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."
Is it possible, I wonder, to have too much of a ‘good thing’? Baritone Matthias Goerne can spin an extended vocal line and float a lyrical pianissimo with an unrivalled beauty that astonishes no matter how many times one hears and admires the evenness of line, the controlled legato, the tenderness of tone.
But, this programme at Wigmore Hall, simultaneously a paean to and epitome of the spirit of late-Romantic ‘sehnsucht’ - aching yearning, wistful sorrow, poignant reminiscence and bitter-sweet loss - threatened to not just to take one’s breath away but to transport one away to a world where the static emotional weight might overwhelm and consume the very spirit of life.
Goerne and his young accompanist, Seong-Jin Cho, opened their recital, ten minutes after the advertised start time, with Hugo Wolf’s Drei Gedichte von Michelangelo (1897). These were among Wolf’s last compositions and the three songs are suffused with the weary melancholy of unattainable love - as the celebrated painter, sculptor and poet works by candlelight and reflects on the painful disjuncture between the artistic creativity which bestows fulfilment and longevity, and human relationships that are fractured by failure and loss.
At times, such as at the close of ‘Wohl denk’ ich oft’ (I often recall), Goerne summoned oratorical grandeur - ‘Genannt in Lob und Tadel bin ich heute/ Und, dass ich da bin, wissen alle Leute!’ (Today my name is praised and censured, and the entire world knows that I exist!) - and there was quiet resignation as the voice plummeted at the close of ‘Alles endet, was entstehet’ (All must end that has beginning). Moreover, though the tempi were languorous and the spirit laden - ‘Ziemlich getragen, schwermütig’ (sombre and depressed), ‘Langsam und getragen’ (slow and grave), and ‘Sehr langsam und ruhig’ (very slow and calm) being Wolf’s instructions - an angry energy whipped through ‘Fühlt meine Seele’ (Is it the longed-for light of God) when the poet-speaker’s memories were stirred by rays from heaven which storm the heart.
But, the prevailing mood, here and throughout the recital, was one of weary defeat. In these Wolf songs, Goerne’s baritone was decidedly bass-baritonal in register and colour, and Cho complemented these hues with dark, sombre, intensely responsive introductions and postludes.
Immediately apparent, also, was the intense sensibility and strong independent voice of Cho - whose international career was kick-started by his Gold Medal success at the 2015 Chopin Competition in Warsaw. The two-bar unison which prefaces the first song was remarkably and compellingly nuanced; the low semi-tonal murmuring of the second lied evoked both mystery and fear. Cho isn’t afraid to take his time; nor to eke every ounce from a mezza voce line. Though the lid of the Wigmore Steinway was fully raised, not once did Cho make his presence improperly felt. It was to his credit that, while such painstaking expressivity might have further burdened the music with torpid solipsism, the effect was in fact invigorating - the piano preludes, postludes and dialogues injecting light and life into the sober sequence of lieder.
Seong-Jin Cho. Photo credit: Harold Hoffmann.
The Wolf songs were followed by eight songs by Hans Pfiztner (1869-1949), a composer whose opportunistic relationship with the Nazi regime has probably attracted more attention that his music. The lieder presented here certainly demonstrated Pfitzner’s Schumann-esque sensitivity to text. But, despite Goerne’s ability to heighten individual words and phrases - ‘Ich liebe dich’, first intensified then, at the close, diminished in ‘Sehnsucht’ (Longing); ‘Doch schöner ist deiner Augen Schein’ (but prettier still are your shining eyes) in ‘Es glänzt so schön die sinkende Sonne’ - the overwhelming mood was one of a down-dragging lethargy. Admittedly, this allowed us to enjoy the grainy beauty of Goerne’s lower, bassy, register - as in the final stanza of ‘Ist der Himmer darum im Lenz so blau?’ (Is the sky so blue in spring?) - alongside his effortless elision of the musical phrases.
Again, Cho was an independent voice; the piano part did not so much complement or enhance as articulate its own strong narrative. Surges upwards from the bass in ‘Sehnsucht’; exquisite textural clarity in ‘Wasserfahrt’ (Sea voyage); wonderful expansiveness at the opening of ‘Es glänab so schön die sinkende Sonne (The setting sun shines so prettily); fluent third-based movement in ‘An die Mark’ (To the March of Brandenburg), which expressed the wonder of the speaker, ‘dreaming like dark eyes, in an eternal yearning for spring’s realm’. These features gripped one’s attention just as the light-fingered but niggling clarity of the postlude to ‘Stimme der Sehnsucht’ (Voice of longing) was affecting.
