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."
Making Fidelio - Beethoven’s paean to liberty, constancy and fidelity - an emblem of the republican spirit of the French Revolution is unproblematic, despite the opera's censor-driven ‘Spanish’ setting.
After all, Beethoven was 19-years-old at the time of the storming of the Bastille, and in 1805, when the composer first presented his three-act Leonore one would have needed to be politically illiterate not to sense that an opera trumpeting such ideals would be associated with the spirit, if not the historical actualities, of the Revolution.
Similarly, no one would challenge the suggestion that Fidelio has dramaturgical, and generic, ‘issues’ that a director might seek to resolve in their own way. The opera’s troubled evolution caused Beethoven considerable labour and unrest, and the Fidelio that was performed in Vienna on 23rd May 1814 certainly didn’t solve the problems of the earlier three-act (1805) and two-act (1806) Leonores which preceded it. Even after eleven years and four different overtures, Beethoven was still lamenting that the opera needed wholesale re-writing.
So, there is nothing surprising or objectionable about Tobias Kratzer’s presentation, in this new production for the Royal Opera House, of Act 1 of Fidelio as a representation of a crucial juncture in the history of political ideals and events. Blazoned upon the curtain-drop is the Revolutionary motto, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”, against a video-projection background of … well, us. Okay, leaving aside the matter of whether the ROH stalls audience is a fitting emblem of Revolutionary ideology, it’s perhaps not amiss to remind us that the upholding of such values requires us to step up to the breach. And, it’s a reminder that is slapped on with a trowel in Act 2.
Photo credit: Bill Cooper.
And, so, Act 1 unfolds with realistic Terror. No matter that the energetic curtain-raiser overture that Beethoven finally plumped for after years of compositional agonising has little of the musico-dramatic relevance and impact of his preceding efforts. Kratzer uses it as a musical background to head-rolling violence - literally, as a blood-dripping basket is heaved into designer Rainer Sellmaier’s claustrophobic prison courtyard, for bereaved widows to retrieve the guillotined heads of their rebellious, truth-speaking husbands. When the prison warden’s daughter, Marzelline, arrives bearing a wicker basket of laundry, the parallel is discomforting: violent retribution is simply part of the day’s housework.
The comic domesticity of the opening scenes has been criticised for its disjuncture with the heroic exploits and virtuous redemption which ensue. Kratzer sets about trying to smooth over the schism - though the sliding forth of Rocco’s private rooms surely presents some sight-line issues to those seated on the right of the auditorium.
Though Rocco and Marzelline are descendants of eighteenth-century buffa, Kratzer underplays their obvious and comic self-interest: such egoism would obstruct the heroic virtue that he is intent upon them displaying subsequently. The first few numbers of Act 1 do not establish the world of the ‘old regime’. The bickering of Marzelline and Jaquino is unsettling rather than peevish, and the tension is tautened by Fidelio’s incessant knocking at the door. Marzelline should be a foil for Fidelio/Leonore’s virtue and constancy. Here, she is certainly not her father’s daughter. And in any case, Rocco ‘Gold aria’ does not seem to establish pecuniary self-interest as more important than his role as a paterfamilias.
Amanda Forsythe (Marzelline) and Lise Davidsen (Fidelio). Photo credit: Bill Cooper.
Proceedings begin to turn awry when Fidelio unwraps his/her breast-swaddling and is espied by the disillusioned Marzelline. Surely, the game is up? But, no, this Marzelline is inspired to her own heroic course of action. There are other obstacles to dramatic fluency, not least the over-loading of the spoken dialogue with text drawn from Beethoven’s contemporaries Georg Büchner (mainly from Danton’s Death) and Franz Grillparzer.
At the end of Act 1, the descent to the dungeons, where Rocco and Fidelio are to dig the grave of the prisoner prior to Pizarro’s arrival and assassination of his nemesis, is in this production an ascent into the light. That’s to say, the darkness is all within. Lighting Designer Michael Bauer confronts us with a glaring whiteness. Brechtian alienation reigns. The purpose of the blinding neon frame is revealed. At the start of Act 2 we find ourselves once again watching ‘ourselves’, this time in the form of the ring of present-day, grey-suited spectators - seated in a council chamber? or, drawing-room? - who stare at the shackled figure of Florestan, prone upon a slate mound, their shocked, disgusted, self-castigating expressions writ large in the back-wall video projections.
Jonas Kaufmann (Florestan). Photo credit: Bill Cooper.
Dramaturg Bettina Bartz gives an account, sometimes persuasive, of the directorial thinking, and suggests that in Act 2 Beethoven ‘depicts an almost timeless space in which interpersonal and societal issues are played out’. Well, one might say, there’s still a ‘rescue opera’ underway. Watching the flinches and cringes - inspired as much by reluctantly acknowledged guilt as by the physical stench and unsightly sores - as Florestan thrusts himself towards his ‘audience’, as far as his shackles allow, might well be as discomforting as intended. But, it’s also distracting: do we want to be diverted by an onlooker surreptitiously unwrapping and devouring a chocolate bar as Florestan confronts us with a musical vision of man’s inhumanity and capacity for resistance, revolt and redemption? Does this really tell us anything about ourselves, or about Beethoven, or Fidelio?
