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

Nick Pritchard as Ferrando, Kitty Whately as Dorabella, Sarah Tynan as Despina, Eleanor Dennis as Fiordiligi and Nicholas Lester as Guglielmo in Così fan tutte © Robert Workman
03 Jun 2018

Così fan tutte: Opera Holland Park

Absence makes the heart grow fonder; or does it? In Così fan tutte, who knows? Or rather, what could such a question even mean?

Così fan tutte: Opera Holland Park

A review by Mark Berry

Above: Nick Pritchard as Ferrando, Kitty Whately as Dorabella, Sarah Tynan as Despina, Eleanor Dennis as Fiordiligi and Nicholas Lester as Guglielmo

[Photos © Robert Workman]

 

Would it not be a typically sentimental coping mechanism adopted to avoid confronting the questions – artificial yet profound, indeed profound through artificiality – it asks of its characters and its audiences alike? If one does not at some level, perhaps the most important level of all, find that Così goes deeper and further than Tristan, then one most likely has not understood either. Given a tragedy without catharsis, a tragedy in the clothes, surpassingly elegant and ravishing, of comedy: sometimes one might ask who needs an opus metaphysicum at all? (We might actually need it in order to recover.)

At any rate, absence had certainly made my heart grow still fonder when it came to Opera Holland Park. Not having been able to visit last summer, I returned to what may well be the most completely successful show I have yet to see and hear there. There is certainly I would put above it, quite a claim, given that we are dealing with Mozart, the most difficult of all composers to perform. There is nowhere to hide, on stage, in the pit, nor indeed in the audience. Nor should there be. Moreover, one had the sense, whether in production or in musical performance – the distinction is far from distinct – that this ambivalent, ambiguous, existentially devastating drama was being enabled, with the lightest of touches, to speak for itself. That does not happen by itself; there is no room for ‘non-interpretation’, for some illusory ‘original’. Yet nor did it ever seem that something was being inflicted on the work. There is room for critique, whether in words or in performance, yet sometimes, as here, the work is so rich that it both offers its own and, perhaps, renders it beside the point.

Robert Workman 17.pngFull cast

For what is Così, if it is not a musico-dramatic laboratory, a game whose results we should rather not know, and yet can never quite un-know? We see that in Oliver Platt’s production: not spelled out, ‘in a laboratory’, but actually more or less where it ‘should’ be, in an eighteenth-century setting, in which detail is everything. The more we look at what might seem a straightforward, ‘traditional’ production – and, in a sense, is – the more we see – and hear. The chorus, which like us watches proceedings and occasionally participates, is, from the start, a participant and perhaps a critic. It is not quite the Neapolitan ‘daily passeggio’ of which Leopold Mozart wrote, in a letter quoted by Helen Wallace in the programme, for that was perhaps too obviously theatrical, at any rate too bound to a particular stratum of the social hierarchy: ‘in a few hundred carriages the nobles go out driving in the afternoon until Ave Maria to the Strada Nuova and the Molo.’ These seem largely to be more ‘ordinary’ people, but what is ‘ordinary’? They are like us, perhaps, but they also remind us that we need not be ‘like’, or at least identical to, the principal characters on stage to learn from them. And so, when one looks more closely, one notices an apparently ‘male’ member of the ‘chorus’ in apparently ‘female’ dress. (S)he brings no particular other attention to himself or herself. There is no obvious plotline, no ‘distraction’, as some would have it, rightly or wrongly; there is also no obvious exit strategy for us on heteronormative or other grounds. Così fan tutti/e; or, mutate nomine, de te fabula narratur.

