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.
“The best music to listen to in a great Gothic church is the polyphony which was written for it, and was calculated for its resonance: this was my approach in the War Requiem - I calculated it for a big, reverberant acoustic and that is where it sounds best.”
The words of Benjamin Britten in his speech, On Receiving the First Aspen Award, on 31st July 1964, two years after the premiere of the composer’s War Requiem on 30 th May 1962 in Coventry Cathedral, the destruction, rebirth and consecration of which the work was commissioned to commemorate and celebrate.
Interestingly, in his Aspen Award speech Britten also reflected upon what he called the ‘so-called “permanent” value of our occasional music’, noting that we should not worry too much as, ‘A lot of it cannot make much sense after its first performance, and it is quite a good thing to please people, even if only for today’. And, pragmatically Britten observed, ‘One must face the fact today that the vast majority of musical performances take place as far away from the original as it is possible to imagine’.
There have, inevitably, been numerous performances of Britten’s War Requiem this year, some in gothic cathedrals, others in venues of diverse function, form and acoustic. English National Opera’s Artistic Director Daniel Kramer and Turner Prize-winning artist Wolfgang Tillmans have now brought the War Requiem into the opera house and placed it upon the theatrical stage. In so doing, they continue the trend for staging Passions, oratorios and Requiem masses which has seen Deborah Warner, Peter Sellars, Jonathan Millar, Calixto Bieito et al attempt to make ‘drama’ from ritual and liturgy.
Britten’s War Requiem captured the sentiments of a world reeling with the grief of a century of war. Britten spoke in his Aspen Award speech of the ‘many times in history the artist has made a conscious effort to speak with the voice of the people’. His belief that it was the responsibility of the creative artist to communicate directly to society was expressed time and again: in his speeches on receiving the Freedom of the Borough of Aldeburgh and on Receiving Honorary Degree at Hull University’, both in 1962, for example.
But, the Requiem is many things. It is a public statement of the composer’s own pacifism, prompting our understanding that war does not cease when warring nations put down their guns. It is also a homage to Wilfred Owen, whom Britten described as ‘by far our greatest war poet, and one of the most original and touching poets of this century’. Britten scholar Philip Reed has suggested that what Britten admired was the directness of Owen’s poetry and the fact that it highlighted the ‘ironic conflict of verbal and musical messages’ when juxtaposed with the Latin Requiem text.
So, in additional to the verbal and musical messages, do we need visual images too? What will they add, diminish, change?
Essentially, Kramer’s and Tillmans’ War Requiem is a series of such visual images, presented with technological slickness and potently lit by Charles Balfour. None of these images are inappropriate; some, in my view at least, are somewhat hackneyed; some are striking.
Kramer and Tillmans begin with reference to a visually driven narrative which was designed to bring about social and cultural change. Two halves of an open book tower over and straddle the stage in the ‘Requiem aeternam’. The pages of Ernst Friedrich’s War Against War flick over, exposing the captions and photographs which the young German - an anarchist and anti-militarist activist who had been incarcerated during WW1 for his refusal to fight - intended to unmask nationalistic propaganda and lay bare the false narratives of militaristic rhetoric. Disfigured faces - ‘The Visage of War’ - stare at us, as we stare at them: through such visual activism Friedrich aimed to challenge politically correct ‘ways of seeing’ and create an experienced, rather than imagined, intimacy between viewer and viewed.
Roderick Williams and Ensemble. Photo credit: Richard Hubert Smith.
But, the pages of the book turn quickly, evading our gaze, and are succeeded by images of other conflicts, horrors and inhumanity. During the ‘Liber scriptus proferetur’, a poster, ‘Breaking the Silence: Gender and Genocide’, urges us to remember the massacre in Srebenica in 1995. Then, the uniforms are of a different kind of patriotic allegiance as bottle-throwing football thugs march through the streets. Monochrome photographs of the ruined shards of Coventry Cathedral remind us of the origins of the work - composed in the aftermath of another world war, and at the height of the Cold War with the threat of nuclear conflict terrifyingly real - and of Britten’s remark, made during rehearsal for the 1963 Decca recording, that the ‘Libera Me’ “happens today to mean something”.
Photo credit: Richard Hubert Smith.
