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.
No wrecked motorcycle (director Harry Kupfer’s 1987 Berlin Orfeo), no wrecked Citroen and black hearse (David Alagna’s 2008 Montpellier Orfée [yes! tenorissimo Roberto Alagna was the Orfée]), no famed ballet company (the Joffrey Ballet) starring in L.A. Opera’s 2018 Orpheus and Eurydice).
In Rome there was but an excavated grave.
It was Canadian stage director Robert Carsen’s 2006 Lyric Opera of Chicago take on the ancient Orpheus legend as told by Virgil in his Georgics and then reimagined in 1762 Vienna by Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck — these days simply called Gluck — as a one and one half hour azione teatrale.
Mr. Carsen revived his production of Gluck’s azione teatrale last November (2018) in Paris with famed French counter-tenor Philippe Jaroussky and French soprano Patricia Petibon, and just now (March 21) he staged it again in Rome with an all-Italian cast and conductor. Note that when Gluck refashioned his opera in French for 1774 Paris it became a full-blown drame héroique, Orphée was now a non-controversial haute-contre (a naturally high tenor voice) rather than a contralto castrato (a voice once disliked by the French), and of course Gluck added airs, choruses and dances to make a lengthier evening.
Carlo Vistoli as Orfeo with Act I mourners
Back in 1762 Vienna there were two brief dances in the drama — one by the infernal spirits, another by the Elysian spirits — and now in Rome (as well as Paris!) there were none. Robert Carsen’s stage was but a bed of pebbles, an excavated grave, a hand held bowl of fire and a sky. The black silhouettes of mourners bemoaning the death of Eurydice transformed themselves into barely visible, supine, white covered infernal spirits who slowly transformed themselves into black silhouetted blessed spirits, movement that sufficed to prolongate Gluck’s drama.
If there was actual dance in the Carsen Orfeo ed Euridice it was in the duet of Euridice’s escape from hell. Euridice, beautifully sung by Mariangela Sicilia, repeatedly implored Orfeo to place his loving gaze upon her, when he did not she turned away in dismay. Orfeo then faced the back of her head to beg her repeatedly to wait. She would not.
The emotional stillness of director Carsen’s bleak choral landscape was initially shattered by Orfeo’s thrice repeated,“Euridice” in a spine chilling cry by Italian counter-tenor Carlo Vistoli. Mr. Vistoli is the perfect swain — young, handsome, masculine, immaculately groomed musically, endowed with a beautiful contralto voice. Though Gluck’s arias for Orfeo were much simplified from the highly ornamented singing of the Baroque, Mr. Vistoli did not eschew adding the occasional appoggiatura. These chokes and sobs rendered his laments heart wrenching.
If conductor Gianluca Capuano normally conducts period instrument orchestras, in Rome he revelled in exploiting the resources of a modern symphonic ensemble (the Rome Opera orchestra) to create an immediacy that did not falter through the intermission-less duration. It was a close reading of Gluck’s score that left no emotive phrase unremarked, taking us to an emotional level that in fact betrayed Gluck’s intention to purge Baroque opera of its excesses.
The great tension of Baroque opera is love vs. duty. It is indeed this same tension that pervades Gluck’s reform opera. It is Orfeo’s duty to not look at Euridice, and finally it is his love for Euridice that forces him to forsake his pledge, his passion overwhelming the art that had so moved the infernal spirits.
By the time we arrived, with Orfeo, to his “Che faro senza Euridice” we were all in a state of utter despair, Gluck’s azione teatrale having become an expressionistic nightmare.
Fortunately Gluck’s Amore, sung by Hungarian born, Italian formed soprano Emöke Baráth, saved the day reuniting Orfeo and Eurydice through the power of love, thus averting Orfeo's suicide, indeed the mass suicide of all of us who, with Orfeo, had endured the tragedy of this splendid evening.
Michael Milenski
Cast and production information:
Orfeo: Carlo Vistoli; Euridice: Mariangela Sicilia; Amore: Emöke Baráth. Orchestra and chorus of the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma. Conductor: Gianluca Capuano; Production: Robert Carsen; Sets and Costumes: Tobias Hoheisel; Lights: Robert Carsen and Peter Van Praet. Teatro dell'Opera, Rome, Italy, March 21, 2019.