Opera Today

Mozart: Così fan tutte - Royal Opera House

Sir Thomas Beecham was probably over-egging it a little when he described Così fan tutte as resembling “a long summer day spent in a cloudless land by a southern sea”. Very little - actually none - of that comes across in this production, but there is something to be said for the lithe, effortless way in which the conductor, Stefano Montanari, keeps the music moving. The delicacy of Mozart’s scoring, the beautiful - almost tangy - woodwind phrasing were played like lyrical instrumental waves rippling through the orchestra. This had the benefit of focusing attention on Mozart’s glorious ensembles and arias which sounded fresh enough to leap off the pages of the score - and there was no lack of soul-searching in many of the solos. Beecham may have been right after all.

I’ve always rather sided with those - perhaps an unfashionable view to hold these days - who find the libretto and plot of Così slightly weak and rather concocted. Given the length of the opera, Mozart - rather uncharacteristically - doesn’t develop the motives of fidelity and honour completely satisfactorily. But that is not to say there aren’t complex attitudes towards femininity and love because there are. Gloger’s production does little to enlighten us, however. There is perhaps some truth in the view that Mozart was a largely theatrical composer when he came to writing his operas so Gloger’s idea of setting the whole work in Alfonso’s ‘theatre’ seems a logical extension of this. But that overwhelming ambition Gloger has to be theatrical glosses over what is so disturbing about this opera. Often, I thought I was sitting through scenes from a Comedy of Errors or a Midsummer Night’s Dream. Gloger’s production is so literally theatrical it forgets that Così is a heavily ambivalent opera, almost a little unnerving in its treatment of women. It’s such a comic tour de force (and this production is very funny, the play between Orendt’s Guglielmo and Fanale’s Ferrando almost recalling Laurel and Hardy at times) that self-knowledge is either taken for granted or simply elided over altogether.

For Gloger, Don Alfonso’s theatre is viewed entirely as an experiment, a laboratory in which to match-make and explore the complexities of love and fidelity. Arguably, his reasoning has as much to do with the psychology of the process as it does with the emotional circumstances of it but it’s the very concept of the multiple scene changes which makes the whole production such a chaotic - and often crowded - flop. It begins off stage from one of the opera boxes which, depending on your point of view, either draws the audience in, or does the opposite; likewise, a tendency to place the scenery to the forefront pushes the singers too far forward for no demonstrable purpose other than to make the production seem small in scale. Proscenium arches give height, but they’re often so bleak - a simple black brick wall, for example - that the singers seem to be squeezed into the centre of them as if you’re watching them on a television screen. A railway station with a vast clock is almost occluded in smoke; a brightly lit steel-framed cocktail bar (rather better done by Bieito, I seem to remember), a semi-wilting tree with an unconvincing serpent wrapped around it didn’t really convince me. Muscled stage hands, with tattoos, or cigarettes between their lips, shifting scenery or drawing up backdrops merely add to the clutter.

Where the production has a strength is that it advances the contemporaneous nature of relationships from its original setting. The idea that a modern day Così might demonstrate that couplings can be torn apart by infidelity and betrayal isn’t revolutionary but Gloger stops short of being truly shocking as Bieito (in his Don Giovanni) didn’t. Gloger’s Guglielmo ends up becoming a slightly tragic figure for whom love is an empty vacuum; Ferrando comes closest to the ideal of faithfulness but only because he recognizes he is in danger of abandoning it altogether. Dorabella doesn’t seem to know what she wants. Fiordiligi becomes the most deceitful and confused of all. Alfonso’s experiment might be seen as the masterful duplicity and manipulation that it is - just as Despina’s disguises are masks of elaborate confusion. All of these aspects of love collide and entangle in this production even if you don’t necessarily grasp it by the end.

In a way, it’s quite surprising given how I generally didn’t warm to the production how riveting I found much of singing. Much of this was beautifully sung - and exquisitely - if perhaps - a little over-acted. Così fan tutte undeniably contains some of Mozart’s most ravishing music and the casting here was nigh ideal in balancing the voice colours. There was some unanimity in the bass-baritone of Gyula Orendt’s Guglielmo and the tenor Paolo Fanale’s Ferrando - the parallels of warmth and contrast to the voices were like the equivalent of a harmonious echo. Salome Jicia’s Fiordiligi was gloriously pitched, Serena Malfi’s Dorabella a little more understated - but rich enough and fully convincing. Thomas Allen’s voice has waned a little - but no one sings the role of Alfonso with more irony, or sheer joy - and today there are just hints of tragic overtones to it. Serena Gamberoni’s Despina was a glorious portrait in wit and soubrette and deliciously funny.

That richness in Serena Malfi’s voice was magnificent in ‘Smanie implacabili’ - taken with a beautiful soaring line and an almost tragic intensity. Stefano Montanari tended to drive the music fast - especially in Act I - so if Malfi were intent on bringing some added depth to her singing it wasn’t always apparent. The prominence that Montanari gave to the woodwind, however, was often a sublime foil against the warmer richness of Malfi’s voice - even at these brisk tempos. Oddly, he seemed to slow down for Ferrando’s ‘Un’aura amarosa’ which was perhaps the highlight of Act I. The sheer beauty, the beguiling tonal colour, the careful phrasing and the ability to hold the most exquisitely shaped pianissimo were simply jaw-dropping. It’s the only time throughout the opera you felt a singer was entirely drawing the audience into this rather self-destructive world - a quite magical moment. If there was a wonderful serenity to much of Fanale’s singing - and he never really felt constrained by the intensely lyrical size of his tenor voice - Orendt’s Guglielmo rather revelled in the vast comic scale of his arias. It’s not just that the voice is so large, but it’s that it also has such a developed and innate sense of character. The voice can sound mocking one moment - almost like a foil to Thomas Allen’s Don Alfonso - but the next it seems to imitate the orchestra - how some of Orendt’s notes rang out against some of the brass fanfares, as if in a comic duet, was thrilling. Salome Jicia was colossal in her ‘Fra gli amplessi pochi astanti’ - thrilling in her high notes and riding over the orchestra, somehow seeking to assert her dominance over both the men as her prospective lovers.

Stefano Montanari - making his house debut - managed to get the Royal Opera House orchestra to play with a lightness of touch which was admirable. The opening to Act II can - in the wrong hands - sound like a Bruckner adagio and Montanari came close to making it do so. But at his best, which was much of the time, this was a performance of the score that was fleet and, shrewdly, highlighted individual instruments within the orchestra. There was a period feel to all this - without it overtly being one.

Covent Garden’s Così fan tutte is one that is predominantly rescued by the singing and conducting; it would, largely, sink without a trace if that weren’t the case.

Marc Bridle

Paolo Fanale - Ferrando, Gyula Orendt - Guglielmo, Thomas Allen - Don Alfonso, Salome Jicia - Fiordiligi, Serena Malfi - Dorabella, Serena Gamberoni - Despina; Jan Phillip Gloger - Director, Stefano Montanari - Conductor, Julia Burbach - Revival Director, Ben Bauer - Set Designer, Karin Jud - Costume Designer, Bernd Purkrabek - Lighting Designer, Royal Opera House Orchestra & Chorus.

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; 25^th February 2019.

Gavin Higgins' The Monstrous Child: an ROH world premiere

Following somewhat in the line of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Coraline - last year’s premiere for children - Gavin Higgins’s The Wondrous Child, to another libretto by a children’s author, this time Francesca Simons, seems to me to have a good chance of prospering not only in that specific role, but also more generally. It is certainly a successful first opera - from the Linbury, from Higgins, from Simons, and indeed from the production team and performers, without which any single effort would likely come to naught. Opera, we were reminded, is above all a company effort - which should, of course, include the audience too. Let us hope, then, that plenty of teenagers were among those who were able to secure tickets before the run sold out; and/or that further tickets will be released, as often happens in practice.

Many - though perhaps not so many of us on the first night - will doubtless come to the opera through Simons’s book ‘of the same name’, as Peter Cook and Dudley Moore might have had it. Not that there is anything of ‘Little Miss Britten’ here; for not only is the plot drawn from Norse mythology, from the myth of Hel, goddess of the dead; the libretto is distinctly on the Anglo-Saxon and perhaps even the Norse roots of the English language. Had his English been better, Wagner might have lauded the lack of Latinism. The immediacy, not to mention the ‘earthiness’ of some of the vocabulary make particular sense in a primaeval realm - and will surely appeal to teenagers of all ages in the audience too. To a certain extent, staging and score work with that, performances perhaps still more so; they also recall (to us), however, consciously or otherwise, that we are no more Anglo-Saxons than we are Norse gods. The false immediacy of which Wagner could occasionally - very occasionally - prove guilty in theoretical, though never dramatic, writing stands always in need of puncturing in our modern condition. That is not a value judgement, simply an observation.

Simons knows that as well as Higgins, as well as by director, Timothy Sheader and his team. And so, we are reminded by the puppetry in the first half of the staging, actors and singers lightly detached - this is not The Mask of Orpheus, nor does it try to be! - from their characters in some cases, as well as by Hel’s narration of that first part, the later character recounting the deeds of the child-puppet her, that even in - particularly in - a drama dealing with (supposedly) eternal gods, time plays a mediating role. Again, Wagner of all musical dramatists could have told us that - and does. Higgins offers much in the way of readily associative and memorable leitmotifs in his score, as well as plenty of ‘atmosphere’ and ‘action’, after a fashion that would surely make sense to teenagers - and others - accustomed to the ways of film scores, without ever sounding ‘like’ film music. Video and electronic sound help us shift between locations, for instance from the gods realm in the skies to the place of Hel’s banishment, from which she will bring about the end of the gods’ rule.

Leaving aside the (understandable) exaggeration about what opera ‘is’, for it can be any number of things, one knows what Simons means when she writes in the programme: ‘It took me a while to understand how different writing a libretto is to writing a novel. Opera is much more direct: people say what they think - repeatedly. Opera is so heightened, it really is the perfect way to express the emotion and epic sweep of myths about gods and giants, love and hate, as well as a young girl’s journey towards creating her own life.’ To my mind - and increasingly on reflection - Simons and Higgins achieve this with great success here. Pacing is different too; the analogy Simons draws with a picture book - ‘the words need to allow space for the illustrations’ - is interesting. Again, one senses a true collaboration: between librettist and composer, of course, but also with the production team and performers.

Marta Fontanals-Simmons gave a fine performance as Hel: half goddess, half corpse. Never sentimental - she does not want mere pity - she involved us in her plight, her hopes, her decision through sheer force and variety of vocal personality. Rosie Aldridge and Tom Randle impressed and (not a little) repelled as her parents: those who cursed her and ultimately the world by bringing her into it. Lucy Schaufer proved typically compassionate as the giantess Modgud, keeper of the bridge to Niflheim and the dead. Odin, king of the gods, received a sharply observed performance from Graeme Broadbent, taking us plausibly from hauteur to downfall. Dan Shelvey’s Baldr, as carefree and compassionate in tone as the lovelorn Hel thought him, offered a performance both delightful and moving. The Aurora Orchestra under Jessica Cottis could hardly have offered surer advocacy in the pit.

Mark Berry

Hel: Marta Fontanals-Simmons; Angrboda: Rosie Aldridge; Loki: Tom Randle; Modgud: Lucy Schaufer; Baldr: Dan Shelvey; Odin: Graeme Broadbent; Nanna, Thora: Elizabeth Karani; Actors and Puppeteers: Laura Caldow, Stuart Angell. Director: Timothy Sheader; Designer: Paul Wills; Lighting: Howard Hudson; Video: Ian William Galloway; Movement: Josie Daxter. Sound Intermedia/Aurora Orchestra/Jessica Cottis (conductor).

Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, London, Thursday 21 February 2019.

Elektra at Lyric Opera of Chicago

In the title role of Elektra Nina Stemme’s multi-faceted portrayal commands attention, even during moments of silence or merely by an implied presence. Elektra’s sister Chrysothemis is sung with wrenching urgency by Elza Van Den Heever. Their brother Orest, as portrayed by Iain Patterson, is an emotionally committed figure whose heroic stature emerges in response to requisite action. Klytämnestra and Aegisth are performed by Michaela Martens and Robert Brubaker. Donald Runnicles conducts with masterful control the Lyric Opera Orchestra. Mme. Stemme and Messrs. Patterson, Brubaker, and Runnicles make their Lyric Opera of Chicago debuts in these performances.

Despite the protagonist’s absence in the initial scene, her essence pervades the steps of the palace. In answer to the question, “Wo bleibt Elektra?” (“Where is Elektra?”), the orchestra supplies a response: Runnicles elicits a palette of darting colors and fractured chords from the Lyric Opera Orchestra as if to suggest the patterns that have altered any sense of Elektra’s equilibrium. Once she appears and commences her monologue, Stemme’s Elektra wavers between controlled reflection, expressed piano, and flights of hysterical determination delivered with piercing top notes. The horror of her father’s murder and the subsequent transformation of the royal linger here in cries of anger yet also in shudders of repulsion. This trajectory of identification with Elektra’s persona grows only deeper throughout the evolution of Stemme’s performance.

Vital to this production, and in the spirit of Strauss’s conception, is Elektra’s interactions with others – both in and beyond her immediate family. The hesitant notes expressed by Van Den Heever’s entrance prompt Elektra to dwell on the potential malleability of her sister in securing an ally. The voices of both sopranos mingle, at rimes, in lyrical union until the failure of any cooperation becomes clear to the initiator of vengeful plans. Stemme’s subsequent confrontation with Klytämnestra enhances the tensions between two figures neither of whom will yield her ground. Martens does not rely on caricature to define the self-contained cause of Elektra’s anguish. Instead, she faces her daughter with the attempt at composure while inadvertently succumbing to glances of apprehension. Martens’s departure reflects a forced attitude of dignity since he has stared into the eyes of gleaming justice. Elektra’s encounter with Orest and the ultimate realization of her plan shows the complexity of Stemme’s approach reminiscent of the earlier monologue. She is at first cautious, then peals of controlled emotional relief sweep over the Grecian princess. After the moving scene of recognition, there is still work to be done. Patterson is especially effective as Orest: a growing resonance pulses in his voice as he nears the moment of revealing his identity. Once Elektra sends him into the palace, Stemme’s portrayal begins a final transformation. Her frantic search for the forgotten axe sways into the triumphant cry of “Triff noch einmal!” (“Strike once more!”) as Klytämnestra ‘s shrieks resound from within the palace. In a final semblance of control the daughter of Agamemnon leads Aegisth to his punishment when he comes tripping along in a daze of confusion. Stemme’s play of gentility here costs her final shred of stability. When she initiates her dance in this production Stemme appears in an apotheosis of light, so different from the grey and dull tones of the struggles highlighted earlier in this production. As she falls lifeless, the light is extinguished, her task is done, the surviving siblings must persevere in her spirit.

Salvatore Calomino

Handel Singing Competition semi-finalists announced

The adjudicators for this year’s Competition include Ian Partridge CBE, Catherine Denley, Michael George, Lawrence Zazzo, Rosemary Joshua and Jane Glover. The semi-finalists will be accompanied on harpsichord and will each sing for fifteen minutes in an all-Handel programme. Five or six singers will proceed to the final in April and will be accompanied by the London Handel Orchestra and Laurence Cummings, musical director of the London Handel Festival. St.George's, Hanover Square is of course the church where Handel himself worshipped, and the Festival continues his great tradition of nurturing young talent through the Handel Singing Competition.

All of the finalists are between 23 to 34 years old and will be competing to win one of four prizes: First Prize (£5000), Second Prize (£2000), Audience Prize (£500) and the Finalist Award (£300).

"I am thrilled with the response to the Handel Singing Competition this year, with a record number of applications from across the world, demonstrating that this is a truly international event. Congratulations to all the Semi-Finalists - we look forward to hearing you all on 5 March!" Samir Savant, Festival Director - London Handel Festival

The Handel Singing Competition has been held annually since 2002 and has grown year on year, aiming to continue Handel’s tradition of nurturing young talent. Past finalists include Ruby Hughes, Iestyn Davies, Lucy Crowe, Tim Mead, Sophie Junker and Anna Starushkevych. The Competition works with an impressive line-up of adjudicators, and past judges include James Bowman, Iestyn Davies, John Mark Ainsley and Rosemary Joshua. All of the finalists from this year’s Competition are guaranteed a lunchtime recital in the 2020 London Handel Festival.

https://www.london-handel- festival.com/page/competition/ 24/
For information about the London Handel Festival click here

Longborough Festival Opera founders to receive Wagner Society award

The award comes as Longborough announces its new Ring cycle, following their critically acclaimed 2013 cycle which established the festival as a destination for Wagnerians around the world.

