve Met Stars Live in Concert broadcasts was going to be a palpably intense and vivid event, as well as a musically stunning and theatrically enervating experience.
‘Love’ was the theme for this Live from London performance by Apollo5. Given the complexity and diversity of that human emotion, and Apollo5’s reputation for versatility and diverse repertoire, ranging from Renaissance choral music to jazz, from contemporary classical works to popular song, it was no surprise that their programme spanned 500 years and several musical styles.
The Academy of St Martin in the Fields have titled their autumn series of eight concerts - which are taking place at 5pm and 7.30pm on two Saturdays each month at their home venue in Trafalgar Square, and being filmed for streaming the following Thursday - ‘re:connect’.
The London Symphony Orchestra opened their Autumn 2020 season with a homage to Oliver Knussen, who died at the age of 66 in July 2018. The programme traced a national musical lineage through the twentieth century, from Britten to Knussen, on to Mark-Anthony Turnage, and entwining the LSO and Rattle too.
With the Live from London digital vocal festival entering the second half of the series, the festival’s host, VOCES8, returned to their home at St Annes and St Agnes in the City of London to present a sequence of ‘Choral Dances’ - vocal music inspired by dance, embracing diverse genres from the Renaissance madrigal to swing jazz.
Just a few unison string wriggles from the opening of Mozart’s overture to Le nozze di Figaro are enough to make any opera-lover perch on the edge of their seat, in excited anticipation of the drama in music to come, so there could be no other curtain-raiser for this Gala Concert at the Royal Opera House, the latest instalment from ‘their House’ to ‘our houses’.
"Before the ending of the day, creator of all things, we pray that, with your accustomed mercy, you may watch over us."
Anniversaries and commemorations will, as usual, feature significantly during the 2018 BBC Proms, with the works of Leonard Bernstein, Claude Debussy and Lili Boulanger all prominently programmed during the season’s myriad orchestral, vocal and chamber concerts.
But, this year’s Proms will also mark two political events of 100 years ago: the end of the First World War and the 1918 Parliamentary Act which granted suffrage to women over the age of 30. And, both season-strands were present at this First Night performance given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under their Chief Conductor, Sakari Oramo, with works composed at the start of the century by English composers placed alongsideFive Telegrams - a new work by Anna Meredith in collaboration with 59 Productions which was jointly commissioned by the BBC Proms, 14-18 NOW and Edinburgh International Festival.
The ‘elegiac’ side of things was confined to the first half of the concert. Vaughan Williams’s Toward the Unknown Region, a setting of text from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, was first performed in 1918, though not heard at the Proms until after the Second World War. Presumably the composer was drawn repeatedly to Whitman’s poetry - in the Sea Symphony and Dona nobis pacem, for example - because of the American poet’s blend of pseudo-religious mysticism and humanistic values. The opening lines were sensitively sustained by the BBC Symphony Chorus, every word carefully declaimed. Oramo kept things moving along and build with grandeur but avoiding triumphalism towards the massive hymn-like climax, encouraging a blossoming swell of sound from his singers. It was resolute but not too nobilmente, the emphasis on song and spirit in the final floating cry: ‘Equip them at last, them to fulfil, O soul!’
Oramo strove for similarly restrained sentiment in Holst’s The Planets, though he allowed his two timpanists to propel ‘Mars’ from dark beginnings to a thunderous tumult, their menacing rhythm pounded with unrelenting insistence, as trombones and horns snarled, and the woodwind sneered. The horn solo at the start of ‘Venus’ sounded a little tentative, but there was much delicacy and sweetness in this movement, not least some lovely string playing enhanced by gentle solos from leader Stephen Bryant. ‘Mercury’ was fleet but sharply defined, a whirl of colour and nuance.
