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."
“Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.” Well, the spectral Queen of Carthage atop the poppy-strewn sarcophagus wasn’t quite yet “laid in earth”, but the act of remembering, and remembrance, duly began during the first part of this final instalment of the Academy of Ancient Music’s Purcell trilogy at the Barbican Hall.
I recently discussed with director Thomas Guthrie his plan - initially proposed by AAM director Richard Egarr - to precede the presentation of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas with the staging of Dido’s funeral, accompanied by a selection of the composer’s instrumental and vocal music, so it was no surprise when the black figures of the AAM Chorus processed soberly onto the platform and, observing courtly protocol, heralded the ritual with unison drum-thumps of almost violent portent. The careful peeling back of the delicate shroud revealed a fragile white form - a vulnerable, delicate, ethereal figure, seemingly far removed from the tragic queen of history and myth.
Rowan Pierce. Photo Credit: Mark Allan.
Perhaps this was Guthrie’s ‘point’: “Remember me,” she urges, but who is ‘me’? Who was/is Dido: a tragic victim of Fate destroyed by imperial destiny, or a real flesh-and-blood woman betrayed and abandoned by a lover for whom god-ordained purpose outweighs private passions? Moreover, how should we ‘remember’? Should we lament, pity and commemorate, sustaining a memory of the dead in the land of the living, as the final chorus of the opera counsels and as the AAM Chorus here observed: ‘Soft and gentle as her heart, / Keep here your watch and never part’? Or does Dido advocate not merely pity, but vengeance?
Certainly, as Rowan Pierce’s Belinda and Ashley Riches’s Aeneas stood beside the wraith-like effigy there was a palpable anger to their grief, and a sense of imminent confrontation and conflict. This strength of feeling was, however, strangely at odds with the intimate gentility of the musical discourse. Leader Bojan Čičič, violinist Rebecca Livermore and viola da gamba player Imogen Seth-Smith played the first three movements of Purcell’s Sonata in G minor with immensely touching refinement, but the intimate quietude transported us to the realms to which Dido had departed, distancing us from the more visceral emotions of those present at her funeral. The Barbican Hall seemed too large and ‘open’ a venue for such private concerns.
Pierce sang ‘So when the glittering Queen of Night’, from Orpheus Britannicus, from the shadows and with moving clarity and sensitivity, accompanied by theorbo and plaintive strings, but from my front stalls seat I wondered whether her tender pianissimo carried to the uppermost tiers of the Barbican Hall. There was more animation in the Chacony in G minor Z730, during which Riches prowled and scowled; the Pavan in G Minor (in which Čičič and Seth-Smith were joined by Persephone Gibbs) offered delicate though somewhat distanced musing.
The most direct impact was made by the AAM Choir whose voices, in ‘No stars again shall hurt you form above’ from The Tempest, circled the instrumentalists, blending with unaffected sweetness. A cushion of softly brushed theorbo strumming accompanied Pierce and Riches in ‘Close thine eyes and sleep secure’, inviting us into the intimacy of grief: their declaration that “The music and the mirth of kings/ Are out of tune unless she sings” rang with painful truth. The rites were brought to a close with Purcell’s Chacony in G minor Z807, conducted by Egarr with inspiring energy and with, literally, his whole being. After the anguish of so much unalleviated G minor, the final tierce de Picardie was something of a relief.
Dido and Aeneas, Academy of Ancient Music. Photo Credit: Mark Allan.
And, so, in the second half of the concert we looked back to the events which had resulted in such doleful rites and woe. There has been considerable debate over the ‘politics’ of Dido and Aeneas: the nature and degree of the opera’s engagement with the troubling years of the Stuart monarchy, as well as still unresolved problems relating to the dating and chronology of performances and sources. But, Guthrie, despite declaring his belief that Dido is “clearly related in the 17th -century mind to Elizabeth I (‘Elissa dies tonight’)”, seemed here to eschew a search for a topical allegory in his filtering of the very human, and diverse, emotions of the opera through puppets - avatars which rather restricted the range of the drama’s passions and abstracted them from any specific or inferred context.
Laura Caldow (puppeteer) and Caitlin Hulcup (Dido). Photo Credit: Mark Allan.
I worried whether the fragile, translucent puppet-Dido - touchingly slight and subtle - could actually bear the tragic weight of the Queen’s Fate. Though expertly manipulated by soprano Caitlin Hulcup and puppeteer Laura Caldow, in the final reckoning I felt that ‘she’ could not. However, that’s not to say that the tiny quiver of jaw, delicately pained expression and poignant hinterland gaze of this Other-monarch were not affecting. And, if there was a restriction of expressive range and a sense of emotional secrecy, then this was perhaps apt. For the Queen of Carthage remains a mystery to us: her public destiny seems to conflict with her private feelings, the latter remaining elusive and incompletely understood - as she tells Belinda, her grief ‘admits of no revealing’.