Lizzie Graham comments: “Martin and I are delighted to receive this award on behalf of the whole team at Longborough who work so hard to make Wagner successful here, and are currently helping to put our new Ring cycle in place.”

Six Charlotte Mew Settings: in conversation with composer Kate Whitley

When Mew died in 1928, the obituary in the local newspaper was painfully terse: ‘Miss Charlotte Mary New [sic], ... a writer of verse.’ Today, while Mew’s poetry is admired by a small but ardent group of devotees, her name remains largely unfamiliar, although a forthcoming biography of Mew by Julia Copus, to be published by Faber, will bring the poet’s life and work into the public eye.

It was a life of tragedy and torment, illness and incarceration. Mew’s aunt and uncle, on her mother’s side, both suffered from insanity and were institutionalised. Of the seven children of Frederick Mew, a struggling architect, and Anna Kendall Mew, only four survived childhood. When she was nineteen, Charlotte’s eldest brother, Henry, afflicted by what would now be diagnosed as schizophrenia was sent to a mental institution, where he spent the last thirteen years of his life. Charlotte’s younger sister, Freda, then in her early teens, was similarly plagued. Financial hardship followed Frederick’s death in 1898 and Charlotte, her sister Anne, and their mother moved into a rented home, subletting the upper floor and eking out a frugal existence. Her mother died in 1923, and when Anne succumbed to cancer four years later Charlotte began to suffer from delusions. When, in February 1928, she was diagnosed as neurasthenic, she voluntarily entered a nursing home, where on 24 March she committed suicide by drinking Lysol. [1]

Diminutive, prone to wearing dull men’s suits, swearing and smoking with equal vigour, Mew must have cut an odd figure even among the poets who gathered at Monro’s Poetry Bookshop. Mew apparently told her friend Alida Monro that she and her sister had determined early in life ‘that they would never marry for fear of passing on the mental taint that was in their heredity’ - perhaps influenced by the prevailing new theories in eugenics. Her lesbianism only intensified her feelings of isolation and alienation.

However, beneath her reserved and reclusive manner, passion burned fiercely. Though reluctant to recite her poetry at public readings, when she did accept an invitation Mew startled the audience: ‘They sat facing the little collared and jacketed figure, with her typescripts and cigarettes … Once she got started (everyone agreed) Charlotte seemed possessed, and seemed not so much to be acting or reciting as a medium’s body taken over by a distinct personality. She made slight gestures and used strange intonations at times, tones that were not in her usual speaking range.’ [2]

Mew’s poetic voice is soon to be heard again, in a new expressive form. Composer Kate Whitley has set six of Mew’s poems for soprano, bass and strings, and these songs will be presented as part of a special concert at Temple Church, London on Tuesday 30 April . The programme has been curated by bass Matthew Rose, and brings together soprano Katherine Broderick, pianist Anna Tilbrook and violinist Jan Schmolck to celebrate music for voice commissioned by the Michael Cuddigan Trust. Also on the programme is the world premiere of a new work by David Bruce, plus Martin Suckling’s Songs from a Bright September, works which were similarly commissioned by the Michael Cuddigan Trust, of which Rose himself is a trustee. Rose comments, “Michael Cuddigan, along with his wife Anne, were so kind to look after me as a student in Aldeburgh for many years. Michael had the most amazing love for music and musicians, and we started this Trust five years ago in his memory. I’m greatly looking forward to this exciting evening of new works performed by some of the country’s leading musicians.”

Kate is a composer-pianist and co-founder of The Multi-Storey Orchestra, which, from its base at Bold Tendencies car park in Peckham, takes professional performances to local schools and further afield. She has frequently striven to take classical music into new contexts and before new audiences. Her concert piece, Sky Dances, was performed at Trafalgar Square as part of a programme that brought together the LSO, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and 70 young musicians from East London. Paws and Padlocks, a children’s opera about two children who get trapped overnight in a zoo, was performed at Blackheath Halls in 2016, while Speak Out, which set words by Malala Yousafzai, was performed by BBC National Orchestral and Chorus of Wales on International Women’s Day 2017 in support of the campaign for better education for girls. NMC Recordings released a CD of her music, I am I say , in 2017.

I ask Kate what it was that had drawn her to Mew’s poetry. She explains that the initial impetus came from Sir Stephen Oliver, a Trustee of the Michael Cuddigan Trust and the great-nephew of Mew’s life-long friend Ethel Oliver, who got in touch with Kate and, giving her copy of Mew’s collected works, suggested that she might compose some settings. Kate had never heard of Mew but found the poems instantly appealing and absorbing; she discussed Mew’s work with Julia Copus, whose knowledge and love of the poems were of enormous value as she guided Kate’s selection of three poems, her choice being influenced by length and theme. ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ was framed by two shorter poems, ‘Rooms’ and ‘Sea Love’, and these three songs were performed by Matthew Rose and the Albion Quartet in Orford Church in June 2017. Kate has now composed three further settings - ‘I So Like Spring’, ‘Absence’ and ‘Moorland Night’ - which will be sung by Katherine Broderick on 30 April.

Mew strips bare the inner lives of her poet-speakers, with often painful honesty. There is a driving tension between restraint and release - as if Mew wants both to speak out and hold back. Images of confinement allude to the social structures which force women into emotional, physical and financial dependency on men. But, for all her personal idiosyncrasies, Mew was no ‘New Woman’, and remained a Victorian in her social outlook, lamenting the loss of old certainties as the world moved forward into the age of modernity, of uncertainty and crisis. I wonder whether Kate finds, as I sometimes do, the wrought emotional intensity of Mew’s poems somewhat overwhelming? On the contrary, Kate tells me, that it was this very intensity, conflict and rawness which she found so moving.

She was, though, initially a little daunted to be confronted with texts so different from anything else she had previously set to music. The rhyming couplets of ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ and the regularity of the form of ‘Sea Love’ seemed to demand regular phrase shapes, an approach to text-setting which was contrary to Kate’s usual, instinctive practice. But, in the event, the way the poetic form imposed itself upon the musical form was a positive stimulus, for it seemed to offer a way of capture the tenor of Mew’s world and our distance from the historical past: “It felt natural to compose in this way; it was the best way to communicate what the poem says.”

‘The Farmer’s Bride’ is a man’s account of his marriage to a woman who rejects his attentions and demands. One night she escapes but is hunted down by her husband and other villagers who find her among a flock of sheep. The crowd ‘caught her, fetched her home at last/ And turned the key upon her, fast’. She submits to the conventions of domesticity, ‘So long as men-folk keep away’, and each night climbs a stairway: ‘sleeps up in the attic there/ Alone, poor maid’. I wonder if Kate hears the speakers in Mew’s poems as being male or female? The speakers in Kate’s second set of poems could be either, she says, but it’s a male voice we hear in ‘The Farmer’s Bride’. We never actually hear the voice of the young girl after whom the poem is named, and this is the point - she is described from the male point-of-view, a ‘madwoman in the attic’:

Three summers since I chose a maid,
Too young maybe—but more’s to do
At harvest-time than bide and woo.
When us was wed she turned afraid
Of love and me and all things human;
Like the shut of a winter’s day
Her smile went out, and ’twadn’t a woman—
More like a little frightened fay.

I agree with Kate that here Mew assumes a male voice in order to communicate strong erotic desire: the man’s lament is not for his young bride’s sadness and suffering, but for his own unfulfilled desire.

The image of the locked room or enclosed space recurs repeatedly in Mew’s poems, exposing her loneliness, and we find it elsewhere in Kate’s settings. ‘I remember rooms that have had their part/ In the steady slowing down of the heart’ says the speaker in ‘Rooms’, noting that ‘The room is shut where Mother died’. The word ‘shut’ reappears in ‘Absence’ - ‘In sheltered beds, the heart of every rose/ Serenely sleeps to-night. As shut as those/Your guarded heart;’ - and ‘Moorland Night’: ‘My eyes are shut against the grass’.

These poems have a dramatic lyrical tone, but the rhythms are restless as the forms frequently juxtapose extremely short and long lines which tug against the underlying meter, and the rhyme schemes are complex. I wonder whether these formal idiosyncrasies were disinclined to lend themselves to musical setting? Again, Kate seems to have found such elements creatively inspiring. She describes the way in which the voice and strings work together, sometimes the voice leading and the strings accompanying, elsewhere the strings coming to the fore between the lines or at the end of stanzas, and this seems to me to imitate the restless conflicts and tensions within the poems.

‘Moorland Night’ is the final poem in The Farmer’s Bride. Here, Mew seems to find resolution in nature:

My face is against the grass - the moorland grass is wet -
My eyes are shut against the grass, against my lips there are the little blades,
Over my head the curlews call, And now there is the night wind in my hair;
My heart is against the grass and the sweet earth, - it has gone still, at last;
It does not want to beat any more,
And why should it beat?
This is the end of the journey.
The Thing is found.

In an essay, ‘The Poems of Emily Brontë’, which is printed in Mew’s Collected Poems & Prose, Mew described Brontë as ‘a self-determined outlaw’, ‘a soul which scorns the world with masterful persistence and disclaims all comradeship save that of the “strange visitants”’. Brontë’s poetry is, she says, ‘dominated by a note of pure passion … a passion untouched by mortality and unappropriated by sex, the passion of angels, of spirits, redeemed or fallen, if such there be and sorrow of an ever-unsatisfied desire, she looked out upon the world, which the sad circumstances of her environment, together with the gloomy bias of her nature, showed so dark, with a curious indifference and mistrust’.

These words might equally describe Mew and her own poetry.

Kate Whitley’s Six Charlotte Mew Settings can be heard at Temple Church on 30th April 2019.

Claire Seymour

Expressive Monteverdi from Les Talens Lyriques at Wigmore Hall

It gave us a welcome opportunity to hear the zest and zip of Christophe Rousset’s Les Talens Lyriques - Rousset, stood with his back to us, his hands hovering with vivid alertness above the keyboards of the organ and harpsicord, a bundle of bristling energy - and to appreciate the expressive talents of three singers who, though familiar and esteemed presences in the concert halls and opera houses of Europe, are less frequent visitors to these shores.

‘Chiome d’oro’ from the Sixth Book of Madrigals (1619) got things underway, the entwining tenor voices of Swedish haute contre Anders J Dahlin and Norwegian Magnus Staveland spinning ‘tresses of gold’: there was joy and lightness of spirit, and a combination of precision and elasticity in their silkily unfolding phrases and melismas; and, the fluctuation of tempi gave the impression of being both flexible and controlled, as the music conveyed the sweep of varied emotions. The mood was never too earnest and retained its playful bite. Both singers studied in Copenhagen, Dahlin at the Royal Conservatory of Music and Staveland at the Royal Opera Academy. They joined forces again in ‘O sia tranquillo il mare’ (Whether the sea be calm) from the Eighth Book, Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi, and here they exploited every wonderful dissonance, ‘Mai da quest ’onde io non rivolgo il piede’ (I shall never again turn my steps back to this ocean), throbbing with the pain of betrayal. As the strength of their lamentation for the faithlessness of the poet-speaker’s beloved was expressed in a musical shudder, both body and soul grieved. A poignant tierce de Picardie, ‘E spesso ancor t’invio, per messagieri’ (often I send messages to you), seemed to suggest a hope which then proved false, as the tenors swelled through their pain: ‘A ridir la mia pena, e’l mio tormento’ (to tell you repeatedly of my pain and my torment). Coming together in the closing, summative lines, they articulated the moral - he who entrusts his heart to a lady and his prayers to the wind, can hope for no mercy - in dark, low voices. This was a performance that was at once visceral, spontaneous and expressively calculated to make its effect felt.

Between these tenor duets, soprano Eugénie Warnier performed ‘Quel sguardo sdegnosetto’ (That disdainful little face) from the second book of Scherzi musicale (1632). I enjoyed the strong sense of engagement between the voice and Isabelle Saint-Yves’ cello line, and the flashes of joy which propelled the music towards its triple meter, though I found Warnier’s tone a little ‘white’: pure and clean, yes, but full and diverse enough to capture every drop of nuance that Monteverdi squeezes from the text? - I wasn’t so sure. And, the very purity of the sound, here and elsewhere in this performance, made the tuning of some cadential phrases difficult to secure, as the floating soprano hovered rather than skewered the pitched, while the string and continuo issued a grainier hue. Warnier’s sensitive performance of ‘Ohimè ch’io cado, ohimè’ (Alas, I am falling, alas) - the ending was exquisitely still and poised - was preceded by Giovanni Kapsberger’s Sinfonia prima à 4 con due bassi (1615). Here, we enjoyed the balletic violin fingering of Gilone Gaubert and Virginie Descharmes which flirted with Angélique Mauillon’s harp and the ripples of Laura Mónoca Pustilnik’s lute, a silky ribbon against the gravellier organ and cello timbre. Was Kapsberger’s Sinfonia offered as an instrumental complement to Monteverdi’s experiments with vivid declamatory expression? Or as a palette cleanser? Or simply to give the singers a rest? The Sinfonia was not mentioned in Alexandra Coghlan’s programme note, and no other items by Kapsberger, or for instruments alone, were performed.

Scalding dissonances returned in the tenors’ duet, ‘Ardo e scoprir, ahi lasso, io non ardisco’ (I burn and, alas, I do not dare to reveal); there was delicious bittersweet-ness which epitomised the contemporary aesthetic - ‘Per trovar al mio mal pace e diletto’ (to find, in my woe, peace and delight’ - and wonderful gradations of intensity as the rhetorical fragments formed a cogent whole. The first half concluded with the ‘Lamento d’Arianna’ from Arianna. Oh, that more of this contribution to the commemoration of the marriage of Francesco Gonzaga and Marguerita of Savoy was extant! One wonders what the newly-weds made of this ‘celebratory’ expression of such pain and torment … a suffering which, perhaps, expresses a sorrow bound up with Monteverdi’s own dissatisfaction, grief and restlessness in 1608. As early as 1601 he had written to the Mantuan Duke expressing his concern that court intrigues might deprive him of his place, and recording his affliction by illness, poverty and overwork, and a talent overlooked. In September 1607 his wife died; two weeks later Monteverdi was summoned to Mantua to write Arianna for a wedding which would take place by proxy in Turin in February 1608 and be celebrated in Mantua with two weeks of festivities in May 1608. The title role was to have been taken by Catérina Martinelli, pupil of Monteverdi’s wife who had lived with him from 1603, but in March 1608 she died of smallpox and the role was sung by Virginia Ramponi: she was reputed to have learned the part in six days and her emotive performance to have moved many to tears. No wonder that Monteverdi later remarked that Arianna had almost caused his own demise.

Warnier moved with freedom and naturalness through the lyrical arioso - the vocal line is less rhythmically complex that the idiom of Orfeo - and fused music and language to express deep and diverse human emotions. Her soprano was quite withheld at the start, allowing the harp and lute to articulate the sentiments of the text, and the escalation of intensity and rhetoric was admirably controlled, as was the responsiveness of the instrumental lines to the voice. I wondered, though, whether it was wise to position Warnier in the centre of the Wigmore Hall platform behind the instrumentalists: could those seated directly behind Rousset see her at all? So much depends not just on the vocal expression but on the ‘lived’ embodiment of emotion: one thinks of the Three Ladies of Ferrara, famed as much for the luxuriant effusiveness of their manner and presentation as for the beauty of their voices and their ability to execute elaborate ornamentation.

After Warnier’s rendition of ‘Si dolce è’l tormento (So sweet is the pain), the second half of the programme was dominated by Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda - based on Tasso’s mock-chivalric account in Gerusalemme liberate of the duel between Tancredi, the Christian soldier, and Clorinda, the Muslim warrior he loved, which ends with the death of Clorinda - which was composed in 1624, commissioned by Monteverdi’s patron Girolamo Mocenigo.

