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.
![n, Hanna Schwarz as Pique Dame [All photos copyright Ruth Walz, courtesy of the SBrandon Jovanovich as Hermanalzburg Festival]](http://www.operatoday.com/Bassarids_Salzburg1.png)
Hans Werner Henze’s fifth opera, The Bassarids (those who wear fox skins) had its world premiere at Salzburg’s Grosses Festspielhaus in 1966. Now, 52 years later Henze’s massive “opera seria” returns, but to the Felsenreitschule —the old riding school made into a theater that hosts the Salzburg Festival’s difficult operas, the Grosses Festspielhaus now dedicated to the grand repertoire.
And difficult Henze’s opera is. There is an heroic orchestra — batteries of brass, batteries of percussion, harps, pianos, guitars, it is after all the destruction of the founding family of one of ancient Greece’s greatest cities in the retelling of the last play of one of Greece’s greatest tragedians, Euripides! Not to mention two tone rows (yes, Henze was a serial composer) that configure the stark world of Pentheus, king of Thebes and the colorful world of Dionysus his challenger.
Euripides’ Bacchae was recast as an opera libretto for Henze by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, who provided the libretto for The Rake’s Progress and texts for Benjamin Britten. Thus here as well are the expected discussions, rather fixations on repressed sexual realities.
King Pentheus dressed as a woman, Dionysus plus a bacchanalia spirit (mute role)
Essentially Semele, great grand daughter of Cadmus, founding king of Thebes, was murdered while giving birth to a son who may be the son of Zeus, and therefore a god, or maybe not. Cadmus abdicated naming Semele’s sister Agave’s son Pentheus as the new king. Pentheus has complicated feelings about his mother who is pretty complicated herself. A challenger appears who may be the god Dionysus. Everyone joins his cult. Pentheus disguises himself as a woman to learn about the cult. He is discovered by a band of women led by his mother who tear him to pieces believing that he is a lion. Dionysus removes his mother Semele from her earthly tomb and takes her to Olympus to join him as a god.
With all this on his mind Henze needed far more than his two tone rows, thus he mined musical and operatic traditions to embellish and enrich his musical manifestation of the Auden/Kallman take on the Euripides’ Bacchae. Vocal lines are comprehensible, and there actually is a sort of bel canto. There are occasional, quite beautiful arias within the opera’s symphonic structure. Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion is oft quoted, Mahler like textures and harmonies are discernible, and by musical miracle we even arrive at a momentary, truly magnificent 6/4 chord (second inversion of a triad) during Semele’s assumption!
It is magnificent, complex, highly expressive music that painstakingly delves into the psychological depths of insecure men and women, of obsession, and into the psychologies of mass social phenomena and the resulting human debasement.
But the final scene of the opera is in fact wonderfully liberating, indeed moving as Dionysus leaves Thebes and abandons the cult he has founded. He commands Persephone to open the gates of hell and release his mother that she may triumphantly unite with him upon Olympus.
Mounting Henze’s setting of the Auden/Kallman’s neurotic tale of infanticide in the massive stone world of the old riding school was a wondrous gift to famed Polish stage director Krzysztof Warlikowski. He simply spread it all out across the expanse of the riding school paddock, The a vista crypt and shrine of Semele on the far left, the private bedroom (his neurotic inner life) of King Pentheus on the far right and in between three palace rooms where the founding dynasty of Thebes was destroyed. The massive upper reaches of the riding school galleries became a metaphorical mount Cithaeron.
Henze’s choruses were crucial players in the drama, not spectators, though the chorus did begin the evening as spectators filing into the first two rows of the auditorium as the citizens of Thebes praising their new king. They quickly left and little by little they joined the Dionysian cult as did Thebes founder Cadmus, deftly enacted by venerable bass Willard White who was in good voice.
The palace prophet Tiresias — blind of course — was played by Austrian tenor Nikolai Schukoff who cross-dressed as the fey Calliope of the Intermezzo. Cadmus’ granddaughter Agave was convincingly, even heroically portrayed by Frankfurt Opera’s dramatic mezzo soprano Tanya Ariane Baumgartner. Her weaker sister Autonoe was sung by Berlin’s Komischen Oper’s Vera-Lotte Böcker.
Agave as Venus in Intermezzo, with Adonis, Persephone and Calliope
A more complicated if less defined character was Pentheus’ Captain (of the royal guard) sung by Hungarian bass-baritone Károly Szemerédy who doubled as the Adonis in the Intermezzo in which Dionysus’ magic mirror shows to Pentheus the unbridled sexuality of his mother — a cunningly staged scene by Warlikowski that video-mirrored the Intermezzo in black and white from its enactment far stage left onto a wall far stage right.
Pentheus’ wet nurse Beroe, sung by Dutch mezzo Anna Maria Dur, was another complex character. Hera, Zeus’ wife impersonates Beroe so that she could intimidate Semele into demanding to see her lover (Zeus) thus destroying herself. Yet Beroe expresses blind, uncomplicated maternal love for Pentheus earning our sympathy.
Canadian Opera’s baritone Russell Braun brought unbridled commitment to his portrayal of the weak, sexually repressed King Pentheus, moving from impotent authority to loss of identity, from fulfillment as a woman to honesty as a lost man. Sri Lankan-American tenor Sean Panikkar brought full spectrum to Dionysus, from cunning manipulator to the loving son of the mother he never knew.
Henze’s score is fiendishly difficult, for its singers and for its orchestra. Conductor Kent Nagano marshalled the always impressive forces of the Vienna Philharmonic into a convincing performance, simultaneously chorus master Huw Rhys James conducted (from the pit) the 100 or so voices of the concert choir of the Vienna State Opera in its huge chorus role.
Michael Milenski
Additional production information:
Sets: Christian Schmidt; Costumes: Reinhard von der Thannen; Lights: Stefan Billiger
Grosses Festspielhaus, Salzburg, August 13, 2018.