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."
Strictly speaking, The Weimar Republic began on 11th August 1919 when the Weimar Constitution was announced and ended with the Enabling Act of 23rd March 1933 when all power to enact laws without the involvement of the Reichstag was disbanded.
The Weimar Berlin: Bittersweet Metropolis programme notes gives us a wider timeline - beginning with the Wilhelmshaven sailor’s mutiny (which was to pre-empt the 1918-1919 German Revolution) and ends with the German invasion of Poland on 1st September 1939. These broader dates certainly sit more easily with some of the works included in future concerts in this series such as excerpts from Busoni’s Doktor Faust (at the very earliest end), presumably some cabaret songs, but most notably Alban Berg’s 1935 Violin Concerto.
What is unquestionably the case is that the thirteen years up to the Enabling Act embrace one of the most radical, creative and influential periods of art, philosophy and science in European culture; likewise, the almost equal number of years which followed it, is a period of one of the most savage attempts to unwind, repress or eradicate it entirely - not just from a single country, but from much of a continent, whilst also eliminating a whole race who had contributed so much to it during the Weimar years.
It is perhaps German Expressionism which most epitomises the Weimar Republic, even though some artists and musicians would later oppose its influences. Robert Wiene, F.W.Murnau and Fritz Lang would in cinema explore the disintegration, warped destruction, social fragmentation and chaos of a Berlin in flux - though a decade later Joseph von Sternberg would repudiate this vision in films like The Blue Angel which came as close as any to visualising its decadence through the world of cabaret. Georg Wilhelm Pabst and William Dieterle did as much as any to make films about the prostitution and homosexuality which were openly part of late 1920s German society. If after 1933 Hitler would come to describe these kinds of art as degenerate it was because they often stood for forms of propaganda - and inherently Marxist ones as well.
That the music which Esa-Pekka Salonen has chosen for this series - especially in his first concert - should mirror a wider cultural exploration of Berlin during this period is no surprise, and nor is it one that it should be taken from cities like Vienna (the birthplace of Alban Berg). Beginning with Three Pieces (or, Fragments) from Wozzeck, we’re already tracing the influences of early German cinema with its brutalist, uncompromising sadism - though what film could convey in oblique lines and disorienting angles against menacing shadows, Berg can do with music that amplifies itself through atonalism, varying pitches and drama of searing intensity.
Certainly not the easiest music with which to open a concert - you’d rather expect an orchestra to build up to the kind of impact Berg demands - the performance was extremely compelling. In one sense, Wozzeck is an opera which looks forward, with some prescience, to the horrors of the Third Reich rather than to those of the Weimar Republic - though Berg was using a libretto based on the reactionary horrors from a century before. Its themes of militarism, characters who becomes victims of a society they neither understand nor can escape, sadistic brutality and violence against each other and medical experimentation are indictments of social injustice and, as it happens, rather more relevant than to any single time in history.
The Three Fragments compress much into twenty minutes of music, though it requires a soprano with a gift for narrative and the ability to immerse herself very quickly into the character of Marie to bring it off. Angela Denoke was largely a superb advocate for these pieces, even down to her impressive stage presence which was racked with intensity: the quivering body, the deeply reflective eyes, the moulded hand gestures. Her ability to bring sectional contrast to the first fragment was exceptionally convincing. Denoke could be searing in her lamentation of infatuation for her Drum Major and the guilt of the child born out of wedlock; but in singing a lullaby to the child she became unbearably touching. She was equally telling in the second fragment. Reading from the Bible of Jesus’s meeting with an adulterous woman, Denoke became not just aware of the uncertainty of her own future but of the eventual downfall she was to meet. The violent outburst of ‘Herr Gott! Sieh’ mich nicht an!’ was crushing and seemed to come from nowhere - a searing reminder of the music that dominates the final fragment. But this second piece is entirely written to shore up the contradictions between hope and despair and Denoke was more than equal to doing this.
The final fragment is Berg at his most Mahlerian, though perhaps the climax of this music owes as much to Wagner as it does to Mahler. Perhaps divided violins might have helped a touch here (something Salonen has never much been in favour of) but no matter - the playing of the Philharmonia was scorching, especially in the shattering climax of the lament.
Hindemith’s Concerto for Orchestra, which followed the Berg, felt distinctly anachronistic beside the Wozzeck fragments. More than some of the composers included in this series, Hindemith is a composer who embraced expressionism and then later turned against it - something which was to cause him to have a complex relationship with the Third Reich during the 1930s (though he emigrated before the outbreak of war). This 1925 work looks as far back as the Baroque for its inspiration. The Concerto clearly treats particular sets of instruments in the orchestra as separate voices - in the first movement this is a solo bassoon, oboe and violin; in the second brass and percussion; in the fourth it’s given over to basses. The performance was dazzling.
As compelling as the Berg had been in the first half of the concert, it was Kurt Weill’s Suite from The Threepenny Opera which left a simply unforgettable impression. I suppose one might have regretted the lack of any vocal music here, but Max Schönherr’s 1956 Suite (which drops three items from the original arrangement but adds an additional one) was Weimar from beginning to end. It’s been said of this work that it is “the weightiest lowbrow opera for highbrows and the most full-blooded highbrow musical for lowbrows” (Hans Keller) and Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra rather took this to heart. Big band jazz, played by great orchestras, can sometimes be a fascinating experience (even experiment) but the sheer opulence and ravishing sound we got here was breath-taking. The idea that any of this music, that its Hogarthian depiction of a city, should sound quite this lush is probably slightly repellent but despite the rich strings it felt slightly neutered by Salonen’s nod to Weill’s original orchestration. There was no denying the superb playing on muted brass, the jazzy clarinets and piercing flutes. ‘Mack the Knife’ crooned wonderfully (if over-emphatically); it all felt very stylish, if hardly particularly socialist.
The final work, Shostakovich’s Revolutionary finale from The Golden Age presented a slightly darker side of Weimar Germany. It captures the composer’s fascination with football on the one hand, but scores political goals through its narrative of match rigging, police harassment, imprisonment and the Marxist class struggle. The scoring for this work is like a ballet for soccer players: raucous percussion, blazing brass, strings battling through this maelstrom of sound. Salonen and the Philharmonia whipped up a frenzy of playing which was barely unrestrained in its riotous violence. Shostakovich may well have this ballet end with the solidarity of workers and his football team overthrowing their capitalist oppressors, but the irony of the oppression which was soon to come didn’t quite go unnoticed in this riveting performance.
Weimar Berlin: Bittersweet Metropolis continues on 23rd September 2019.
Marc Bridle
Berg - Three Pieces from Wozzeck, Hindemith - Concerto for Orchestra, Weill - The Threepenny Opera: Suite (arr. Schönherr), Shostakovich - The Golden Age: Revolutionary Finale
Angla Denoke (soprano), Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor), Philharmonia Orchestra
Royal Festival Hall, London; Sunday 9th June 2019.