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.
Kurt Weill’s “American opera,” Street Scene debuted this past weekend in the Kay Theatre at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, with a diverse young cast comprised of students and alumni of the Maryland Opera Studio (MOS).
An ambitious work for any theater, Street Scene is especially challenging for younger singers because it encompasses such a variety of styles, from blues to jazz, to popular dance idioms of the 1940s, to Puccini-esque arias and complex ensemble numbers, let alone the many intervening moments of spoken dialogue. Maestro Craig Kier, the orchestra comprised of the University of Maryland (UMD) School of Music students, and the cast sparkled in their energetic opening performance, not completely devoid of stumbles, but entirely entertaining. The production is a part of the Kurt Weill Festival, funded partially by the Kurt Weill Foundation, hosted by the UMD School of Music, and spearheaded by the MOS director Kier. This year-long celebration of Kurt Weill is also a component of the UMD’s Year of Immigration initiative.
Kurt Weill considered opera his “real field of activity,” and throughout his career wrote extensively for the stage. Yet, in America as in Berlin, he was constantly trying to circumvent the well-trodden tropes of established classical opera and define his own place within the operatic tradition. In this pursuit, the composer used popular culture as a foundation for his innovative musical ideas. In 1946, Weill decided to use the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Street Scene by Elmer Price for his new opera, designed to be uniquely American and intended for a premiere on Broadway. Weill knew Rice personally, had seen the play, and saw potential in the raw realism of its subject and characters. It was to be an American urban folk tale, set in one of the storied tenements of New York City. Weill engaged the celebrated African-American poet Langston Hughes as lyricist, to adapt Rice’s text to song, but also kept many passages of spoken dialogue intact. The composer brilliantly combines text and music, using the orchestra to underscore and comment on the action, as well as set up and accompany vocal numbers. As you hear and see a blending of the Broadway song and dance style with traditional operatic arias, it may not be quite so apparent how enormous the challenge is to the conductor and orchestra to navigate and prepare for suc stylistic shifts. Maestro Kier deftly navigated these hurdles, as the UMD orchestra valiantly (mostly) followed.
The hotbed of musical ingenuity and stylistic medley that is Street Scene may not be for everyone, and neither is its dark, troubling plot. Set over the course of a single day on the street in front of a tenement building, the first act begins with the neighbors complaining about the oppressive heat, and focuses on Anna Muerrant (Helena Crothers), a mother and wife, who desperately wishes to believes that there might be more to her lonely and unfulfilling existence. Only a few minutes into the show, the barely disguised hints and gossip from her nosey neighbors reveal that she is carrying on an affair with the sleazy milkman. Crothers brought a melancholy strength to Mrs. Muerrant’s soaring arias. When Mrs. Muerrant’s teenage son stumbles onstage, having been in a rough fight defending her reputation, we begin to understand that the neighborhood gossip is taking hold. Soon it reaches Mrs. Meurrant’s eldest child, beautiful Rose (Shafali Jalota). As Rose navigates her mother’s protestations, her father’s thinly veiled anger, abuse, and neglect, while fending off unwanted attention from a variety of men, she finds solace in Sam Kaplan (Samual Keeler), her quiet, nerdy neighbor and friend. Jalota and Keeler shone in their innocently staged duet at the close of the act, as the two sit together on the front steps of the building, dreaming of leaving it together.
Another highlight of the first act and a special moment of true hilarity was the famous Ice-Cream Sextet, a dramatic ode to the magnificence of ice-cream on a hot day. The star of the sextet and other lighthearted interludes was Dallas Gray, who electrified the audience with his energy and comedic timing as one of the building’s denizens, Italian musician Lippo Fiorentino.
Dramatically much faster-paced and more difficult to follow, the second act begins with a new life, as a birth is celebrated in the building, transitions through a double-murder by Mr. Muerrant of his wife and her lover, and closes with a departure, as Rose leaves the tenement and Sam to face an unknown future alone. Meanwhile, Park Avenue nannies ogle the infamous murder scene, prospective tenants view the Muerrant’s now-vacant apartment, while the remaining neighbors again complain of the heat, as the curtain falls.
One of this production’s great strengths lies in its remarkable set (Ryan Fox) and lighting design (Peter Leibold IV). The exquisitely crafted, looming tenement building, reaching up to the rafters, provides stability to the complex drama, while each of the six windows of the house brings clarity but also circumscribes the less central storylines taking place in individual apartments, not allowing them to overshadow the opera’s dominant themes of oppression, poverty, and desperate loneliness. The lighting follows the changing time of day in the story with the subtle shifts of color and shadows.
Another pleasant surprise was the strength of acting demonstrated by some of the cast, although, in that, many disparities are to be expected. Crothers in particular brought an inner strength to Mrs. Muerrant, who might otherwise have been seen as a weak and superficial character. Keeler also was up to the challenge of elevating Sam to hold his own opposite Rose/Jalota’s stunning vocal technique and poised stage presence.
Although the political undertone of this opera – a new look at the success, failure, and reality of the American dream – was not particularly highlighted in this production, it did bring to the fore the distinctly different (if brashly accented) ethnicities of families and individuals inhabiting the tenement. And, as a part of the Year of Immigration, the MOS production of Street Scene lends a folkloric quality to this vitally contemporary topic by its picturesque depiction of the quirky locals and immigrants coexisting within the squalid but undeniably lively New York City slum. How much more American could it be?
Ruth Bright
School of Music
University of Maryland