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."
On 25th March 1875, Gilbert & Sullivan’s one-act operetta, Trial by Jury, opened at the Royalty Theatre on Dean Street, in Soho. 131 performances and considerable critical acclaim followed, and it out-ran is companion piece, Offenbach’s La Périchole.
Just under two years earlier, on Saturday 24th May 1973, the Alexandra Palace and Park had opened, five years late and over-budget ( plus ça change). This ‘North London Palace of the People’, located on the site of a former 450-acre dairy farm which in 1856 had been inherited by the non-agriculturally minded grandchildren of one Thomas Rhodes, comprised a building spanning seven acres surrounded by 200 acres of landscaped gardens. Built by Royal assent, the Palace was designed to further the Victorians’ ethical endeavour to cultivate a ‘higher civilisation’ - promotional advertisements promised “Healthy exercise, rational recreation” - in which fresh air and music played an equal part. [1]
The eastern transept comprised a concert room that could seat 3,000 people, while the Great Central Hall could accommodate 12,000 people and a 2,000-piece orchestra. The huge site afforded the opportunity for varied music-making, including al fresco performances on the banks of the Triple Lakes. (If you’re wondering when my ‘review’ will start, I’d ask you to bear with me, there is a point to the preamble …)
Not all have been impressed. Nikolaus Pevsner (in The Buildings of England, 1951) described the Ally Pally, as it affectionately came to be known, as ‘one of the most extensive and most prominently placed of London buildings’, but dismissively quipped that ‘there is not much else to be said about it’. And, from the start, financial over-optimism or mismanagement, what you will, threw a shadow over the Palace’s future. In the six months from November 1875, the venue ran up a £23,000 deficit and economic dire straits becoming a recurring trope, continuing as late as the 1980s when the then trustees, Haringey Council, over-spent on a refurbishment and ice-rink. Fire also repeatedly threatened to curtail the project, with the building going up in flames just 16 days after the opening and again in 1980.
Over the years, the Palace has served as a hospital for Belgian refugees, an internment camp for German and Austrian civilians from 1915-19, and as a horse racing course, among other guises. In 1935, the BBC took on the lease of part of the Palace, setting up studios is some derelict Victorian dining rooms, and on 2nd November 1936 the first television broadcast took place from the Ally Pally. Transmission was disrupted by WW2, when its transmitter was used to jam German bombers’ navigation systems, and in 1947 by a fuel crisis, but Ally Pally studios remained the BBC’s main transmitting centre for London until 1956.
BBC Proms at … Alexandra Palace. Photo Credit: BBC/Chris Christodoulou.
It seems serendipitous therefore that Alfred Meeson, who, with his co-architect John Johnson, designed the Palace, had also built the Royal Albert Hall - the home of the Promenade concerts since the summer of 1941. For, this year, the BBC has chosen the Ally Pally for one of their ‘out-and-about’ Proms, in anticipation of the official reopening of the Palace’s Theatre to the public on 1st December 2018 - restored with the help of an £18.8m lottery grant, and part of a £27m restoration of Ally Pally’s east wing.
So, what better choice to grace this Victorian stage than Gilbert & Sullivan, censurers and celebrators of Victorian frailties and foibles in equal measure. Staged with slickness and style by director Jack Furness and conducted with gleeful joie de vivre by Jane Glover, Trial by Jury returned to what BBC presenter Petroc Trelawny described as the wonderfully preserved dilapidation of the Palace’s Theatre, and provided forty minutes of slight but so less satisfying pleasure.
Originally composed and rehearsed in just a few weeks, and essentially a single act of trifling tomfoolery, Trial by Jury presents an unpretentious lampooning of Gilbert’s favourite target - the English judiciary. There is no elaborate artifice in plot, lyrics or music, and no spoken dialogue: just some direct expression and gentle musical parody of Bellini and Handel. The characters, individual and choric, are one-dimensional but the message is simple and clear. Angelina (Mary Bevan) is suing Edwin (Sam Furness) for breach of promise; everyone in the court, barring the defendant, is a hypocrite with their eye not on love but money, and hankering after economic advantage.
Keel Watson ushered the BBC Singers into the courtroom with stentorian, punctilious and supercilious concern for the decorum and propriety of judicial process, and the male and female chorus members ranked themselves stage right and left, displaying a wry appreciation of G&S manners and mannerisms - though Jack Furness, in his attention to detail, sometimes overlooked practicalities: it’s impossible to kneel and raise one’s hand in solemn oath, and turn the pages of one’s score.
BBC Singers. Photo Credit: BBC/Chris Christodoulou.
