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.
Prima la music, poi la parole? It’s the perennial operatic conundrum which has exercised composers from Monteverdi, to Salieri, to Strauss. But, on this occasion we were reminded that sometimes the answer is a simple one: Non, prima le voci!
The Royal Opera House’s new production of La forza del destino, directed by Christof Loy and first seen at Dutch National Opera in 2017, had been hyped to the heights since the first moment it was announced that it would reunite Anna Netrebko and Jonas Kaufmann for the first time at Covent Garden since the soprano and tenor formed a triumphant threesome with the late Dmitri Hvorostovsky in La traviata in 2008. The anticipatory buzz was amplified by gossip about tickets changing hand for crazy figures on re-sale sites, speculation about which star would cancel first, and rumours that Kaufmann had been a rare figure at rehearsals, with Azerbaijani tenor Yusif Eyvazov - Netrebko’s husband, who shares the role of Don Alvaro - filling in at the dress rehearsal.
For once, though, a hyperbolic build-up did not culminate with bathos but with brilliance: consummately expressive singing which quite simply entranced and exhilarated. There is never any doubting the luxurious beauty and intense communicativeness of Anna Netrebko’s soprano but on occasion, as in last year’s Macbeth , I have longed for a little more precision to accompany the vocal glamour and shimmer. Here, however, making her role debut as Leonora, Netrebko had me transfixed with a performance in which drama was balanced by discipline, and interpretation was fired by intellect and intuitive insight in equal measure, casting a compelling vocal spell.
Anna Netrebko (Leonora), Jonas Kaufmann (Don Alvaro). Photo credit: Bill Cooper.
From the first gestures of the dumb-show presented during the overture, Loy places Leonora at the centre of the drama and Netrebko’s vocal and physical definition of character was riveting. Though this Leonora was painfully wracked by conflicting desires and duties in ‘Me pellegrina ed orfana’, her Act 1 duet with Alvaro had an almost fierce directness. ‘Madre, pietosa Vergine’ began with a deep darkness, blossomed sweetly, then floated bewitchingly - an exquisitely elegant mezza voce - in ‘Vergine degli angeli’. Nebtrenko rose effortlessly above the orchestra’s throbbing climaxes, while the agonising intensity of ‘Pace, pace, mio Dio’ conveyed both Leonora’s fervour and her frailty with spellbinding magnetism.
Jonas Kaufmann (Don Alvaro). Photo credit: Bill Cooper.
Sweeping in through a window stage-right, as if to counter any doubts about his participation with a bold physical statement of his presence, Kaufmann was a heroic Alvaro, a little restrained at the start but expanding to encompass a magnificent range, vocally and dramatically. The tenor spins a heart-meltingly lovely line, by turns ardent and tender, the lyricism charged with tragic suffering, and, as demonstrated in Act 3’s ‘La vita e inferno’, has absolute control of his voice from the most impassioned fortissimo to the softest whisper, magically grading the diminuendo at the close. Ludovic Tézier’s Carlo was no less impressive, his glowing baritone equally commanding and absorbing as he unleashed a vengeful fury which was countered by smooth lyricism in ‘Urna fatale’; the extended duets of Act 3 - in which Kaufmann and Tézier reprised a partnership first formed in Munich in 2014 - were finely wrought dramatically and musically, and utterly compelling.
Jonas Kaufmann (Don Alvaro), Ludovic Tézier (Don Carlo). Photo credit: Bill Cooper.
And, the casting luxuries did not stop there, with several singers reprising roles that they sang in Holland including American soprano Roberta Alexander who was a splendid Curra, strongly defined and impactful, and Italian tenor Carlo Bosi as the pedlar Trabuco who arrived to sell his wares with a chutzpah worthy of a Dulcamare. Ferruccio Furlanetto’s Padre Guardiano was a growling dark foil to Leonora’s sweetness, while Alessandro Corbelli was excellent as Melitone, fun but never flippant, the text clearly enunciated and gracefully phrased. It’s a shame that the Marquis of Calatrava’s death, which triggers the fateful tragedy, prevented us hearing more of Robert Lloyd’s bass which conveyed a father’s love and his demand for submission with equal conviction. And, it was good to hear Jette Parker Young Artists, Michael Mofidian, as Alcalde. Veronica Simeoni, making her ROH debut, seemed not entirely comfortable in the role of Preziosilla: though she did her best to make ‘Al suon del tamburo’ a rousing romp and danced gamely in the Rataplan chorus, sporting emerald belly-dancer pantaloons and surrounded by somersaulting acrobats in spangly top hats, she struggled to project and to reach the upper echelons of the role securely and confidently.
Anna Netrebko (Leonora), Robert Lloyd (Marquis de Calatrava). Photo credit: Bill Cooper.
From the pit, Sir Antonio Pappano immediately ratcheted up the tragic intensity in a surging, heated overture, and crafted the ebbs and flows of the tragedy with consummate command. Whether carousing, warring or in devotional mood, the ROH Chorus were in fine voice and entered into the spirit of the lively, sometimes rather inconsequential, tableaux and crowd scenes.
Verdi abandoned the classical unity of time, place and action in La forza, thereby creating a headache for directors who must make varied locations spanning vast geographical distances, and visited over a period of many years, cohere. Then, there’s the problem of how to assimilate the broad humour within the prevailing tragic narrative. Rather than imposing a binding ‘concept’, Christof Loy and designer Christian Schmidt seem to embrace the disunity. The white marble walls of the Calatrava home that we visit in Act 1, subsequently fall though remnants of the mansion remain in the ensuing locales as the stage becomes a palimpsest of places and periods. Costumes allude to diverse epochs and sometimes seem designed to add to the ambiguity and inconsistency.
There are just two assertive directorial gestures, the first being an extended dumbshow during the overture. Here, atop and around the long table which slices across the floor of the Calatrava palazzo, the three main characters are seen as children. As the screen rises and falls three times, destiny plants the dart which will find its target many decades later; Leonora sits, head bowed, beside a small stature of the Virgin Mary which, enlarged and aloft, will cast a deep shadow over her life. Then, as the drama unfolds, Loy offers us recurring projections which zoom in on Leonora at the moment of her father’s accidental death; the moment which thus seals her fate. But, these ‘psychological close-ups’ are distracting and unnecessary: Verdi’s music tells us all we need to know - especially as here, when it is sung and played with such power and impact.
These directorial diversions don’t really matter, though, as the singing is so absorbing. Verdi may keep his hero and heroine apart for much of the opera, as we traverse through taverns, monasteries and war zones, but when Netrebko and Kaufmann are finally united in Act 4 it certainly feels like - if not ‘fate’ exactly - then very good fortune indeed.
Claire Seymour
Verdi: La forza del destino
Leonora - Anna Netrebko, Don Alvaro - Jonas Kaufmann, Don Carlo di Vargas - Ludovic Tézier, Padre Guardiano - Ferruccio Furlanetto, Fra Melitone - Alessandro Corbelli, Preziosilla - Veronica Simeoni, Marquis of Calatrava - Robert Lloyd, Curra - Roberta Alexander, Alcalde - Michael Mofidian, Maestro Trabuco - Carlo Bosi; Original director - Christof Loy, Associate director - Georg Zlabinger, Conductor - Antonio Pappano, Designer - Christian Schmidt, Associate set designer - Federico Pacher, Lighting designer - Olaf Winter, Choreographer - Otto Pichler, Associate choreographer - Johannes Stepanek, Dramaturg - Klaus Bertisch, Royal Opera Chorus (Chorus Master - William Spaulding), Orchestra of the Royal Opera House.
Royal Opera House Covent Garden, London; Thursday 21st March 2019.