Interestingly, in comparison to the 1607 Orfeo, the practicalities of the premiere of which we know little, Monteverdi took great care to describe how this work should be performed - details which, for obvious reasons of practicality were not realised here. The two combatants were to be armed, Tancredi arriving ‘on horse’, Clorinda from the other side. There was to be no scenery. The instrumentation was also unusually precise: four viola da gamba. And, Combattimento should follow swiftly from the preceding madrigals in Book Eight, without gesture, with no warning. Clearly Monteverdi was determined it would make the utmost theatrical and expressive effect.

Here, such ‘effect’ was largely due to Staveland’s stunning control of the dominating narrative. His engagement and concentration never wavered; he united the drama; and though the melodic range of the narrator’s part is quite narrow he conjured variety and power, mirroring the passions of the text, and differentiating between direct speech and narration. I was transfixed. Tancredi and Clorinda are not able to express their own emotions until the very end. Dahlin’s high tenor line was both fraught with tension and softened by sentiment: a real human appeal, driven by an insistent and compelling anger. The instrumental playing was precise but never rigid - indeed, even quite ‘fey’ at times: the shivering concitato repetitions had real grace, while pizzicato swords clashed brightly and fanfares ‘trumpeted’ in rich triadic pronouncements.

This was a fairly short concert and so we were treated to an encore - though at over ten minutes, Luigi Rossi’s Serenata a tre voci: Amante ‘Rappresentan gl’orrori di questa notte’ might have been more appropriately positioned within the declared programme, which would have at least given us access to the text. It made for a divertingly light, and however well sung and played, not wholly satisfying close to the intense musico-dramatic expression of love and war which had preceded it.

Claire Seymour

Les Talens Lyriques : Christophe Rousset (harpsichord), Eugénie Warnier (soprano), Anders J Dahlin (tenor), Magnus Staveland (tenor)

Claudio Monteverdi - ‘Chiome d’oro’, ‘Quel sguardo sdegnosetto’, ‘O sia tranquillo il mare’ (Settimo libro de madrigali); Giovanni Kapsberger - Libro primo di sinfonie a quattro voci; Monteverdi - ‘Ohimè ch’io cado, ohimè’, ‘Ardo e scoprir’ ‘Lamento d’Arianna’ fromArianna, ‘Sì dolce è’l tormento’, Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda

Wigmore Hall, London; Thursday 21^st February 2019.

"It Lives!": Mark Grey 're-animates' Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

They included the gloriously named Humgumption; or, Dr.Frankenstein and the Hobgoblin of Hoxton (1823), Frank-in-Steam; or, The Modern Promise to Pay (1824), and Another Piece of Presumption (1823) in which Peake delivered a burlesque on his own play - one of the first light-hearted treatments of what was to become a cultural icon, and anticipating subsequent humorous explorations of the ‘myth’, such as Mel Brooks’s 1974 film Young Frankenstein, a comedy which itself pays homage to Universal Studios’ Frankenstein films of the 1930s.

When Mary Shelley gave literary life to her now infamous Dr Frankenstein and his progeny-cum-doppelgänger, she surely could not have imagined that her text would take on a life of its own, its offspring during the following 200 years being assembled from a miscellany of bits and parts much like the creature itself. Recently widowed, financially insecure, a single mother, in August 1823 Shelley returned to England hoping for support from her in-laws, only to find that success came from unexpected quarters. On 24 August, she wrote to Leigh Hunt, ‘But lo & behold! I found myself famous! - Frankenstein had prodigious success as a drama & was about to be repeated for the 23rd night at the English opera house’. [1]

The wellspring of dramatic, cinematic and balletic adaptions has seemed infinitely fertile. The first silent screen adaptation came in 1910; James Whale’s 1931 film, which was based on Peggy Webling’s stage version, spawned a ‘Bride of’ and ‘Son of’, cementing the image of Boris Karloff’s creature in the cultural consciousness. The title of Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 film, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, attests to its wish to honour its source with veracity; The Rocky Horror Show gave us the transvestite Dr Frank N. Furter. Nick Dear’s version for the National Theatre (2011) alternated Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller in the roles of creator and created. A female Frankenstein trod the boards in Greyscale and Northern Stage’s 2017 production of Selma Dimitrijevic’s variant on Shelley’s novel, as one Victoria Frankenstein overcame restrictions upon women’s study of science in England by travelling to Bavaria to study chemistry and cadavers. With Doo-Cot Theatre’s Frankenstein - the Final l, which features ‘an 8-foot animated creature [with] live digital imagery and projection, a specially-composed soundtrack and choreography’, Frankenstein firmly entered the technological age.

The novel and our response to it have evolved in time, as we develop our own narratives in relation to the original text, explains composer Mark Grey, whose new opera Frankenstein will premiere at La Monnaie in Brussels from 8 - 20 March 2019, directed by Àlex Ollé ( La Fura dels Baus) and conducted by Bassem Akiki.

Shelley’s text, which incorporates contemporary scientific developments such as galvanism and vitalism, is often viewed as a cautionary tale of over-reaching technological endeavour and the failure of science to regulate itself. But the novel’s social and cultural implications are much more complex. Indeed, in conversation with Mark, I suggest that the challenge of creating an opera from a text which bursts and bristles with such wide-ranging themes and debates - the questing Romantic hero, scientific experimentation, social democracy versus the fear of the inchoate revolutionary mob, the innocence of childhood, Gothic horror and terror, patriarchal oppression, male fear of female fertility and procreative power, the blasphemous usurpation of God’s role and the penalties for violating Nature - is a daunting one.

Very aware of the potential traps that are lying in wait for the composer who attempts to adapt a literary text for the operatic stage, Mark explains that the opera that he and his librettist Júlia Canosa i Serra have created does not - indeed, given the complexity of its narrative structure, cannot - tell the novel verbatim. Rather than looking back he has looked forwards, pulling the novel from its literary past and propelling it several centuries into the future. He has aimed both to respect Shelley’s text, and its place in history, and to create a work which is expressive of the day in which we live. After all, he remarks, Shelley’s own novel melded voices and echoes from various texts - Paradise Lost, ‘The Ancient Mariner’, the Prometheus myth - inside a new literary “umbrella”.

Grey describes his aim to make a “visceral connection” with what Mary Shelley was experiencing at the time that she wrote her novel: guilt for the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the vehement advocate for women’s rights who died eleven days after the death of her second daughter; and for the death of her own premature infant; and remorse at not having been more attentive to her half-sister Fanny, whose depression led her to commit suicide.

I suggest to Mark that this theme - death as an ever-present companion to birth - seems to me to be the heart of the novel. Victor Frankenstein, too, is motherless; what he calls the ‘first misfortune’ of his life, when he mother dies having caught scarlet fever from his cousin Elizabeth, is both the birth of his awareness of the potential of modern science, and ‘an omen, as it were, of my future misery’. Victor comes to fear that, should their union be consummated, his beloved Elizabeth will become pregnant and die. Indeed, the dream which Victor has just after bringing his creature to life is telling: ‘I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel.’ One is put in mind of a dream that Shelley recorded in her journal on 19 March 1815, shortly after the death of her first child: ‘Dream that my little baby came to life again - that it had only been cold and that we rubbed it before the fire & it lived.’

Mark suggests that patriarchal dominance, too, is also a covert element within Shelley’s story, as well as her ‘difficult’ relationship with her father, William Godwin. Indeed, in the introduction to her novel she notes the Percy Bysshe Shelley was, ‘from the first very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage’, and years later she recorded in her journal, ‘I was nursed and fed with a love of glory. To be something great and good was the precept given me by my father: Shelley reiterated it’.

But, many early versions, particularly the Hollywood accounts of the narrative which stamped the powerful visual imagery of Boris Karloff’s creature on our collective consciousness, have in Mark’s words, “stripped out” the tale - whether motivated by the need to entertain, or by time constraints - and it is the desire to retrieve some of what has been “lost” that has influenced Mark’s and Júlia Canosa i Serra’s approach. I wonder whether the narrative structure - a Chinese-box form, with its framing letters from Robert Walton, who meets Victor on the frozen expanse of the Arctic as the latter quests for a vengeful reunion with his creature; the creature’s first-person retrospective account; and sundry inter-woven letters and diary entries - is a prohibitively complicated basis for an opera libretto. Mark is quick to agree - after all, who knows whether Walton hasn’t gone crazy too! - but he explains that he and Canosa i Serra have “unravelled the onion” of the narrative, and given priority to the creature’s narrated memories of its ‘birth’, development, acquisition of language, and of its rejection by those human beings that it encounters, to create a subjective flashback.

It’s a flashback that is set in the future. Mark reminds me that Walton is the only person other than Victor to see the creature as it heads towards its professed funeral pyre at the North Pole. In Mark’s opera, a team of scientists, re-enacting Walton’s quest, so to speak, find the preserved form of the creature in the granite blocks of ice, and re-animate it. The story thus begins with remembrance of the past.

So much of our response to the creature depends on the rhetorical power of its appeals to its ‘maker’, I suggest: it is less ‘monster’ and more ‘poet’? Does Mark’s musical language attempt to guide us towards a sympathetic, even empathetic response to the creature? Mark’s interest in issues of social justice has been informative here, leading him to emphasise Shelley’s criticism of the social injustices and prejudices of her day. They are, after all, our own, Mark points out: we only have to look at the situation in the US today (and in the UK and Europe, I add), where racial concerns about the ‘Other’ are feeding oppression, suffering and violence. His opera retains the ‘blind man’ of the original: the father of the De Lacey children whose close family bonds, despite their poverty, teach the creature values of kinship, community and compassion. Unaware of the creature’s physical appearance, the blind man appreciates the creature’s care and articulacy, in contrast to even the ‘innocent’ children - like William, Victor’s younger brother - who recoil at its physical ‘ugliness’, which they associate with evil and menace. One thinks of the Syrian refugees trying to relocate into Europe, Mark says, and the way the ‘outcast’ is such a powerful emblem of social prejudice and injustice today.

In addition to his extensive work as a composer - which has included world premieres at famous concert halls including Carnegie Hall and The Walt Disney Concert Hall, and commissions by prestigious organisations including the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra - Mark is also an Emmy award-winning sound designer, having collaborated with composer John Adams and others for over three decades. In 2002 he pioneered the way as the first sound designer in history to design for the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fishery Hall; and, Mark was the artistic collaborator and sound designer for On the Transmigration of Souls by John Adams, which commemorated the lives lost in the World Trade Centre Attack on September 11, and for which Adams won a Pulitzer Prize.

Mark sees technology as a way to both draw out the fantastical elements of Shelley’s story, and to make it more ‘believable’. After all, what is ‘reality’ today, he asks? We have AI, robotics, drones that fly themselves and are fighting wars. I guess that I am one of the ‘academics’ whom he describes, with their head and pens down! But, Mark’s ideas about how one might find a way to express the contemporary “balance between creator and created”, something which is perhaps “unknown”, are engaging and intriguing.

As Mark explains, the creature begins life like a child - one rejected by its ‘parent’, who recoils from a gaze which reflects his ‘self’: Victor cringes when ‘his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me’. The creature grabs Victor’s notes and begins to assemble words into language, and to comprehend through reading, that he is ‘other’ and ‘outcast’. Mark’s music seeks to communicate this process: initially the vocal writing for the creature is melodramatic, as he hangs on a vowel or employs fluid melisma; but, as he assembles words and pushes then into more formal rhythmic combinations, he becomes more musically articulate, and confident.

I had read that Mark and Júlia Canosa i Serra aimed originally ‘to cast the Creature in as much of an androgynous light as possible, falling somewhere between genders’. Mark explains that the first performance of the opera had been planned for the La Monnaie in 2016, but that structural renovation of the house had resulted in a delay. Originally, they had envisioned the monster as being of ambiguous sexual identity - it is assembled in the novel from ‘bits’ - and had considered casting the creature as an en travesti role. However, further consideration had led them to conclude that this might confuse the story, and so the idea of making the creature a high tenor came to mind. Mark comments that in the novel the creature is fighting for its identity: both its social and sexual identity. It has almost supernatural physical powers of speed and strength, but speaks with eloquence, sensitivity and insight. Mark had worked with Finnish tenor Topi Lehtipuu in the past, and at 6 foot 7 inches or so, and with a slender frame, not to mention a light but strong high tenor voice, he seemed perfect for the role. The opposite, one might think, of Boris Karloff’s lumpen, lurching ‘monster’.

After the Monnaie production, Mark will head to Rome in April for a performance of his Frankenstein Symphony at the Auditorium Parco della Musica, given by the auditorium’s Contemporanea Ensemble and conducted by Tonino Battista. The piece is an exciting collaboration with the National Geographic, who are bringing their Festival of Sciences to Italy’s historic capital with the theme of invention. At the time of the initial postponement of the production, Mark took the opportunity to extract five scenes from the opera and transform these into instrumental form. He explains that it was helpful to hear these orchestral presentations of his work, and to connect musically with the score before it was staged - the difference between musical and theatrical time is something to which he returns during our discussion. It was a luxury to be able to re-examine and re-adjust the score - to “nip-and-tuck” (the scientific metaphor seems apt!) - and to be able to make it more agile in places, not so heavy, he explains. The Frankenstein Symphony is essentially a ‘symphonic suite’, which transfers writing for voice into instrumental form: a complex process of revision and assemblage from diverse parts.

Looking ahead, I ask Mark about his new project, to be presented in April 2020, Birds in the Moon - a travelling chamber opera for two voices and string quartet, which will be staged in a mobile shipping container, exploring themes of migration and immigration. This is a work which really will be ‘brought to the people’: a shipping container will be converted into a ‘magical box’, the sides of which open to form a stage - a sort of “travelling carnival”, Mark suggests. This is a work that he imagines travelling “down South”, to the US border with Mexico, though since it will be ‘housed’ on the back of a truck, it could pretty much roll up anywhere, and the shipping container could serve as a metaphor for industrial sweat shops as much as for deportation compounds.

In the Introduction to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus Mary Shelley bids her ‘hideous progeny go forth and prosper’. Does she mean the creature? Or, her own text? She speaks, after all, of her ‘affection’ for the latter, ‘for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone ...’. The novel embodies Mary Shelley’s struggle to ‘create’. Since its first appearance countless others have sought to re-animate the novel. And, doubtless we all do so in our own image.

Claire Seymour

Bampton Classical Opera Young Singers' Competition 2019

The previous winners were mezzo-soprano Anna Starushkevych (2013), sopranoGalina Averina (2015) and mezzo-soprano Emma Stannard (2017). In 2017 an Accompanists’ Prize was introduced, and the first winner was Keval Shah. Bampton Classical Opera has a reputation for its commitment to young talent and a number of singers who have appeared on the Bampton stage have gone on to work with national companies such as The Royal Opera, English National Opera and Opera North.

The first round of the Bampton Classical Opera Young Singers’ Competition 2019 (closed sessions) will take place on 5 and 6 October in London. The public final will take place in the Holywell Music Room, Oxford, on Sunday 17 November at 6pm. This is always an entertaining and thrilling event, and a chance to hear some remarkable performances. Judges for the competition include two internationally renowned British singers: tenor Bonaventura Bottone and mezzo-soprano Jean Rigby. Bampton is delighted to announce they are joined this year by the esteemed accompanist and conductor Phillip Thomas, who was a vocal coach and répétiteur at English National Opera, and the official accompanist to the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World for many years.

There will be a fund-raising reception for this year’s Young Singers’ Competition on 26 March at the Caledonian Club, Halkin Street, London SW1 . Bampton Classical Opera is honoured that Benjamin Hulett, one of the first young singers to perform with the Company, who now has an international career at the highest level, will launch this year’s competition, talk about his career and give a short recital. He will also be commemorating his 20th year as a professional performer. Benjamin first performed for the Company in 2000 in Stephen Storace’s Comedy of Errors, which is very apt as this year Bampton is staging Storace’s other Viennese opera Bride and Gloom. Benjamin commented: “ Bampton Classical Opera is a brilliant company who work with a lot of rising stars, often spotting them before anyone else, and their performances are excellent .”

