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."
We are accustomed to seeing Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo at the helm of a large orchestra, baton in hand, guiding the instrumentalists with unassuming but precise authority and expressive, communicative musicianship.
However, this lunchtime Prom recital at Cadogan Hall by the BBC Singers showed that he is just as at home before a 24-voice a cappella choir, his open hands as light and elegant as a bird’s wing, his gestures free, natural and masterly in crafting impassioned swells, finely graded fades and wonderfully responsive presentation of the poetic texts presented in this sequence of English part-songs, predominantly dating from early twentieth century but also including a new work by Laura Mvula commissioned by the BBC.
Oramo has been Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra since 2013 - fittingly his first performance as Chief Conductor came during that year’s Prom season - and during his tenure he has presided over many performances involving the BBC Singers, but this was the first time that he had conducted the ensemble a cappella. The repertoire seemed to represent both Oramo’s own love of British music, which developed during the ten years, 1998-2008, he spent as Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and the singers’ own musical heritage. One imagines that many must have encountered these works during their early training in the country’s cathedral establishments. Certainly, they were perfectly attuned to the idiom and the result was an exquisite, blemish-free, consistent like-mindedness which was both a glory and, perhaps, a slight weakness.
For, the programme, entitled The Sense of an Ending, presented a largely homogenous autumnal sobriety and it was delivered with polite gentility and restraint, the sound never other than lovely but perhaps lacking in diversity. And this was a pity in Mvula’s Love Like a Lion, which offered plentiful opportunity for impassioned colouring of the melody and rhythmic drama, and which invited a freedom of expression which the BBC Singers did not fully embrace.
The recital opened with Frank Bridge’s strophic setting of Shelley’s ‘Music, when soft voices die’. Though unpublished until 1979, the work was composed in 1904, the same year that Bridge composed the Three Pieces for String Quartet and Novelletten for string quartet, and perhaps it is not too fanciful to hear the beautiful fusion of of four stringed instruments in the part-song’s seamless vocal blending so wonderful exploited by the BBC Singers here. If Oramo did not emphasise the way the hemiola rhythms point the text in the arching, homophonic phrases, then he did bring to the fore both Bridge’s harmonic intensifications, ‘odours, when sweet violets sicken’, and the fluid interweaving of the inner parts in the second strophe, the tenors rising high with ease and creating forward motion. The diminishing repetitions by sopranos and tenors of the final line, ‘Love itself shall slumber on’, were grounded with perfect fixity by the long pedal bass - the deep breathing of peaceful sleep.
Simple, quiet, consoling, but perhaps a part-song more suited to bringing a concert to a close. The same might be said of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ ‘Rest’ (1902), a setting of Christina Rossetti’s sonnet, ‘O Earth, like heavily upon her eyes’. Oramo skilfully captured the stillness of the first part of the sonnet, while maintaining forward momentum. The slightest of pauses before the subito pianissimo on ‘Paradise’, after an impassioned rise, was magical: ‘With stillness that is almost Paradise.’ The volta pushed forward, the sentiments now more confident, the poet desirous of union with God.
Holst’s Latin-text Nunc Dimittis for eight-part choir and soprano and tenor soloists was composed in 1915 for Richard Terry and the choir of Westminster Cathedral, but largely forgotten until it was published in 1979 in an edition prepared by Imogen Holst. The work shares with the Bridge and Vaughan Williams a debt to Tudor polyphony, sensed in the use of modality and antiphonal writing, but Holst’s harmonic language is more individualised, his engagement with the text more dynamic and sometimes surprising, as in the lightly tripping ‘Gloria in Patri’. Oramo built up the layers of the opening phrase persuasively and conveyed the expansiveness of the writing, with the sopranos bright and pure, and the lower regions warm and wholesome in tone.
Oramo explained to the audience that he had grown up with the choral tradition, not so much as a singer himself but as an admirer of the work of two uncles who were renowned choral conductors. He first encountered Laura Mvula during his Birmingham years when she was a member of the City of Birmingham Youth Choir which occasionally shared the stage with the CBSO. Oramo spoke with conviction about Love Like a Lion, admiring the way Mvula has engaged with elements from the English choral tradition and with the three poetic texts by Ben Okri which present different stages and facets of love.
