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.
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.
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.
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.’
‘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.’
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 doors at The Metropolitan Opera will not open to live audiences until 2021 at the earliest, and the likelihood of normal operatic life resuming in cities around the world looks but a distant dream at present. But, while we may not be invited from our homes into the opera house for some time yet, with its free daily screenings of past productions and its pay-per-view Met Stars Live in Concert series, the Met continues to bring opera into our homes.
Music-making at this year’s Grange Festival Opera may have fallen silent in June and July, but the country house and extensive grounds of The Grange provided an ideal setting for a weekend of twelve specially conceived ‘promenade’ performances encompassing music and dance.
There’s a “slide of harmony” and “all the bones leave your body at that moment and you collapse to the floor, it’s so extraordinary.”
“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.”
The hum of bees rising from myriad scented blooms; gentle strains of birdsong; the cheerful chatter of picnickers beside a still lake; decorous thwacks of leather on willow; song and music floating through the warm evening air.
![Scene from Cosi fan tutte [Photo by Hans van den Bogaard]](http://www.operatoday.com/Cosi%CC%80%20fan%20tutte%20-%20De%20Nationale%20Opera%20-%20Hans%20van%20den%20Bogaard%20%280034%29.png)
Dutch National Opera’s October offering is Così fan tutte, a revival of a 2006 production directed by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, originally part of a Mozart triptych that elicited strong audience reactions. This Così, set in a hotel, was the most positively received.
In their treatment of this coming-of-age comedy, in which two young men trick their girlfriends into cheating on them with themselves in disguise, the directors emphasise the extreme youth of the couples. They even transform the sonorous Dutch National Opera Chorus into a pack of slouchy, surly teenagers. In this adolescent context, the couples’ overreactions to setbacks in their love life, including several suicide threats, make perfect sense.
Unfortunately, despite plenty of frantic stage business, the production is practically devoid of humour. Whenever the audience laughed it was at Da Ponte’s dialogue. The staging as a whole is illogical. Yes, even the improbable premise that two women can become intimate with each other’s boyfriends and not recognize them has to follow some kind of psychological, if not naturalistic, logic. When the sisters first meet their suitors, in reality their boyfriends pretending to be minor celebrities, Despina the waitress/chambermaid is treating them to a striptease in the hotel lobby. It’s anyone’s guess why Fiordiligi and Dorabella should be so outraged by this. After being rejected, the celebs start making out with each other, under the influence of the poison they pretend to have swallowed—an original idea that contributes nothing to their wearing down the women with their incessant wooing and pestering. Even worse are the unmusical choices, such as the silent scenes. There’s no excuse for stopping the music while characters get dressed when there’s yards of rhythmic, bouncy recitatives. Equally exasperating is the defacement of arias with unacceptable noise, such as Dorabella smashing a sideboardful of breakfast things during “Smanie implacabili”.
There are a couple of insightful, even witty, touches. Electric lights flicker when Despina, dressed as a turbaned doctor/alternative healer, weaves her hocus pocus. And Ferrando physically attacking Guglielmo when he finds out that Dorabella has been unfaithful is totally believable. However, such moments are sparse. Eighteenth-century Naples is traded for an unspecified seaside resort in the 1960s, but if this conjures up colourful vintage postcards, think again. It is true that the hotel guests wear a garish tangle of fifties and sixties fashions. But the only beachy thing about the unspeakably ugly set, a peanut butter-colored revolving platform partitioned into three hotel interiors, is the sprinkling of anaemic sand in front of it. There isn’t a hint of blue sky or water anywhere, not even through a window. Luckily, the performers supplied the much needed elan.
Ivor Bolton maintained a sprightly pace with deft and unfussy conducting. He expertly modulated the volume of the charmingly fluent Netherlands Chamber Orchestra to suit the soloists, creating pleasingly balanced ensembles. Another asset were the dry recitatives, during which the singers and continuo players kept up a stream of well-timed, sparkling repartee. Besides Bolton on the harpsichord, and a cello, the continuo included a guitar strummed by a superfluous but endearing beach hippie. Bolton and the soloists rescued the production from being a disappointing muddle. Thomas Oliemans made a fine role debut as a pipe-smoking, beard-stroking Don Alfonso, the puppetmaster behind the sadistic charade. I think he was supposed to be the hotel owner. His vocally secure cynic crackled with energy, occasionally revealing glimpses of the sadistic nature behind his amiable bon vivant act. Oliemans’s tangy timbre contrasted nicely with the other baritone in the cast, Davide Luciano, whose voice poured out like coffee liqueur, making him a particularly attractive Guglielmo. He and Angela Brower sang an exquisite “Il core vi dono”. Such a shame that this erotically charged duet was directed to exude the sensuality of a stock-taking session.
Brower was a delightful Dorabella, the flightier of the two sisters, her poised mezzo-soprano flawlessly produced. Soprano Annet Fritsch successfully captured Fiordiligi’s highly strung earnestness. The low notes lacked body, which is problematic in this role, and during her first big aria, “Come scoglio”, it sounded as if she was overtly managing every phrase. Given the manic staging, she probably was, having to negotiate the music’s Olympic leaps and runs while fussing aimlessly with books and glasses of water. In the second act she sang more organically, delivering a potent "Per pietà", sadly marred by a case of persistent hiccups in the horn solos, and an arresting surrender duet with her Ferrando, Sebastian Kohlhepp. Kohlhepp, who commands a robust, darkish tenor with slightly clipped Germanic vowels, sounded slightly pressed in “Un’aura amorosa”, but then went on from strength to strength. This production retains the frequently cut taxing aria “Ah, lo veggio”. Kohlhepp sang it with supreme control and conviction. Last but not least, Sophia Burgos as the free-spirited Despina left nothing to be desired. Her diction was clear, her musical instincts unerring, and her vocal acting as natural as her feline movements, even in her parodic disguises as the doctor and the notary. The cast served Mozart and Da Ponte well, even if the production team didn’t.
Jenny Camilleri
Mozart: Così fan tutte
Anett Fritsch, Fiordiligi; Angela Brower, Dorabella; Sophia Burgos, Despina; Davide Luciano, Guglielmo; Sebastian Kohlhepp, Ferrando; Thomas Oliemans, Don Alfonso. Jossi Wieler, Director; Sergio Morabito,Director; Barbara Ehnes, Set Designer; Anja Rabes, Costume Designer; David Finn, Lighting Designer. Ivor Bolton, Conductor. Dutch National Opera Chorus. Netherlands Chamber Orchestra. Seen at Dutch National Opera & Ballet, Amsterdam, on Thursday, the 3rd of October, 2019.