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.
![Santtu-Matias Rouvali [Photo by Kaapo Kamu]](http://www.operatoday.com/Santtu-Matias%20Rouvali%20High%20Res%204%20-%20credit%20Kaapo%20Kamu.png)
Finnish conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali has been making waves internationally for some time. The chief conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra is set to take over from Esa-Pekka Salonen as principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in 2021.
At his debut with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra he displayed an effortless flexibility, being equally at home in the unfettered sweep of Italian Romantic opera and the stringent rhythmicity of Stravinsky’s neoclassical opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex. “Inexorable Fate” was the theme linking the three items on the programme, and the first two also turned out to share several musical elements.
Rouvali conducts with panache, his arms drawing graceful curves in the air, as he punctuates the music cleanly with small flourishes of his baton. After the opening chords ushered in the inescapable destiny of the title, the overture to Verdi’s La forza del destino took off with refreshing buoyancy. Rouvali kept the details crisp and the tone brilliant even at the swiftest of prestos. He applied the same care in the phrasing of Ariadne, the last composition by Theo Verbey, who died unexpectedly last October, conceived as a companion piece to the Stravinsky. Unlike Oedipus’s unsuccessful efforts to escape the prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother, Ariadne manages to outsmart the labyrinth of fate by giving Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur, a ball of thread that guides him out of the maze. Lasting around twenty minutes, Ariadne, like Verdi’s overture, combines transparent lyricism with dramatic progression. Starting out with fragile flute figures, it swells to include the full complement of strings. When the whole range of the brass comes in with a driving motif, there is sinister menace. The piece constantly changes colour and texture, making use of the whole orchestra. Before all the sections unite for a final restrained crescendo, an ethereal violin solo rises, haloed by a harp. Although Verbey didn’t describe the work programmatically, it was easy to imagine the Cretan princess’s thread unwinding in the woodwinds and the rumbling monster charging in the horns. Ariadne is a highly gratifying swansong and the RCO gave it a lustrous world premiere.
They carried over that burnished sound to Oedipus Rex, with its starring roles for the sinuous clarinet solo, bulldozing brass and its main motor, the pummelling percussion. Rouvali’s reading was dynamically exciting and extremely polished, maybe a tad too polished for the more savage moments. A little snorting raucousness in the fanfares wouldn’t have been out of place, but one can’t really cavil about such a fine interpretation, which also boasted a superlative choir. The choir in Oedipus Rex is a dominating presence and acts as a Greek chorus. The men of the Latvian State Choir were not only technically impeccable, but got every mood and nuance right—the magnificent bombast of the royal ovations, the gossipy whispers and the terrible deluge with which they pronounce Oedipus the foulest of monsters before they send him away with a tender farewell. The work reached its dramatic peak in their scene with the Messenger and the Shepherd, sterlingly sung by bass-baritone Christian Van Horn and tenor Attilio Glaser. Van Horn was also a vocally imposing, dangerous-sounding Creon. Bass-baritone Shenyang emitted gravitas as the prophet Tiresias, spitting out ominous consonants when Oedipus enrages him into disclosure.
In the spirit of the formalistic nature of the work, director Gijs de Lange had the soloists, whose faces were painted with white masks, standing stiff, moving only their arms in stylized gestures. This worked for Van Horn, Glaser and Shenyang, who all benefited from singing downstage. Tenor Lance Ryan, however, was not helped by being sent behind the orchestra when his curiously expressionless Oedipus starts to piece the horrific revelations together. The same applied to a certain extent to soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci, who, after a vocally unstable start, sang a warm and textually focused Jocasta. Pity about her physical remoteness behind the double basses. The decision not to subtitle the Latin text was a mistake. While De Lange’s wish to maintain audience detachment was a valid one, subtitles would have been a boon to those unfamiliar with the work. Stravinsky himself built in enough alienating features, exploiting ritualistic repetition and incongruity between text and music, as when he set the description of Oedipus’s self-blinding as a rowdy drinking chorus. Paradoxically, actor Pierre Bokma, unlike most of his predecessors, stayed away from stagey declamation and chose to deliver the Dutch narration naturalistically, as if talking to a camera. Whether or not this was a conscious choice, it was the most alienating effect of all.
Jenny Camilleri
Igor Stravinsky: Oedipus Rex
Theo Verbey: Ariadne (World Premiere)
Giuseppe Verdi: Overture to La forza del destino
Lance Ryan (tenor), Oedipus; Anna Caterina Antonacci (soprano), Jocasta; Christian Van Horn (bass-baritone), Creon/Messenger; Shenyang (bass-baritone), Tiresias: Attilio Glaser (tenor), Shepherd; Pierre Bokma, Narrator. Gijs de Lange, Mise-en-espace. Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Conductor. Latvian State Choir. Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Heard at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, on Thursday, the 30th of January, 2020.