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."
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’.
This was The Sixteen’s first performance before a live audience since lockdown shut down musical life back in March, and the music of some of the composers dating from the late-15the century to the early-17th century included in their Kings Place programme had originally been prepared for the group’s twentieth annual Choral Pilgrimage tour, which was curtailed earlier this year. The programme for the 2020 Pilgrimage was to focus on Rome and to include music by Josquin des Prez, Felice Anerio and Tomás Luis de Victoria, among others, some of the selected compositions having previously been recorded by the ensemble on The Call of Rome .
Thus, litanies by Anerio and Victoria framed the musical offerings at Kings Place. Felice Anerio was born in Rome, studied under Palestrina as a chorister in the Vatican’s Cappella, and succeeded him as composer to the papal choir. Safety restrictions may have turned the usual (and paradoxically) eighteen-strong The Sixteen into a ten-voice ensemble but, curving in two half-rings across the Kings Place platform, they had no difficult in establishing the expansive glories of Anerio’s double-choir setting of the Litaniae Beatissimae Virginis Mariae. The textures are varied and Christophers used dynamic contrasts to enhance them further. The momentary intimacy of two sopranos pleading with the “Regina angelorum” to pray for mankind flowed naturally into the vibrant invocatory litanies of the full-throated choir. Rhythms were agile and, though the text is characteristically repetitive, there was never any sense of the formulaic.
Tomás Luis de Victoria was maestro di cappella at the Jesuit seminary in Rome. His setting of the Litaniae Beatae Mariae is grand, built upon the sorts of contrasts that Christophers relishes - not just of musical elements such as dynamics and texture, but also of states of mind, ecstasy being juxtaposed with calm reflection. Despite the density of the double-choir material, The Sixteen sounded lucid, airy and flowing.
Josquin des Prez’s six-part motet, O virgo prudentissima, which sets words by the classical scholar and poet Poliziano, was tremendously spacious, the bass probing downwards with a lovely dark grain, the sopranos stretching upwards with shining vigour. The reduced number of voices seemed to create more brightness and majesty, not less. The central canon for alto and tenor created a momentary pause for the counterpoint to rest, only for the music to regather with refreshed energy, pushing towards the final Alleluia. In his will, Josquin asked for his two motets, Pater noster and Ave Maria, to be performed in the market square, in front of his Condé home, whenever church services included an outdoor procession. The Sixteen paid homage with warmth, gentleness and affectionate sincerity.
As seems almost obligatory now in programmes of Renaissance vocal music - though this makes it no less welcome - the music of Arvo Pärt was interspersed between the earlier compositions. VOCES8 themselves performed Pärt’s The Deer’s Cry in the first concert of the Live from London series, back at the start of August, a programme based on their latest disc, After Silence. The fifth-century text presents the prayer spoken by Ireland’s patron saint, St Patrick, as he led his fellow monks to safety, following an ambush. The choral tone at the start was hushed but heavily fraught with tension; the fragmentary repetitions - “Christ with me”, “Christ in me” - pulsed like heart-beats, held together across the palpable silences by St Patrick’s faith. Christophers pushed the silences as far as they would go, until they were filled by the higher soprano voices, the latter building and then exploding in fervour before all subsided into the quiet certainty of belief.
Pärt’s Da pacem Domine was commissioned by the Catalan conductor Jordi Savall for a concert dedicated to peace and written two days after the Madrid train bombings in March 2004 as a tribute to those who died. Here its colour-tones spread like glowing carillons around Kings Place’s Hall One, the ringing voices bouncing off one another in gleaming patterns. Christophers’ judicious pacing created a fluid, purposeful momentum for the shifting and evolving colours. I was put in mind of a paint-laden artist’s brush dropping its load into clear water, and the paints blending while retaining their own vibrant identity. We heard the composer’s Morning Song when The Gesualdo Six sang ‘live from London’ a few weeks ago. The use of higher female voices - as scored by Pärt - gave The Sixteen’s rendition a sense of greater hopefulness and buoyancy, though the slower tempo adopted by Christophers seemed to make the rhythm animation more restrained.
There was an English voice to counter the continental masterpieces. The first of the two Libera nos settings composed by John Sheppard reminded us that England had its golden age of polyphony too. To return to the painterly imagery, here a wide, laden brush, slowly smeared its indigo and verdigris, its gold and lapis lazuli, as a light streamed in through a high church window onto the canvas.
To complement the choral songs, choral poetry was placed within the folds of the vocal programme. As Christophers explained, in a recorded interview with VOCES8’s Artistic Director Barnaby Smith, 2020 is the 850th anniversary of the death of Thomas Beckett, in Canterbury Cathedral where Christophers was himself a chorister. Three of the plays Choruses for the women of Canterbury were recited by Christophers’ daughter, Antonia. It was a pity that during the opening lines of the recitations, “Here let us stand by the cathedral, here let us wait” and “Does the bird sing in the South?”, the camera was focused on Christophers, with the be-masked audience in the auditorium behind, because when the lens was turned to Antonia Christophers herself it was clear that her presentational impact was as compelling as her vivid vocal presence. (It was a pity, too, that the microphone picked up some muttering from the auditorium.) Holding the text but speaking predominantly from memory, she made us feel the import of the people’s ‘waiting’ - for Advent, for the renewal of spring, for the destiny that “waits in the hands of God.”
The reception offered by the audience at Kings Place evinced huge warmth and gratitude. They were thanked in turn with an encore sung by four members of The Sixteen, the Agnus Dei from Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices. After the accumulating intensity of the vocal conversations, the movement subsided into wonderfully delicate reflective introspection.
As Eliot wonders, what is there for the people to do? “Only to wait and to witness,” proclaim the women of Canterbury. Apt words, it feels, at this present time.
Stilo Antico perform the next concert in this Live From London series, on Saturday 26th September.
Claire Seymour
The Sixteen: Harry Christophers (conductor); Antonia Christophers (narrator); Julie Cooper, Katy Hill, Alexandra Kidgell & Charlotte Mobbs (soprano); Daniel Collins, Edward McMullan & Kim Porter (alto); Jeremy Budd & Mark Dobell (tenor); Ben Davies & Rob Macdonald (bass)
F. Anerio - Litaniae Beatissimae Virginis Mariae; Arvo Pärt -The Deer’s Cry, T.S. Eliot - ‘Here let us stand’ fromMurder in the Cathedral, Josquin des Prez - O Virgo prudentissima, Arvo Pärt - Da pacem Domine, T.S. Eliot - ‘Does the bird sing in the South?’ (Murder in the Cathedral), John Sheppard -Libera nos I, Josquin des Prez - Pater noster / Ave Maria, Arvo Pärt - Morning Star, T.S. Eliot - ‘We praise Thee, O God’ (Murder in the Cathedral), Tomás Luis de Victoria - Litaniae Beatae Mariae
Live From London , Live from Kings Place, London; Saturday 19th September 2020.