After the interval, Goerne returned to songs he knows well: Wagner’s Wesendock Lieder which are more commonly heard sung by the female voice, but for which the baritone made a compelling case for transposition. If in ‘Der Engel’ (The angel) Goerne’s ‘fervent prayer’ conjured an airy expansive which lifted him and us heavenward, then Cho’s delicate accompaniment and playout was truly celestial. There was a vocal strength and urgency in ‘Stehe stille!’ (Stand still!) which was balanced by the piano’s self-regarding busyness, and which transmuted to a transfiguring pianissimo as with remarkably purity and earnestness, Goerne proclaimed, ‘Erkennt der Mensch des Ew’gen Spur/ Und lost dein Rätsel, heil’ge Natur! (then men perceives Eternity’s footprint, and solves your riddle, Holy Nature!).
The meandering of ‘Im Treibhaus’ (In the greenhouse, a study for Tristan and Isolde) was delicately shaped, Goerne’s middle range effortlessly focused, the lower part of his voice viscerally affecting. The clarity of line and immaculate intonation at the close was stunning. ‘Schmerzen’ (Agonies) opening with a bitter-sweet smear of harmonic and vocal anguish; in ‘Träume’ (Dreams, study for Tristan and Isolde) Cho’s accompaniment pulsed through the harmonic sequence before extinguishing itself in dissonance with astonishing delicacy, and the slightest sequence of expressive ‘delays’ in the piano postlude spoke of an exquisitely alert sensibility.
Five songs by Richard Strauss - again these lieder are more often associated with the female voice but were convincingly transposed here - moving from youthful dreams to fading dusk, closed the recital. In ‘Traum durch die Dämmerung’ (Dream into dusk) the ‘lilt’ was just sufficiently present to be persuasive, and Goerne floated the final phrase into the divine light - ‘blaues, mildes Licht’ - of heaven’s glow. Cho’s delicate arpeggiated chords at the start of ‘Morgen!’ (Tomorrow!) offered both hope and poignant resignation, and the oscillating dissonances of ‘Ruhe, meine Seele!’ (Rest, my soul!) were paradoxically troubling; here, Goerne’s strengthening, then softening, of the voice was expertly controlled, as was the translucent beauty of the image - ‘Und ich geh’ mit Einer, die mich lieb hat’ (I walk with one who loves me) - at the heart of ‘Freundlich Vision’ (A pleasant vision).
I’m not sure if it was his intent, but in compiling this idiosyncratically undeviating and unalleviated programme, Goerne almost seemed to be issuing a sombre challenge to his audience: if you want to experience the beauty and truth of these songs, then listen, come, follow me into the hinterland where this ‘truth’ exists. He beckoned us into the a strange world - a world of shadows, sensibility, quietude, sweet sorrow - never more so than in the final lied, ‘Abendrot’ from the Four Last Songs (1948). The gleam and frailty of Cho’s extended postlude was otherworldly.
But, I’m not sure that we were entirely transported. This was a strangely ‘distanced’ performance, in which the communication that is at the essence of a lieder recital was both tantalisingly and teasingly present, but just out of reach. Goerne read many of the songs from the printed scores positioned on a music stand to his right, and his gaze was at other times directly into the belly of the piano, to the floor, towards an imagined horizon. At the close, he stood still and silent as Cho’s piano postlude trickled away. For a moment, I imagined that the audience might simply, silently creep away, leaving Goerne and Cho transfixed in that hinterland to which they had summonsed us - the musicians, like Keats and all the Romantics poets, subsumed within an artistic immersiveness which is both necessary and dangerous.
But, no; the frames which, as Virginia Woolf knew, separate, so frustratingly, art and life, were re-established. Goerne’s fractional glance towards his accompanist served, like Keats’s ‘Forlorn! the very word is like a bell/ To toll me back from thee to my sole self!’, to bring us all back to the present. The spell was broken, the applause began. But the slight disquiet lingered.
Claire Seymour
Matthias Goerne (baritone), Seong-Jin Cho (piano)
Wolf - Drei Gedichte von Michelangelo; Pfitzner - ‘Sehnsucht’ Op.10 No.1, ‘Wasserfahrt’ Op.6 No.6, ‘Es glänzt so schön die sinkende Sonne’ Op.4 No.1, ‘Ist der Himmel darum im Lenz so blau’ Op.2 No.2, ‘An die Mark’ Op.15 No.3, ‘Abendrot’ Op.24 No.4, ‘Nachts’ Op.26 No.2, ‘Stimme der Sehnsucht’ Op.19 No.1; Wagner - Wesendonck Lieder; Richard Strauss - ‘Traum durch die Dämmerung’ Op.29 No.1, ‘Morgen’ Op.27 No.4, ‘Ruhe, meine Seele’ Op.27 No.1, ‘Freundliche Vision’ Op.48 No.1, ‘Im Abendrot’ from Four Last Songs.
Wigmore Hall, London; Tuesday 24th April 2018.