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."
The September sunshine that warmed Wigmore Street during Monday’s lunch-hour created the perfect ambience for this thoughtfully compiled programme of seventeenth- and twentieth-century English song presented by soprano Lucy Crowe and pianist Joseph Middleton at Wigmore Hall.
Where else to start but with Henry Purcell, as realised by Benjamin Britten. ‘Lord, what is man?’, one of Purcell’s divine hymns, setting Bishop William Fuller’s text and published in the second volume of the Harmonia Sacra in 1693, poses quite a weighty question for a lunchtime recital, and Middleton embraced its rhetorical power, issuing a sterling call-to-arms with a stabbing mordant deep from the darkness of the piano’s bass. Though her soprano has developed real weight and impact, Crowe could not quite match the incision of the drama that Britten shapes within the accompaniment’s flourishes, jangles and sudden gruff outbursts. A little challenged to find colour when the vocal line swooned low, Crowe did project the recitative-like line cleanly and with feeling, but what was missing was a symbiosis between sound and sense - at times I struggled to follow what the soprano was singing about even though I had the text before me. There was, however, a convincing progression through the tripping dance, ‘O for a quill drawn from your wing’, towards the concluding ‘Hallelujah’ in which Crowe flew brightly through the melismatic runs above the piano’s stamping praise.
I’d have liked a less emphatic ground bass in ‘O solitude’, though, and while Crowe’s soprano retains its beguiling purity of tone and crystalline sparkle, I did not find her phrasing consistently convincing. The singer-protagonist’s wonder at the trees, as fresh and green as ‘when their beauties first were seen’, rose with ethereal elation supported by Middleton’s delicate decorations, but in the subsequent reflection on the mountains whose ‘hard fate makes then endure/Such woes as only death can cure’, some unexpected dynamic fluctuations disrupted the indissolubility of the musical and semantic articulation of the text. Little of the theatre music or sacred music of John Weldon (1676-1736) is well-known, excepting the concluding work of Crowe and Middleton’s seventeenth-century triptych: the ‘Alleluia’ found in one source of Weldon’s anthem O Lord, rebuke me not, the latter’s renown being a consequence of its misattribution to Purcell and Britten’s subsequent realisation. Middleton found nuance and sensitivity in the piano’s engagement with the repetitive vocal phrases, and the latter were agilely negotiated by Crowe.
Over the rim of the moon (1918) by Britten’s contemporary Michael Head followed. The high piano chords which introduce ‘The ships of Arcady’ had a lovely swing, both gentle and propulsive like the ebb and flow of the moon-tugged tide, and Middleton conjured a Debussyian sea-scape of rippling wavelets. Crowe’s unmannered directness communicated strongly though a little more give and take would have drawn us in still further. In Francis Ledwidge’s final stanza, when the poet-narrator dreams of Arcady as he looks across the waves and pauses, alone, drifting slowly into reverie as he stares through the ‘misty filigree’, there is time in the music for lingering, but such opportunities for poetic reverie felt at little rushed at times. However, the soprano spanned the arching lines persuasively, both here and in the subsequent song, ‘Beloved’, where the melody often ranges high and low within a single phrase. Middleton’s octave doublings deepened the Romantic intensity of this brief but passionate ode to music, nature and love. In his introduction to Songs of the Field (1916), Lord Dunsany affectionately nicknamed Ledwidge, ‘the poet of the blackbird’, because of the frequency with which he returned to the bird’s artless song and the simple forms and language with which he represented its beauty. Crowe confirmed the aptness of this phrase through the sweet simplicity of manner and melody in ‘A blackbird singing’, though it was a pity that Ledwidge’s relaxed rhymes were again often indistinguishable. ‘Nocturne’ was an unsettling expression of the poet’s grief for his homeland which captured the melodic melancholy of Georgian wistfulness.
Head was the composer of more than 100 songs and, apart from a few well-known songs, we do not hear enough of them in the concert hall. The same might be said of John Ireland whose vocal compositions stand at the heart of his output and which were described by the scholar William Mann as ‘perhaps the most important between Purcell and Britten’; so, it was good to have five of Ireland’s songs at the centre of this programme - and, indeed, they inspired wonderfully communicative expression from Crowe and Middleton. The duo captured the philosophical depths and mysteries of Aldous Huxley’s poem, ‘The trellis’, in the timelessness of the piano’s initial quiet rocking which blossomed so richly, and in the searching lyricism of the vocal melodies which Crowe brought to a ravishing close, suggestive of the secret transfiguration of a poet enveloped by the ecstasy of love: ‘None but the flow’rs have seen/ Our white caresses/ Flow’rs and the bright-eyed birds.’ ‘My true love hath my heart’ rippled with sensuousness, and the performers communicated the spontaneity that Ireland evokes, as feelings well up and overspill. In contrast, they revealed the heart-ache that lies beneath the sparse economy of the composer’s setting of Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my dearest’, creating a deep, quiet anguish from such simple means. The flowing naturalness of ‘If there were dreams to sell’ conveyed a gentler fatalism, but ‘Earth’s Call’ brought a concluding flood of sensuous, even dangerous, emotions. The piano writing here is tremendous, and Middleton relished the musical narrative, truly conjuring ‘every natural sound’.
The three settings from William Walton’s Façade that closed the recital programme did not seem Crowe’s natural territory, not least because Edith Sitwell did not merely provide Walton with his texts, but also influenced his musical setting, the rhythms of which were shaped by her own recitation of the poems which the composer notated. In Laughter in the Next Room (1948), Sitwell’s brother, Osbert, described the creative process: ‘I remember very well the rather long sessions, lasting for two or three hours, which my sister and the composer used to have, when together they read the words, she, going over them again and again, while he marked and accented them for his own guidance, to show where the precise stress and emphasis fell, the exact inflection or deflection.’ Crowe’s diction did not really do justice to such meticulous collaboration and the songs’ linguistic acrobatics, but she coped very well with the challenging oddities and angularities of Walton’s intonations and inflections. The three songs selected, ‘Daphne’, ‘Through Gilded Trellises’ and ‘Old Sir Faulk’, are all based on popular song - English, Spanish and American, respectively. Middleton’s accompaniment wriggled and writhed with Hispanic flair and Crowe blanched her tone effectively at the close of ‘Through Gilded Trellises’: ‘Ladies, Time dies!’ But, one felt, though, that the soprano needed to throw her innate poise and composure to the wind, in order to release the extravagance, eccentricity and sheer mad gaiety of Walton’s and Sitwell’s cryptic archness.
Crowe’s encores found her back on more comfortable and familiar ground. After an unaccompanied and beautifully elegiac performance of the Irish folk-song ‘She Moves through the Fair’, the soprano was joined by Middleton to take us ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’, as set by Britten, bringing the recital back to its beginnings. The two songs coloured this lunchtime presentation of glorious English song with a lovely Celtic tint.
Claire Seymour
Lucy Crowe (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)
Purcell - ‘Lord, what is man?’ (realised by Benjamin Britten), ‘O solitude, my sweetest choice’ (realised by Benjamin Britten); John Weldon - ‘Alleluia’ (realised by Benjamin Britten); Michael Head - Over the rim of the moon; Ireland - ‘The trellis’, ‘My true love hath my heart’, ‘When I am dead, my dearest’, ‘If there were dreams to sell’, ‘Earth's call’; Walton - three settings from Fa çade (‘Daphne’, ‘Through gilded trellises’, ‘Old Sir Faulk’)
Wigmore Hall, London; Monday 24th September 2018