Recently in Reviews
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."
Reviews
16 Oct 2018
Pascal Dusapin’s Passion at the Queen Elizabeth Hall
Ten years ago, I saw one of the first performances of Pascal Dusapin’s Passion at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. Now, Music Theatre Wales and National Dance Company Wales give the opera its first United Kingdom production - in an English translation by Amanda Holden from the original Italian: the first time, I believe, that a Dusapin opera has been performed in translation. (I shall admit to a slight disappointment that it was not in Welsh: maybe next time.)
The premiere took place two nights earlier in
Basingstoke; I saw this resourceful, imaginative dance staging at the Queen
Elizabeth Hall. Titles might not have been a bad idea, but there is always
something to be said for making an audience listen, or at least encouraging
it to do so. (There was, alas, some extraordinary distracting behaviour
from a few bad apples on this occasion, one woman near me aggressively
scratching herself like an alley-cat throughout, another apparently running
a tombola from her handbag. Such highly distracting goings on did not
appear to be part of a directorial Konzept; perhaps, however, I
was missing the point.)
Dusapin’s Orpheus or rather Eurydice, opera, the lovers abstracted to Her
and Him, Lei and Lui, with shadowing support from ‘The Others’ (Gli Altri),
takes its place in perhaps the most venerable of all operatic traditions.
Orpheus, son of Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry, and, according to some
tellings of the legend, Apollo’s too, tamed animals, even charmed Hades
itself, through performance on his lyre - here suggested, yet perhaps not
merely to be identified with, the oud, Rihib Azar’s part and performance
evocative, generative, and questioning towards the close. Orpheus’s purview
- and that of Greek mousikē more generally - was greater
than what we, in an age cursed by specialisation, might consider to be
‘music’: he was poet, enchanter and prophet; he communicated the qualities
of all the Muses through his identity as a musical performer. Where,
however, is Eurydice in all that? As ‘traditional’ a supportive figure, a
victim, as ever? Here she is granted, or better she assumes, newfound
agency. As Dusapin, quoted in the progamme, put it: ‘I sincerely wanted to
do something with this myth, and yet I wasn’t really attracted to a story
where a woman dies, engulfed by flames, sacrificed by the stare of an
impatient man … So I thought: “What if the woman knew? And what if she
suddenly decided not to go back towards the light?”’ Just as composers from
Monteverdi to Birtwistle have retold, remade the myth in the light of their
own concerns, the concerns of their times too, so have Dusapin and a
splendidly integrated team of performers.
Worthy successors to the not inconsiderable team of Barbara Hannigan, Georg
Nigl, Ensemble Musicatreize, Ensemble Modern, and Franck Ollu, Jennifer
France, Johnny Herford, EXAUDI, the London Sinfonietta, and Geoffrey
Paterson offered an outstanding musical performance, ably shadowed,
incited, and criticised by a fine team of dancers. One had little doubt
that the Sinfonietta and Paterson were not only presenting what one was
‘supposed’ to hear, but in the emphatic sense performing it, bringing it
into life and revealing its form in the dramatic here and now. Comparisons
make little sense in the case of an artist such as Hannigan; perhaps they
do far more rarely than many of us would care to admit. France’s
performance had us believe in this particular Eurydice, her particular
concerns and ‘character’: what could be more feminist than that? Herford
cheerfully yet wistfully consented to and furthered a remodelling of
Orpheus’s role that leaves us all the richer. With none of Nigl’s sometimes
disconcerting idiosyncrasies, he - as indeed did the rest of the team -
suggested that we are all the richer for this recent chapter in the
progress of the myth. A subtly raucous - yes, that is intended - duet
between trombone and oboe; a recognisably celestrial yet menacing glimpse
of heaven; a (false?) witness of the clavecin ‘past’; an approach
to an expected final unison that proved not to be such at all: these and
many more such moments attested to the fleeting quality of memory, the
necessity of multiple standpoints in and of the present.
Mark Berry
Her: Jennifer France; Him: Johnny Herford; Dancers: Cyril Durand-Gasselin,
Nikita Goile, Ed Myhill, Julia Rieder, Malik Williams, Queenie
Maidment-Otlet. Co-directors: Michael McCarthy, Caroline Finn; Designs:
Simon Banham; Lighting: Joe Fletcher. Sound Intermedia (sound design, after
original concept by Thierry Cudoys)/EXAUDI/London Sinfonietta/Geoffrey
Paterson (conductor). Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, Saturday 13 October
2018