But, where was the anger that the queen hurls at her betrayer, the anguish of confession publicly displayed in the lamentation with which she submits to the darkness and death that shade and invade her? Purcell draws us into his characters’ self-doubts and divisions, but this Dido-puppet retained an air of formality and detachment, her inner life hidden from public view. However, Caitlin Hulcup’s smooth, plush mezzo did communicate the queen’s struggles, conflicts and uncertainties. Dido’s dying lament tugged against the unrelenting ground bass, and at our heart-strings, shining with a velvety richness that seemed at odds with the insubstantial, brittle figure so carefully lain upon the earth by Hulcup and Caldow.
Photo Credit: Ben Thompson (puppeteer) and Ashley Riches (Aeneas). Photo credit: Mark Allan.
Like Hulcup, Ashley Riches was assisted by a puppeteer, Ben Thompson, though both singers showed astonishing adeptness in manipulating their self-representing avatars all the while singing with focus, sensitivity and character. Riches brought a lovely tenderness to Aeneas’s pleas and avowals, which complemented the gentle lowering of the puppet’s gaze and cautious reaching out of its slender arms, though it was hard to imagine this Aeneas as an authoritative warrior-leader torn from his queen by the fulfilment of his Roman destiny. It was also difficult to imagine or sense any ‘real’ attraction between the two lovers, though William Carter and Eligio Luis Quinteiro did their best to conjure passionate frissons with the vibrant jubilations of their baroque guitars as the queen and her suitor departed for their tryst in the cave.
Rowan Pierce was superb as Belinda, conveying the lady-in-waiting’s vivacity, directness and integrity through both her dramatically sensitive phrasing and the way in which she bestowed her puppet-mask with a freedom of movement. As the Second Woman, soprano Charmian Bedford communicated a corresponding spiritedness. Blackly draped and illuminated with a piercing blue hue, Neal Davies was a vivid and surprisingly earthy Sorceress, while counter-tenor James Hall posed as the false Mercury, issuing his divine command from behind a mask, in the rear doorway of the platform.
Choir of the Academy of Ancient Music. Photo Credit: Mark Allan.
While Michael Casey’s pointed lighting brought the subtleties of the solo-puppet’s visages to the fore, the Chorus, their masks trailing sinuous scarves, sometimes slipped into the shadows as they moved around, behind and through the instrumentalists, the puppets losing definition amid the swirling trains. Interestingly, only when the chorus abandoned their masks for a rip-roaring, hop-skipping sailor’s jig did one feel the full directness and life-spirit of Purcell’s music, though, even here Guthrie and designer Ruth Paton denied us any visual colour.
That said, some of the best singing of the night came from the AMM Choir. Indeed, if we remained distanced from the blanched puppet-protagonists, then this placed the glories of the music itself centre-stage. Egarr led his musicians with dynamic gusto, leaping to his feet to whip up instrumental rejoicing and tempests, moving to the front to join the Witches’ Chorus in their gleeful revelling, “Destruction’s our delight”, shaping the tempos and phrasing with natural ease and control.
The drooping phrases of the final chorus unfolded in a seemingly unceasing cycle, making public Dido’s inner life in a perpetual appeal to the Cupid’s to “scatter roses on her tomb”, a petition which, like our remembrance, would and will never cease.
Claire Seymour
Purcell: Sonata No.1 in G minor (movements 1, 2 and 3), ‘So when the glittering Queen of Night’ (Orpheus Britannicus), Chacony in G minor Z730, Pavan in G minor, ‘No stars again shall hurt you from above’ ( The Tempest), ‘Close thine eyes and sleep secure’, Chacony in G minor Z807, Dido and Aeneas.
Dido - Caitlin Hulcup, Aeneas - Ashley Riches, Belinda - Rowan Pierce, Sorceress - Neal Davies, Second Woman - Charmian Bedford, First Witch - Kate Symonds-Joy, Second Witch - Cathy Bell, Sailors - James Geer/Edmund Hastings/Matthew Sandy, Puppeteers - Laura Caldow/Ben Thompson; Director - Thomas Guthrie, Music Director/harpsichord - Richard Egarr, Lighting - Michael Casey, Designer - Ruth Paton, Choir and Orchestra of the Academy of Ancient Music.
Barbican Hall, London; Tuesday 2nd October 2018.