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."
The presence of a large cast of ‘animals’ in Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen can encourage directors and designers to create costume-confections ranging from Disney-esque schmaltz to grim naturalism.
And history is on their side. An advertorial in the Brno newspaperMoravské noviny, prior to the premiere of the opera at the Na hradbách Theatre on 6th November 1924 had little to say about the music or the design, but promised the paying public ‘seventy costumes’ designed by artist Eduard Milén, including - as Jennifer Sheppard notes in her article ‘How the Vixen Lost Its Mores: Gesture and Music in Janáček’s Animal Opera’ - ‘grasshoppers and crickets in “yellow-green tailcoats and magnificent little wings”; black-and-white glow-worms with reflectors “to light up their bottoms” in the night scenes; a wire-frame rooster costume lined with brightly coloured fabrics; and a green, blue and black dragonfly of “melancholy beauty”, whose tiny, delicate underwings were illuminated in glittering gold’. [1]
Not to be outdone, for their first production of the opera in May 1925 the Prague National Theatre engaged Josef Čapek, brother of the author Karel, as designer, and he duly dished up ‘flying goggles for the mosquito; flouncy polka-dot petticoats for the hens; cowboy spurs with golden rowels for the rooster; a furry deerstalker for the forester’s dog’ (Ibid).
Such aspirations for mimicry-cum-verisimilitude are not on the agenda of Peter Sellars, whose production of Vixen - first seen in Berlin in 2017 - was performed at the Barbican this week by his long-term collaborator and friend, Sir Simon Rattle, and the LSO. Here, minimalism prevails. The entire cast - soloists, London Symphony Chorus, the children of LSO Discovery Voices - are dressed in simple black and perform the action on a bare raised platform in from of the orchestra. Props comprise the odd chair or table, carried on by cast members as required.
Sophia Burgos (Fox) and Lucy Crowe (Vixen). Photo credit: Mark Allan.
In the light of Janáček’s rather arbitrary ‘pairings’ of man and beast - the same singer takes the roles of the Forester’s wife and the Owl, the Priest’s animal embodiment is the Badger, and the inebriate Schoolteacher and Mosquito share a role and a bottle - my first thought was how on earth were we to distinguish the animals’ identities and their human correlations? But, I need not have worried: video designers Nick Hillel and Adam Smith (of Yeast Culture) offer an Attenborough-esque Planet Earth natural history side-show which presents tadpoles as they wriggle into life, dragonflies engaging in shimmering. flickering mating rituals, peering owls, migrating geese, fluttering sun-flecked forests and moonlit mountains.
Indeed, Sellars’ approach pre-empts objections which are sometimes voiced about the stylisation of gesture in which some productions indulge; and if we can’t always differentiate between man and animal, then this only serves to emphasise the inter-connectedness of the entire natural world, man included.
Billboards in Brno in 1924 had enticed prospective punters, ‘It will be a dream, a fairy tale that will warm your heart’, but there is no sentimentality in Sellars’ Vixen. That’s not to say that it does not touch one’s heart, but the strings it pulls of the more sombre, dark kind. Warmth came in the form of the wonderful playing of the LSO. The score includes many instrumental episodes, which are often both balletic and mimetic, and Sir Simon Rattle ensured that every rhythm was delineated with pulsating vigour, every surge of harmonic passion blossomed fulsomely, every extreme of register was meticulously scaled: there was some especially beautiful playing from the strings. In the programme booklet Rattle declares this opera was “the piece that made me want to become an opera conductor … and [its] still one of the pieces that reduces me to tears more easily than any other”, and the loving tenderness with which he articulated the score’s emotions and dramas might well have inspired a tear from many in the Barbican Hall. The LSO did not just mimic or suggest stage movement or feeling, they took responsibility for the drama, filling in the gaps in the episodic structure, immersing us in a glorious musical embrace.
Photo credit: Mark Allan.
Lucy Crowe was a stunning Vixen - insouciant, courageous, feral, sensuous, daring, brazen and honest. This is one of best things I’ve seen Crowe tackle. This Vixen was strong and nimble, and Crowe relished the physical animation as much as she did the vocal vivaciousness. Standing astride the Forester’s kitchen table she impassionedly goaded the repressed hens into socialist revolt, and when she failed, she resorted to tricksy tactics, claiming that she’d rather be buried alive than live with such losers. A winning move: the Cock’s vanity got the better of him and his ‘bravery’ saw him succumb to the ‘playing dead’ mime. The Vixen’s gluttonous gourmandising on chicken skewers was played out in gloriously chin-greasy detail on screen.
