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."
Based on Hogarth’s 18th-century morality tale in eight paintings and with a pithy libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, Stravinsky’s operatic farewell to Neo-classicism charts Tom Rakewell’s ironic ‘progress’ from blissful ignorance to Bedlam.
On the way he discards the ever faithful and appropriately named Anne Trulove and succumbs to the temptations of Nick Shadow in the guise of the devil whose news of a windfall inheritance catapults Tom to a dissolute life in London where he marries the bearded Baba-the-Turk, plunges into a financially ruining bread-making scheme and, after defeating his alter ego at cards, dies grieving for his beloved Anne in an asylum.
Grim stuff, but it’s an opera suited to the talents of young singers who in this case were hand-picked musicians belonging to Barbara Hannigan’s Equilibrium Young Artists - a mentoring initiative for young professional musicians created in 2017 and here at Snape making their UK debut. This Rake’s Progress was the grand finale of a series of European performances which had been launched in Sweden at the end of last year. The production has been a semi-staged affair from the start and any potential issues over balance and space that might have been perceived in advance at Snape (where all the players and singers occupy a single performance area) were immediately dispelled. That said, Linus Fellbom’s directorial note in the programme book indicating the use of a performing ‘box’ (used in earlier outings) had to be ignored; this production left the performers free rein to use the stage directly in front of the orchestra. Of course, much was left to the imagination so that Mother Goose’s brothel and Sellem’s junk-filled auction were left to the mind’s eye. But with acting and singing as distinguished as this, there was little needed in the way of visual signposting to hold the ear and eye. Without pauses for scene changes the action rattled along with obliging swiftness.
That’s all credit to Hannigan (whose opera conducting debut this is) and Fellbom who, in the absence of any set and props (not forgetting much atmospheric lighting) provided sharply defined characters helped by some thoughtfully conceived costumes - Tom ironically dressed in ‘pure’ white and everyone else, including the innocent Anne, chorus and on-stage orchestra, clad in funereal black with gender fluid overtones for Shadow, whose culotte-like trousers might as well have been a skirt.
The cast was led by the young Welsh tenor Elgan Llŷr Thomas as the feckless Tom, whose brightly lit tone swept through the score from the opening duet through to “death’s approaching wing”. Able to command facial expression with ease, whether shame, frustration or child-like naivety when incarcerated in Bedlam, Thomas gave a truly persuasive portrait and his attempt to define love was particularly touching. There was no lack of chemistry between him and Greek soprano Aphrodite Patoulidou as a pure-toned Anne Trulove. Notwithstanding a slightly pressured Act 1 ‘Quietly night’ (here just slightly too fast to be as poignant as it can be), her Cabaletta had just the right steely determination and her closing lullaby, ‘And no word from Tom’, wonderfully tender, its heartbreak delivered the evening’s emotional climax.
Guadalupen-born Yannis Francois gripped throughout as the flamboyant Nick Shadow, a gentlemen’s gentleman whose ample baritone and insidious presence peaked in a compellingly wrought card game. Of the remaining cast, Fleur Barron was a generously hirsute and idiosyncratic Baba the Turk, James Way a confident man-about-town Sellem and Antoin Herrera-Lopez Kessel doubled as a timid but sympathetic Father Trulove and androgynous Mother Goose. A meticulously prepared chorus excelled as whores and roaring boys, auction bidders and madmen, and strikingly taut instrumental support came from the Ludwig Orchestra whose players (including Edo Frenkel on the harpsichord) brought much luminous detail to Stravinsky’s chugging rhythms and spiky outlines - the whole dispatched with Mozartian clarity. Praise too must be heaped on Hannigan whose incisive direction and unflagging pace electrified from the start, her minimal gestures sparking life into those opening fanfares and her keenly sensitive ear securing an ideal balance between her vocal and instrumental forces. In short, Hannigan and Fellbom nailed this unstaged Rake to release its emotional energy with dramatic power. Among the outstanding singers of Equilibrium are stars in the making.
David Truslove
Tom Rakewell - Elgan Llŷr Thomas, Anne Trulove - Aphrodite Patoulidou, Nick Shadow - Yannis Francois, Baba the Turk - Fleur Barron, Sellem - James Way, Father Trulove / Keeper of the Madhouse/Moose Goose - Antoin Herrera-Lopez Kessel, Director/Design/Lighting - Linus Fellbom, Conductor - Barbara Hannigan, Ludwig Orchestra & Chorus of Opera Holland Park.
Snape Maltings Concert Hall; Thursday 20th June 2019.