Juxtaposed with man’s inhumanity are nature’s cycles of decay, death and renewal. The camera scrutinises the stripped bark of a fallen tree trunk as it sheds its protective skin, skims sea-surf scummy with pollution, and hugs a ground embraced by ferns and moss. A cloud of snow explodes, bringing another war poem by Owen to mind, with its image of ‘air that shudders black with snow’. The snow-dust blankets the stage - assuaging and beneficent, or hostile to man who has negated nature and alienated himself from its nurture?
There are some moments where image, word and movement are brought together. ‘So Abram rose’ and the ‘Quam olim Abrahae’ are illustrated by an aerial shot of a sacrificial sheep, as tenor David Butt Philip, dressed in an officer’s great-coat, oversees a procession children: lambs to the slaughter, indeed, or as Owen bitterly describes, ‘men who die like cattle’.
Photo credit: Richard Hubert Smith.
When asked about the ‘sweetness’ of the War Requiem’s final pages, in an interview with Charles Osbourne in 1963, Britten responded, “I can’t see any great defect in sweetness as long as it’s not weakness”. At the close, Kramer and Tillmans open a window on dense, verdant leaves of renewal, though the lingering agitations of the side drum and snares seem more in keeping with the ambivalent questions of Owen’s poem ‘The End’: ‘Shall Life renew these bodies? Of a truth/All death will He annul, all tears assuage?’
The choreography of the enlarged ranks of the ENO Chorus - who sang with fervency and impact - offers no surprises. They lie motionless, are marshalled in ranks, they march, they mourn. They, and the projected images, don’t ‘show’ us anything that we can’t already hear. Fluctuating grey-green fogginess backlights the ‘Libera me’, but we can hear the cacophonous slaughter in the violence of the percussion and, later, in the quasi-hysterical eruptions of the ‘Dies irae’. Moreover, the power of the customary spatial separation of the three ‘strata’ of the War Requiem - with the two soldiers exposed in the foreground, the liturgical consolations of the soprano and full chorus behind them, and the innocence of the children’s choir placed at an unreachable remove - is lost; as is the contrast between the chamber orchestra and full symphony, though the ENO Orchestra gave us clanging colours and vivid textures, and conductor Martyn Brabbins successfully balanced spaciousness and intensity.
Roderick Williams and Ensemble. Photo credit: Richard Hubert Smith.
The members of Finchley Children’s Music Group were well-regimented choreographically and vocally spick and span. Emma Bell’s vivid but sometimes overly feverish rendition of the soprano solos offered few of the consolations that we might expect of a celebrant of the Mass. But, tenor David Butt Philip and baritone Roderick Williams both gave committed and musically affecting performances.
Roderick Williams and David Butt Philip. Photo credit: Richard Hubert Smith.
The most powerful moments are those of stillness and simplicity. After some uncomfortable music-hall style gestures in ‘Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death’, which weakened the irony inherent in the music, Butt Philip and Williams stood motionless in ‘Strange Meeting’, freed from the horrors of the battlefields they have left behind but trapped, restless, in a mysterious nightmare. The strength of Butt Philip’s tone betrayed all of the dead soldier’s bewilderment and disillusion, while Williams’ gentleness accommodated both the bitterness and pity of the counterpart who rises from the piles of languishing souls and whose ‘dead smile’ expresses his wry recognition of the futility of war: ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend.[…]/ Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed./ I parried; but my hands were loath and cold./ Let us sleep now …’.
Here, surely, was the place for Friedrich’s mutilated men for whom there are no ‘friends/enemies’ or ‘us/them’, only victim-soldiers, and whose shattered bodies and faces short-circuit conventional oppositional narratives of conflict?
Kramer and Tillmans demonstrate care and respect for Britten’s work, but the result feels oddly passive and distanced. And, they risk, in their emphasis on the visual at the expense of the verbal and musical, turning the War Requiem into a film score.
Claire Seymour
Britten: War Requiem
Emma Bell (soprano), David Butt Philip (tenor), Roderick Williams (baritone); Daniel Kramer (director), Martyn Brabbins (conductor), Wolfgang Tillmans (designer), Nasir Mazhar (costume designer), Justin Nardella (associate designer, Charles Balfour (lighting designer), Ann Yee (choreographer), ENO Orchestra and Chorus, Finchley Children’s Music Group, Sylvia Young Theatre School.
English National Opera, Coliseum, London; Friday 16th November 2018.