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."
‘Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.’ The words of George Orwell, expressed in a Tribune article, ‘The Sporting Spirit’, published in 1945.
In recent weeks, there have been so many Armistice centenary events, and commentaries on such commemorations, that the weight of memory, history and collective expectation and responsibility has sometimes felt bewildering or overwhelming. The performance of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s 2000 opera The Silver Tassie - the apex of the ‘Total Immersion’ weekend of performances, screenings and talks inspired by the events of 1914-18 at the Barbican Centre - brought debates about sport and war, violence and religion, love and sexuality, into tense, troubling and heightened theatrical focus. The performance was buffeting and blistering; the musical and emotional punch delivered was knockout; but, just what was being ‘celebrated’ was more equivocal.
As the Guardian’s Senior Sports Editor remarked in the Saturday edition, the centenary of the 1914-18 conflict has seen a veritable ‘blizzard of remembrance’. Barney Ronay was reflecting on the life and achievements of Kent and England cricketer Colin Blythe, who hailed from Deptford in south-east London and, off-season, played violin in concert orchestras around Kent, and whose death - one among half a million men on both sides who were slaughtered in the Battle of Passchendaele, the 101st anniversary of which falls this weekend - was marked in the cricket media and by local people in south-east London this week. Ronay asks, ‘How to grasp this industrialised slaughter? How to remember it in a way that makes any sense?’ One might add a further question: through art? Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera, The Silver Tassie, certainly upholds the continuing argument for and appeal of WW1 as a source of creative inspiration and monument.
Sean O’Casey’s 1928 play on which Amanda Holden’s libretto for Turnage’s opera is based, laments such loss of life - literal and figurative, for many ‘survivors’ were condemned to a living death - in the First World War. The play’s hero, the dynamic star of the local football team, Harry Heegan, leads his fellow sportsmen to victory in the coveted Championship Cup. With the eponymous trophy secured in the cabinet, Harry, the apple of his parents’ eye and worshipped by his girlfriend Jessie, heads off to war, only to return disabled and embittered. Jessie falls in love with Barney who, ironically, has won the VC for saving Harry’s life; Teddy Foran, an abusive husband who lives in a flat above the Heegans, returns from the frontline blinded and dependent upon the wife he has bullied and threatened. Harry and Teddy have to find a way to survive when, in their youth, they are brought to a state of ‘leg-staggering an’ belly-creeping’.
When W.B. Yeats rejected O’Casey’s play for the Abbey Theatre in 1928, he commented that, ‘There is no dominating character, no dominating action, neither psychological unity nor unity of action ...’. In particular, Yeats lamented the contrast between the expressionistic abstraction of Act 2 and the realism of surrounding three Acts - the home-front of the latter being the predominant forum for the unfolding dramatic conflicts. Moreover, the effect of war on the soldiers and the society from which they hailed is uppermost in O’Casey’s play, and everyone - man and woman, church and state, parent and child - is implicated in the horror.
The playwright’s Act 2 chants and songs may have troubled the critical commentators, but they facilitate Turnage, whose operatic adaptation transforms this section of the drama into a grand choral episode delivered from behind the front lines of the Western Front: it is one of the opera’s strongest theatrical statements. The vigorous male voices of the BBC Singers and the animated Finchley Children’s Music Group were poignantly juxtaposed with the passing parade of boy stretcher-bearers. Brindley Sherratt was a sonorous ‘Croucher’, named after those who huddled in the trenches’ and who associates God with destruction, thereby inverting Ezekiel’s vision of the divine, throned chariot.
After an expository Act 1, it’s only really in Acts 3 and 4 of the opera that the human dimensions of the drama assert their grip. And, in the second half of this semi-staged performance there was a terrific balance between collective, communal suffering and individual and personal experience. In its presentation of a caustic cocktail of sex, religion, violence and love, Turnage’s opera reminds me of Britten’s Billy Budd. The role of Susie, the epicentre for the juxtaposition of violent destruction and religion, was terrifically sung by Sally Matthews who displayed power and evenness over a wide vocal range. Harry’s parents were warmly embodied by the discerning Susan Bickley and Mark le Brocq - Sylvester Heegan’s cardigan buttons were veritably popping with pride.
In the communal dance hall in Act 4, a quarrel between Harry and Jessie threatens to wreck the most recent celebrations of a Silver Tassie victory. As Harry, Ashley Riches was brutal and blunt, and paradoxically eloquent, about the effect of his wounds, both physical and emotional. As the inconstant Jessie, Louise Alder sang with characteristic poise but seemed a little under-characterised, and her need to flick briskly through her score weakened the impact of her moment of physical commitment to Alexander Robin Baker’s vehement, vigorous Barney.
Ryan Wigglesworth conducted a vividly colourful and percussive reading of the score, and if at times it felt a little relentless - the singers were subtly amplified but there were a few imbalances - then who am I to complain of a battery of drums and percussive, grating noise. One other thing: though semi-staged effectively and efficiently, Kenneth Richardson’s dramatic presentation seemed - give or take the odd green-and-white striped football scarf - rather Irish-lite, given that Turnage has said, ‘The fundamental thing I was concerned with was the Irishness of the play. Every line is within that Irish tradition.’
That said, there was so much to admire that I’m not entirely sure why I felt a little disconcerted at the close, as the applause echoed rapturously and extendedly, and the individual singers took their bows, joined by stage director Kenneth Richardson, chorus master James Henshaw, and Turnage himself.
I think, though, I wondered exactly what it was that we were applauding. Next month sees the release of Peter Jackson’s film They Shall Not Grow Old, which digitalises archive footage of WW1, following its television screening on Armistice Day on BBC2. The oft repeated misquotation of Laurence Binyon’s poem, ‘For the Fallen’ - ‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:’ - seems dispiritedly poignant.
The BBC has recently published on its website an account of survivors’ commemorations in the aftermath of the war : ‘A year after the conflict had ended, villages, towns and cities held parades, church services and observed two minutes’ silence. That was during the day. The evening of 11 November was different. Thousands of people - most of them young - wanted to have fun. “Victory balls” - charity fundraising events involving fancy dress, dancing, singing and copious drinking - were held to cater for this need. […] They celebrated with their comrades and marked the sacrifices of their fellows by living and enjoying their own lives.’
Though such Victory Parties were subsequently criticised, replaced by more sober commemorations, the BBC reports that, ‘One former officer stopped taking part in commemorations, describing them as “too much like attending one’s own funeral”’.
How we commemorate seems no less personal, and political, today.
This performance of The Silver Tassie was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is available on BBC iPlayer for 30 days.
Claire Seymour
Mark-Anthony Turnage:
The Silver Tassie
Harry - Ashley Riches, Susie - Sally Matthews, The Croucher - Brindley
Sherratt, Mrs Foran - Claire Booth, Teddy - Marcus Farnsworth, Barney -
Alexander Robin Baker, Jessie - Louise Alder, Mres Heegan - Susan Bickley,
Sylvester - Mark le Brocq, Dr Maxwell/Staff Officer - Anthony Gregory,
Corporal - Benedict Nelson, Finchley Children’s Music Group, BBC Singers,
BBC Symphony Orchestra, Conductor - Ryan Wigglesworth, Stage director -
Kenneth Richardson.
Barbican Hall, London; Saturday 10th November 2018.