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."
Walk for 10 minutes or so due north of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden and you come to Brunswick Square, home to the Foundling Museum which was established in 1739 by the philanthropist Thomas Coram to care for children lost but lucky.
Currently showing at the Museum is a fantastic special exhibition, Two Last Nights! Show Business in Georgian Britain, which opens a window on the often riotous and raucous goings-on both front-of-house and behind-the-scenes in the eighteenth-century theatre and opera house, through exhibits such as fans printed with seating-plans to show where the great and good could be found, large illustrated tickets which are works of art in themselves, sharp contemporary cartoons and over-crowded playbills.
The latter are astonishing, showing the extent and diversity of the variety and vaudeville, sketches and song on offer each long evening of entertainment. A similar bill in the Burney Collection at the British Library gives the flavour: at the King’s Street Theatre in Bristol on the evening of 23rd August 1775, theatre-goers could enjoy Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, before which they were treated to a Prelude written by one George Colman Esq., while the play was followed by a ‘New Dance to which will be added A New Dramatic Entertainment, The Maid of the Oaks’, concluding with a Fête champêtre - illuminated with ‘near one thousand lamps’ original songs and choruses, a new minuet. The whole evening concluding with a dance. Preludes and after-pieces, divertissements and dances, comedies, dramatic romances, tragedies and farce frequently collided. Not surprising, Hogarth’s pen skewered both the artistes and the players, the aristocrats and the plebs.
I justify this rather diversionary preamble to my review of Music Theatre Wales’ production of The Intelligence Park at the ROH’s Linbury Theatre because Gerald Barry’s first opera resembles such a marathon Baroque bombardment. Both Hogarth and Handel, the latter whom Barry professes to admire, were fervent supporters of the Foundling Hospital Chapel - from 1749 Handel gave an annual benefit concert, raising thousands of pounds for the Hospital - and Barry channels Hogarth in his metatheatrical mash-up, though with little of the neoclassical wit and precision, tempered by soul-touching lyrical sentiment, that Stravinsky demonstrates in The Rake’s Progress. Instead Barry wields an iconoclastic sledgehammer, bludgeoning all connections between sound and syntax that might provide structural and semantic coherence … or, at least a semblance of comprehensibility.
Michel de Souza as Paradies, Adrian Dwyer as D'Esperaudieu Photo credit: Clive Barda.
But, then, Barry’s not in the business of ‘coherence’. In the sleeve notes to the 2005 NMC recording of the first production of The Intelligence Park at the Almeida Theatre in July 1991 (which was broadcast on BBC Radio 3), Barry professes not to like ‘texts which are bound by logic or plot’, preferring instead those, such as that by his librettist Vincent Deane, characterised by ‘coolness and a bizarre artificiality which allow extreme careering at tangents’.
In fact, the essential plot and the ‘opera-about-opera’ paradigm of The Intelligence Park are pretty straightforward, it’s the idiom and execution which scramble reason and rationality. The time is 1753, the place Dublin. Robert Paradies has composer’s block and is struggling to complete his new opera. Marriage to his fiancée, Jerusha Cramer, will bring him her bombastic father’s money, and the leisure to devote himself to his art. But, he’s obsessed with the castrato Serafino, who is Jerusha’s singing teacher. Worse still teacher and pupil elope. The plus side is that Paradies infatuation fuels his musical inspiration; the downside is that Serafino and Jerusha transmute into Wattle and Daub who find their way into his opera. As real and imagined become inextricably tied up in creative and romantic knots, Paradies loses his grip.
Photo credit: Clive Barda.