The simplicity of ‘Like a child’ conveyed innocence, joy and freedom, and Mvula’s sympathetic text-setting was deeply engaging. ‘I will not die (for him)’, was more troubled, exploiting dissonances and false relations in dense, low chordal textures above which the solo soprano climbed to the stratosphere with starry purity while the baritone responded with resonant urgency. Homophonic pronouncements, ‘I know the music of the sea,/ It is a sweet death lullaby to me.’, brought the various elements back together in slightly restless concord. ‘Love like a lion’ draws on gospel traditions and though the vocal sound and phrasing were unfailingly beautiful, the BBC Singers’ rather strait-laced and polite delivery was a little discomforting; one felt that this music demanded and deserved more visceral passion.
Hubert Parry’s Songs of Farewell concluded the programme. Parry began the fourth song, a setting of John Gibson Lockhart’s ‘There is an old belief’, in 1907 but did not complete the set of six settings of metaphysical texts until 1915, two years before his death. It was wonderful to hear the six part-songs as a whole group, for they create compelling momentum as the voices expand from the initial four-part writing in the first two songs, successively adding a voice and driving towards the double choir eight-part setting of verses from Psalm 39.
Parry’s snidest critics may have quipped that he could make even a telephone directory sound devotional, but one would have to be hard of heart not to respond to Parry’s sensitivity to poetic text in these six ‘motets’, in which he seems to communicate Matthew Arnold’s declaration that poetry, not religion, could serve as a vehicle for devotional thought just as much as his own belief that music, not dogma, could inspire spiritual devotion in an age when religion seemed to have no place.
Oramo’s discerning, sensitive crafting of the musico-poetic forms embraced both the large-scale structures and the slightest of details. In ‘My soul, there is a country’ (Henry Vaughan) the angry vigour of the inner lines of the final verse - ‘Leave, then, thy foolish ranges’ - was marvellously supplanted by the assurance of homophonic conviction at the close: ‘For none can thee secure/But One, who never changes,/ Thy God, thy Life, thy Cure.’ In the following setting of John Davies’ ‘I know my soul hath power to know all things’, the merest pinching of Oramo’s fingers and flick of the wrist brought out the clipped sharpness of the poet’s admission, ‘I know my sense is mocked in everything.’ ‘Never weather-beaten sail’ (Thomas Campion) had a madrigalian sweetness while the Lockhart setting was probing and earnest, particularly in the final stanza where Oramo made the chromatic searching in the final phrase, ‘Earnest be the sleep,/ If not to waken up.’, intensely telling. After the drama and dynamism of ‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’ (John Donne), the delivery of Parry’s setting of ‘Lord, let me know mine end’ was simply marvellous; Oramo and the BBC Singers truly relished the flexible and varied choral textures and impassioned counterpoint.
Earlier in the Proms seasons I heard Parry’s Fifth Symphony performed by the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales under Martyn Brabbins and my rather flippant, and immediately revised, response was ‘Parry trying to be Brahms’. Here, though, the reference to the German master might be more valid and certainly no diminishment of Parry’s marvellous achievement in these songs; for, surely Parry was influenced by Brahms’ Four Serious Songs which he deeply admired, and he selected the same verse from Psalm 29 that Brahms set in the third part of his German Requiem.
Whatever musical shadows hang over the Songs of Farewell, Oramo and the BBC Singers offered us far-sighted illuminations of departure and a consoling Sense of an Ending.
Claire Seymour
Chamber Music Prom 6: The Sense of an Ending
Frank Bridge - ‘Music, when soft voices die’, Ralph Vaughan Williams - ‘Rest’, Gustav Holst - Nunc dimittis, Laura Mvula -Love Like A Lion (BBC co/mmission: world premiere), Hubert Parry - Songs of Farewell; Sakari Oramo (conductor), BBC Singers.
Cadogan Hall, London; Monday 20th August 2018.