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 cautionary tale which W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman fashioned for Igor Stravinsky’s 1951 opera, The Rake’s Progress - recounting the downward course of an archetypal libertine from the faux fulfilment of matrimonial and monetary dreams to the grim reality of madness and death - was, of course, an elaboration of William Hogarth’s 1733 series of eight engravings.
And, the front-drop of Stephen Unwin’s production for British Youth Opera at the Peacock Theatre presented a fitting painterly swipe of reckless colour and some watery splashes, reminding us, in-between scenes, of the opera’s origins and of the virtuosic artifice of the composer’s and the poet’s remodelling of the past.
James Cotterill’s designs transported Tom Rakewell’s moral and material descent to the mid-twentieth century, the creators’ present, though I sensed at times a whiff of late-nineteenth century hypocrisy and degeneracy - the devil-may-care self-destructiveness of Wilde’s Dorian Gray or Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll, say.
This was a slow-burn production which on the opening night started with unfussy restraint but upped the emotional tempo towards the final scenes and closed with a touching picture of utter and irredeemable wretchedness. In fact, it all seemed a bit too discreet and decorous initially, and conductor Lionel Friend’s ponderous tempi didn’t help, though the Southbank Sinfonia’s orchestral textures were always lucid - the players seemed more comfortable in this idiom than they had been a few nights previous, in Jeremy Sams’ baroque pasticcio, The Enchanted Island - and Sam Jury’s fortepiano continuo was crisp and characterful.
Pedro Ometto (Trulove), Samantha Clarke (Anne) and Frederick Jones (Tom Rakewell). Photo Credit: Robert Workman.
The dingy grey curtain which formed the bedraggled backdrop for the dreamy, innocent domesticity of the opening scene - Trulove’s garden being indicated by a few stray pot plants - made for a rather shabby utopian idyll, but the simplicity of design subsequently proved an asset in telling a complicated tale. Splashes of colour - crimson red for Mother Goose’s brothel, hubristic purple of Sellem’s auction - and the modulation of Mark Jonathan’s lighting from the bright light of day to the darkness of graveyard despair, and finally to washed-out pallor amid the shadowy horrors of Bedlam, did good service to the plot.
This was a Progress, though, that was rather perversity-lite. The lip-shaped velvet sofa in the Brothel did not seem likely to swallow up Tom, sucking him into debauchery, and while the array of artefacts with which Tom adorns his house effectively trod the fine line between eclectic eccentricity and trashy tastelessness, the leopard-spotting statuettes and “fantastic baroque machine”, which Shadow professes can turn stone to bread, lacked that touch of truly bizarre extravagance.
Frederick Jones (Tom Rakewell). Photo Credit: Robert Workman.
The singing was top-notch, however. I admired Samantha Clarke’s Elvira in last year’s BYO production of Don Giovanni, and she brought a similar stylishness and beguiling lyricism to her portrait of the long-suffering Anne Trulove. She was well-matched by Frederick Jones’s Rake, who retained just enough hint of ‘boy-next-door’ goodness and gullibility for his decline and ultimate demise to touch our hearts. Tom’s reflections on his love for Anne and his fears for the future bloomed warmly and the challenges of the complex vocal lines proved no problem for the tenor.
Jessica Ouston put in a star turn as Baba the Turk showing a discerning sense of well-placed dramatic details - the knowing twiddling of Baba’s laced-gloved thumbs as she waited in a man-drawn hackney for Tom’s inevitable capitulation was a deliciously cruel comic touch - and using her juicily plump mezzo to make the fairground celebrity much more than just a dramatic device.
Sam Carl (Nick Shadow). Photo Credit: Robert Workman.
Both Iain Henderson’s Sellem and Emma Lewis’s Mother Goose might have been more outré, but the roles were confidently sung. Sam Carl’s Nick Shadow, too, displayed surprisingly understated Machiavellianism, but the seductive softness of Carl’s bass-baritone - which I enjoyed earlier this year at the Kathleen Ferrier Award Finals and in the Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s production of Lennox Berkeley’s The Dinner Engagement - made it easy to see why Tom was duped by Shadow’s propositions and promises, and Carl’s switch from friend to foe was sly and disturbing. Pedro Ometto (Trulove) and Thomas Mole (Keeper of the Madhouse) completed a fine cast and the BYO Chorus were in roaring voice.
There was one area of ‘weakness’ though, as there had been in An Enchanted Island. The singers’ diction lacked clarity. And, Auden’s words do deserve to be heard. By coincidence, the preceding evening had found me at Wilton’s Music Hall for ENO Studio Live’s production of Benjamin Britten’s Paul Bunyan - Auden’s first essay at libretto writing. Interestingly, in an undated draft memoir about his collaborations with Benjamin Britten, the poet reflected: ‘It was during this period [1939-40] that Britten wrote his first opera, and I my first libretto, on the subject of an American Folk hero - Paul Bunyan. The result, I’m sorry to say was a failure, for which I am entirely to blame, since, at the time, I knew nothing whatever about opera or what is required of a librettist. In consequence some very lovely music of Britten’s went down the drain.’ Auden is perhaps somewhat too harsh on himself; there were various reasons for the operetta’s poor reception. But, certainly, his libretto for The Rake’s Progress demonstrates his mastery of the craft. The Peacock Theatre is not fitted with surtitle screens, so the singers had even more responsibility to ensure that we could appreciate the virtuosic pastiche of Auden’s literary melange, which equals Stravinsky’s musical parodies for stylistic bravura.
Despite this, the pathos of Tom’s grim fate certainly made its mark and when the cast broke the fourth wall, their moralising summation, that the Devil makes work for idle hands, effectively drummed home a lesson that had been deftly and directly delivered.
Claire Seymour
British Youth Opera: The Rake’s Progress
Trulove - Pedro Ometto, Anne - Samantha Clarke, Tom Rakewell - Frederick Jones, Nick Shadow - Sam Carl, Mother Goose - Emma Lewis, Baba the Turk - Jessica Ouston, Sellem - Iain Henderson, Keeper of the Madhouse - Thomas Mole; Director - Stephen Unwin, Conductor - Lionel Friend, Designer - James Cotterill, Movement Director - Natasha Harrison, Lighting Designer - Mark Jonathan, Southbank Sinfonia, BYO Chorus.
Peacock Theatre, London; Tuesday 4th September 2018.