Sam Furness was the epitome of masculine artlessness and unconcern, frankly admitting, as he lounged easily in the ‘dock’ and drew nonchalantly on a cigarette, that he had dumped Angelina, but that was because he was tired of her. Que faire? Edwin seemed positively guiltless judged against the avaricious scheming of Bevan’s Angelina. She is “no unhappy maid” as she reminded the solicitous chorus and her faux histrionic appeals for compensation, “I love him, I love him!”, and hyperactive hyperventilating had their desired effect on Neal Davies’ equally unprincipled Judge, who vowed to ditch his ugly wife - married for her father’s wealth - and, having fined Edwin, take the newly enriched Angelina for himself. Ross Ramgobin, as Angelina’s Counsel, rivalled his client for thespian extravagance, as he urged the jury to consider the misery inflicted not by Angelina’s loss of a husband but by her financial forfeiture.
The goofery gushed along but, given that Gilbert’s lyrics are the ‘simplest’ - in diction and form - that he ever wrote for Sullivan, it’s a pity that we didn’t hear more of them. The acoustic in the Theatre is good but the patter largely defeated the cast.
Mary Bevan (Angelina), Neal Davies (The Learned Judge), Sam Furness (Edwin). Photo Credit: BBC/Chris Christodoulou.
The first part of the Prom was devoted to overtures and songs that would have found favour with the Palace’s first Victorian audiences. Glover coaxed some vivacious playing from the BBC Concert Orchestra: woodwind sparkled at the start of Sullivan’s Overture to Act 4 of The Tempest (1961-62), and here and in the Overture to Ethel Smyth’s The Boatswain’s Mate (1913-14, rev. 1921) there was plentiful melodrama and colour. Three movements from Parry’s incidental music to The Birds (1883) proved less engaging, though there was some delicate clarinet and horn playing to admire in the Intermezzo.
Bevan sang Alfred Cellier’s ‘All alone to my eerie … Whispering breeze’ with unaffected directness and sweetness, caressing the phrases gently, and she was beautifully complemented and balanced by some sensitive string playing. The soprano was joined by Sam Furness for a beguiling rendition of Stanford’s ‘So it’s kisses you’re craving’, which balanced musical charm with dramatic causticity. Neal Davies was no more successful in the Lord Chancellor’s party piece from Iolanthe, ‘When I Went to the Bar’, than he was in the Learned Judge’s subsequent and similarly named, ‘When I, good friends, was called to the bar’. At least in the latter a context had been established for the Judge’s conceited and corrupt self-praise, but the Iolanthe number came and went in a blink of an eye, so swift was the tempo set by Glover. Though, after Davies’ first two garbed lines, she tried to put on the brakes, the damage was done, and it didn’t help that Davies’ eyes were rather glued to his word-sheet.
The best vocal item was Furness’s ardent rendition of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s ‘Onaway! Awake Beloved!’, in which warm horns and strings established a restful bed of sound from which Furness could assail the melodic peaks with assurance and strength. Here we could hear every word, and the earnestness of the sentiments was touching rather than cloying.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the Ally Pally was both a white elephant and economic millstone. But, it did and does represent a powerfully persuasive emblem of Victorian aspiration and culture. The success of Trial by Jury encouraged Gilbert, Sullivan and Richard D’Oyly Carte to form, in 1876, the company which would present the collaborations of the Victorian age’s most celebrated comic writer and composer. At the start of the twentieth-first century, the majestic exterior of the Palace, the tastefully distressed interior of the Theatre the spacious majesty of the glass-domed East Court which forms an impressively capacious ante-room still cast a spell. Let’s hope that the magic results in both uplifting entertainment and economic success in the years to come.
Claire Seymour
Proms at … Alexandra Palace: Neal Davies (The Learned Judge), Mary Bevan (The Plantiff), Sam Furness (The Defendant), Ross Ramgoblin (Counsel for the Plaintiff), Keel Watson (Usher); Jack Furness (stage director), Jane Glover (conductor), BBC Concert Orchestra, BBC Singers.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor - ‘Onaway, Awake Beloved’ (from Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast); Alfred Cellier - ‘All Alone to My Eerie … Whispering Breeze’ (from The Mountebanks); Dame Ethel Smyth - The Boatswains Mate, ‘Overture’; Arthur Sullivan - ‘When I went to the Bar’ (from Iolanthe); Charles Villiers Stanford - ‘So it’s kisses you’re craving’; Hubert Parry - The Birds, Suite (Introduction, Intermezzo, Bridal March), Prelude to Act IV of The Tempest; Arthur Sullivan - Trial by Jury.
Alexandra Palace, London; Saturday 1st September 2018.
[1] See Paul Watt, Alison Rabinovici, ‘Alexandra Palace: Music, Leisure, and the Cultivation of “Higher Civilization” in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Music and Letters, Volume 95, Issue 2, 1 May 2014: 183-212, for a detailed account of the origins, development and history of the Palace.