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."
Beach balls and parasols. Strolls along the strand. Cocktails on the terrace. Laura Attridge’s new production of Così fan tutte which opened English Touring Opera’s 2020 spring tour at the Hackney Empire, is a sunny, insouciant and often downright silly affair.
Not for Attridge the moral imperatives, psychological ‘proofs’ or ideological frameworks which some thrust upon Mozart and Da Ponte’s drama of abstract forces which drive human behaviour, which cannot be denied and should not be lamented. In an essay which considered the relationship between Così and Fidelio, Edward Said suggested that Così ‘refuse[s] the kind of metaphysical, or social, or cultural significance found readily by [various commentators] in Don Giovanni, Die Zauberflöte and Le nozze di Figaro’, and Attridge seems to agree.
“Out of a gothic North” we go “Southward into a sunburnt otherwhere”, said Auden in his poem ‘Good-Bye To The Mezzogiorno’, “some believing amore/ Is better down South and much cheaper”. And so Attridge transports us to 1930s Alexandria, then Egypt’s most cosmopolitan city, a beacon of Mediterranean culture and a gateway to Europe. That tolerant and inclusive city where the great, good and glamorous from far and wide - France, Italy, Greece, England, Armenia - mingled, in their chic bathing costumes, with Egyptian Jews and Muslims on ‘the sand beaches of Sidi Bishr’, as Lawrence Durrell described one such fashionable seafront watering-hole in his Alexandria Quartet.
Designer Oliver Townsend and Lighting Designer Mark Howland flood the small Empire stage with colour and sunlight. The crisp glare of the promenade where Don Alfonso, a English writer-abroad, lounges to pen his observations of the interlopers’ amorous antics, gives way to the cool blues and greens of a Neoclassical terrace. The emerald drapes, cobalt columns, gold patterned woodwork and hanging lanterns evoke leisured luxury: it’s a fitting arena for the lovers’ dalliances amid the alabaster statuary and palm plants.
Alfonso, sporting a white suit and panama, may be as cool in dress and as in manner, but the lovers are an explosion of colour. Their days are dedicated to fun and frolics. Indeed, the sunshine seems to have gone to their heads. Faces are flushed and hearts are febrile when ‘Dr Despina’ arrives to revive the ‘suicidal foreign lovers’, her medical apparatus producing Mesmer-like magnetic vibrations racier than is customary. The amused men throw themselves into the fiasco with a physical gusto which is more than matched by the concerned women. It’s hilarious and swiftly despatched. Farce at its best.
Stephan Loges (Don Alfonso) and Jenny Stafford (Despina). Photo credit: Richard Hubert Smith.
The cast are perfectly attuned to the blithe spirit of Attridge’s production. Martha Jones’ Dorabella, flamboyantly attired in a glorious green trouser-dress, grasps her romantic opportunities with relish, and confesses all in a beautifully sonorous ‘È amore un ladroncello’, looking and sounding not the least regretful as she reveals her indiscretions to Fiordiligi. Joanna Marie Skillett is a more demure Fiordiligi, attempting to defy the amatory sunstroke that afflicts the other lovers, but passion drives the precision of both ‘Come scoglio’ and ‘Per pietà’. As she pleads with herself to resist temptation and moral taint, her sincerity is undermined by some gentle but pointed horn commentary.
I admired Tom Elwin’s Nemorino last summer, in Into Opera’s L’elisir , and here he was a vocally elegant Ferrando, his diction, like that of all the cast, excellent - enabling us to enjoy the insinuations, double entendres and wry couplets of Jeremy Sams’ English translation. Frederick Long sang with a lovely fresh and relaxed tone as Guglielmo, dashing in his knee-boots and flying suit as he swept Dorabella to the clouds.
Thomas Elwin (Ferrando) and Frederick Long (Guglielmo). Photo credit: Richard Hubert Smith.
As Despina, Jenny Stafford demonstrated the same comic timing and vocal grace that have impressed several times at Bampton Classical Opera . Stephan Loges evinced Don Alfonso’s worldly-wise weariness, lounging with a lazy lethargy which was complemented by the languidly uncoiling smoke of his cigarette, but his cool cynicism did not deprive the recitatives of their cutting impact.
There was a sense of caution in some of the ensembles. This is understandable at the start of a long tour, but was also a result of some uncertainty, of tempo and tuning, from the Old Street Band in the pit. Conductor Holly Mathieson got the show on the road with a crisp overture, but elsewhere a bit more zip and drive was needed.
Lawrence Durrell claimed that in the Alexandria Quartet ‘only the city is real’. And, that spirit of amoral fantasy imbued this Così . There was no gravity, no guilt, no emotional shipwrecks. As Despina says, “Quello ch’è stato, è stato,/ Scordiamci del passato.” What’s done is done and the less said the better.
“Wish you were here!” proclaims the picture-postcard front drop. Audiences around the country certainly will wish they were!
Claire Seymour
Mozart: Così fan tutte
Fiordiligi - Joanna Marie Skillett, Ferrando - Thomas Elwin, Dorabella - Martha Jones, Guglielmo - Frederick Long, Stephan Loges - Don Alfonso, Despina - Jenny Stafford; Director - Laura Attridge, Conductor - Holly Mathieson, Designer - Oliver Townsend, Lighting Designer - Mark Howland.
English Touring Opera, Hackney Empire, London; Saturday 29th February 2020.