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.
After a series of productions somehow skewed, perverse, and/or pallid, the first Seattle Opera production of the new year comes like a powerful gust of invigorating fresh air: a show squarely, single-mindedly focused on presenting the work of art at hand as vividly and idiomatically as possible.
There are flaws, absurdities, inconsistencies: but even these feel more like virtues than faults; like so many homage to the eternal genius of Verdi and his immortal warhorse Il trovatore.
The very setting exudes the shabby, sturdy spirit of Italian Romantic opera. Commissioned from John Conklin (no one seems to remember just when) as a set for Bellini’s Norma, built in Seattle Opera’s shop, reconfigured before it first was seen in Cincinnati as a Trovatore, and repeatedly re-reconfigured since until it more resembles bricolage than organic unity.
But, when not cluttered by the shambling male chorus (think of the Penzance police force in full black body-armor), it does offer a decent platform for melodrama: ragged, foreboding Conklinesque walls, central altar-like platform, a sharply raked stage overhung by a gargantuan sanguineous moon-shape.
The musical side is well supported by the Seattle Opera house-band under the (rather too tasteful) baton of Carlo Montanaro, but Trovatore is nothing without the right voices, and with a few caveats, the ones we hear more than make the grade. Nora Sourouzian’s is not the ideal molten Azucena voice, but her singing is dramatically spot-on and, particularly in her duets with Manrico, deeply moving. The Manrico himself, Martin Muehle makes a physically frail figure, but that’s all to the good in emphasizing the fearful hopelessness of the character’s situation. In mid-register his voice is dry and inexpressive, but as it rises toward the half-dozen crucial notes of the role it opens into full-throated bronze; Muehle gives the end of “Di quella pira” the full Pavarotti, and the audience responds accordingly.
Michael Mayes is much closer to physical and vocal norm of a di Luna; his portrayal suffers most from Montanaro’s genteel, overly lyrical baton, but he is a consistently powerful and idiomatic singer; as the climax approaches his fury and frustration achieve the necessary dangerous near-madness.
And then there is Angela Meade. I can add nothing to the encomia that more distinguished critics have awarded her. She has only deepened as an artist since her dazzling Met debut as Elvira in Ernani. I do not believe there is another soprano living who can touch her in this repertory: her mere presence at Seattle Opera, 100 miles from her birthplace, seemed a miraculous intervention to me, and the audience on Sunday afternoon, thirsty, nay parched for this kind of taste and artistry and presence, provided her the appropriate hosannas.
I must, sadly end this rave, as always, with a boo. As always, Marion McCaw Hall casts its stifling veil over every singer performing on its stage. That the orchestra’s sound is full and detailed only emphasizes the sense of a permanent sonic scrim between stage and audience.
As the Aiden Lang era dwindles to its close, it is more than time that the Opera board confront its biggest challenge yet: the company now has the modern, unified office and tech shop it has needed since the beginning. Now it must face its ultimate challenge: the hall it performs in.
Roger Downey
Cast and production information:
Manrico:Martin Muehle; Azucena: Nora Sourouzian; il Conte di Luna: Michael Mayes; Leonora: Angela Meade; Ferrando: Adam Lau; Inez: Nerys Jones; Ruiz: John Marzano. Stage director: Dan Wallace Miller; Set design (original): John Conklin; most recent revisions: Christopher Mumaw; Costumes: Candace Frank; Lighting: Christophe Forey; Choreography: Kathryn Van Meter. Seattle Opera Chorus, John Keene, chorusmaster. Seattle Opera Orchestra, Carlo Montanaro, conductor. McCaw Hall, Seattle Center, Seattle; Sunday 13th January 2019.