Recently in Performances

ETO Autumn 2020 Season Announcement: Lyric Solitude

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.

Love, always: Chanticleer, Live from London … via San Francisco

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 …).

Dreams and delusions from Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper at Wigmore Hall

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.

Treasures of the English Renaissance: Stile Antico, Live from London

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.

A wonderful Wigmore Hall debut by Elizabeth Llewellyn

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.

The Sixteen: Music for Reflection, live from Kings Place

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’.

Iestyn Davies and Elizabeth Kenny explore Dowland's directness and darkness at Hatfield House

'Such is your divine Disposation that both you excellently understand, and royally entertaine the Exercise of Musicke.’

Paradise Lost: Tête-à-Tête 2020

‘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.’

Joyce DiDonato: Met Stars Live in Concert

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.

‘Where All Roses Go’: Apollo5, Live from London

‘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 're-connect'

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’.

Lucy Crowe and Allan Clayton join Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO at St Luke's

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.

Choral Dances: VOCES8, Live from London

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.

Royal Opera House Gala Concert

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’.

Fading: The Gesualdo Six at Live from London

"Before the ending of the day, creator of all things, we pray that, with your accustomed mercy, you may watch over us."

Met Stars Live in Concert: Lise Davidsen at the Oscarshall Palace in Oslo

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.

Precipice: The Grange Festival

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.

Monteverdi: The Ache of Love - Live from London

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: Rowan Pierce and Christopher Glynn at Ryedale Online

“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.”

A Musical Reunion at Garsington Opera

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.

OPERA TODAY ARCHIVES »

Performances

Thomas Hampson (Photo: Johannes Ifkovits)
28 Nov 2005

Thomas Hampson in Recital

Monday evening, November 21, 2005, I was fortunate enough to attend a benefit recital given by Thomas Hampson in the Fox Theater in Spokane, Washington.

Hampson, whose roots are in eastern Washington, was donating his time to benefit the renovation of the theater, an art-deco palace with magnificent acoustics that recently escaped demolition when acquired by the Spokane Symphony. Since vocal recitals by international stars are rare in my own city of Seattle, I decided to make the trip across the state to hear this one, and it was well worth the trip.

Not until shortly before I left the hotel for the theater did it occur to me to check Hampson’s extensive web site www.hampsong.com for the program, and I ultimately wished that I had done so much earlier. Hampson had chosen to present a selection of Schumann lieder with which I was not familiar, a set of Mahler lieder related to “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” texts, and eight American art songs, most of which I knew or had heard. But the printed program supplied nothing beyond the song titles, composers, and poets, and the singer’s biography. This lack was partially made up as Hampson talked to the audience at some length between the sets of songs, summarizing the texts of the German songs (and referring the audience to his web site for full texts—which I did find, although not the translations, having to follow his link to www.recmusic.org for those).

Despite using his voice for all this talking (he began by using a microphone, but as the recital continued he stopped bothering to walk over to it and just spoke to the audience), his singing voice held up well. He opened with “Lust der Sturmnacht”, followed by three settings of German texts after slightly disconcerting Danish poems by Hans Christian Anderson. Hampson presented these with an expressive range of vocal color, from his full operatic sound in the martial “Der Soldat” to intimate stillness at the end of “Der Spielmann”. Impressed as I was by Hampson’s singing, I found myself even more astonished by the accompanist’s ability to make incredible sound in the postlude to “Muttertraum” on the Kawai grand. It was clear that this was no ordinary accompanist, and indeed at the break between the Schumann and Mahler songs, Hampson apologized for having also failed to supply the bio of his accompanist for the program. He introduced Wolfram Rieger, originally from Munich and now teaching in Berlin, with whom he has collaborated for eleven years, and who has also collaborated with Brigitte Fassbaender and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, among others.

The juxtaposition of happiness with loss that had pervaded the Schumann song texts continued in the Mahler set. “Ablösung im Sommer” led the set, taken at a quick tempo. Hampson’s diction and involvement with the song were fine, although I do have to say that the spots where the singer imitates the sound of the cuckoo is more effective in the soprano of, say, Lucia Popp. I would find it hard to imagine a more heartfelt and effective performance of “Ging’ heut Morgen über’s Feld” than the one that followed. In his introduction to this set, he had described how the songs of Mahler had resonated for him from his earliest experience with them as a young singer, and “have guided me through many times since”. In singing this song he used a remarkable range of facial expression and vocal color to evoke first the joy of the external world and eventually the intense grief at the realization that the singer’s emotional landscape will never match that of the beautiful spring day. This song was followed by “Aus! Aus!” and “Zu Strassburg auf der Schanz’ “, (the latter introduced by Hampson as “one of the most beautiful songs Mahler wrote“), echoing the dark attitude toward war of Schumann’s “Der Soldat”.