Crowe’s Vixen was both ethereal - her soprano silky in the reflective soliloquies - and earthy. In the cartoons by Tĕsnohlídek upon which the opera was based, the Vixen relieves herself into the badger’s den to force him to evacuate, and Crowe sprayed with gleeful vigour! She sang with flashes of brightness and fire, balanced by soft sensuousness. It was an utterly beguiling performance.
Sophia Burgos’ Fox was surprisingly tender: no strutting and posing here, instead coaxing and caring in a beautiful love duet with the Vixen. Initially I thought that Burgos struggled to carry over the strong orchestral fabric, but she grew in stature, crafting a convincing personality: a sort of house-husband of paternal benevolence, anxiously ushering their growing brood of cubs into the under-stage den when their mother was threatened by Hanno Müller-Brachmann’s Poacher, Harašta, after she’d raided his basket of poultry. If the Vixen’s death did not seem quite so shocking as it sometimes can do, then that did not seem to matter: the Vixen’s death was not the climax of a dramatic arc but rather just one happening, incidental and quickly forgotten by a natural world whose chief concern was to nurture the next generation.
As the Forester, Gerald Finley’s performance captured the moral complexities faced by the humans living in the forest. Amorality met anxiety met ambiguity in the personage of this Forester. This was an expressive tour de force. And, a vocal triumph too. Some may have objected, but I loved the way that the original cartoon’s intimations that the Vixen was the animal embodiment of Harašta’s seductive beloved, Terynka, was referenced in Finley’s encounter early with the Vixen - a passionate love-making accompanied by overflowing orchestral warmth, which teased out myriad emotions. Upon returning home, the Forester was met with a disapproving scowl from his Wife, richly sung by Paulina Malefane (also Owl and Woodpecker). Was the encounter real or imagined? The ghostly green glow in which the encounter was bathed by lighting designer Ben Zamora made it difficult to know. But, their subsequent struggle in which they seemed locked was as much a physical one as a psychological one: with the Vixen, by turns, beaten for stealing the Forester’s food, biting back in defiance, nestling needily alongside her captor, needling him with her desire for freedom.
Photo credit: Mark Allan.
This was a luxuriously cast performance, even allowing for the dearth of native Czech speakers. Peter Hoare was equally commanding and characterful as Schoolmaster, Cock or Mosquito; Jan Martiník was a fine Parson/Badger, gruff and glum. Müller-Brachmann stalked opportunistically and menacingly around the Barbican Hall, his hunting gun perched, ever-ready. Anna Lapkovskaja’s Dog was convincing put out by the arrival of a usurper in the Forester’s household, but animal instinct took over though the companionship she craved was denied her. The London Symphony Chorus sang with vigour and managed their entrances and exits swiftly, while the children of the LSO Discovery Chorus were well drilled, vocally and dramatically, charming us in every scene in which they appeared.
And, what of Sellars’ slide-show? Well, images such as the gruesome hunter’s trap and the conveyor belts of chickens heading to their destined doom certainly made their mark. But, the city apartment blocks were an odd evocation of the Forester’s milieu and the folk dancers who supplied the entertainment at Harašta’s wedding seemed less fitting. Overall, I found the visuals rather hyperactive: however well one knows the opera, how could one take in the dramas playing out on both screen and stage, in song and symphonic strata, simultaneously?
The three Acts ran segue with no interval; in fact, Rattle allowed barely a breath between Acts - just enough time to get personnel off-stage and back on again. The effect was to cohere the episodic scenes - which have little to connect them, chronologically or in terms of dramatic linearity - into one flowing stream of nature, emphasising not so much the epiphanic rebirth that the Vixen’s death bestows upon the Forester, but rather the continuous renewal of life, and the speed of transitions between seasons and generations. At the close the Forester espies the Frog: not you again, he declares, only to be answered by a cheeky, slimy nose-rub and the riposte, “That wasn’t me, it was my grandfather. He told me all about you.” The moment was simultaneously insouciant and of import: here was the brevity of life, the brutality and benevolence of nature. Like the whole performance, it was beguiling and brilliant.
Claire Seymour
Gerald Finley (Forester), Lucy Crowe (Vixen), Sophia Burgos (Fox), Jan Martiník (Badger/Parson), Peter Hoare (Mosquito/Cock/Schoolmaster), Hanno Müller-Brachmann (Harašta), Irene Hoogveld (Jay), Anna Lapkovskaja (Mrs Pašek, Dog), Paulina Malefane, (Forester’s Wife/Owl/Woodpecker), Jonah Halton (Pásek); Peter Sellars (Director), Sir Simon Rattle (Conductor), Ben Zamora (Lighting Designer), Nick Hillel and Adam Smith (Video Design/ Yeast Culture), London Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Chorus, LSO Discovery Voices.
Barbican Hall, London; Thursday 27th June 2019.