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."
In 1917 Leoš Janáček travelled to Luhačovice, a spa town in the Zlín Region of Moravia, and it was here that he met for the first time Kamila Stösslová, the young married woman, almost 40 years his junior, who was to be his muse for the remaining years of his life.
Though hard at work on his opera The Excursions of Mr. Broucek, which was first performed in 1920, when he returned to Brno Janáček immediately started sketching the first ten songs of what was to become a 22-song cycle for tenor, mezzo-soprano and piano, The Diary of One Who Disappeared. It set poems by Ozef Kalda that had been published in the Brno newspaper, Lidové noviny, on 14th and 21st May 1916, titled ‘From the pen of a self-made man’. The poems told the tale of a young Czech boy, Janíček, from ‘a good family’, who is seduced by ‘a dark Gypsy’, Zefka, and lured into the ‘free’ life of the traveller.
That Stösslová was the inspiration for The Diary is in no doubt: the composer wrote to her from Brno, on 10th August 1917: ‘Will you believe that I’ve not yet got out of the house? In the morning I potter around in the garden; regularly in the afternoon a few motifs occur to me for those beautiful little poems about that Gypsy love. Perhaps a nice little musical romance will come out of it - and a tiny bit of the Luhačovice mood would be in it.’ A year later, on 2nd September 1918, his mood was less optimistic: ‘It’s too bad my Gypsy girl can’t be called something like Kamilka. That’s why I also don’t want to go on with the piece. I can’t explain why you don’t write to me … I have nothing more than memories - when then, so I live in them.’
Janáček continued work on The Diary during the following two years, completing it in 1920. It was first heard at a private performance that year, and then premiered at the Reduta Theatre in Brno on 18 th April 1921. There is undoubtedly an ‘operatic’ dimension about the cycle, not least because, after the first eight songs in which the tenor recalls when he saw Zefka, songs nine to eleven act out that first meeting, as the composer turns indirect speech into direct interaction. Zefka enters at the end of song eight, and an offstage female chorus (like that which represents the soul of the Volga in Káťa Kabanová) sings the narrative of a seduction Janáček deliberately avoids portraying ‘on stage’.
In song nine, Zefka sings: “Welcome Janíček, welcome here in the wood. What happy coincidence brings you this way? What are you standing here like that for? So pale; so still; Why, are you perhaps afraid of me?” To which the young man replies, “I really have no cause to be afraid of anyone. I came here only to cut an axle-pin”, whereupon Zefka invites him to put aside his duties and to listen to her gypsy song. The remaining songs chart the aftermath of the seduction.
Photo credit: Jan Versweyveld.
Not surprisingly, there have been various dramatizations of The Diary - including Shadwell Opera’s Grimeborn production in 2017. Janáček himself is reported to have said that he wanted the cycle to be performed in ghostly half-lighting. That said, the drama is present in every note of the music. The Diary does not depend for its power on overt context, gesture or symbol. That over-prescription might in fact destroy the almost visceral intensity of the work was something that I felt very strongly during this staging of Ivo van Hove’s ‘interventionist’ staging at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre. Superimposing an autobiographical narrative on the tale told in poetry, and commissioning additional music and songs from the Belgian composer Annelies Van Parys which ‘allow us to see some of the story form Zefka’s perspective’, van Hove almost doubles the work’s length while significantly diluting its expressive immediacy.
Van Hove worked with two of his regular collaborators for this 2017 production for the Belgian company Muziektheater Transparant: set and lighting designer, Jan Versweyveld, and costume designer An d’Huys. Versweyveld’s set seems to shift us forward from the latter years of the First World War to the 1960s, and from nature to ‘civilisation’: specifically, to a photographic lab-cum-studio flat, comprising kitchen, dark room, office and bedroom, the patterned lighting effects intended, I assume, to evoke the landscape of the original woodland tryst. The confined space can, however, accommodate a grand piano. Janíček (tenor Ed Lyon) is now a photographer; rather than reliving his memories through music, he projects his remembered encounter - the gypsy’s name, an image of the Romany girl - onto the lab-apartment’s walls, assisted by an elderly man (Wim van der Grijn) who, we learn, is the composer himself.