As a metareferential document of a creative crisis, The Intelligence Park is not, in theory, so different from Franz Schreker’s penultimate opera,Christophorus oder ‘Die Vision einer Oper’ ( St Christopher, or ‘The Vision of an Opera, 1924-29). Barry, though, sets out to destroy any conduit through which intelligibility might be communicated. The vocal lines deliberate disrupt syntax and meaning, through rhythmic fracture, elongation and hysterical stuttering, and through melodic and registral displacement and athletic angularity. The singers are required to essay vocal gymnastics, with the male roles leaping between falsetto and Hadean depths. If the word-setting is not so much arbitrary as deliberately anarchic, then the prevailing fortissimo wind-brass dominated accompaniment of punching patterns of repetitive staccatos obliterates the text in any case. In the Linbury Theatre I could detect scarcely a word of Deane’s 18th-century linguistic style-games, which are themselves intercut with splashes of Italian, and was forced to choose between gazing up at the oh-so-high surtitles to learn what was being said or looking at the stage itself to try to work out what was going on. Neither course of action produced a satisfying result.
Adrian Dwyer as D'Esperaudieu, Stephen Richardson as Sir Joshua Cramer, Stephanie Marshall as Faranesi. Photo credit: Clive Barda.
There is no danger of music and words coming together in any ‘meaningful’ relationship; indeed, they are surely designed to be in combat. Each theatrical element does battle with every other aspect of the ‘drama’ and the result is a frenetic but self-consuming energy which burns itself to obliteration on a bonfire of the bizarre. Director-designer Nigel Lowery’s toy theatre-style painted sets are imaginative and eye-catching. But Lowery substitutes excess for elucidation: smeared clown make-up, outsize Aristophanic head masks, manic stage business - all seems designed to obscure rather than to explicate.
Rhian Lois as Jerusha Cramer Photo credit: Clive Barda.
The cast, however, give their all. It was announced at the start that Michel de Souza was unwell, and surely by the end he must have felt truly dreadful having been asked to force his voice high and low, and generally swallow and strangle sound and syllable. As he companion D’Esperaudieu, Adrian Dwyer was more successful than most in communicating if not meaning then at least words, and he and Rhian Lois as Jerusha were able to produce a focused tone which could carry about the tumult and communicate with some directness. Not so Patrick Terry, as Serafino, who, despite a characteristically committed and game performance was often inaudible. Stephen Richardson threw himself about the stage and his voice in all directions as Sir Joseph Cramer; Stephanie Marshall completed the dedicated cast. Raphael Flutter’s solo treble was transmitted in recorded form via the bobbing heads of the grotesque putti slouching on the columns of the theatre-within-a-theatre set. Conductor Jessica Cottis guided the London Sinfonietta confidently but when she joined the cast on stage for the curtain-call she looked exhausted, only tentatively allowing herself what seemed a relieved smile.
Patrick Terry as Serafino. Photo credit: Clive Barda.
Paradies’ opera audience - who prefer card games and gastronomic cuisine to genuine ‘culture’ - formed a row of rubbery double-headed Francis Bacon-inspired Dummies: I guess this was ‘us’. But, if The Intelligence Park is an opera about unfulfilled creativity, then I wondered just whose creativity was under the spotlight. Some commentators have described Barry as a ‘visionary’. I found his fantastic, frantic pastiche tedious: thinking of Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy, or imagining what Adès might do with this conceit, made it hard to discern just what ‘vision’ it was that Barry was supposed to have had.
Photo credit: Clive Barda.
Admittedly, I was no fan of the composer’s 2011 opera The Importance of Being Earnest , which won widespread acclaim, but in that case Wilde’s perfectly well-made play was able to withstand Barry’s rough treatment. On this occasion, I began to wish that the Grim Reaper who haunted the production with increasing frequency would wield his scythe on proceedings. That said, there were plenty in the Linbury who voiced their praise vigorously at the close. Visionary or Emperor-with-no-clothes?
Claire Seymour
Gerald Barry: The Intelligence Park (Libretto: Vincent Deane)
Robert Paradies - Michel de Souza, D'Esperaudieu - Adrian Dwyer, Sir Joshua Cramer - Stephen Richardson, Jerusha Cramer - Rhian Lois, Serafino - Patrick Terry, Faranesi - Stephanie Marshall; Director and Designer - Nigel Lowery, Conductor - Jessica Cottis, Lighting assistant - Fridthjofur Thorsteinsson, London Sinfonietta
Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, London; Wednesday 25th September 2019.