Tickets, including champagne, canapés and a ticket to the November final are £60 and will provide all-important support to the competition. For tickets to the fund-raising reception on 26 March contact Anthony Hall, Administrator, Bampton Classical Opera ( anthony@bamptonopera.org)

Competitors for the Young Singers’ Competition 2019 can apply by downloading an application form and information document from the company’s website - www.bamptonopera.org or on request by emailing ysc@bamptonopera.org. Applications open on 1 March, 2019 and close on 31 July.

First (Closed) Round:
Venue: tbc, London
Date: Saturday 5 and/or Sunday 6 October

Final (Public) Round :
Venue: Holywell Music Room, Oxford
Date/Time: Sunday 17 November, 6pm

First prize £1,500 - Second prize £600
There will also be a £500 Accompanists’ Prize.

Previous Winners and Runners-up :
2013
Winner: Anna Starushkevych (mezzo-soprano)
Runner-up: Rosalind Coad (soprano)

2015
Winner: Galina Averina (soprano)
Runner-up: Céline Forrest (soprano)

2017
Winner: Emma Stannard (mezzo-soprano)
Runner-up: Wagner Moreira (tenor)
Accompanists’ Prize: Keval Shah

Petrenko Directs Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis

Though Beethoven himself never heard a complete performance of this craggy mass, he considered it his greatest work. In it, he distilled techniques from an exhaustive three-year study of Western religious music since Palestrina, updating them into a style that presages his late symphonic and chamber works. The result is a sprawling work, constructed out of a dense accumulation of disparate fragments in an almost post-modern manner. Joyous exclamations sit cheek by jowl with tender laments, each painted in contrasting colors, timbres and styles.

Given, in addition, the sheer technical challenge and occasional awkwardness of the solo and choral writing, it is hardly surprising that many performers and listeners find the work unapproachable, even baffling. Yet the challenge has long attracted great conductors: most famously, Toscanini and von Karajan, both of whom tended to treat the work like a grand symphony. In recent years, early music experts Gardiner and Harnoncourt have made the case for a contemplative and less overtly romantic interpretation.

From the first note, one hears Petrenko’s debt to the latter tradition. He insists on extreme transparency, tightly controlled balances, restrained dynamics, rhythmic energy and swift tempos – a gentle, other-worldly approach that projects clearly from the stage of the acoustically near-perfect Nationaltheater. At the same time, however, the warmth and polish of modern orchestral instruments accentuates the romantic side, even if at times one might wish for more expressiveness in the phrasing and exuberance in the fugal climaxes. The unique tension in the Angus Dei, for example, in which forlorn pleas for peace echo above an oddly warlike undercurrent, hardly registers. Still, Petrenko’s compromise is surely preferable to the confused bombast or harsh precision this work often elicits.

The orchestra responded brilliantly, following every command – even at some remarkably swift tempos. As a full-time pit band, they naturally command operatic techniques, such as an aura of rapt transparency by attacking chords at the marked dynamic and then having all but the solo parts fall away. The Staatsoper chorus, too, displayed rare subtlety and blend, even if Petrenko’s restraint and Beethoven’s challengingly high vocal lines sometimes pushed the sopranos to the brink.

The difficulty of Beethoven’s choral writing is exceeded by what he gave the four vocal soloists. Petrenko appears to have selected these singers, which includes notable interpreters of Baroque and modernist works, to complement his understated interpretation. Outstanding was the contribution of Marlis Petersen, who approaches the harrowing soprano part with no apparent strain, perfect intonation and – almost uniquely, in my experience – a warm yet focused tone right up to the top of the voice. Young mezzo Olga von der Damerau responded with equal passion and warmth, if slightly less solid technique. Tenor Benjamin Bruns negotiated the punishingly tessitura clearly and sweetly, despite a tendency (at least early on) to approach notes from below. In any other company, young Bass Tareq Nazmi might have seemed underpowered – one did wish for more passion in the Agnus Dei – yet nonetheless projected with precision and feeling.

It added up to as fine a performance of this great work as one is likely to hear these days. The sold-out crowd of Sunday morning spectators remained utterly silent during the work and responded enthusiastically afterwards.

Andrew Moravcsik

Cast and production information:

Marlis Petersen, soprano; Olga von der Damerau, mezzo-soprano; Benjamin Bruns, tenor; Tariq Nazmi, bass. Kirill Petrenko, conductor. Chorus of the Bayerische Staatsoper. Bayerische Staatsoper. Nationaltheater, Munich. 17 February 2019.

Stéphanie D’Oustrac: Sirènes

D’Oustrac’s Sirènes is also valuable because it demonstrates different approaches to the art of song for voice and piano. Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été op 7, to poems by Théophile Gautier, initially completed in 1841, was exactly contemporary with the works of Schumann’s Liederjahre. Later, Berlioz would expand the accompaniment for orchestra, effectively creating a new genre, orchestral art song, which would be developed later in the century by composers like Mahler and Hugo Wolf. Nonetheless, even in the original form for voice and piano, these songs are highly individual, quite distinct from the songs of Schumann and Mendelssohn. “I only wish people to know that [these works] exist”, wrote Berlioz, “ that they are not shoddy music . . . and that one must be a consummate musician and singer and pianist to give a faithful rendering of these little compositions, that they have nothing to do with the form and style of Schubert’s songs”.

These mélodies of Berlioz are characterized by elegance and restraint. In “Villanelle”, for example, the repeating patterns in the piano part might evoke Schubert, but there’s an effervescent gaiety in them that is matched by graceful flow of the vocal line. In “Le spectre de la rose”, the more languid pace allows the voice to curve sensuously. Berlioz clearly understood the carnal undertones in Gautier’s poetry. The piano part is gentle, but persistent, like an embrace. When D’Oustrac’s tone deepens with the phrase “Ô toi qui de ma mort fus cause”, one can almost sense the perfume rising from the petals of the doomed rose. Although Les Nuits d’été is not a song cycle in the strictest sense of the term, recurring themes of love, and death and perpetual change give it a coherence which is particularly clear when it is performed with the intimate focus that a single singer and pianist can achieve. The three songs, “Sur les lagunes : Lamento”, “Absence” and “Au cimetière: Clair de lune”, form a unit, sombre with the stillness of the tomb, which is then broken by “L’île inconnue” where the ebullient high spirits of “Villanelle” return. Les Nuits d’été begins with promise of Spring and new life, and ends with adventure. “La voile enfle son aile, La brise va souffler.”, D’Oustrac breathing buoyancy into the word “souffler”. Though Heine inspired Mendelssohn and Schumann with dreams of the East, Gautier and Berlioz are tapping into an even deeper vein in the French aesthetic : ideas of freedom, change and new frontiers in exotic settings. D’Oustrac and Jourdan extend Les Nuits d’été by following it with Berlioz’s La mort d’Ophélie, from Tristia op 18, a setting of a ballade by Ernest Legouvé, who, like Berlioz himself, adapted Shakespeare for French theatre. Ophélie, who dies for love, floats upon a torrent, depicted in the rippling piano part. “Mais cette étrange mélodie passa rapide comme un son”. Though the voice imitates a lament, this is not so much a song of mourning but a transformation through music. The stream carries “la pauvre insensée, Laissant à peine commencée Sa mélodieuse chanson.”

This recording is titled Sirènes, tying Berlioz’s songs together with Richard Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, both inspired, in part, by women who awoke strong emotions. Sirens, who attract but aren’t necessarily positive, though they generated great art. With full orchestration, the Wesendonck Lieder showcase Wagnerian flamboyance. But, as with Les Nuits d’été , voice and piano versions concentrate focus on a more intimate scale. Even more pertinently, this highlights Wagner’s place in the context of the Lieder of his time, and in relation to Schumann and Franz Liszt. “Der Engel” is gentle, and the dramatic declamation of “Stehe Still !” more human scale. D’Oustrac and Jourdan are particularly impressive in “Im Treibhaus”, the sensitivity of their expression reflecting the intense inwardness that makes Lieder as powerful a genre as opera.

One of the most iconic siren figures of 19th century Romanticism was the Loreley. This recording begins with one of the most beautiful Loreley songs of all, Liszts’s “Die Loreley” S273/2, a setting of Heine’s poem. D’Oustrac’s silvery timbre illuminates the song, accentuating its mystery. She and Jourdan include another other Liszt setting of Heine, “Im Rhein im schönen Strome”, S272/3 and four settings of Goethe, of which “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh” S306/2 works particularly well with D’Oustrac’s lucid style.

Anne Ozorio

Faust in Marseille

It was a difficult evening at the Opéra de Marseille, a fine cast in service of a production from the Opéra Grand Avignon where stage director Nadine Duffaut has staged 14 productions over the years for her husband Raymond Duffaut, Avignon Opera’s guiding light since 1977 when he was appointed general director by his father, the then mayor of Avignon.

Opera in the south of France traditionally has been mired in politics, the complexities of which extend to the complicities of the Provençal opera houses. This 2017 Avignon Faust soon travels from Marseille to Nice for performances in May.

Mme. Duffaut is in fact an able metteur en scène. Her 2016 Opéra Grand Avignon production of Katja Kabanova which I saw at the Opéra de Toulon (45 miles from Avignon) proved her to be a meticulous storyteller, Janacek’s turgid tale of the intricacies of family and business coinciding with Mme. Duffaut’s obsession with detail. The Katja Kabanova unfolded in nothing more than a white box, Janacek’s motivic complexities directly objectified by Mme. Duffaut’s actors.

Such was not the case in this much reviled production as seen just now in Marseille. The simple bel canto like dramatic structure of Gounod’s naive story was amplified into a complex, bizarre nightmare that can only be deciphered by Mme. Duffaut. There were actually two Fausts, the old one and the young one. Siebel was not Gounod’s trouser role, instead he was sung by a crippled tenor. There was historical black and white film footage of Valentin’s war that was most likely the Franco-Algerian war. All this to make Gounod’s Faust real.

Nicole Car as Marguerite, Jean-Françoise Borras as the young Faust

The chorus however was an abstract mass of masked black and white movement, the Kermesse enlivened by three contortionist acrobats. Marguerite was at first a huge image projected on a full stage scrim, who later became real in a costume that shouted early 1960’s only to become a huge doll (20 feet or so), then to give birth realistically a vista, and finally to become a shaft of light for her salvation.

Mme. Duffaut’s long time collaborator, set designer Emmanuelle Favre provided a huge, architecturally detailed box, with a shadow box within the back wall covered by a painting of Jesus wearing a crown of abundant thorns (Bosch?) behind which the old Faust appeared from time to time (when he wasn’t writhing on the stage floor). There were occasional projections of leaves, branches and flowers. All in all it was not a pretty sight — what you could see of it through the bizarre lighting effected by Philippe Grosperrin.

77 year-old American conductor Lawrence Foster therefore took the opportunity to forgo exploiting the sweetness of Gounod’s trivial sentimentality in search of a deeper, desperate musical response to the nightmare Mme. Duffaut had erected on the stage. What resulted was a strident deconstruction of French Romanticism, revealing an emotionless musical skeleton. If nothing else this approach revealed the Gounod score to be technically daunting, engendering new respect for the often discounted genius of this composer.

Red shoed Nicolas Courjal was the Méphistophélès. This splendid bass reveled in the lighter banter of Gounod’s score, his words tumbling out into the house providing some moments of true delight in this otherwise lugubrious evening. As did vocal meanderings of the beautifully voiced and extremely well sung Faust of tenor Jean-François Borras, far more at home in French than in Italian as Boito’s Faust (Mefistofele) last summer in Orange. Nicole Car’s Marguerite was a vocal extravaganza indeed, but unlike Faust and the devil she did not find character. Étienne Dupuis as well did not find character in his beautifully sung Valentin, though in his case he was musically trounced by the conducting.

Tenor Kévin Amiel was the frustrating Siebel, frustrating because I really needed the mezzo vocal color. The old Faust, Jean-Pierre Furlan gave Faust’s "Rien! En vain j'interroge" in vocal shreds. Marthe, sung by Jeanne-Marie Lévy, sounded mature indeed. Strangely the student Wagner, played by Philippe Ermelier was about 50 years-old.

Bass Nicolas Courjal travels with the production to Nice. Marguerite there will be sung by Nathalie Manfrino of the original Avignon cast. Stefano Secco will be an Italianate Faust. Italian conductor Giuliano Carella (Toulon Opera’s music director) hopefully may provide a starkly different musical atmosphere though the production will remain hopeless.

Nice be warned.

Michael Milenski

Cast and production information:

Marguerite: Nicole Car; Marthe: Jeanne-Marie Levy; Faust: Jean-François Borras: Vieux Faust: Jean-Pierre Furlan; Méphistophélès: Nicolas Courjal; Valentin: Étienne Dupuis; Wagner: Philippe Ermelier; Siebel: Kévin Amiel. Orchestre et Chœur de l’Opéra de Marseille. Conductor: Lawrence Foster; Mise en scène: Nadine Duffaut; Décors: Emmanuelle Favre; Costumes: Gérard Audier; Lumières: Philippe Grosperrin. Opera de Marseille, Marseille, France, February 16, 2019.

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Down in flames: Les Troyens, Opéra de Paris

Anyone can trot out superficial clichés about so-called modern productions, but it's far more important to understand why a production works, or doesn't. The starting point as always is the opera, and the ideas behind it.

Berlioz captured the expansive, extravagant spirit of his time. France was resurgent, colonizing Africa and Asia, obliterating the defeat of Napoleon with new confidence. Paris was being rebuilt on a grand scale. Yet Berlioz, never a shrinking violet, intuited the hubris that comes with imperial glory. Les Troyens is flamboyant, but its backdrop is catastrophe. Empires are annihilated, nations forced into exile. Berlioz's orchestration reflects this turbulence, with blazing highs and apocalyptic darkness. Though Didon and Enée enjoy an interlude of heady bliss, their happiness is doomed. That idea of glory cursed by hubris remains powerfully potent today - perhaps even more so now, given what's happening in the world. Perhaps audiences don't want to be reminded about war in Syria (and Lebanon, where Tyre was) and of the hundreds of thousands of refugees in the Mediterranean, many escaping from the area that was Carthage. Fair enough. There's no more reason that a production should be set in period costume. In any case, Berlioz wasn't doing history enactment, and the audiences of his time were conditioned to the past as allegory, Classical Antiquity rather than Antiquity Realism. Berlioz's music was audacious, possibly the most advanced and adventurous of its time. Shock and awe were part of his aesthetic. Les Troyens doesn't have to be pretty - cosiness is decidedly not its message - but at least it should engage the mind.

Dmitri Tcherniakov productions don't generally appeal to me because he tends to decorate rather than engage with what ideas might be in an opera. His Glinka Ruslan and Lyudmila for the Bolshoi was as inert as a Fabergé egg, (read more here), his Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk for ENO put Shostakovich on mute (more here), his La Traviata for La Scala died in the womb (here) and his Rimsky-Korsakov's Invisible City of Kitezh missed the magic so fundamental to the opera (please read Amsterdam's invisible, risible Kitezh here). But I loved his Bizet Carmen at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2017. The drama in Carmen isn't the kitsch surface so much as the way the characters act out their motivations to extremes. Thus Carmen as transaction analysis is not only feasible, but full of insight. Perhaps Tcherniakov was trying to recap that Carmen with Les Troyens, but frankly, he needs to work with a good dramaturge.

Michèle Losier (Ascagne), Brandon Jovanovich (Énée), Stéphanie d'Oustrac (Cassandre), Véronique Gens (Hécube), Stéphane Dégout (Chorèbe) Photo credit: Vincent Pontet.

Tcherniakov sets the Troy part of Les Troyens as a fairly typical tin-pot dictatorship, which is not wrong in principle, but there is a lot more to Berlioz's Troy than this. Cassandre is the central character, not Priam and his court, and she is cursed because she can prophesy the future. Stéphanie d'Oustrac was stunning, stealing the show by her vocal presence and instinctive feel for creating character. I was riveted : she's a force of nature. But all Tcherniakov had to offer her was a yellow suit , standing out from the blue shades around her, and when the Greeks burst in they hardly seem to figure. Anyone who didn't get the Horse in David McVicar's Les Troyens for the Royal Opera House should be forced to watch Tcherniakov til they squirm. There is no reason to assume, like the Trojans and Tcherniakov do, that the impending disaster is all in Cassandre's mind.

