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.
Poulenc’s racy little 1947 confection took stage within Kurt Weill’s peculiar little 1927 singspiel Mahagonny all framed within the current California drought and doomsday predictions of impending global aridity.
But it has been raining a bit in San Francisco, and global warming might even make San Francisco wetter rather than dryer. All this took a bit of the edge off this far-fetched conglomeration of an opera within an opera within a commentary. The good news is that we heard some very good singing by well-trained young artists, and there were some snappy performances as well. Not to forget a quite capable little orchestra in a real pit in a real and indeed fine theater, the Lam Research Theater.
San Francisco has long been in need of an additional opera company to explore vast expanses of the repertory left untouched by the heroic scope of War Memorial Opera House. The 750 seat Lam Research Theater offers a potential home to such an opera company, and maybe it is Opera Parallèle, a venture of conductor Nicole Paiement and stage director Brian Staufenbiel, who have mustered a couple of productions each year since 2010, some of them in this fine theater.
This sally onto the Lam Research Theater stage was a meager production — a too real, quite forlorn 22 foot, vintage cabin cruiser put up on wheels and clumsily pulled around the stage. There was no context for the boat, like a parched earth ground or like denuded hills surround, though there were some meager gaseous aurora borealis lighting effects that flickered faintly from time to time that maybe were drought related.
The little, and it is conceptually and musically inconsequential, Mahagonny did not hold together visually or musically on the open, blank stage and the singers were simply too singerly, their elegance a poor substitution for the Weill/Brecht intended grit. Mme. Paiement’s orchestra was without edge and the maestra’s tempos felt leaden indeed.
Glenn as The Boy, Gabriel Preisser as The Husband in Les Mamelles de Tirésias. Photo by Steve DiBartolomeo, Westside Studio Image
But it all picked up splendidly when the evening morphed into the Poulenc boulevard musical, Les Mamelles de Tirésias intended to titillate and distract the post WWII Parisian public. To be sure the “advanced” social ideals seemed a bit overworked in long-emancipated San Francisco. Fortunately director Staufenbiel did not take the issues too seriously having transformed the piece into I pagliacci (a commedia dell’arte troupe descends on a backward village) here Weill's singers come upon a camp of refuges from drought stricken village somewhere on the French Riviera. Except it was on a blank black stage.
The downstage sideways positioned cabin cruiser did work very well in Les Mamelles because it gave many levels for action, and many nooks and crannies for visual surprises. You could forget the off-the-wall concept (at least there was a concept, a concept sorely lacking these days in the War Memorial) and simply enjoy the quite appealing music beautifully played in the pit and sung on the stage.
Baritone Gabriel Preisser brought unusual warmth and charm to the role of the Thérèse’s husband, tenor Thomas Glenn stood out in his Les Mamelles caricatures and more than anyone else approached the tone of the Weill. Bass-baritone Hadleigh Adams brought snap and flair to Les Mamelles’ antagonist, the Constable. The entire cast attests the high level of training behind young American artists, and the accomplishment of these young singers was very pleasurable to behold.
It will be a relief to perceive them as artists of personality someday, hopefully soon, rather than as fine young singers. Perhaps Opera Parallèle can accomplish this with deeper production values.
It was finally a well realized evening, of institutional accomplishment and promise. Off-the-wall is meant as a compliment by the way, forget the unfortunate transition at the end back into the little Mahagonny.
Michael Milenski
Casts and production information:
The Husband: Gabriel Preisser; Therèse/Tirésias: Rachel Schutz; The Constable: Hadleigh Adams; The Director: Daniel Cilli; The Journalist/The Son: Thomas Glenn; The Newspaper Vendor: Renee Rapier; The Bearded Man: Aleksey Bogdanov; The Big Lady: Amber Marsh; The Lady; Suzanne Rivin. Opera Paralléle Orchestra and Chorus with the Resound Ensemble. Conductor: Nicole Paiement; Concept and stage director: Brian Staufenbiel; Production design: Frédéric Boulay; Set design: Dave Dunning; Costume design: Christine Crook; Choreographer: KT Nelson. Lam Research Theater, April 26, 2014.