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.
The Sixteen continues its exploration of Henry Purcell’s Welcome Songs for Charles II. As with Robert King’s pioneering Purcell series begun over thirty years ago for Hyperion, Harry Christophers is recording two Welcome Songs per disc.
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.
In February this year, Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho made a highly lauded debut recital at Wigmore Hall - a concert which both celebrated Opera Rara’s 50th anniversary and honoured the career of the Italian soprano Rosina Storchio (1872-1945), the star of verismo who created the title roles in Leoncavallo’s La bohème and Zazà, Mascagni’s Lodoletta and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.
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.
Collapsology. Or, perhaps we should use the French word ‘Collapsologie’ because this is a transdisciplinary idea pretty much advocated by a series of French theorists - and apparently, mostly French theorists. It in essence focuses on the imminent collapse of modern society and all its layers - a series of escalating crises on a global scale: environmental, economic, geopolitical, governmental; the list is extensive.
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.’
Amongst an avalanche of new Mahler recordings appearing at the moment (Das Lied von der Erde seems to be the most favoured, with three) this 1991 Mahler Second from the 2nd Kassel MahlerFest is one of the more interesting releases.
‘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.’
If there is one myth, it seems believed by some people today, that probably needs shattering it is that post-war recordings or performances of Wagner operas were always of exceptional quality. This 1949 Hamburg Tristan und Isolde is one of those recordings - though quite who is to blame for its many problems takes quite some unearthing.
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."
Investec Opera Holland Park’s brilliantly cast new production of Un ballo in maschera reunites several of the creative team from last year’s terrific La traviata, with director Rodula Gaitanou, conductor Matthew Kofi Waldren and lighting designer Simon Corder being joined by the designer, takis.
The latter’s set designs emphasise intrigue and betrayal. Dark panelled walls loom high, imposing bulwarks which shield in secrecy assassins and illicit lovers alike, then swivel exposing treacheries, or open up crevasses through which the guilty can slip away. In Act 1 Scene 2, Simon Corder turns the timber transparent, and through the eerie blue mists we watch a menacing dumb-show of murder.
There’s no specificity of ‘place’: the panels are not particularly ‘Swedish’ or ‘American’, but they blend effectively into the Jacobean Holland House beside which the Opera Holland Park theatre-tent nestles. The ‘tone’ is not especially regal either.
Matteo Lippi (Gustavo). Photo credit: Ali Wright.
This Gustavo is not an autocratic,
profligate monarch who abolishes the privileges of the nobility and is
challenged by a mutinous aristocracy. The motives driving Ribbing’s and
Horn’s assassination plot are personal not political: a beloved stolen, a
brother scorned. Gaitanou elects to set the tragic love triangle of
Gustavo-Amelia-Anckarström in the early 1950s. The men are dressed in
trench coats and trilbies; the women wear frocks and felt hats.
Anne Sophie Duprels (Amelia). Photo credit: Ali Wright.
Not all of Gaitanou’s ideas ‘makes sense’, alone or in combination. Why are Gustavo and his peers practising their lunges, parries and ripostes during the overture? The fencing masks may foreshadow the carnivalesque masques of the final scene, and the cuts and thrusts are rhythmically in tune with the vigour and tautness of Verdi’s score, but the épées and sabres don’t make any further appearances. Why is Amelia a sculptress? We see her, beside her easel in her studio, working on a clay bust: is she sublimating her erotic desires into art? When her deceived husband later dashes the sculpted head to the floor, is this a symbol of the violence he will do to the real-life Gustavo? And, when sent to the gallows to find the herb that will cure her of her forbidden desires, why does Amelia head to hospital and check into a clinic? When the lovers are interrupted by Anckarström, she’s forced to don a nurse’s uniform and hide behind a perilously flimsy surgery screen.
Anne Sophie Duprels (Amelia) and Opera Holland Park Chorus. Photo credit: Ali Wright.