D'Oustrac's Cassandre was matched by Stéphane Degout's equally impressive Chorèbe, sung with such depth and conviction that he made the role come alive, so vivid and human: what a pity that Chorèbe has to die in the First Act ! Luxury casting: d'Oustrac and Dégout interacted so well, and with such verve that their performance would be memorable on its own terms.

Photo credit: Vincent Pontet.

Carthage here is an anonymous office space, which worked fine in Tcherniakov's Carmen, because it evoked the displaced ennui behind the desperation of Carmen and her companions. But as the libretto makes clear, Didon's Carthage is a happy place, where people have built constructive lives. Didon is a much loved success : she's given others asylum, she's not "in" an asylum, needing help. Unless you think that being kind to refugees is madness. Had the performances of Brandon Jovanovich and Ekaterina Sementchuk been on the same level as D'Oustrac and Dégout, one might forgive the banal staging. Jovanovich and Sementchuk weren't bad, but didn't quite rise to the heights, either. A rather depressing Royal Hunt and Storm, saved by Jordan's incisive conducting, splendidly luminous in the love scene, and demonic in the storm. So rewarding, in fact, you could enjoy this Les Troyens as an orchestral exercise.

Very well cast lesser roles - Véronique Gens as Hécube and Paata Burchulzade as Priam, who can still create character, Thomas Dear as The Ghost of Hector, Aude Extrémo as Anna, Cyrille Dubois as Iopas,Michèle Losier as a very fetching Ascagne, Christian van Horn as Narbal. At the end D'Oustrac, Dégout, Gens, Burchulzade and Dear return as ghosts, raising the staging from the grave. With this conductor, this orchestra and most of this cast, this Les Troyens could have been brilliant, but let's hope we won't have to wait another 30 years for a better production. This staging might be fine in some provincial house, but Paris is not the place for it.

Anne Ozorio

image=http://www.operatoday.com/troyens_paris.png
image_description=Scene from Les Troyens [Photo © Vincent Pontet / OnP]

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product_title=Hector Berlioz: Les Troyens. Philippe Jordan (conductor) Opéra national de Paris, Stéphanie d'Oustrac, Stéphane Dégout, Brandon Jovanovich, Ekaterina Sementchuk, Véronique Gens, Paata Burchuladze, Thomas Dear, Aude Extrémo, Cyrille Dubois, Michèle Losier, Christian van Horn. Livestreamed on arte tv. 1st February 2019.
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Luminous Mahler Symphony no.3: François-Xavier Roth, Gürzenich-Orchester Köln

The Gürzenich Orchestra gave the world premiere of this symphony in Cologne on 9th June 1902, conducted by Mahler himself, who also conducted the premiere of his Fifth Symphony with the orchestra, in October 1904. Though its personnel have changed, the repertoire remains close to the orchestra's core. François-Xavier Roth follows in the footsteps of Michael Gielen, who conducted the Gürzenich Orchestra and conducted Mahler with the innovative SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg, where Roth was the final Chief Conductor.

The lucidity of this performance should come as no surprise, especially to those who have been following Roth and the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln over the last few years, and not just in Mahler, though their recording of Mahler's Symphony no.5 is highly recommended. The first movement of Mahler's Symphony no.3 is huge, almost a symphony in itself. Roth grasps its internal structure, bringing out its formidable architecture. The opening theme is strongly shaped, creating the pattern of "peaks" (trumpets and trombones) and "valleys" which are very well defined, muffled trumpets and solo trumpet calling out into the distance, the strings and winds adding sweetness. Roth emphasises the pattern with very quiet, muffled percussion, before the next sequence, where the trombones call, heralding the way ahead. This deliberation respects the marking "Kräftig. Entschieden" but also contributes to the interpretation of the symphony as a whole. From steady discipline, the symphony progresses : the apotheosis at its conclusion is reached only by a process, which includes struggle as well as moments of loveliness. As if the goal were in sight, the pace speeds up towards the end of the first movement : turbulent excitement, hurtling forwards, winds, trumpets and trombones leading into the next phase,buoyed up by cheerful, almost swaggering woodwinds. If Mahler's entire output can be heard as one great symphony, its basic ideas repeated and developed, the first movement of the Third Symphony is a microcosm in itself. Mahler's original title for this movement was "Pan Awakes, Summer Marches In". Even without the label, it's clear from this performance what he meant : vigour and freshness.

The second part of Mahler's Symphony no.3 begins with a movement "tempo di minuetto a dance between two partners, extending the pattern in the first movement, but also evoking the idea of dialogue that rises so often in Mahler, even up to the Adagio from what would have been his Tenth Symphony. The dance element brings out the best in Roth, given his background in French repertoire, so strongly influenced by the patterns of dance and precision. Elegance does count in Mahler and highlights the subtlety in his orchestration. This pays off too in the third movement, where details like the quote from the Wunderhorn song Ablösung im Sommer ("Kuckuck ist tod!") aren't there simply for decoration. In the song, summer is not over, though the cuckoo is dead, since the Nightingale takes over and "singt und springt, ist allzeit froh, Wenn andre Vögel schweigen". As in so much of Mahler's work, death is not an end but a stage in a process, where death is defeated by new forms of life. Thus the flutes and piccolos, giving context to the posthorn. This is heard from offstage, invisible but powerful. Does it suggest distance, or memory or future hope ? The "kuckkuck ist tod" figure returns, cheekily and leads the orchestra into another dance, whipped almost into frenzy, before the posthorn calls again, and the pace descends, like twilight into night. Yet again, the resurgent pattern returns, with a finale of energetic affirmation, not defeat.

From brooding near silence (basses and celli), Sara Mingado, the alto, emerges, singing a text from Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra: "O Mensch! Gib Acht!", her voice illuminated by motifs on violin and clarinet, which here sound non-western, which is quite approrpiate : this is no mainstream "Christian" symphony. Something is gestating. The misterioso of the fourth movement gives way to the joyous fifth movement, significantly scored for youthful, fresh-sounding voices. Mingardo is now haloed by the Women's choir of Schola Heidelberg and the youth choir of the Kölner Dom. The words "Bimm bamm" supposedly evoke the sound of bells marking celebration.

The forward thrust of the journey in the first movement is now drawing to resolution. In the final movement, marked "Ruhevoll", lines stretch, as if reaching into distance: strings now dominant, winds adding depth, brass responding. Exquisite playing from the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln : the refinement feeling almost luminous. Here, too, the structure involves a series of stages, observed more carefully by Roth than by conductors who push too much towards the ending. As in the first movement, purposeful progression matters, for the reward is worth the journey. The tuba announces one transition, a flute another. Very natural-sounding trumpets recall the Alpine landscape aspects of the symphony, bringing echoes of past memories - and of the posthorn - together with hopes for the future. Unity at last, the different sections of the orchestra in concert (literally) with each other. Thus the deep feeling that grows ever more secure as the movement proceeds, culminating in the coda where the timpani pound, not so much MGM glitz but with the depth and conviction of a strong heartbeat.

Anne Ozorio

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Andrew Davis conducts Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ at Hoddinott Hall

That this meditation on Christ’s infancy is still pertinent today, with its themes of political ambition and religious intolerance, came across with considerable force, not least through the ideal pacing from Andrew Davis who steered the combined forces of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and its Chorus through an almost uninterrupted 90-minute traversal.

Clearly, much of the success was also due to four outstanding soloists, but their varied levels of communication raised questions, if not issues, about the nature of a work which traces the biblical story from Herod’s dream, through the flight into Egypt and on to the Holy Family’s arrival in Sais as refugees. It’s a hybrid work that conforms to the conventions of oratorio and yet rubs shoulders with opera. Indeed, one might suggest L’enfance du Christ is an oratorio wanting to be an opera - albeit a gentle, pastoral one, its dramas (mostly evoked and narrated) contained within a series of tableaux that occupy a mainly devotional mood. Yet its few theatrical moments such as Herod’s scene with the mysterious soothsayers in Part 1 and Joseph’s attempts to find shelter in Part 3 create an operatic dimension that simultaneously blurs distinctions of genre.

This was strikingly apparent in the contrasting manner of delivery from the soloists: Matthew Brook appeared to embrace the work as opera. He inhabited his dual roles as a malevolent and paranoid Herod and later as a compassionate Ishmaelite father with evident conviction, enjoying his characterisations and seemingly transforming the platform into a stage. His rich baritone wrapped itself with growing torment around his Part 1 soliloquy, and was sung so mellifluously he almost drew our sympathy. Whilst there wasn’t quite enough menace or projection in his lower register, there was enough cutting-edge timbre above and detailed expression to bring off a persuasive performance that seared itself onto the memory.

Berlioz characterises other roles less generously and which, arguably, belong more to oratorio than to opera. Nonetheless, they were sung here with clarity and nobility from Roderick Williams and Sarah Connolly as Joseph and Mary. However well executed in terms of intelligent musicianship and depth of experience, these were stand-and-deliver performances with plenty of gravitas and fervour but an absence, at times of tenderness and even fragility - possibly coming over better on the live transmission. Doting parents? More like a visiting uncle and aunt and their first scene together seemed too uninvolved to sustain dramatic tension. Connolly’s voice is a less flexible instrument these days but her hardening of tone to evoke desperation on the journey to Sais was well served.

Andrew Staples, as a clear-voiced Narrator, sang with polished tone throughout - bringing a range of colour and subtlety to the role as if born to it, singing off the voice with effortless control (‘Tous attendaient’ near the beginning was exemplary) and outlining events with a burnished eloquence. His gentle evocation of the infant Jesus asleep en route to Sais was simply stunning.

The BBC National Chorus of Wales was also in fine shape, whether as Ishmaelites, soothsayers and shepherds, the latter catching the ear in Part 2 for an intensely wrought leave taking of the Holy family, its pppp dynamic scrupulously observed for the final verse. Even more magical was an angelic semi-chorus purring repeated ‘hosannas’ and ‘halleluias’ off stage to wondrous effect and the work’s ethereal apotheosis could not have been better judged - the chorus transcendent.

Let’s not forget the orchestral players who provide much of the work’s cinematic detail - to which BBCNOW carried with obvious relish, Chief amongst many felicitous passages included a superbly disciplined cabalistic dance (with razor-sharp strings), unrestrained brass to convey Herod’s terror and flute and strings bringing affection to frisky lambs by the stable in Bethlehem. An exquisitely played Trio for two flutes and harp confounded the idea that this passage robs Part 3 of momentum.

Yet it was momentum that Andrew Davis - a thoroughbred Berlozian - supplied in spades, directing with demonstrable enthusiasm and flexibility, keenly responsive to the music’s shifting colours and moods. From those strange woodwind sonorities at the start to the closing a cappella Christian message, the work’s characteristic restraint was lovingly conveyed, tempi perfectly judged for the music, performers and venue. Perhaps too, Davis is also The Ultimate Romantic.

David Truslove

Berlioz: L’enfance du Christ Op.25

Sarah Connolly (mezzo-soprano), Andrew Staples (tenor), Roderick Williams (baritone), Matthew Brook (bass-baritone), Sir Andrew Davies (conductor), BBC National Orchestra of Wales, BBC National Chorus of Wales (chorus master: Adrian Partington).

Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff; Friday 15th February 2019.

Love Songs: Temple Song Series

Not a solo vocalist, but rather four young prize winners - a soprano and mezzo soprano, a tenor and a baritone - serenaded us, and each other, during this recital of Romantic lieder, for solo and ensemble voices, in Temple Church.

When Brahms sent the manuscript of his first book of ländler-like Liedeslieder Walzer Op.52 to his publisher Simrock, in 1869, he described the set of eighteen songs for four voices and piano four hands as Hausmusik. Perhaps an expression of his growing passion for Robert and Clara Schumann’s third daughter, Julie, the songs, when still in manuscript form, would have been first performed at domestic gatherings in Clara’s house in Baden-Baden, during the summer of the preceding year. Gemma Summerfield, Fleur Barron, James Way and Julien van Mellaerts were not exactly gathered around Julius Drake and Stacey Bartsch, seated at the Steinway positioned where the Round Church meets the nave, but they made a potentially intimate group.

Unfortunately, the acoustic of this medieval/Gothic revival church does not naturally lend itself to multitudinous melodising, especially when a quartet of vibrato-heavy operatic voices does battle with the fan of the underfloor heating system, as was the case during the first seven of the Liedeslieder Walzer on this occasion. Initially, at least, it was quite difficult to take in the resonant richness of the quartet as they launched with zeal into the quasi-Schubertian vigour of the waltzes, with their boisterous swinging cross-rhythms and vivacious romantic dialogues.

But, the sixth waltz, ‘Ein kleiner, hübscher Vogel’ (A pretty little bird), more lightly traversed diverse moods, and Gemma Summerfield’s subsequent rendition of ‘Wohl schön bewandt’ (All seemed rosy) offered a vocal sheen and sensitivity of expression which were cleansing. The ensemble timbre was particularly tender in ‘Wenn so lind dein Auge mir’ (When you gaze at me so tenderly), while ‘Ein dunkler Schacht ist Liebe’ (Love is a dark pit) pushed forward with fitting urgency. James Way impressed in ‘Nicht wandle, mein Licht’ (Do not wander, my love), singing with yearning tenderness but with sufficient focus and weight to avoid over-sweet sentimentality, and making much more of the words than was possible in the ensembles.

The original publication described the vocal/chorus parts as ‘optional’, and Brahms’s piano parts are characteristically rich in detail and nuance. The two pianists brought as much variety as they could to the tripping lilt and sway, and did not let a detail pass them by, as when Drake’s low, dark bass line at the start of, ‘Die grüne Hopfenranke’, gently evoked the “green tendrils of the vine” that “Creep low along the ground”. In the concluding ‘Es bebet das Gesträuche’ the piano staccatos wryly mimicked the trembling foliage which itself embodies the shudders of the poet’s heart when he thinks of his beloved.

It’s no doubt a matter of personal taste, but despite the variety of poetic moods, I found the incessant triple-time meter - and Brahms is not averse to an oom-pah-pah - and rich vocal blend somewhat relentless: rather as if one had over-indulged on Sachertorte with hefty dollops of Schlagobers. It doesn’t help that the texts, translations by poet and philosopher Georg Friedrich Daumer of East European folk poems, are rather undistinguished.

The fifteen songs of Brahms’s Neue Liebeslieder Walzer Op.65 (1875), which closed the concert, are however both more light-footed and more sincere of sentiment; there is less ebullient hopefulness and good cheer, and more doubt and disenchantment - perhaps expressive of Brahms’s anguish when his beloved Julie married an Italian nobleman, Count Marmonto Di Radicati, just a few days after the completion of the Op.52 set.

Here, too, one finds greater diversity of texture with many of the songs being written for solo voice or duet, and more imaginative engagement with the texts in the piano accompaniments. Drake and Bartsch swirled eerily at the start of ‘Finstere Schatten der Nacht’ (Sinister shadows of the night) and their enthusiastic pounding in the Russian-Polish dance song, ‘Vom Gebirge, Well auf Well’ (From the mountains, wave upon wave) was matched by the quartet’s exuberance: as if everyone had downed a few shots of vodka during the interval.

The soprano has the lion’s share of the solos, and if an overly wide vibrato weakened the focus of the line in ‘An jeder Hand die Finger’ (I had adorned the fingers), then Summerfield soared with simple grace through ‘Rosen steckt mir an die Mutter’ (My mother pins roses on me). She valiantly attempted to make a narrative of ‘Alles, alles in den Wind’ (Every single thing you say to me), frowning indignantly at Way during his ardent rendition of the preceding ‘Ich kose süß mit der und der’ (I sweetly caress this girl and that). Jan van Mellaerts displayed strong rhetorical power in ‘Ihr schwarzen Augen’ (You, jet-black eyes) and Fleur Barron was similarly adept at slipping into different personae, the sensuous layers of her mezzo bringing expressive depth to ‘Wahre, wahre deinen Sohn’ (Protect, protect your son). The soprano-alto duet, ‘Nein, Geliebter, stezte dich’ (No, beloved, do no sit), was one of the evening’s highpoints, the beautifully reverent tone enhanced by Drake’s soft low pedal and the delicately running inner lines of the accompaniment.