Without intermission, Hampson then took a sip from a mug that he had stashed behind the piano, and invited the audience to stand up and turn around once to warm up, as the theater’s noisy heating system had been turned off during the performance (something that will presumably be fixed by the renovation). He then spoke of how he had begun his 15-20 year-long study of American art songs searching for the American Schubert or Mahler, only to decide it was a waste of time to take that approach. Instead he sees this song literature as a forum in which Americans can look at ourselves, examining what it has been to become “America”. In his view, the “quiet cultured thinking” of America’s philosophers and poets, which these songs capture, is regrettably not as well known as some of the more commercial American products that have pervaded the world. He spoke with warmth and enthusiasm of his current project with the Library of Congress to bring some of the library’s vast collection of American song before the public through his current recital tour. He mentioned Stephen Foster’s project as wanting “to write the Thomas Moore ballads all over again” in an American context. and recounted the work of Arthur Farwell with the Wa-Wan press, which sought to make serious American music available to Americans. Despite the fact that much of this discussion was delivered between songs, without aid of the microphone, Hampson continued to sing beautifully a representative selection of the undeservedly obscure American art songs that he has championed for some years.

The section began with two rather dark texts about shipwreck: Charles Griffes’ “An Old Song Re-sung” and Edward MacDowell’s “The Sea”. After these we heard “Grief”, by the African-American composer William Grant Still, which ends with the exhortation to the weeping angel to “raise your head from your hands” to see “the white dove, Promise.” In this last song in particular, the magic in the accompaniment was matched at the end by that of the pianissimo in the voice. This song was followed by Arthur Farwell’s “The old man’s love song”, based upon an Omaha Indian melody. In John Duke’s setting of “Richard Corey,” Hampson at first returned us to the mundane world in which the title character moved, the accompaniment’s illustration of how he “glittered when he walked” so apt as to prompt giggles from the audience, until the final line when he “put a bullet through his head.” The next song on the program had clear relevance to the occasion, as Hampson evoked his early memories of excitement at hearing music in the very theater in which we sat by singing “Memories”, by Charles Ives. The first section was taken so quickly that at first the singer and accompanist seemed to race against each other, but it had settled into a dead heat by the time Hampson gave a robust performance of the whistled sections, and ended when the accompanist announced “Curtain!”, at which point they shifted to the “rather sad” memories of a bygone era and family member. We returned to the world of ships and the water in the final two programmed songs, first an arrangement by Stephen White of the folk song “Shenandoah” with a majestic accompaniment that was matched by Hampson’s full heroic voice in the first verse and the tenderest of pianissimo in the “I love your daughter” verse, which was sustained through the end of the piece, at which point the accompanist launched immediately into Aaron Copland’s energetic “Boatman’s Dance.” In the master class that Hampson gave the following day, he repudiated critics’ use of the term “vocal coloring”, saying that singers do not have “a crayon box for color”, but rather that if the singer is truly expressing the emotion of the song, the sound quality will vary accordingly. Well, whatever accounts for it, there was throughout this recital a satisfying spectrum of sound, providing sufficient sonic variety and surprise to create in the audience a range of emotion beyond that which was clearly already there in welcoming a favorite son who had achieved international stardom back into the historic theater where he had first been inspired by live classical music performed by the Spokane Symphony.

Prolonged standing applause followed the conclusion of the Copland, and there were several encores. In the first, Hampson invited the audience to sing along, and when we realized he was singing Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer” many of us did join as he conducted us, but we gradually dropped out, as most of us acknowledged it was in fact Hampson we had all paid to hear, and by the second verse it was likely that no one knew the words anyway. His second encore was given in response to a request, “Roses of Picardy”, by Haydn Wood. The third encore, “Don’t Fence Me In,” was a tip of the hat to another local celebrity, Bing Crosby, and Hampson’s personality, never retiring, opened up still further with an appropriate cowboy accent and walk. In the final encore, Cole Porter’s “I Concentrate on You”, apparently dedicated to the audience as representative of a treasured community in which this international star has his roots and sees the values expressed in American song, it began to be evident that the animated talking in the underheated auditorium was starting to take its toll on his lowest notes, and this time he allowed the stage hand to continue to raise the hand-painted original fire curtain that had served as backdrop, as he and Wolfram Rieger bid us good night and retired behind it.

Barbara Miller

Send to a friend

Send a link to this article to a friend with an optional message.

Friend's Email Address: (required)

Your Email Address: (required)

Message (optional):