Photo credit: Jan Versweyveld.
At the start, all is silent. A woman in red (Marie Hamard) enters and is instructed by a recorded male voice to make a cup of tea, sit at the piano and tap out a scale, some snatches of melody. It feels clunky and awkward. Pianist Lada Valesova then takes her place at the keyboard; her playing is the linchpin of the performance, every gesture redolent with a clear vision of musical meaning and empathy for the composer’s emotive language. What a pity the piano lid remains closed throughout, though this does not prevent Valesova from conjuring emotional fire and frailty with equal insight and impact.
Lyon’s singing is fervent and precise, though there’s a lack of Slavic colour and passion, for all the rolling around on the carpet in which he and Hamard indulge. But, Lyon also conjures a telling sincerity and vulnerability which is countered by Hamard’s vocal strength. Van Parys’ music merges into Janáček’s songs with surprising persuasiveness, though I can’t help but feel that Janáček’s decision to allow the gypsy’s voice to be heard only in the central encounter strengthens the yearning and desire communicated by Janíček.
Marie Hamard and Ed Lyon. Photo credit: Jan Versweyveld.
There’s nothing amiss with the ‘quality’ of the individual performances. But, the whole is strangely cold and clinical. One thing that is sadly missing is the exoticism of the ‘gypsy’; a red ‘business dress’ and hooped earrings don’t really compensate. Writing to Stösslova from Hukvaldy in July 1924, the composer declared, ‘And Kát’a, you know, that was you beside me. And that black Gypsy girl in my Diary of One Who Disappeared - that was especially you even more.’ Later, in April 1927, a year before his death Janáček wrote, ‘Wherever I am, I think to myself: you can’t want anything else in life if you’ve got this dear, cheerful, black little ‘Gypsy girl’ of yours’.
At the time of The Diary’s composition, there was considerable prejudice against the gypsy population in Moravia, and the cycle’s original text had included political comments about the need for a gypsy homeland (and indirect plea, perhaps, for a Czech homeland). Janáček scholar Michael Beckerman’s observations are instructive: ‘For centuries the Gypsies, hated and reviled, nonetheless furnished material for myriad erotic fantasies, becoming the dark tabula rasa on which all the base and sensual fantasies of white society were projected.’ In 1918 the new country of Czechoslovakia was formed, guaranteeing equal rights to all citizens - including 20,000 gypsies: ‘far from being a harsh, disturbing or sinister presence, the Gypsies at this time functioned as what we might call “orientalism from within”, an exotic symbol of freedom, passion and improvisation.’ Van Hove almost completely ignores, or destroys, this - surely fundamental - dimension of the work.
At the close of van Hove’s realisation, the seated figure of Wim van der Grijn reads and then burns his letters to Stösslova, dropping the flaming pages into a waste-paper bin. His unfulfilled dreams now ashes, he climbs into the small bed, presumably ready for death. But, The Diary ends in defiance and hope, not despair. Originally the vocal climax came in song 14, the height of Janíček’s desolation and hopelessness, “Oh what have I lost!” But, Janáček’s revisions shifted the emotional peak to the final song, which rises to a top C: “All that is left is for me to say goodbye forever.” And, with a farewell to his father, mother and little sister, “the apple of my eye”, Janíček departs: “Zefka is waiting for me with our son in her arms!”
Van Hove’s staging is refined where it could be raw; elegant where it could be elemental. He denies us intimacy, immediacy - an intensity, recalling the string quartets, which draws us into the stories the composer tells, whether fictional or autobiographical. And, he denies us the hope and consolation that Janáček’s final song exudes.
Claire Seymour
The Diary of One Who Disappeared : Leoš Janáček and Annelies Van Parys
Tenor - Ed Lyon, Zefka - Marie Hamard, Actor - Wim van der Grijn; Director - Ivo van Hove, Set/lighting designer - Jan Versweyveld, Costume designer - An d’Huys, Dramaturg - Krystian Lada.
Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, London; Wednesday 5th June 2019.