In the final song of Brahms Op.65 set, the poet-narrator of Goethe’s ‘Nun, ihr Musen, genug!’ (the only text not by Daumer) dejectedly banishes the Muses which have failed him in his quest to expressive the anguish of love-sickness. The Muse certainly didn’t desert Robert Schumann when he composed his Spanische Liebeslieder Op.138 (1949), the two books of which framed the interval. Schumann sets texts from the German poet and philologist Emanuel von Geibel’s Volkslieder und Romanzen der Spanier, translations of songs and poems by Spanish and Portuguese Renaissance poets, and if there is nothing that called be termed ‘genuinely Spanish’ about these ten songs then there are rich colours, occasionally darkened with sombre shadows, toe-tapping bolero rhythms and guitar-like textures that inject an uplifting spirit. But, more than that, the songs have a sincerity and naturalness of expression as conveyed, for example, by the stillness and focus that Summerfield controlled with such poise at the close of ‘Tief im Herzen trag’ ich Pein’ (Deep in my heart I bear my grief).

The ladies’ duet, ‘Bedeckt mich mit Blumen’, was ripe with drama and feeling. Van Mellaerts sang the romance, ‘Flutenreicher Ebro’ (Surging River Ebro), as he strolled amidst the audience seated in the nave, and if the text that he sang in the second stanza bore little resemblance to that printed in the programme, then his delicate pianissimo in the subsequent stanza and the earnest heightening of the plea, ‘Fragt sie, fragt sie’ (Ask her, ask her), were plentiful compensation for the lapse of memory. The singers indulged in some quasi-operatic playfulness in ‘Blaue Augen had das Mädchen’ (The girl has blue eyes), the urbane charm of Way and van Mellaerts eventually winning over the disdainful Barron.

And, there was more fun and ‘theatre’ at the close, in an encore which reprised one of the Brahms waltzes which had opened the concert, but reinterpreted, with more unbridled spice and glee. Here, at last, we could imagine the depth of Brahms's infatuation with Julie that led him to texts that both captured and inflamed his dreams - “Tell me, maiden dearest, who has with your glances roused these wild ardours in this cool breast of mine, will you not soften your heart?” - and also the exquisite blend of pleasure and pain that those song-filled evenings in the Schumanns’ salon must have brought him.

Claire Seymour

Gemma Summerfield (soprano), Fleur Barron (mezzo-soprano), James Way (tenor), Julien van Mellaerts (baritone), Julius Drake (piano), Stacey Bartsch (piano).

Brahms - Liebeslieder Walzer Op.52; Schumann - Spanische Liebeslieder Op.138; Brahms - Neue Liebeslieder Walzer Op.65

Temple Church, London; Thursday 14^th February 2019.

Philip Glass: Akhnaten – English National Opera

Sitting through English National Opera’s production of Akhnaten, you clearly get the sense that there are many bars of great music here, written by a great composer, but what this opera shares with Satyagraha, which was staged at ENO last year, is an overwhelming sense that Glass simply doesn’t know when to finish what he has started. To suggest the ends of his operas are interminable is something of an understatement. They go on. And on.

I’m not sure it helps that in recent years there has been a tendency to take Glass’s music more slowly - each of the three acts here was longer than advertised in the press notes, and the performance itself was significantly broader than the only recording of this opera. This had benefits - and drawbacks. Visually, Phelim McDermott’s direction is stunning - it’s beautiful to look at, the colours are distinctively Egyptian (the blues, purples, oranges and golds), the heat from the sun is often so bright you can feel its warmth against your face, and there are clever juxtapositions between symbiology and elements of the scenery - but it is also full of distractions. If I found the performance often to be lacking in power, and slightly flat in expression - contrary to the widely held belief that Minimalism doesn’t have the musical range to be expressionist - it was undeniably beautifully sung and, in the case of Act II, almost overwhelming so.

Akhnaten is, I suppose, what you might call a palindromic opera. This isn’t just in the narrative - starting with the funeral of Amenhotep III and ending with the death and funeral of Akhnaten himself; it’s also reflected in the recapitulation of the music, too, at either ends of the opera (though in typical Glass fashion he goes on. And on.). Almost identically palindromic are the orchestral and vocal timbres of the opera itself and the great repetitions you hear in both. There are no violins, so the balance given to the orchestra is predominantly dark; on the other hand, Akhnaten is sung by a counter-tenor and Nefertiti by an alto so they, too, occupy an almost identical range albeit at polar opposites of the sound spectrum. A great production of Akhnaten doesn’t ignore these spatial contrasts - and ENO’s comprehensively embraces them. The almost hieroglyphic symbiology which appears on the backdrop during the opening orchestral prelude to the opera is itself a kind of symmetry to McDermott’s direction: a square frame comes to represent ‘The Window of Appearances’, an image of steps reflects the iron staircase a fully naked Akhnaten descends before his coronation ceremony and which he later climbs to get closer to the sun, and a symbol of a house defines the reign of the young pharaoh himself.

One of the blessings of this production is that it remains so relatively close to the libretto and its historical reference points. Glass does fit a lot into a short time span - an entire almost two-decade reign. One could argue the essence of agelessness, and immortality, is ever-present, only for it to be cruelly cut down by death itself. Glass’s “portrait” operas are, after all, about historical figures who live long after their events, who shape humanity in their own time and forever afterwards. But Akhnaten’s reign was about cult, it was about redefining the very concept of religion itself and the ruin and unrest of a society that never accepted it. In that sense, Akhnaten has a particular relevance that is still being fought about today - but if you look slightly deeper beyond the surface of McDermott’s production he also touches on social division, race and gender identity, for example.

Akhnaten’s recognition of the sun - or Aten, predominantly the sun disc and its rays of light - is the dominant visual image of the production. It is exactly that - a vast disc - blinding in Act I, but by Act II is set in the background as something to be reached towards against a myriad of sunsets and sunrises. The cleverness of Bruno Poet’s lighting is that the colours merge and distort and change and are so subtle that the eye never really notices them until after they’ve happened. The overwhelming memory of Act II - and it’s a powerful one - is of Akhnaten slowly climbing the stairs to get closer to the sun, almost to become consumed by and absorbed into it. Strip lights are used to show rays of sunlight fanning out of Akhnaten like a brilliant plume of peacock feathers. And yet, the mythology of human destruction - that getting too close to the sun is fatal - never quite strays far from the mind.

I had mentioned at the beginning of this review that there are some distractions. This is mainly to do with the juggling - done with quite mesmerising effect by the Gandini Juggling Company. The booklet notes do suggest that this art-form was commonplace in Ancient Egypt so it isn’t as if it’s just there for no purpose - and, in fact, their purpose is quite a symbolic one in McDermott’s production. It’s clearly completely absorbing to watch, and I think if your peripheral vision is good enough you can clearly focus on what is happening elsewhere on stage too. The distraction is really at a human level in that you constantly (or, I certainly did) felt disaster was just around the corner: a clash of balls here, batons that slip between fingers. Technically, it was extraordinarily balletic and often coalesced around Glass’s music. Symbolically the balls do represent the disc of the sun, but most cleverly of all is their use during the death of Akhnaten himself. As the jugglers throw the balls high up into the air and let them drop to the floor the effect is of an executioner’s axe.

The casting of this production is superb - I’m not really sure it has a single weak link. Anthony Roth Costanzo, singing the role of Akhnaten for the third time (his second for ENO, and once in Los Angeles) has evolved into a dominant stage presence. It is rarely enough for an opera singer just to be able to sing the part but what makes Costanzo such a delight to watch is his undeniable stage presence. His devolution into something close to method acting - the defined body tone, the balletic - near glacial - movements, the almost Vedic discipline, and the spiritual closeness to Glass’s music - are extraordinarily convincing. Align this with singing that has such sweeping beauty and a range of emotion that is unusual for a counter-tenor and his assumption of the role of Akhnaten is a deeply moving portrait rather than a performance. Act I rather passed me by, to be honest, it all felt rather anodyne from a musical point of view - but Costanzo has rather less to do in that rather than simply move (naked, or otherwise). Act II, however, was a tour de force - simply one of the most emotionally, and vocally, powerful displays of singing I’ve heard for quite some time. The voice can sometimes feel a little strained at the bottom of the register - but Glass rarely goes there - although those repeated, long “Ha’s” were glorious with a breath control that was peerless. The love duet - itself starting and ending in such slow motion like a mating ritual, with the lovers intertwining in an ocean of blood-red drapery - had extraordinary intensity to it - both as a visual and vocal spectacle. But perhaps nothing quite came close to Costanzo’s ‘Hymn to the Sun’. His ascent towards and into the vast disc of the sun seemed eternal but was also somehow completely motionless. It had been sung magnificently.

One can’t fault Katie Stevenson’s Nefertiti either. The voice is exceptionally beautiful to hear, razor sharp yet full of expressive touches. The chemistry between her and Costanzo - especially in the love duet - was entirely of the kind where you found yourself being drawn into their love story and not away from it. Equally fascinating, was Costanzo’s on-stage relationship with his mother, Queen Tye, sang by Rebbeca Bottone. If with her white-powdered face, tightly curled hair and almost stony gaze, she slightly reminded me of the Virgin Queen she has a magnificently authoritative presence and powerful, resonating voice to match. Zachary James’ Scribe dominates the stage like Fafner - the voice powerful, his diction absolutely crystal clear. In many respects, so much of the casting was exemplary because ENO had brought in identical singers from the 2016 run of this production - there was a very distinct sense of everything just falling into place as you very rarely get in revivals.

My only real criticism of this performance is with Karen Kamensek’s conducting of it. No one should underestimate the difficulty in playing Glass’s music, but one of the issues with this production is whether the pacing of it is because McDermott wants the music played this slowly because the movement of the actors on stage relies on it being played this way, or whether Kamensek is of the view (now also largely believed by Dennis Russell Davies in his later reworkings of Glass’s scores) that the music should simply be played this way and McDermott fleshes out his production around this. This largely worked with her conducting ofSatyagraha last year; it wasn’t always so successful with Akhnaten on opening night here. You might, for example, certainly expect a more flexible, but broader, tempo to bring more power to the music in Akhnaten - but oddly that didn’t always happen. The magnificent timpani and brass passages that Glass writes for the Funeral of Amenhotep III in Act I, for example, were oddly underwhelming. On the other hand, that very expansiveness was absolutely compelling in Act II and Act III when the music is much less dramatically visceral and more intensely drawn. There’s no denying the ENO orchestra play this music with impressive precision - though I think on this occasion they took a little more time to find their stride.

I’m not sure I’ve ever had much truck with people - or critics, for that matter - who find Glass’s music incomprehensible, or the musical equivalent of watching paint dry. Akhnaten is an unquestionable masterpiece - and in many respects Phelim McDermott’s production of it is one that brings this work to life. It would also, I think, be very hard to imagine a better cast Akhnaten than the one we have here.

Marc Bridle

Akhnaten - Anthony Roth Costanzo, Nefertiti - Katie Stevenson, Queen Tye - Rebecca Bottone, Horemhab - James Cleverton, Aye - Keel Watson, High Priest - Colin Judson, Scribe - Zachary James; Director - Phelim McDermott, Conductor - Karen Kamensek, Set Designer - Tom Pye, Costume Designer - Kevin Pollard, Lighting Designer - Bruno Poet, Gandini Juggling Company, Orchestra and Chorus of English National Opera

English National Opera, London; 11^th February 2019

Rachvelishvili excels in ROH Orchestra's Russian programme

The lightning-quick aural pyrotechnics of Stravinsky’s 1917 Feu d’artifice which opened this Royal Opera House Orchestra Concert fizzingly embodied the visual imagery of Vernon Scannell’s poem, ‘The Gunpowder Plot’. Antonio Pappano, bursting with rocket-like energy, propelled the quietly whirring woodwind and twitching strings towards a kaleidoscopic explosion: horns and trumpets forming a vibrant display of canonic colour, staccato ascents surging from the orchestral depths to the sonic heavens, harps spraying arpeggio-fountains. There was brief respite - a pointillistic shower of string harmonics and flutters forming a scintillating star-scape - but this was the merest pause for breath, before the climactic sequence of crackers and crashes, surging and seemingly infinite. Pappano’s precision mastered both the luminosity of Stravinsky’s delicate will-o’-the-wisps and the flamboyance of the sparks and flames.

Feu d’artifice was a stirring ‘Russian Five-inspired’ warm-up to the sequence of Rachmaninov songs - as orchestrated by Vladimir Jurowski, grandfather of the current LPO principal conductor, and the late Hungarian pianist, conductor and composer, Zoltán Kocsis - which formed the heart of this programme of less familiar Russian repertoire. Rachmaninov composed 83 songs, or ‘románsy’ as they are called in Russian. They have been collected into opuses according to factors such as date and geography, but they do not form ‘cycles’. In lesser hands, the pick-and-mix selection that we had here might have struggled to form a lucid whole, especially if the audience insisted on clapping each song, as they initially did here. Georgian mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili and Pappano certainly illuminated the wonderful diversity and range of these songs - from the dark, nasally Slavonic tint of ‘Christ is risen’ in which Rachvelishvili projected a religiosity of almost operatic intensity, to the softer reflections of ‘She is as beautiful as midday’ in which her restrained, controlled line was a hypnotic thread. But, they also provide insight into the cohesive aesthetic of the songs. Rachmaninov saw them as belonging to a specifically Russian milieu; when he left Russia in 1917, to make his living as an international pianist, he wrote no more songs.

Rachvelishvili’s used the velvety glossiness of her mezzo to capture the burgeoning excitement of the lovers depicted in ‘Midsummer Nights’, the lyrical surges shining rhapsodically, while Pappano communicated the restlessness of this song in which rapture is tinged with anxiety. The naturalness of Rachvelishvili’s delivery in ‘Come, let us rest!’ was compelling, as she persuasively embodied the poetic persona who dreams of angels’ songs and visions of heaven, shining like a jewel. And, in the closing orchestral episode, as the clarinet echoed the fading vocal line, Pappano evoked this world of her imaginings, the music seeming to carry us ‘elsewhere’: “My addakhnjón …/ My addakhnjón …” (We will rest …). ‘When yesterday we met’ was intimate, and the string playing - by solo players at the opening, then luxuriously enriched - beautiful. What a pity that one particularly wheezy audience member, here and elsewhere, saved their most vigorous hacking for the closing cadence.

Rachvelishvili’s performance was rapturously received, and she generously offered more. Her first encore, ‘Here it is so fine’, painted an exquisite vision of the distant river, glittering like fire, and meadows, a carpet of colour, reaching the apex of dreamy loveliness in the soaring final line where the pianissimo high B was floated tenderly and with absolute vocal security. Rachmaninov was not averse to transcriptions and orchestrations of his songs, and made several of the latter himself, including of his most famous song, ‘Vocalise’. I do not know if it was the composer’s own orchestration that we heard here, but we enjoyed a glorious vocal rhapsody, spun with absolute control, as Rachvelishvili sustained the nuance and interest, never letting the tension of the phrases slacken but not pushing the line too hard.

Pappano chose to conclude his Russian programme with Tchaikovsky’s Orchestral Suite No.3, offering us a welcome opportunity to hear a work which, like the composer’s other three suites, which were all composed in the period between the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, is seldom programmed in the concert hall. Freed from the ‘rules’ of symphonic form, Tchaikovsky’s imagination seems to have flourished, if the wealth of lyricism and colour is anything to judge by. It’s not surprising that the Third Suite was well-received when premiered in St Petersburg in January 1885, conducted by Hans von Bülow, an occasion which led Tchaikovsky to write to Madame von Meck: “I have never seen such a triumph. I saw the whole audience was moved, and grateful to me. These moments are the finest adornments of an artist’s life. Thanks to these it is worth living and labouring.”

