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 Barbican Centre’s For the Fallen commemorations continued with this varied and thought-provoking programme, The Last Letter, which interweaved vocal and instrumental music with poems and prose, and focused on relationships - between husband and wife, fellow soldiers, young men and their homelands - disrupted by war.
Devised by Dr Kate Kennedy - who is the Weinrebe Research Fellow in Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford - and performed in Milton Court Concert Hall by the Britten Sinfonia, baritone Jonathan McGovern and narrators Sophie Hunter and Richard Pryal - the programme represented, in Kennedy’s words, a ‘re-thinking and re-imagining’ of the First World War: a ‘nuanced’ picture allowing us to hear a ‘multiplicity of voices’ and which ‘put the composers of the war side by side with the writers, both male and female’.
It was certainly a diverse programme, with two musical works - the five songs which form Nico Muhly’s The Last Letter (2015), here performed for the first time in an arrangement for chamber orchestra, and five songs from Ivor Gurney’s settings of Housman, The Western Playland (1919, pub. 1926) - forming the backbone around which assorted poems, letters, prose fragments and other musical items were arrayed.
While the performances, musical and spoken, were unwaveringly committed and engaging, the sequence seemed to me overly complicated and fragmented - not least because of the confusing and unhelpful layout of the printed programme, in which a list of the musical items was followed by a description of the poetry and prose readings (though the texts themselves were not supplied), with the texts of the songs by Muhly and Gurney buried later in the programme amid explanatory notes relating to the other musical compositions to be performed. How was one to negotiate through the sequence, especially as the Concert Hall was repeatedly plunged into darkness, allowing for some atmospheric and theatrical spotlighting of the readers but making it nigh on impossible to read the printed texts supplied? Moreover, the cycles by Muhly and Gurney lost some of their impact because of the dispersal of their movements amid other items which tugged one’s focus in different directions, hindering the development of a ‘narrative’ and weakening the accumulation of expressive intensity through each cycle’s sequence of songs.
That said, I was impressed by the way the evening’s two narrators, Richard Pryal and Sophie Hunter, brought the varied voices, relationships and experiences of the historical past, recorded on the written page, into the living present. Amplification was employed - by necessity, I suppose, though one imagines that any self-respecting schoolmaster of the day would have had little trouble projecting with clarion resonance to the corners of the Concert Hall - and at times I would have liked the spoken voices to have had a little less immediacy, as in Rupert Brooke’s ‘Fragment’ or Wilfred Owen’s ‘Futility’, where I would have welcomed more gradation of tone and volume. But, Pryal and Hunter drew us into the pain and pathos recorded in the memoirs of Helen Thomas - whose poet-soldier husband, Edward, was killed at Arras in April 1917 - and in the letters of Vera Brittain and her fiancé, Roland Leighton.
Frederick Kelly’s letter to Edward Marsh, informing him of the death of his dear friend, Rupert Brooke, was beautifully recited by Pryal, accompanied by an intense rendition of Kelly’s Elegy: In Memoriam Rupert Brooke (1915), arranged for small string ensemble, in which Thomas Gould’s violin solo floated tenderly like an ascending spirit (Kelly was himself killed at the Somme just a few months thereafter). One of the most striking readings was ‘The Relief’, part of ‘Out of the Trenches’ from Broken Carousel by the German, Jewish poet, Leo Sternberg (translated from the German by Peter Appelbaum), with its terrible images of the soldiers ‘snowed in the trenches like snow-covered clods of earth … Our death cry only a signal for the army/ Behind us’.
In the light of the Armistice commemorations and with Brexit on the horizon, the fact that Muhly’s The Last Letter was commissioned by the Barbican Centre and the European Concert Hall Organisation, with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union, seemed almost painfully ironic. Muhly’s settings of four letters drawn from Mandy Kirkby’s edition, Love letters of the Great War, and Schiller’s poem ‘The Gods of Greece’ (translated by Richard Wigmore) was first performed in this same Concert Hall in October 2015 by baritone Benjamin Appl and pianist Gary Matthewman. Here, members of the Britten Sinfonia played the composer’s new chamber orchestration, accompanying Jonathan McGovern, who gave an earnest and compelling performance.
