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.
![Harrison Birtwistle [Source: Wikipedia]](http://www.operatoday.com/Harrison_Birtwistle.png)
Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra marked the opening of the 2018-2019 season with a blast. Literally, for Sir Harrison Birtwistle's new piece Donum Simoni MMXVIII was an explosion of brass — four trumpets, trombones, horns and tuba, bursting into the Barbican Hall. When Sir Harry makes a statement, he makes it big and bold !
Short as it was, this fanfare was more substantial than it might have seemed at first. Like the composer himself, it was forthright and direct — no messing about. Hence the gruff low timbres and pugnacious sassiness, punctuated by percussion, with woodwind interjection, and later a tuba solo. Characteristic Birtwistle quirks and earthiness. Oddly enough the piece sounded like the way Birtwistle speaks in conversation. Since Birtwistle and Rattle have had a long relationship that goes back to the mid 1970’s, Donum Simoni is personal, like an autographed portrait of the composer with an affectionate dedication to an old friend.
In a masterstroke of provocative but inspired programming, Rattle followed Birtwistle with Gustav Holst. Holst’s Egdon Heath (A homage to Thomas Hardy) op 47 (1927) is rooted in the idea of timeless landscape. Like Hardy’s Wessex, Egdon Heath doesn’t exist, though it feels as though it should. Low rumbling harmonies, long, ambiguous string lines that seem to be hovering between tonalities: like mist above a heath. Tempi speed up, but clear, long lines return and an anthem-like motif emerges : almost Elgarian in the way that it evokes time and place. A single trumpet rang clear and the sounds dissolved into the ether around them. Though Rattle has built his reputation on new music, he has done a lot of Elgar and Sibelius. This Egdon Heath was a beautifully textured tone poem rich with feeling. Rattle is making connections between Holst and Birtwistle, who creates imaginary landscapes, rough hewn from almost organic forces, merging past, present and future in co-existing layers. Some may scream that Holst isn’t “modern” but yes he was, in his own way. Rattle’s gift for intelligent musical juxtapositions is one of his strengths, from which we can learn.
Rattle and Mark-Anthony Turnage have worked together for decades, too. Rattle premiered Turnage’s Remembering ‘in memoriam Evan Scofield’ with the LSO at the Barbican last year and with the Berliner Philharmoniker in Berlin. Turnage’s Dispelling the Fears from 1994/5 is a much earlier work. Trumpet players Philip Cobb and Gábor Tarkövi are principals of the LSO and the Berliner Philharmoniker respectively, so this performance was also a drawing together of past, present and future. The two trumpets stalk each other in dialogue and at cross-purposes, connecting and disconnecting with the orchestra around them. Though it is a serious work, there’s wit in it too, which connected it, in turn, to Benjamin Britten’s Spring Symphony.
Britten’s Spring Symphony (1948) is big, flamboyant and bursting with good-humoured high jinks — an excellent choice with which to open a new season. Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra were joined here by soloists Alice Coote, Elizabeth Watts and Allan Clayton with the London Symphony Chorus (Simon Halsey), the Tiffin Boy’s Choir, the Tiffin Girls’ School Choir and the Tiffin Children’s Chorus (James Day). The Spring Symphony is more than symphony : it is a piece of music theatre, where visuals count. Here, the youth choruses walked into the Barbican Hall and sang from the edge of the platform, up one aisle and on the stage itself. Not quite as stunning as last year’s Berlioz Damnation of Faust when Rattle and the LSO were joined by young singers who seemed to materialize everywhere. But the difference lay in the music itself. Cheerful as the Spring Symphony is, there’s something very “English” about it, and its high spirits need a certain degree of discretion. In terms of Britten’s output it occupies a strange place. It’s not Peter Grimes, but closer to another genre dear to Britten’s heart : community music-making for the sheer pleasure of making music together.
Thus the sprawling structure, four parts with twelve distinct sections, which together form a large, impressionistic portrait of Spring in its many manifestations, a Birtwistle “landscape” of sorts. If there’s any symphonic predecessor, it might be Mahler’s Symphony no 3 where summer rushes in with exuberant vigour. Like the god Pan, artists don’t follow rules : they create. Thus the many different texts from various sources, some medieval, some modern, and the variety of settings and styles. Wisely, Rattle didn’t try to homogenize them, but kept the separate parts distinct, so each shone on its own merits. A blazing “Shine out, fair sun !” set the mood. There are many Brittenesque elements in the piece which would be fun to isolate, and relate to, later works, but it is enough that the work as a whole flows naturally as a series of tableaux. Lively performances : everyone having a good time. Which is as things should be. Rattle, a consummate communicator, knows how to share his enthusiasm with performers and with audiences. A lot of fuss these days is made of grim-faced pious “music education” but this is how things actually work in the real world. Note the final section “London to thee I do present the merry month of May”.
Anne Ozorio