One imagines that the composer would have been similarly pleased and proud to hear this vivid, dynamic performance by the ROH Orchestra. Each time Pappano dipped his baton into Tchaikovsky’s many-coloured paint-pot, he found a new hue or timbre, and he drew finely textured images of detail and clarity, aided by some superb playing from his musicians. The flowing Élégie throbbed with a perfect balance of pain and passion, the ache enhanced by a series of beautiful woodwind solos by clarinet, oboe and, at the close, cor anglais. After an expansive Valse mélancolique which was sometimes wracked with anxious cares, the Scherzo was a whirlwind of pianissimo virtuosity, so fast, precise and delicate that one almost held one’s breath, as if watching a Formula 1 driver negotiate the twists and turns with pinpoint exactitude. The ROH Orchestra stayed securely on track, punctuating the close with a tutti fortissimo full-stop. ‘Beat that!’ they seemed to say, as concert leader smiled at his maestro. No wonder the audience couldn’t resist showing their appreciation.

Tchaikovsky himself started the tradition of performing the final movement as a separate concert piece, and the Theme and Variations - which were choreographed by George Balanchine - is more familiar than the preceding movements. Pappano brilliantly defined the diverse moods and rhythmic character of the unfolding variations. Concert Master Sergey Levitin relished the virtuosity of the cadenza which links the nine and tenth variations, and the solo violin melody in the latter was warm of tone and playful in spirit. The concluding Polacca was grand and imperial.

The ROH musicians and their conductor had clearly enjoyed themselves, as had the audience who vigorously showed their deep appreciation, and their affection for Pappano. Despite being recalled to the stage numerous times, he declined to give them the encore they desired, gesturing with a wry smile that it was ‘time for bed’. One imagines that the executive management must hope that at the end of the 2022-23 season, when Pappano’s current contract will end, that they can prove more persuasive.

Claire Seymour

Anita Rachvelishvili (mezzo-soprano), Antonio Pappano (conductor), Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Stravinsky - Feu d’artifice; Rachmaninov - ‘Christ is risen’ Op.26 No.6, ‘All things depart’ Op.26 No.15, ‘So dread a fate I’ll ne’er believe’ Op.34 No.7, ‘As fair as day in blaze of noon’ Op.14 No.9, ‘Midsummer nights’ Op.14 No.5, ‘When yesterday we met’ Op.26 No.13, ‘Come, let us rest!’ Op.26 No.3, ‘How fair this spot Op.21 No.7; Tchaikovsky - Orchestral Suite No.3 in G major Op.55

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London; Friday 8^th February 2019.

Independent Opera & Britten Sinfonia celebrate bicentenary of Queen Victoria & Prince Albert's births

An Independent Opera commission, Talbot took inspiration from Queen Victoria’s sapphire and diamond coronet designed for her by Prince Albert, which was purchased for the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2017 through the generosity of IO co-founders, Bill and Judy Bollinger, and Douglas and James Bollinger as a gift to the Nation and the Commonwealth. The coronet, which will go on permanent public display from 11 April in the newly refurbished William and Judith Bollinger Gallery, is the highlight of the V&A’s bicentenary celebrations, alongside events, displays and new publications.

For his new cantata, Joby Talbot has set poetry from across the world that explore themes of love and loss: “A Sheen of Dew on Flowers sets sacred texts by women, collected from all parts of the world and written across three millennia. The poems (translated into English by the American poet Jane Hirshfield) speak of love and mourning and are put together in a way that suggests a burgeoning love affair that is cut short by bereavement. It thus mirrors the story of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's own relationship, while celebrating the great museum that was such an important part of their shared vision,”

Conducting Britten Sinfonia and Britten Sinfonia Voices for the first time is Natalie Murray Beale, IO's Creative Director, who will be joined by soloists Kelley O’Connor and Tobias Greenhalgh. The evening will also include a performance of Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony No. 3 in recognition of the composer’s relationship with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. This performance marks IO’s third collaboration with Britten Sinfonia following productions of Hartmann’s Simplicius Simplicissimus and Voseček’s Biedermann and the Arsonists .

Independent Opera at Sadler’s Wells was founded in 2005 to support outstanding young artists in every discipline of opera. Seeing the need to bridge the gap between raw talent and a professional career, co-founders Bill and Judy Bollinger, together with Alessandro Talevi, devised a series of initiatives to support young and talented artists. IO mounted its first production - Rossini’s La Scala di Seta - directed by Alessandro Talevi, within the year and, two years later, launched its comprehensive Artist Support scheme with Natalie Murray Beale as consultant. She has overseen the running and development of the scheme which to date has awarded scholarships, fellowships and one-off grants to 116 artists in the fields of singing, directing, design, choreography and production. In addition to the 137 grants worth more than £800,000, part of IO’s ethos is also to provide professional mentoring support.

In 2017, IO added a further string to its bow when it launched the first of its annual recitals at the Wigmore Hall, held for IO's current vocal award recipients, all recent graduates from the UK’s leading music conservatoires. The same year IO announced the start of their sponsorship of the biennial Wigmore Hall International Song Competition from 2019, with Natalie Murray Beale as a member of the jury.

Bill and Judy Bollinger were recognised as Philanthropists of the Year at the 2016 International Opera Awards

English National Opera to reprise its 5* production of Paul Bunyan at the historic Alexandra Palace Theatre

The new venue follows the ‘inspired choice’ (Bachtrack) of Wilton’s with another painstakingly restored Victorian music hall. ‘London’s oldest new theatre’ was reopened in December 2018, the interior retaining the charm of the original 1875 hall but with the facilities to put on the most sophisticated new productions. The £23m restoration’s opening was widely praised, with the BBC declaring it ‘like walking into a novel’.

Paul Bunyan , an ENO Studio Live production, is a parable on the American Dream from Benjamin Britten and WH Auden, telling the story of the eponymous giant as he builds a lumber farm with a sprawling cast of accomplices. Seldom performed, its first ENO staging in 2018 was called ‘an exhilarating experience’ (5* The Mail on Sunday) ‘thrilling’ (The Guardian) and ‘a joyful spectacle’ ( The Daily Telegraph).

Jamie Manton returns to direct along with many of the original cast. ENO Harewood Artists Elgan Llŷr Thomas (‘particularly lovely singing’ -The Daily Telegraph) and Rowan Pierce (‘captivating’ - The Daily Express) reprise their roles as Johnny Inkslinger and Tiny respectively.

Zwakele Tshabalala takes the role of Hot Biscuit Slim in his second ENO performance after forming part of the Porgy and Bess ensemble in 2018. ENO Harewoood Artist Alex Otterburn also makes his second ENO appearance after singing Squibby in the world premiere of Iain Bell’s Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel. Former ENO Harewood Artist Barnaby Rea, last seen as Iolanthe’s Private Willis in 2018, takes the role of Ben Benny the cook.

The ENO Chorus (‘triple threats to a man’ - The Spectator) return to the secondary roles they filled with ‘boundless skill and personality’ ( The Stage)the first time round. Simon Russell Beale reprises his pre-recorded performance as Paul.

ENO Chorus Master James Henshaw conducts his second ENO production, having made his conducting debut in 2017 with another Studio Live production, The Day After.

ENO Studio Live is part of ENO Outside, which takes ENO’s work to arts-engaged audiences that may not have considered opera before, presenting the immense power of opera in more intimate studio and theatre environments. Other venues the company has appeared at include Hackney Empire, Regent’s Park Outdoor Theatre and The Gate Theatre, Notting Hill.

Performances will take place on the 9, 10, 11 (matinee and evening performance), 13 May.

Tickets will go on sale on the 8 (priority booking) and 11 February (public booking) (eno.org, 020 7845 9300)

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Glyndebourne celebrates 25 years of its award-winning opera house in 2019

The drive to build a new opera house at Glyndebourne came from Sir George Christie, then Chairman of Glyndebourne, who raised £34m in private funding to pay for the project. The building was designed by Michael Hopkins and Partners and has won many awards for the quality of the architecture and the craftsmanship of its component parts. Despite being larger than the previous theatre, the auditorium retained a sense of intimacy, and delivered a vastly improved acoustic.

The new opera house opened on 28 May 1994 with a performance of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, the same opera that opened the very first Glyndebourne Festival in 1934. It was the first purpose-built opera house to be constructed in the UK since Glyndebourne founder John Christie built the original Glyndebourne theatre in the 1930s.

25 years on, Glyndebourne will soon unveil the largest building project it has undertaken since the opera house, a new state-of-the-art production hub designed by Nicholas Hare Architects. It will be home to Glyndebourne’s expert props, sets, costumes, wigs, and making departments, as well as a new rehearsal studio and music practice rooms.

The production hub opens in the run-up to Glyndebourne Festival 2019, a season that gathers together some classic operatic fairy tales. Highlights include a rare opportunity to see a fully staged production of Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust, a fresh and playful new production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and the Festival debut of Glyndebourne’s first-ever production of Massenet’s Cendrillon, directed by Fiona Shaw.

The season is completed with revivals of three popular productions from Glyndebourne’s recent history: Melly Still’s evocative production of Dvořák’s Rusalka, Robert Carsen’s irreverent take on Handel’sRinaldo and Annabel Arden’s stylish staging of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia.

The Festival can once again be enjoyed on stage, on screen and online. Three of the season’s productions will be screened in cinemas UK-wide and broadcast free online in partnership with the Telegraph Media Group.

Off-stage, visitors to this year’s Glyndebourne Festival can enjoy displays of art and sculpture, including the first major works by Nicholas Hare, the architect behind the new production hub, who has become a sculptor following his recent retirement. His three large-scale works, sculpted in Cor-Ten rusted steel, will be on display in the Glyndebourne gardens throughout the summer.

In addition, an expanded gallery space within the opera house is being relaunched as Gallery ‘94. This will house an exhibition on the theme of ‘Between Worlds’, featuring work by eleven different artists that draws on the architecture and topography of Glyndebourne, to mark the 25th anniversary of the opera house.

Public booking for Glyndebourne Festival 2019 opens online on Sunday 3 March. For more information visit glyndebourne.com.

Glyndebourne Festival 2019 runs from 18 May - 25 August 2019

13 performances between 18 May - 10 July 2019 Glyndebourne’s debut production of La damnation de Faust is a rare opportunity to see this extraordinary work fully staged - the perfect way to mark the 150th anniversary of the composer’s death. Directed by Richard Jones, the cast is led by top British tenor Allan Clayton, making a role debut as Faust, alongside Christopher Purves as his nemesis, Méphistophélès. Glyndebourne’s Music Director Robin Ticciati, a passionate champion of Berlioz, conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Jules Massenet Cendrillon

14 performances between 8 June - 2 August 2019

One of the greatest operatic fairy tales, Massenet’s Cendrillon makes its Festival debut in Fiona Shaw’s thoughtful contemporary updating. John Wilson will make his first appearance at the Glyndebourne Festival conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra and a cast led by Glyndebourne favourites Danielle de Niese as Cendrillon and Kate Lindsey as Prince Charming.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Die Zauberflöte

15 performances between 18 July - 24 August 2019

Mozart’s most magical comedy returns to Glyndebourne for the first time in over a decade in a new production by the renowned directing / design duo Barbe & Doucet that promises to take a fresh and playful look at the opera’s troublesome gender politics. Leading British bass Brindley Sherratt stars as Sarastro alongside exciting young singers including Caroline Wettergreen, Sofia Fomina and Björn Bürger. Antonello Manacorda conducts the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

Revivals

Gioachino Rossini Il barbiere di Siviglia

15 performances between 19 May - 14 July 2019

Opera’s greatest comedy returns to the Glyndebourne Festival in Annabel Arden’s stylish, surreal production, first staged in 2016. Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Antonín Dvořák Rusalka

12 performances between 29 June - 21 August 2019

A heartbreaking fairy tale of love and loss comes vividly to life in Melly Still’s evocative production. Glyndebourne’s Music Director Robin Ticciati conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra, with soprano Sally Matthews as the nymph who loses all for love. Canadian mezzo-soprano Patricia Bardon is the witch Ježibaba who takes it from her.

George Frideric Handel Rinaldo 8 performances between 8 - 25 August 2019

Robert Carsen’s witty and irreverent production of Handel’s Rinaldo returns to Glyndebourne with an all-new cast. American mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong takes the title role with fast-rising young countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński as Eustazio and Italian soprano Giulia Semenzato as Almirena. Baroque specialist Maxim Emelyanychev conducts the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

Lucrèce Borgia in Toulouse

With the tightness of a short story, Felice Romano reunites mother with son at a party in Venice only to have the mother inadvertently poison her son at a party in Ferrara when all she had wanted to do was poison a few of his raucous friends. The plot is only slightly more complicated in that Lucrèce’s currently surviving husband Alphonse believes she is having an affair with her son, even though we know that possibly her son is having an affair with his best friend Maffeo Orsini.

It is a beautifully crafted opera, the story unfolding in highly structured musical numbers that encase the unstoppable series of obviously very tense situations. There are a lot of feelings to put on the table.

There is a delicate balance between ambience and emotion in bel canto, like there is a delicate balance between voice and pace — the emotions must flow but not rush nor may they falter. Italian conductor Giacomo Sagripanti created a plausible orchestral platform for bel canto, his more effective moments however were in his drives to the cadences that wrap up Donizetti’s emotive extensions. The maestro was obviously limited by the capabilities of his singers.

Annick Massis as Lucrezia Borgia, Mert Süngü as Gennaro

If Annick Massis, the sixty-one year old French bel canto diva, masterfully projected Lucrezia’s Borgia family pride and a towering pride of maternity, she could not effect a resolute tone of voice. Carefully placing her voice far back in her throat she avoided the wide, unfocused, indeed indeterminate tones that I heard in her 2015 Monaco Mathilde (Guillaume Tell). This new placement erased all authority of tone, her quite clean, careful coloratura had no sheen or pizazz, limiting its effect.

Turkish tenor Mert Süngü too physically created a convincing persona, that of a swashbuckling young warrior. Though a fine singer and a solid performer Mr. Süngü did not find the elegance of voice or line to establish the potentially sublime magic for the young warrior’s feelings for his mother and for his friend Matteo.

Frankfurt Opera bass Andreas Bauer Kanabas (the final Kanabas is his recently appended Bohemian maternal family name) took on the role of Alfonso d’Este. His dark hued voice serves him well for quite a variety of roles in Frankfurt and elsewhere, but his voice does not have the brightness that make raging bel canto lines fly off the page. French ingenue mezzo Eléonore Pancrazi brought little presence to the tenor’s best friend Matteo Orsini. This spirit of random casting extended to the myriad of smaller male roles required by this opera.

Andreas Bauer Kanabas as Alfonso d'Este, Thomas Bettinger as Rustighello (behind)

The 1917 production was from Valencia, Spain, by well-known (in California) Spanish director Emilio Sagi with his usual designers, Llorenç Corbella (sets) and Pepa Ojauguren (costumes). While Mr. Sagi moved his actors in easy accordance with the dramatic minimalism of Felice Romano’s libretto the physical production succumbed to an atmosphere of extravagant, abstract faux luxury. The result approached the questionable splendor of a sleek remake of a once grand, old hotel (ubiquitous metallic glints and lurid colors floating in chic blackness).

The legendary murderous excesses of Donizetti’s heroine Lucrezia Borgia universally seem to ignite hyper-active production imagination. Such response is at odds Felice Romano’s minimalism making Donizetti, finally, its victim.

Michael Milenski

Cast and production information:

Alfonso d’Este: Bauer Kanabas; Lucrezia Borgia: Annick Massis; Maffio Orsini: Eléonore Pancrazi; Gennaro: Mert Süngü; Liverotto: Galeano Salas; Vitellozzo: François Pardailhé; Gazella: Jérémie Brocard; Rustighello: Thomas Bettinger; Gubetta: Julien Veronèse; Ascanio: Rupert Grœssinger. Chorus and Orchestra of the Théâtre du Capitole. Conductor: Giacomo Sagripanti; Mise en scène: Emilio Sagi; Decors: Llorenç; Costumes: Pepa Ojanguren; Lights: Eduardo Bravo. Théâtre du Capitole, Toulouse, France, February 3, 2019.

image=http://www.operatoday.com/LucreziaBorgia_Toulouse1.png

product=yes
product_title=Lucrezia Borgia in Toulouse
product_by=A review by Michael Milenski
product_id=Above: Mert Süngü as Gennaro, Eléonore Pancrazi as Orsini [all photos copyright Patrice Nin, courtesy of the Opéra du Capitole}

Amanda Majeski makes a stunning debut at Covent Garden in Richard Jones's new production of Kát’a Kabanová

I’m not sure that Richard Jones’s new production of Leoš Janáček’s Kát’a Kabanová addresses, or solves, these questions, but it certainly made me reflect upon them.

