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."
![Luciano Pavarotti [Photo by Terry O'Neill/Decca Records]](http://www.operatoday.com/Pavarotti_T-ONeill--Decca.png)
Ron Howard’s latest music documentary after The Beatles: Eight Days a Week and Made in America is a poignant tribute that allows viewers into key moments of Pavarotti’s career – but lacks a deeper, more well-rounded view of the artist.
It’s easy to dismiss Luciano Pavarotti as the opera singer who took opera to the masses: images of him singing with a microphone – signature white handkerchief to hand – in huge stadiums filled to capacity swiftly come to mind. What is perhaps less obvious, however, was the remarkable career and talent of the Italian tenor who, through a number of bel canto and other key repertory roles, stunned the world with his extraordinary singing, delivered with thrilling vigour, incisiveness, golden high notes and an unmistakable tone.
But a greater engagement with his artistry was not, it appears, what Ron Howard’s new full-length biopic on the renowned artist was set out to do. Instead, we are left with what feels like a broad brush strokes impression of his career and an intimate portrait of Pavarotti the man, told through interviews with family members and colleagues: first wife Adua Veroni and their daughters, second wife Nicoletta Mantovani, former student, assistant and lover Madelyn Renée, as well as co-tenors José Carreras and Plácido Domingo, New York manager Herbert Breslin and London promoter Harvey Goldsmith, among others. What emerges is a friendly, benign portrayal of a warm, loving, larger-than-life figure whose simplicity and schoolboy charm – described by many with the Italian term monello – won over the hearts of those around him.
The film starts with the rare and unlikely footage of Pavarotti travelling through the Amazonian jungle in a journey leading to the Manaus opera house in Brazil, where he is then filmed singing alone on stage, following in the footsteps of Enrico Caruso who performed at the opening of the theatre in 1897. It traces his career from his childhood as the son of a baker and tenor in the local choir in 1930s Modena through to his professional debut in the early 1960s, playing Rodolfo in La bohème at the Teatro Municipale in Reggio Emilia.
One of his first international breakthroughs follows a couple of years later, when he served as a last-minute replacement for Giuseppe di Stefano at London’s Covent Garden. Following that, and thanks at least in part to the Australian soprano Joan Sutherland and her husband and conductor Richard Bonynge, he is propelled onto the leading stages of the world. It is opposite her at the Metropolitan Opera in 1972 that his career truly takes off: after singing ‘Ah! Mes amis’ in Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment – the aria known as the Mount Everest for tenors -with an aplomb that left the audience gasping, he is crowned the ‘King of the High Cs’. A decade of operatic triumphs follows, including an exclusive recording contract with Decca.
The hiring of his manager Herbert Breslin, thought of as ‘one of the most hated people in the opera business’ at the time, was in many ways key to his worldwide fame. Breslin surely knew how to build a commercial success, taking Pavarotti from the confines of the opera house and turning him into a mainstream phenomenon: it is during this time that he starts touring America’s concert halls and that we see him in a range of TV commercials and chat shows. He then sells out New York City’s Madison Square Garden in 1984, before touring China in 1986.
It is of course in 1990, at a performance at the ancient Baths of Caracalla in Rome in the eve of the FIFA World Cup final in Italy that Pavarotti captivates a global audience: singing ‘Nessun dorma’ alongside titans Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, the Three Tenors become arguably the biggest operatic brand the world has ever seen. Their performance at the following World Cup in Los Angeles in 1994 is viewed by around 1.3 billion viewers worldwide, cementing their colossal pop-classical stardom.
The film also provides ample coverage of the later part of his career, spent in great part raising money for a number of causes and charities, and fusing musical styles alongside pop stars such as Bono, Sting and Bon Jovi – none of which ever received much critical acclaim. Though here we are very briefly offered a more dispassionate view of things, overall a more disinterested voice is lacking. The intimate accounts from family members which dot the narrative throughout convey a real sense of his personal life and of the cheeky, generous, outgoing personality of a singer who was both commercially successful and, overall, critically acclaimed. However, not much is made of his acting skills on the operatic stage, for instance, or of his cinematic endeavour with the 1982 feature Yes, Giorgio, which turned out to be a flop. There is no mention of his opera-star tantrums either or of his less successful attempts at heavier roles towards the later part of his life.
Opera lovers might also have liked to have seen a more in-depth and sustained discussion of Pavarotti’s musicianship throughout his decades-long career and more critical views on his artistry and contribution to the artform. Still, he remains one of the most spectacular voices of the twentieth century and in so many ways the quintessential Italian tenor – a view the film thoroughly, and unequivocally, confirms.
Mahima Luna