Other directorial interventions in Act 2 are even more problematic. It is, after all, conjugal fidelity which distinguishes Leonore from the economically self-interested Marzelline. The opera’s virtue is reserved for Florestan and Leonore: in an outburst of quasi-mystical religious ecstasy, Florestan has an apparition of his wife as an angel, ‘Standing by my side to comfort me … To lead me to freedom in the kingdom of Heaven’. The synonymity of conjugal love with republican virtue is destroyed in this production by Kratzer’s decision (spoiler alert) to make Marzelline the agent of liberation. Leonore is denied the gun with which to forestall Pizarro’s villainy: that role is assigned to the pistol-wielding, trumpet-fanfaring Marzelline.
Amanda Forsythe (Marzelline), Simon Neal (Don Pizarro), Jonas Kaufmann (Florestan). Photo credit: Bill Cooper.
The arrival of Don Fernando to ‘save the day’ is one of the inherently problematic aspects of Beethoven’s opera. The notion of an enlightened deputy of an enlightened monarch serving as an abstract emissary of republican light requires some side-stepping. Maynard Solomon, one of Beethoven’s biographers, proposes a ‘solution’, observing that Beethoven’s political views were formed in Bonn during the 1780s, when under Elector Maximilian Franz ‘the ideas of the Enlightenment virtually became the official principles of the Electorate’. Thus, Beethoven subscribed to an ideal of reform from above - enlightened absolutism - by which a ‘prince’ would lead his people towards freedom, brotherhood and peace.
Kratzer opts for reform from below. Here, Don Fernando emerges from the horse-shoe ring of spectators. Perhaps that’s not out of place in a ‘rescue opera’ in which, conventionally, the resolution of political problems is not effected by supernatural deus ex machina but by the real actions by virtuous people. But, it does unbalance Beethoven’s characterisation, which is founded on principles of the constancy of identity, thereby depriving us of a counterpart to Pizarro’s personification of villainy and aristocratic tyranny - excepting the latter’s kindness to the black stallion upon which he arrives to deliver his murderous instructions to Rocco in Act 1.
Simon Neal (Don Pizarro). Photo credit: Bill Cooper.
Thankfully, to counter such dramaturgical turbulence there was much fine singing from the stellar cast. Though apologies were made in advance for Jonas Kaufmann, who had not attended the final dress rehearsal due to ill health, the tenor still managed to communicate Florestan’s rapture, and hit those impossibly high climaxes; if ‘Gott! Welch’ Dunkel’ and the final reconciliation with Leonore were in any way underwhelming the fault lay with Kratzer who seemed to have offered little direction to his principals, so occupied was he with rewriting the Fidelio rule book. When Leonore released her husband - heralded by a beautiful oboe solo - in addition to some awkward blocking there were music-word non sequiturs in their rapturous duet, ‘O namenlose Freude!’: ‘Now I have you in my arms’ they may sing, but on this occasion Leonore and Florestan were yards apart and looking in different directions.
Georg Zeppenfeld was an engaging and warm-toned Rocco, more compelling and sympathetic than is sometimes the case with this role. Simon Neal was Robespierre through-and-through but struggled with the stratospheric demands that Beethoven requires of Pizarro. Amanda Forsythe was a clear-toned Marzelline, but she didn’t have the weight to carry Kratzer’s revisioning of the role. Similarly, Robin Tritschler’s Jaquino was vocally secure but dramatically non-descript. As Don Fernando, Egils Siliņš sang with sincerity but struggled, not surprisingly, to make a dramatic impact.
The day was saved, appropriately, by Lise Davidsen who shone and soared as Fidelio/Leonora. She has a vocal presence which absolutely compels. If only she had not been, repeatedly, a microsecond behind the beat, creating a sense of labouring when Leonore should fly. And, if only she’d been given more directorial assistance by Kratzer, whose only instruction seemed to have related to inappropriate unwrapping of Leonore’s chest bindings.
Antonio Pappano, conducting with a baton, unusually, was as insightful, alert to detail, and empathetic as always, but even the sterling playing of the ROH Orchestra could not overcome the directorial waywardness.
The prisoners’ chorus in Act 1 was magical but had no dramatic context in Kratzer’s account. The final redemptive chorus - as the present-day observers overwhelmed the upholders of the eighteenth-century state - which draws, sometimes verbatim, on Beethoven’s Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II, should have bestowed order after the tumult of the prison scenes. Why did it not?
Well, Leonore may have triumphed with her ideals of hope, fidelity and honour, but Pizarro’s knife glinted still. Picked up by the disgruntled, unreconciled, alienated Jaquino, it seemed to create a crack in the opera’s visionary armour. Perhaps Kratzer’s vision of Fidelio had finally found a ‘truthful’ thread. In an 1998 essay, ‘Opera Opposed to Opera’, which considered the relationship between Così fan tutte and Fidelio, Edward Said remarks that, ‘Every affirmation … carries with it its own negation, just as every memory of love and conjugal fidelity also brings with it the danger and usually the actuality of something that will cancel it, annul it, obliterate it.’ Wise, and sad, words.
Claire Seymour
Jaquino - Robin Tritschler, Marzelline - Amanda Forsythe, Leonore - Lise Davidsen, Rocco - Georg Zeppenfeld, Don Pizzaro - Simon Neal, First Prisoner - Filipe Manu, Second Prisoner - Timothy Dawkins, Florestan - Jonas Kaufmann, Don Fernando - Egils Siliņš; Director - Tobias Kratzer, Conductor - Antonio Pappano, Designer - Rainer Sellmaier, Lighting Designer - Michael Bauer, Video Designer - Manuel Braun, Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House.
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London; Sunday 1st March 2020.