English Touring Opera are delighted to announce a season of lyric monodramas to tour nationally from October to December. The season features music for solo singer and piano by Argento, Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich with a bold and inventive approach to making opera during social distancing.
This tenth of ten Live from London concerts was in fact a recorded live performance from California. It was no less enjoyable for that, and it was also uplifting to learn that this wasn’t in fact the ‘last’ LfL event that we will be able to enjoy, courtesy of VOCES8 and their fellow vocal ensembles (more below …).
Ever since Wigmore Hall announced their superb series of autumn concerts, all streamed live and available free of charge, I’d been looking forward to this song recital by Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper.
Although Stile Antico’s programme article for their Live from London recital introduced their selection from the many treasures of the English Renaissance in the context of the theological debates and upheavals of the Tudor and Elizabethan years, their performance was more evocative of private chamber music than of public liturgy.
Evidently, face masks don’t stifle appreciative “Bravo!”s. And, reducing audience numbers doesn’t lower the volume of such acclamations. For, the audience at Wigmore Hall gave soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn and pianist Simon Lepper a greatly deserved warm reception and hearty response following this lunchtime recital of late-Romantic song.
For this week’s Live from London vocal recital we moved from the home of VOCES8, St Anne and St Agnes in the City of London, to Kings Place, where The Sixteen - who have been associate artists at the venue for some time - presented a programme of music and words bound together by the theme of ‘reflection’.
'Such is your divine Disposation that both you excellently understand, and royally entertaine the Exercise of Musicke.’
‘And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven … that old serpent … Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’
There was never any doubt that the fifth of the twelve Met Stars Live in Concert broadcasts was going to be a palpably intense and vivid event, as well as a musically stunning and theatrically enervating experience.
‘Love’ was the theme for this Live from London performance by Apollo5. Given the complexity and diversity of that human emotion, and Apollo5’s reputation for versatility and diverse repertoire, ranging from Renaissance choral music to jazz, from contemporary classical works to popular song, it was no surprise that their programme spanned 500 years and several musical styles.
The Academy of St Martin in the Fields have titled their autumn series of eight concerts - which are taking place at 5pm and 7.30pm on two Saturdays each month at their home venue in Trafalgar Square, and being filmed for streaming the following Thursday - ‘re:connect’.
The London Symphony Orchestra opened their Autumn 2020 season with a homage to Oliver Knussen, who died at the age of 66 in July 2018. The programme traced a national musical lineage through the twentieth century, from Britten to Knussen, on to Mark-Anthony Turnage, and entwining the LSO and Rattle too.
With the Live from London digital vocal festival entering the second half of the series, the festival’s host, VOCES8, returned to their home at St Annes and St Agnes in the City of London to present a sequence of ‘Choral Dances’ - vocal music inspired by dance, embracing diverse genres from the Renaissance madrigal to swing jazz.
Just a few unison string wriggles from the opening of Mozart’s overture to Le nozze di Figaro are enough to make any opera-lover perch on the edge of their seat, in excited anticipation of the drama in music to come, so there could be no other curtain-raiser for this Gala Concert at the Royal Opera House, the latest instalment from ‘their House’ to ‘our houses’.
"Before the ending of the day, creator of all things, we pray that, with your accustomed mercy, you may watch over us."
The doors at The Metropolitan Opera will not open to live audiences until 2021 at the earliest, and the likelihood of normal operatic life resuming in cities around the world looks but a distant dream at present. But, while we may not be invited from our homes into the opera house for some time yet, with its free daily screenings of past productions and its pay-per-view Met Stars Live in Concert series, the Met continues to bring opera into our homes.
Music-making at this year’s Grange Festival Opera may have fallen silent in June and July, but the country house and extensive grounds of The Grange provided an ideal setting for a weekend of twelve specially conceived ‘promenade’ performances encompassing music and dance.
There’s a “slide of harmony” and “all the bones leave your body at that moment and you collapse to the floor, it’s so extraordinary.”
“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.”
The hum of bees rising from myriad scented blooms; gentle strains of birdsong; the cheerful chatter of picnickers beside a still lake; decorous thwacks of leather on willow; song and music floating through the warm evening air.
![Kirill Petrenko [Photo by Monika Rittershaus courtesy of Berliner Philharmoniker]](http://www.operatoday.com/Kirill_Petrenko.jpg)
The quick rise to prominence and thin catalog of recordings by Russian conductor Kirill Petrenko, outgoing General Music Director of the Bayerische Staatsoper and incoming chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, renders each of his forays into the classic repertoire significant. Last Sunday morning, the Bayerisches Staatsorchester gave the first of three performances of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis under his direction.
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.