By chance, earlier in the day BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour programme had debated ‘only-ness’: the feeling of being the only one to think, feel or act in a particular way - at work, within the family, amongst one’s peers or social groups. As Jones’s front-drop, embossed with a photo-image of a young girl - her wide eyes brimming with energy, the bird she clutches on the verge of sky-bound release - rose to reveal a young woman, head bowed, seated on a park bench in the centre of a bare expanse, ‘only-ness’ seemed an apt term.

Jones’s Kát’a is only, alone and lonely. But Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s 1859 play, The Storm, from which Janáček adapted his libretto, is a social critique of the moral decadence and hypocrisy of the late Russian empire, in particular the merchant classes. And, while in the opera the threat to social stability is perhaps less important than the eponymous heroine’s psychological instability, Kát’a’s immediate environment is just as significant a factor in her tragic decline as the hostile forces of Nature which control human destiny - the River Volga, the storm of Ostrovsky’s title - and her own self-destroying passions, erotic, religious and existential.

And, so, Jones gives us a crowd. They rush hither and thither, circling wildly, sometimes on bicycles, regardless of what the orchestral episodes are ‘saying’, though sometimes the movements cease, frozen by the grip of Lucy Carter’s lighting, and we can hear Janáček’s instrumental music sing Kát’a’s inner song. Society turns its back on Kát’a, an outsider; then, feasts its eyes on her beauty - as three swarthy men peer and leer through the windows of the Kabanová house, forcing Kát’a to tug the curtains closed, trapping her even more claustrophobically within her suburban, late-Cold War prison.

For Jones and his designer, Antony Mcdonald, update the action to the 1970s. When, at the start of Act 1, a half-wall descends near the front of the stage we enter a world of prevailing Stalin-esque ugliness. Stale yellows and browns reek of cheapness and a socio-cultural aesthetic bereft of life, love and soul; a menacing threat to Káta’s own beauty of spirit. But, the time-shift is not wholly satisfactory: in the ’70s would the persecuted, adulterous Kát’a feel compelled to undertake a guilt-driven, self-flagellating public confession, propelled by the forces of social disapprobation and disgust?

If it’s impossible to answer such a question then Jones doesn’t help by removing the opera’s religious symbolism and context - the libretto’s birds are, after all, both symbols of freedom and angelic emblems. Here, the Act 3 confession does not take place in a church, but rather in a bus shelter where the populace are sheltering from the meteorological frenzy: a refuge that put me in mind of the seaside shelter in which - in 1921, the year in which Janáček’s opera was premiered in Brno - T.S. Eliot had sat, recuperating from a nervous breakdown, writing Part III of The Waste Land. ‘On Margate Sands./ I can connect/ Nothing with nothing./ The broken fingernails of dirty hands./ My people humble people who expect/ Nothing.’

Quite. And, as if to push home the existential misery, in this production Jones often dispenses with context altogether and simply places the action in a huge cardboard box. When a side panel was raised, allowing a glowering lamp-post to slide through to cast its sneering illumination over the afore-mentioned park bench, the shadow of Beckett seemed to loom large. Such visual frugality certainly evokes the emotional paucity and bereft bleakness of the community in which Kát’a lives. But, surely the opera also intimates the possibility of love, truth, spiritual sincerity? Where, in Jones’s production, is the beauty of which Kát’a dreams, for which she yearns, and which is reflected by her own inner ‘goodness’?

And, where is the River Volga, ever-present in Janáček’s score - the soul of which calls Kát’a to her watery end: drowning or transfiguration, as you will? Jones tries to convince us that the river lies far out, beyond the audience. Some of the crowd cast their fishing lines into our midst (one unfortunately snapped his rod on this occasion), and the catch that they hook is shoved tauntingly into Kát’a’s face: jump in and join these slippery soul-sisters. But the fat, flapping fish is a mockery of the religio-erotic utterance which emanates from the waters in the form of the off-stage chorus which sings from and of the river’s soul in the closing episodes of the opera.

Having stirred up so many questions, how fortunate Jones is to have American soprano Amanda Majeski to push them from our mind. In her house and role debut, Majeski gives such heartfelt commitment to the role of Kát’a that one worries how she can come back down from the emotional peaks and precipices that she scales in her performance. The Act 1 narration in which Kát’a explains her dreams, visions and nightmares to Varvara was divinely radiant, a revelation of a spirit threatened by ruptures and repressions within and the ruthless rigidity of the world without. Here was an anticipation of the terribly anguished confessions of Luka, Skuratov and Šiškov in From the House of the Dead. Majeski lurched with paradoxical fluency through Kát’a’s emotional upheavals, from insular self-denial to nascent optimism, from sweet fulfilment to utter despair. Her Act 3 confession was simultaneously disturbingly irrational and hypnotically enthralling.

In 1924, Janáček told his ‘muse’, Kamila Stösslová, that, ‘Kát’a, you know, that was you beside me. … That’s why there’s such emotional heat in [these works]. So much heat that if it caught both of us, there’d be just ashes left of us.’ And, here, there was only ash at the close; the wick of Kát’a’s life-spirit was utterly expended, the ‘heat’ extinguished. I was put in mind of Pushkin’s/Tchaikovsky’s Lisa Ivanovna from The Queen of Spades - a recent visitor to the Covent Garden stage - of whom Janáček said, in a 1896 review of Tchaikovsky’s opera, ‘it is in the water that Lisa looks for an end to her troubles.’

Majeski’s stunning vocal acting dominated this performance. But, there were other performances to admire too. Pavel Černoch’s Boris was warm and refined of tone, and tender of heart, though it was sometimes hard to believe that it was the unrestrainable passion of this weak-willed young man - cruelly bullied by Clive Bayley’s boiler-suited, brash Dikoj - that had ignited the volcanic, illicit flame that engulfs so many lives. The lack of emotional connection between Majeski and Andrew Staples’ Tichon was more acceptable: but, Tichon, described in Mark Monahan’s programme article as ‘domineering’, was here anything but; rather, this supposed abusive alcoholic was pitiable, dominated by his mother, desperately in love with but emotionally disconnected from Kát’a - as much a ‘victim’ as his wife’.

Susan Bickley’s Kabanicha was shockingly cruel and sneering. In Act 1 her stare was as steely as her put-downs were powerful and glossy, and her ram-rod back, stuffed into a tight business suit, seemed both to embody and resist the prevailing social oppression. The Act 2 shenanigans between Kabanicha and Dikoj seemed to me to veer too dangerously close to caricature, however. Now the curtains were pulled to hide their hypocrisy from prying eyes, and Bickley sank to provincial curtain-twitchery when she was seen spying on Kát’a’s return after her nocturnal tryst with Boris at the close of Act 2. These scenes should underline the hypocrisy of the town’s moral standards, but I’m sure I heard a snigger in the Covent Garden stalls.

With so much inhumanity on display, the very real human instincts and indulgences of Emily Edmonds’ Varvara and Andrew Tortise’s Kudrjáš were a welcome relief. Edmonds was full of zest and freedom of spirit - leaping impetuously (and literally) into Kudrjáš arms in the ‘garden’ scene. And, Tortise - despite Kudrjáš brown-striped ti-shirt of eye-watering ugliness, greasy curls and clunky spectacles - brought a stirring credibility to their amorous exchanges.

Making his first appearance in the Covent Garden pit, Edward Gardner drew a performance of tremendous warmth and beauty, and compelling sweep, from the ROH Orchestra. The score of Kát’a Kabanová is almost Debussy-ian in its evocativeness and is undoubtedly one of the composer’s most lyrical operatic utterances: was I unfair to lament the absence of the ‘violence’ that also lies within, or to miss the horror and the terror evoked by the dramatic lurches from one emotion to the next?

The tragedy of Kát’a Kabanová is that propriety wins over passionate truth. The composer, yearning for Stösslová to reciprocate his desire, may have identified with the illicit passion of Kát’a and Boris, but in the final reckoning the human failings on show are universal. The strength of this production is its heroine’s vision, superbly communicated by Majeski. And, it is a vision which Edmonds’ Varvara seeks to keep alive when, complaining of the spitefulness of Kabanicha, who locks her in her room as punishment for arranging the lovers’ tryst, Varvara pleads to Kudrjáš: ‘Will you teach me now how I must live?’ It’s a question we all might ask.

Claire Seymour

Leoš Janáček: Kát’a Kabanová

Kát’a Kabanová - Amanda Majeski, Boris Grigorjevič - Pavel Černoch, Marfa Ignatěvna Kabanová (Kabanicha) - Susan Bickley, Varvara - Emily Edmonds, Váňa Kudrjáš - Andrew Tortise, Tichon Ivanyč Kabanov - Andrew Staples, Glaša - Sarah Pring, Savël Prokofjevič Dikoj - Clive Bayley, Kuligin - Dominic Sedgwick, Fekluša - Dervla Ramsay; Director - Richard Jones, Conductor - Edward Gardner, Designer - Antony McDonald, Lighting designer - Lucy Carter, Movement director - Sarah Fahie, Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House.

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London; Monday, 4^th February 2019.

Returning to heaven: The Cardinall's Musick at Wigmore Hall

The eight singers who formed The Cardinall’s Musick on this occasion - some of whom are familiar figures from other ensembles such as The Tallis Scholars and The Sixteen - know this repertory and how to perform it like the proverbial back of the hand. But this no way lessens their attentiveness, expressivity and accomplishment. Rather - refreshingly so, in these days when we seem to be casting all continuity and cogency aside - I felt swept up in what one might call the comfort of tradition. The composers represented provided what was required, by Church and monarch, day after day, month after month, year after year; and they did so with confidence and certainty, of faith and fellow-feeling. And this performance by The Cardinall’s Musick celebrated and sustained the values and practices of such shared knowledge, experience and expectation. Past and present and, one would hope, future, truly cohered.

That’s not to say that the misgivings I tentatively expressed about the first concert in the series, didn’t persist here. It is strange to listen to liturgical music that is the medium and expression of collective worship being performed in a concert hall; it seems different in the case of the Passions of Bach, and the oratorios of Handel, which have such driving narratives and are dramatic and theatrical in character. However, the quality and persuasiveness of the singing pushed any qualms aside. Director Andrew Carwood achieved an excellent balance between a blended ensemble sound and highlights of colour, as individual voices came to the fore, and the security of the performances was underpinned by bass Robert Macdonald, so often providing a relaxed and reassuring foundation. If I had any slight reservation then it would be that occasionally the soprano voices were not entirely attuned to the harmonic bed beneath them, though their sound was bright and sensitively nuanced.

The programmes that Carwood devises, and his delivery of them, confirms the sureness of his conceptions and intent, although in the compositions for smaller combinations of voices I did wonder whether the singers ‘needed’ a conductor. Tenor Steven Harrold was characteristically eloquent in his solo contributions and alertly engaged with his fellow performers, and the absence of a conductor might have encouraged more consistent ensemble communication of this kind.

Thomas Crecquillon’s motet ‘Congratulamini mihi’ retells the story of Mary Magdalene’s meeting with Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, following the Resurrection. It is a stirring and vibrant work, and the five voices conjured energy and expansiveness in the first section before coming to rest on a soft cadential ‘Alleluia’ at the mid-point. Mary’s anxious questioning in the second part of the motet, as she struggles to make sense of the empty tomb, was darker in tone, and Crecquillon’s linear movement led to some striking harmonies as the searching contrapuntal lines interweaved.

Francisco Guerrero’s Mass Congratulamini mihi (à 6) takes up themes from Crequillon’s motet. When Carwood and The Cardinall’s singers recorded the Mass in 2010, on the Hyperion label, they placed the motet after the Mass which parodies it, but here we had the more conventional ordering. This was a truly polished performance, reverential in tone and sung with soaring fluency. Carwood’s tempi were convincing and flexible. The interplay of voices in the Kyrie was gentle, but towards the close there was a slight pushing forwards, intimating a fresh sense of purpose as we looked towards the ensuing Gloria, in which the three upper voices were beautifully beseeching when asking for the Lord’s mercy, and vigour was derived at the close from the conversations between the inner voices. In the Credo, the lines ‘Et resurrexit tertia die secundum scripturas, Et ascendit in caelum’ (And he rose on the third day according to the scriptures, and ascended into heaven) were wonderfully spacious, as Carwood held back the tempo, allowing the expressive harmonies to make their mark, before once more pressing on, ‘Et in spiritum sanctum Dominum et vivificantem’ (And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life). Harrold’s prominent tenor line in the Sanctus was beautifully mellifluous and tender, but again Carwood was alert to the varying sentiments and spirit of the text, building to a buoyant ‘Hosanna in excelsis’, the rhythms of which were particular muscular when the section was repeated after the more withdrawn Benedictus. The triple-time pulse at the start of the Agnus Dei and the sweetly blended sound were consoling, while with the shift to four beats in a bar there was a heightened earnestness. The movements of the Mass were separated by Gregorian chant propers for the Feast of St Mary Magdalene; those sung by tenor Nicholas Todd made a particularly strong impression, the tone warm, the phrasing expressively devotional.

Various female saints - Mary, Cecilia, Barbara - were celebrated in the motets which formed the second half of the recital. I loved the way the singers settled so soothingly and gratifyingly into the final cadence of Peter Philips’ ‘Caecilia virgo’, calming the preceding vigour. Philippe Verdelot’s ‘Salve, Barbara’ was one of the highlights of the evening, the four voices (SATT) flowing through the melismatic lines with beguiling tenderness. Carwood’s careful planning was evident in the progression of pieces, the four lower voices in Adrian Willaert’s ‘In tus patientia’ which followed presenting a pleasing contrast.

We heard more from Guerrero, his six-part ‘Surge propera’, and two settings of ‘Cantantibus organis’ - Luca Marenzio’s four-part setting which was notable for the beautiful soprano and alto duet that pleads for the Lord to make hearts pure, and the more expansive and robust eight-part setting of Daniel Torquet. And composers on this side of the Channel were not neglected. The singers communicated the yearning intensity of William Byrd’s ‘Salve regina’ and glowed through the increasingly rich harmonies with which Byrd conveys the suffering of those groaning and weeping in the vale of tears (‘Gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle’). After such passion and power, Michael Praetoris’ ‘Regina caeli jubila’ for SSA was refreshingly clean and the singing was free and joyful.

In the first concert of this series, Palestrina had been the magisterial figure. Here, he was kept silent until the end, but when The Cardinall’s Musick presented their final item, the composer’s Magnificat Primi Toni (à 8), in which Carwood crafted a compelling forward drive, in was hard not to feel that here was the true master at work - assured and reassuring.

The encore, Joseph lieber, Joseph mein by Hieronymous Praetorius - chosen to mark Candlemas, which falls this Saturday and brings Christian celebrations of the birth of Christ to a close - was beautifully sung but rather dissolved the strength of the spiritual certainty and conviction that Palestrina’s Magnificat establishes. What was most powerfully echoing in my memory as I left Wigmore Hall was the expressive eloquence of Nicholas Todd’s chants. Divine in every sense of the word.

This concert was recorded and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Thursday 31 ^st January; it will be available via BBC iPlayer Radio and the BBC Sounds app for 30 days.

Claire Seymour

The Company of Heaven II : The Cardinall’s Musick

Thomas Crecquillon - Congratulamini mihi; Francisco Guerrero - Missa Congratulamini mihi; Gregorian Chant - Propers for the Feast of St Mary Magdalene; Peter Philips - Cecilia Virgo; Philippe Verdelot - Salve Barbara; Adrian Willaert - In tua patientia; Francisco Guerrero - Surge propera; Luca Marenzio - Cantantibus organis; Daniel Torquet - Cantantibus organis; William Byrd - Salve regina; Michael Praetorius - Regina caeli jubila; Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina - Magnificat primi

Wigmore Hall, London; Wednesday 30^th January 2019.