The sparse textures etched by piano and harp at the start of the first song, threw the vocal yearning into sharp relief, as the husband repeatedly asks his wife, “Please, tell me your name, as I have forgotten it”. McGovern then conjured the urgency of the wife’s reply, surging in short fragments, “Jack - my own - my only love - how I look for our next letter - how much longer shall I have to wait?”, before retreating to a pianissimo of almost visceral intensity, “Oh! Let me feel you crushing,my very life into yours”. The large leap between the first two words of her written request to be permitted a conjugal visit, “Dear Leader of the Company!”, conveyed every atom of the strength she had to summon, before her passion - anger, desire, frustration - seemed to over-spill. McGovern’s focused line in the subsequent slow, simple declamation that she was to divorce her husband and marry another man, masked tragic emotional disturbance, as intimated by the violin’s commentary; the abruptness of the close was brutal. In the final song, in which Schiller describes a deserted landscape, the baritone’s dark tone and robustness through the angular line, “Fair world, where are you?”, was compelling.
The strength of line that McGovern displayed to such good effect in Muhly’s songs was occasionally less effective in Gurney’s Housman settings. In ‘Reveille’, I’d have liked more nuanced phrasing, to complement Gould’s expressive contribution, and while the forthrightness of the poet-speaker’s almost defiant honesty in ‘Loveliest of Trees’ - “Now, of my threescore years and ten,/ Twenty will not come again,/ And take from seventy springs a score,/ It only leaves me fifty more.” - I missed the soft wistfulness of the closing vision of the cherry tree, “hung with snow”. Pianist Mark Knoop engaged expressively with the vocal line and accompanying string quartet in ‘Is My Team Ploughing?’ and McGovern worked hard to differentiate the text’s speakers.
The members of the Britten Sinfonia made their own instrumental contribution to the memorialising medley. I was not familiar with Music for Seven Stringed Instruments (1907-11) by Rudi Stephan, who was killed in action near Tarnopol in Galicia on 29th September 1915, aged twenty-seven, but the Sinfonia’s beautiful performance of ‘Nachspiel’, which ended the first part of the recital, made me want to hear more. The melodies were supple, the tone warm, the harmonies subtly ambiguous, and the players crafted the structure finely, building towards a luminescent close in which the violins soared with silvery translucence above gentle but pointed harp gestures. Two movements, ‘Prelude’ and ‘Forlane’, from Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin (1917), arranged by Robert Weiner for oboe and string quartet, were interspersed between vocal items in the second half of the concert, which concluded, perhaps inevitably, with Barber’s Adagio for Strings (1936). The Britten Sinfonia gave a poised and self-possessed performance, employing a restrained vibrato which served paradoxically to increase the focused intensity. Here, at last, after the multiplicity of voices and perspectives, was the singularity and stillness that offered time and space for reflection and remembrance.
Claire Seymour
The Last Letter
: Britten Sinfonia, Thomas Gould (violin/director), Jonathan McGovern
(baritone), Sophie Hunter (narrator), Richard Pryal (narrator).
Nico Muhly, ‘Letter One’ from The Last Letter (world premiere of
chamber orchestral version); Ivor Gurney, ‘Reveille’ fromThe Western Playland; Frederick S. Kelly (arr. Divall),Elegy: In Memoriam Rupert Brooke; Muhly, ‘Letter Two’ fromThe Last Letter; Gurney, ‘Loveliest of Trees’ fromThe Western Playland; Rudi Stephan, ‘Nachspiel’ fromMusic for Seven Stringed Instruments; Gurney, ‘The Aspens’ fromThe Western Playland; Muhly, ‘Letter Three’ fromThe Last Letter; Ravel (arr. Weiner), ‘Prelude’ fromLe tombeau de Couperin; Muhly, ‘Letter Four’ fromThe Last Letter; Gurney, ‘Is my team ploughing?’ fromThe Western Playland; Ravel (arr. Weiner), ‘Forlane’ fromLe tombeau de Couperin; Muhly, ‘Letter Five’ fromThe Last Letter; Gurney, ‘March’ from The Western Playland; Samuel Barber, Adagio for Strings.
Milton Court Concert Hall, London; Friday 9th November 2018.