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.
![Tómas Tómasson as Amfortas [Photo by Franco Lannino courtesy of the Teatro Massimo]](http://www.operatoday.com/Tomas%20Tomasson%20%28Amfortas%29%20%C2%A9Franco%20Lannino%20IMG_1738.png)
Richard Wagner chose to finish his Good Friday opera while residing in Sicily’s Palermo, partaking of the natural splendors of its famed verdant basin, the Conca d’Oro, and reveling in the golden light of its surreal Monreale cathedral.
Thirty-eight year old Israeli conductor Omer Meir Wellber chose Wagner’s opera of renewal to inaugurate his tenure as music director of Palermo’s Teatro Massimo, architecturally and artistically one of Italy’s most impressive opera houses. The maestro exploited the Teatro Massimo's excellent orchestra to resolutely proclaim Wagner’s sublime grail motif tirelessly throughout the seemingly brief, if five hour evening.
Maestro Wellber inherits the Teatro Massimo’s recent commitment to Teutonic art, the theater having concluded its Ring cycle in 2016 with British stage director Graham Vick’s minimalist Gotterdämmerung. Mr. Vick returned to stage this minimalist Parsifal.
Minimalist does not mean minimal resources. Foremost was the immense empty stage of an historic grand opera theater, the massive cut stones of its back wall strengthened by the architectural principles of ancient Rome. A huge and timeless space, the world and its humanity there to confront us when we entered the theater. The grand proscenium curtain then fell to create the dark, abstract space of the auditorium for the metaphysical musical world of Wagner’s prelude.
The stage and its platform, a giant, raked (upward sloping) space, again appeared on which we soon confronted Amfortas as the naked body of the crucified Jesus Christ, crowned by thorns (the fit and pale Christlike body of Iceland bass Tómas Tómasson). The exposed lighting sources and the half curtain used to mark the changes of scene were additional quotes of typical trademarks of Brechtian Epic Theatre that we were to behold.
Catherine Hunold as Kundry with the seduction bed
While Graham Vick’s theater is indeed essentially Brechtian, respecting an aim to make us think and learn, it also confronts us with blatant humanity using startling costumes — the loin cloth, wounded nudity of Amfortas, the loin cloth wounded nudity of his antithesis Klingor (the fit and muscular body of German bass baritone Thomas Gazheli), the hijāb covering of Kundry in the first act and the female chorus in the second act garden, the army fatigues and assault rifles of the knights of the grail, the pantsless knights of Klingsor’s sex obsessed kingdom.
Pure Brechtian theater rejects realism and its emotions but Graham Vick’s theater uses human bodies to create an intense sense of emotional space that heightens the realities we are forced to confront. His theater demands awesome numbers of human bodies to create these confrontations. Literally hundreds of bodies — a daunting demand fully met by the Teatro Massimo.
Of note in the Vick staging of Parsifal was the use of the half curtain as a shadow curtain in a direct quote of the silhouette processions that puppeteer William Kentridge often creates. The orchestral processions to the Holy Grail in the first and third acts were in Graham Vick’s world shadows of an endless line of a cruel and frivolous humanity marching across the vast stage expanse towards a meaningless grail. And yes, coup de théâtre, finally there was no grail at all!
Gurnemanz among the children, Parsifal and Kundry
Cosima Wagner in her diaries quotes Wagner stating that Parsifal is “salvation to the savior” and the opera’s final music ascends towards somewhere for the more than five minutes of sublime orchestral music with offstage choir. But for Mr. Vick there there was no salvation of the savior — Amfortas had simply disappeared somewhere into the crowd.
The final tableau, in place of Wagner’s dove ascending to heaven while Amfortas and Kundry lay dead on the floor, was Parsifal sitting in the center of a circle of children wholesomely lecturing them about something profound while Kundry is beatifically standing nearby, liberated from Klingsorian aggression (a #MeToo moment), the impoverished knights of the grail now freed to pursue their personal destinies. One presumes that the throngs of humanity that populated Mr. Vick’s processions were now purified as well.
There were many electrifying moments to be sure, among them Amfortas digging out the buried grail (a tin cup), his blood falling into it to be drunk by the knights as they too mortified themselves. Kundry’s seduction of Parsifal held us entranced for its duration. And finally, astonishingly, as Parsifal baptized Kundry, a crowd of children were carried onto the stage holding huge building blocks (the voices of innocence that flooded the auditorium from time to time throughout the evening).
All this was a lot for maestro Amer Meir Wellber to hold together. But he succeeded in a reading that was absolutely straight forward, keeping to the tight timeline for each act that Richard Wagner had dictated (other conductors have loved to flaunt much slower times), thereby laying a solid foundation on which Graham Vick production might lay out his broader, social resolution. If the Italianate sound of the Teatro Massimo orchestra did not capture the philosophic raptures of the northern European spirit it did portray the enlivened spirit of the Mediterranean soul.
Among the many fine performances of the evening, some extraordinary (Tómas Tómasson as Amfortas and Thomas Gazheli as Klingsor), the magisterial Gurnemanz of Canadian bass baritone John Relyea stood out first as a young, emboldened knight, and finally as the old, wise voice of humanity. French soprano Catherine Hunold sang Mary Magdalene/Kundry in fine voice though without correspondence to a Wagnerian Venus.
The announced Parsifal of the production, Daniel Kirch, fell ill. His understudy Julian Hubbard stepped in for all six performances. Mr. Hubbard fully embodied Mr. Vick and Mo. Wellber’s Parsifal. If his fine, young voice served him exceedingly well for the first two acts, it did not possess the power and color to fulfill the heroic vocal demands of Wagner's third act Parsifal.
Michael Milenski
Production information:
Stage Director: Graham Vick; Scenery Timothy O'Brien; Costumes: Mauro Tinti; Choreography: Ron Howell; Lighting: Giuseppe Di Iorio. Chorus, childrens chorus, orchestra of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna. Teatro Comunale, January 28, 2020.