None of this matters, though. The singing is so uniformly strong and persuasive that we’re swept along on the increasingly tragic trajectory. Similarly, conductor Matthew Kofi Waldren - who impressed so much in La traviata last year - exercises acute control over the pacing and ensures that we’re enthralled. The musical temperature of each moment is brilliantly judged, and varied; and the passion is as much driven by rhythm as it is by melody or colour.
Matteo Lippi’s firm, appealing tenor generates warm sympathy for Gustavo, and his effortless production of sound and fine phrasing is suavely aristocratic. Lippi and Anne Sophie Duprels - a favourite at Opera Holland Park following her fine recent performances in Isabeau and Zazà - made for an impressive central pair of doomed lovers. Duprels employed a dynamic and expressive range of colour in ‘Ma dall’arido stelo divulsa’, when riven with conflicting desires - to submit to or to silence her love for Gustavo - and sang with truly affecting power in ‘Morrò, ma prima in grazia’, when pleading with her murderous husband to be able to see her son for one last time (though the baby boy is bound up in such a bumper bundle of swaddling that he looks as if he must be at least five years old!).
Matteo Lippi (Gustavo) and George von Bergen (Anckarström). Photo credit: Ali Wright.
George van Bergen’s imposing Anckarström burned with feeling from his first to last utterance, his baritone bristling with emotion when he warned Gustavo of the imminent danger to his life and blackened by anger and pain when he vowed to gain vengeance for his former friends’ betrayal. Alison Langer , who took the title role in last year’s OHP Young Artists performance of La traviata, is a lively Oscar, as agile vocally as she is light on her feet. This was a vivacious and good-natured Oscar, whose genuine fondness for Gustavo was worn proudly on his white shirtsleeve. Langer’s soprano shone strongly and vibrantly, and her tall figure and graceful movement ensured that Oscar was both more engaging and a stronger presence in ensembles than is sometimes the case.
Alison Langer (Oscar). Photo credit: Ali Wright.
As Madame Arvidson, brandishing an elongated cigarette holder and sporting an astonishing geometrical fascinator, Rosalind Plowright looks like a cross between Marlene Dietrich and the Queen of the Night and she relished the medium’s outlandishness. John Savourin (Horn) and Benjamin Bevan (Ribbing) were convincingly nasty conspirators, while Ross Ramgobin was a lively Cristiano, the sailor whose fortune is foretold by Madame Arvidson.
Rosalind Plowright (Madame Arvidson). Photo credit: Ali Wright.
The eponymous revelry is a riot of costumed drama: I think I spotted Napoleon, Charles II, Anne Boleyn, a Japanese geisha, a Roman centurion, a musketeer and a highwayman amid the sparkling black and gold crowd. It was a pity, perhaps, that Gaitanou did not swing back the panels at this point - one thing the wide stage at Opera Holland Park is surely good for is a grand ball? But, pushing the cast forward to a narrow strip at the forefront of the stage, Gaitanou both sustained the sense of intrigue, the panels concealing treacheries just as the masks obscured identities, and ensured that our focus at the close was on the dead Gustavo, draped across a white stone ‘altar’, his desolate Oscar at his feet.
Claire Seymour
Verdi: Un ballo in maschera
Amelia - Anne Sophie Duprels, Gustavo - Matteo Lippi, Anckarström - George van Bergen, Oscar - Alison Langer, Madame Arvidson - Rosalind Plowright, Ribbing - Benjamin Bevan, Horn - John Savournin, Cristiano - Ross Ramgobin, Servant - Mike Bradley, Un Giudice - Ian Massa-Harris; Director - Rodula Gaitanou, Conductor - Matthew Kofi Waldren, Designer - takis, Lighting Designer - Simon Corder, Movement Director - Steve Elias, Fight Director - Bret Yount, Sculptor - Benedict Romain, Opera Holland Park Chorus, City of London Sinfonia.
Opera Holland Park, London; Saturday 8 th June 2019.