All, however, is not always quite what it seems. For the commedia dell’arte painted faces of Ferrando and Guglielmo are there to start with: visitors, perhaps, from beyond, yet also in need of external transformation – in Tristan, it would be a potion – in order to reveal themselves. Interactions between characters, like those between different chemical elements, are minutely observed, rendering us experimenters of our own, again whether we like it or not. (At least, so long as we watch and listen.) One of the problems some people, not unreasonably, seem to have with this opera is not always appreciating the level of parody, verbal and musical. And so, when Fiordiligi stands on a chair to assume her pose for ‘Come scoglio’, that cruel, loving, and in every sense ravishing seria parody, she initially falters, almost falling (not, I hasten to add, vocally). The watching lovers laugh, and she resumes. All is not quite what it seems, or perhaps it is. That is largely up to us, yet within the framework constructed – or rather within the different, intersecting frameworks constructed, by Alfonso and Despina, by Mozart and Da Ponte, and by production and performers; as well, of course, as that constructed by our own experiences, thoughts, and emotions. We are led to deconstruct that terrifying final ‘moral’ ourselves, Mozart’s brusque neo-Classicism the only possible response to Da Ponte’s seemingly straight hymn to reason. If we do not think about, do not feel its numerous contradictions, we have no one to blame but ourselves – not unlike the characters themselves. Is all perhaps precisely what it seems? Yes and no.

For it is Mozart above all who renders this opera such a necessary agony. And it is the musicians who – with the greatest respect to truly excellent work from everyone else involved, whether in the theatre, behind the scenes, or somewhere in between – who ultimately bring that into life. The City of London Sinfonia offered us gorgeous musical sado-masochism, woodwind one might almost literally have been willing to die for, strings incisive yet far from without warmth of their own. Dane Lam’s tempi began on the quick side, never unreasonably so, yet indicative of an approach one might too readily have taken to be partial. For, as the drama progressed, as the characters achieved greater delineation, so did temporal differentiation. Lam’s was a reading that knew where it was going, and thus could afford to take time on the way – in, for instance, a heartrending ‘Un aura amoroso’.

Not that that would have been heartrending without an estimable Ferrando, of course; that was not, happily, something we needed to put to the test, Nick Pritchard balancing with apparent ease the demands of line and variegation. So too did Nicholas Lester’s Guglielmo, the bitterness of his disillusion moving indeed, his ‘journey’ perhaps the greatest of all. Eleanor Dennis and Kitty Whately likewise proved almost infinitely capable both of sisterly affinity and dramatic disentanglement. So many attributes – sorrow and joy, honour and temptation, simplicity and complexity – were revealed as sides of the same experimental coin. Lines, unadorned or subtly ornamented, exuded both clarity and warmth. We knew them, and yet did not. Sarah Tynan’s Despina was very much the musical catalyst, her cynicism and her sense of fun both vividly portrayed. If Peter Coleman Wright’s pitch was sometimes a little approximate, he brought important dramatic truths to his portrayal of Don Alfonso – perhaps not unlike Francesco Bussani, first in his line. The chorus, well trained, by Richard Harker, could hardly have done more to bring their roles, individual and collective, to life.

There is method in the madness one feels at the close; there has to be. And yet, quite rightly, there remains mystery too. Or, in the ruminations of another operatic character, forced to confront truths of existence he might rather not – at least not too often: ‘Ein Kobold half wohl da:/Ein Glühwurm fand sein Weibchen nicht; der hat den Schaden angericht’t.’ Was Sachs just rephrasing the question? Probably. Are we? Almost certainly. That does not, however, mean that we are not confronting it, that we need not do so. Mozart leads us to Wagner, as well as Wagner to Mozart.

Mark Berry


Cast and production information:

Fiordiligi: Eleanor Dennis; Dorabella: Kitty Whately; Guglielmo: Nicholas Lester; Ferrando: Nick Pritchard; Despina: Sarah Tynan; Don Alfonso: Peter Coleman-Wright. Director: Oliver Platt; Designs: Alyson Cummins; Lighting: Rory Beaton; Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Richard Harker)/City of London Sinfonia/Dane Lam (conductor). Opera Holland Park, London, Thursday 31 May 2018

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):