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."
In a rank order of suicidal depressives, Federico - the Provençal peasant besotted with ‘the woman from Arles’, L’arlesiana, who yearns to break free from his mother’s claustrophobic grasp, who seeks solace from betrayal and disillusionment in the arms of a patient childhood sweetheart, but who is ultimately broken by deluded dreams and unrequited passion - would surely give many a Thomas Hardy protagonist a run for their money.
Whether the titular protagonist of Alphonse Daudet’s 1869 short-story (which the author subsequently transformed into a play, with original incidental music by Bizet) is a real woman or just a projection of Federico’s mind, we do not know. And, it’s not a question that Oliver Platt, the director of this new production of Francesco Cilea’s 1897 opera based on Daudet’s dark tale, seems all that interested in addressing. For Platt gives us a neatly designed, largely naturalistic production in which the inescapable, tragic consequences of romantic obsession and delusion take precedence over any forensic psychological examination of the roots and causes of such angst. That’s not intended as a criticism: this production drives forward unstoppably and clutches all in its relentless grip, enabled by some superb verismo singing and led insightfully by conductor Dane Lam.
The latter demonstrates finely tuned verismo instincts, a sure ear for a surging melodic phrase and a telling orchestral detail in equal measure, and the ability to make six desks of violins sound like sixteen when required. The prelude to Act 1 was a microcosm of such skills, as the dark muted opening relaxed into the tender romanticism of the upper strings’ lyricism, with textures so transparent that we could hear every tantalising woodwind gesture.
Designer Alyson Cummins transports us, not to late 19th-century rural Provence but, I imagine, to an Italian or Sicilian village during the 1940s. Our eye is focused by some crumbling stone walls, clinging to and projecting from the Holland House backdrop, around which assorted wheels, baskets, vats and brooms are scattered. The domain is well-defined: at times it reminds me of a Leonardo Sciascia novel, minus the mafia.
Fflur Wyn as Vivetta. Photo credit: Opera Holland Park/Ali Wright.
It’s quite a static setting though; perhaps that doesn’t matter, given that L’arlesiana is an opera in which the ‘action’ essentially takes place within the minds of Federico and his over-controlling mother, Rosa Mamai, and is allegorically reflected in the tales spun by the wise shepherd/sage Baldassare. But, there is a lot going on in Federico’s psyche. And, while Cilea’s first opera, Gina (a graduation work of 1889), might have owed a verismo debt to Carmen, the composer wasn’t really drawn to violent ‘realism’ in the vein of Puccini, Mascagniet al (who overshadowed him in his day, and still do). L’arlesiana is essentially an opera about hopelessness. And, as such, I feel the representation of Federico’s tragedy needs to find a means to convey his inner thoughts as much as the outer events. That doesn’t necessarily mean the stylisation that Rosetta Cucchi adopted at Wexford in 2012 , though Cucchi’s approach was thought-provoking and not without merit.
The ostensible ‘action’ is simple. Rosa Mamai’s eldest son, Federico, has fallen in love with a woman from Arles. Her youngest son, ‘L’innocente’ is retarded, so she’s pinning all her hopes on getting Federico wedded to the loyal local lass, Vivetta - to ensure that she has someone to look after her in old age, one presumes. Metifio arrives bearing a letter which ‘proves’ L’arlesiana’s infidelity (it never seems to occur to anyone to check the ‘facts’), and Federico agrees to marry Vivetta. But, like Tess Durbeyfield, spinning self-destructively between Angel Clare and Alec d’Urberville, as the wedding day approaches Federico sinks ever more deeply into despair and derangement. Unlike Tess, Federico does not stab his physical and psychological persecutor; instead, he avoids the gallows by jumping to his death off the hayloft. Fortunately, for Rosa Mamai, her youngest ‘idiot’ son has by this time miraculously found his voice, so it looks as if she’ll be alright in her dotage.
Samuel Sakker as Federico and Fflur Wyn as Vivetta. Photo credit: Opera Holland Park/Ali Wright.
L’arlesiana has largely lived by Federico’s lament, ‘È la solita storia del pastore’. At the opera’s first outing, in Milan’s Teatro Lirico in the autumn of 1897, one Enrico Caruso, performing Federico in his first Milan season, made notable a mark, which the opera itself did not; subsequently, the lament has become an ‘Italianate tenor’ calling card, from Gigli to the Three Tenors. Australian tenor Sam Sakker did an excellent job in upholding the tradition; his tenor is strong and sure - sadly, his acting is stock and stiff. In contrast, Fflur Wyn made Vivetta a really credible character - vivacious and sympathetic: no pale Micaëla to an imagined Carmen was she.
Yvonne Howard’s Rosa Mamai was suffocating and sympathetic by turns. Howard had a grip on the matriarch’s obsessive mania and exercised steely control, vocally and dramatically, in her Act 1 narration of her son’s first encounter with the woman from Arles, ‘Era un giorno di festa’. Later her voice did not so much shine with verismo passion, as burn with self-torturing anguish, and her Act 3 ‘Esser madre è un inferno’ made one hold one’s breath. Howard’s stamina, focus and commitment were exemplary.
Samantha Price as L’innocente and Keel Watson as Baldassare. Photo credit: Opera Holland Park/Ali Wright.
Simon Wilding’s Metifio brought much-needed shots of dramatic action into play - for all Cilea’s fluency there is overall a lack of memorability and frequent note-spinning about his melodising. Keel Watson was a resonant though occasionally wayward Baldassare, and created a lovely rapport with Samantha Price’s gamine L’innocente - particularly at the start when he recounted his framing fable about a goat which struggles all-night with a hungry wolf before collapsing and dying at daybreak, a tale which does not bode well for the lad’s older brother’s romantic hopes. As Rosa’s brother Marco, who is despatched to Arles to do some detective work on the mystery woman, James Cleverton made a strong contribution. The Opera Holland Park Chorus weren’t encouraged to be very ‘peasant-like’ in demeanour but they sang with their customary spirit.
This is the third time that Opera Holland Park have staged L’arlesiana. The first production, in 1998, was pretty much the first UK staging of any status; this was followed by a 2003 production directed by Jamie Hayes and starring Sean Ruane as Federico and Rosalind Plowright as Rosa Mamai. I’m in accord with my Opera Today colleague, Jan Neckers , in his wish for a staging of Cilea’s 1892 La tilda, in which a street singer seeks to avenge her wrongs upon a faithless lover. It remains an unknown quantity. OHP as a ‘house’ has a real feeling for this style and for its conventions. It would be good to see what they might make of it.
Claire Seymour
Cilea: L’arlesiana
Federico - Samuel Sakker, Rosa Mamai - Yvonne Howard, Vivetta - Fflur Wyn, L’innocente - Samantha Price, Marco - James Cleverton, Baldassare - Keel Watson, Metifio - Simon Wilding; Conductor - Dane Lam, Director - Oliver Platt, Designer - Alyson Cummins, Lighting Designer - Rory Beaton, Movement Director - Caitlin Fretwell-Walsh, Opera Holland Park Chorus, City of London Sinfonia.
Holland Park, London; Saturday 20th July 2019.