I’d have liked the syncopated motif which introduces Jupiter’s ‘jollity’ to have had a bit more bite and tension, but again Oramo had a good eye for the long-range target, steering fluently through the triple-time accelerando and then easing up, but not too much, for the ‘big theme’. The lack of sentimentalism didn’t stop from one of the audience members seated just behind me from joining, rather untunefully, however; and another small gripe was the applause which punctuated the first few movements. But, the final movements proceeded segue and the compelling momentum which Oramo had formed carried us convincingly onwards, culminating with Neptune’s mystical cry from other unknown regions, as the female voices of the National Youth Choir receded into silence.
The performance had been ‘complemented’ by pulsating colours and lights along the frieze behind the orchestra and the illumination of the Hall’s heights in hot red and cool emerald - a sort of cosmic light-show which anticipated the Son et lumière which was to come.
The concert had commenced at the rather unusual, and not particularly convenient, time of 8.15pm, and after a disproportionately long first half it was 10pm before we had the opportunity to hear the first of this year’s Proms commissions, Anna Meredith/59 Productions’ Five Telegrams. Meredith is one of twenty-two women composers championed by the Proms this summer, with Roxanna Panufnik receiving a commission for the Last Night and eight other women contributing world premieres to the Proms Chamber Music series.
Each of the five movements of this twenty-five-minute work explores one of the forms of communication employed on the Front Lines, and between the war-front and those back home, and is accompanied by a ‘light-show’ which projects a flamboyant and flashy array of colours, patterns and motifs around the auditorium. Meredith has employed big forces, the BBC Symphony Orchestra being complemented by the BBC Proms Youth Ensemble - its 10 trombones, four euphoniums, six trumpets and battery of percussion ranged along the bottom of the choir stalls - and the National Youth Choir of Great Britain. And, the work’s statements are bravura. Meredith has explained, ‘We were clear that we didn’t want to create a sepia-toned, lone-bugled kind of piece. No poppy petals gently falling.’
What we have instead is a firework display of illumination and colour, and there’s no denying it was impressive, but often the mood created felt rather too celebratory and frivolous. I’m sure many found the blend of sound and music interesting or stimulating, perhaps even inspiring, but for this listener the incessant abstract swirling and sputtering, floating and flashing was something of a distraction. At times there seemed to be recognisable visual motifs: flames, water, telegraph wires, search-lights perhaps. But too often music and image seemed unconnected.
Meredith’s genre-bending part-pop, part-minimalist idiom was well-suited to the mechanistic quality of the visuals, particularly in ‘Codes’ where patterns and abstractions flickered and flew around the walls of the RAH to the accompaniment of brutal percussive stamping. In ‘Spin’, too, Meredith conjured an impressive weight from the brass, but she showed she could use her forces selectively, as the concluding ‘Armistice’ hesitantly communicated the confusion and uncertainty which sits alongside cessation of conflict. The singers whispered fragments - “I am quite well” - from the Field Postcards that the soldiers were permitted to send home, but which were heavily censored.
There were pyrotechnics of an aural kind at the start of the concert, in the form of a commemoration and celebration of the life and work of Oliver Knussen who sadly died last week. Scheduled too late for inclusion in the programme booklet, the opening bars of Knusssen’s Fireworks with Flourish may left those listeners anticipating Vaughan Williams a little bemused initially, but their ears were soon pricked by Knussen’s characteristically colourful palette and combination of intricate restlessness and painterly refinement. The storm clouds may have broken that evening over the streets of South Kensington, but inside the Royal Albert Hall the 2018 BBC Proms season kicked off with a sparkling fanfare in all senses of the word.
This concert was broadcast live on BBC2 and Radio 3 and can be accessed via BBC iPlayer .
Claire Seymour
PROM 1: Knussen - Flourish with Fireworks, Vaughan Williams - Towards the Unknown Region, Holst -The Planets, Anna Meredith/59 Productions - Five Telegrams.
Sakari Oramo (conductor), BBC Symphony Orchestra National Youth Choir of Great Britain (Ben Parry, chorus master), BBC Symphony Chorus (Neil Ferris, chorus master), BBC Proms Youth Ensemble; Royal Albert Hall, Friday 13 th July 2018.