Recently in Reviews

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.

Henry Purcell, Royal Welcome Songs for King Charles II Vol. III: The Sixteen/Harry Christophers

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.

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.

Anima Rara: Ermonela Jaho

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.

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.

Requiem pour les temps futurs: An AI requiem for a post-modern society

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.

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.’

Ádám Fischer’s 1991 MahlerFest Kassel ‘Resurrection’ issued for the first time

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.

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.’

Max Lorenz: Tristan und Isolde, Hamburg 1949

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.

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."

OPERA TODAY ARCHIVES »

Reviews

26 Mar 2020

Philip Venables' Denis & Katya: teenage suicide and audience complicity

As an opera composer, Philip Venables writes works quite unlike those of many of his contemporaries. They may not even be operas at all, at least in the conventional sense - and Denis & Katya, the most recent of his two operas, moves even further away from this standard. But what Denis & Katya and his earlier work, 4.48 Psychosis, have in common is that they are both small, compact forces which spiral into extraordinarily powerful and explosive events.

Denis & Katya: Music Theatre Wales - Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, 14th March 2020

A review by Marc Bridle

Above: Emily Edmonds (mezzo soprano) and Johnny Herford (baritone)

Photo credit: Clive Barda

 

A Venables opera is not a comfortable experience. 4.48 Psychosis , which I reviewed in 2018, is drawn from Sarah Kane’s final full-scale play, though it is a work which often seems less like drama and more like opera in its theatricality. In one sense, this opera is almost like a prelude to the drama of Denis & Katya. Parallels with Wagner might not seem that obscure or unusual to make. There isn’t any link between the dramatis personae that threads these works together; but very like Wagner, there are motifs and themes which are common - and very uncommon - to both. The orchestral forces differ between the two operas, but what they share are spatial symmetry and a kind of Morse code in the sound that is sometimes generated. If 4.48 Psychosis is about psychological fragility, the descent into madness, a suicide note drenched in the poetry of opera then Denis & Katya is almost the obverse of this. There is nothing fragile here, rather it’s the tornado of a psychological breakdown, a madness that is violent, a suicide note that is played out in public and broadcast in a language that eschews the poetic into something entirely demotic. One suicide is very private as we experience a mind disintegrating; another suicide is entirely public as it is played out over social media. Psychosis can be an internal civil war, or it can be one that’s like a video game.

Both Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis and Denis & Katya are autobiographical though in highly different ways and witnessed through very different microscopes. Kane’s was a vast monologue, a torrential emotional topography which ended up haunting and tragic from a deeply personal perspective. Denis & Katya is entirely narrative based, though the panorama we see through the webcam and lens of the website, Periscope, is entirely voyeuristic. What violence and tragedy unfolds happens exponentially - the greater the audience becomes, the more extreme the action and drama becomes. It was never unavoidable during this period of cabin fever that the complicity of a world-wide audience tagging each other would be anything other than explosive in its outcome. The case of a virus going viral. And, all that separates the audiences of this tragedy through time is the notion of our distance to it. Whether it be the real time of the events themselves, or the narrative describing the past, the voyeurism of who is watching it is unchanged.

What obviously makes Denis & Katya more compelling - even for Venables and Huffman to get on this particular bandwagon - is who Denis and Katya were. Read newspaper cuttings from the time (a relatively recent 2016) and you’ll find these are a couple of Russian teenagers invariably described as “beautiful”; almost all the photographs that exist of them show them to be clearly in love with each other. What precipitates tragedy in all love stories is disapproval, that love is somehow forbidden. The parallel for the media was Romeo and Juliet but it could have been Tristan and Isolde. Add in a shoot-out and aggressive, aimless hedonism and you come closer to something like Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation, although perhaps the celebrity culture which these dysfunctional teenagers began to crave resembled more Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. But where it is easy to find sensationalism and exploitation in a story about youth and suicide Venables and Huffman are sensitive to their tragedy. This is an opera about Denis and Katya but there are no Denis and Katya. Instead, the events are narrated entirely by six characters, and performed by just two singers.

Because of this what we get is a story that is second-hand at best. It is derived from crime-based reconstructions, documentaries, interviews - and some of it is fictionalised. Even the outcome itself is uncertain, a suicide off camera, just as in all Greek theatre where tragedy often happened off-stage. (This ‘unseen’ suicide has indeed been a source of speculation and fake news ever since.) But there is nothing Sophoclean or Aeschylean about this story except in the rewriting of the role and function of the Greek Chorus. No longer narrating what the protagonists of this drama are doing, they have become actors looking inwards on their webcams, directing the action, no longer just spectators but ones who will become deeply implicated in its outcome.

Music Theatre Wales.jpg Emily Edmonds (mezzo soprano) and Johnny Herford (baritone). Photo credit: Clive Barda.

How far this approach to Denis & Katya blurs the lines between theatre and opera is a thin one. The very concept of narration means much of this opera is spoken rather than sung. This doesn’t always work in its favour. I found the concept of translation, which was only needed for the Russian text, overused when it was applied to the English text as well. As a kind of vocal doubling it worked - but you can have too much of a good thing. The opening prologue - which is long - sets the scene but is hugely descriptive because there are no sets. Any kind of visual set requires very little imagination from its audience - what you see is exactly that. A TV set is described in some detail - where it is, the kind it is - but this is important because it is a central part of their story. It isn’t so much something they watch but something which becomes rooted in their violence - it is blown apart with a shotgun and eventually thrown through a window. Little of this could be shown on stage but works convincingly when narrated.

Of the six roles, the Journalist and the Friend are the most important (the former sung by a mezzo-soprano, the latter by a baritone) and these are also the ones which are principally sung (though the opposite singer will also perform spoken dialogue). The Neighbour and the Teenager are both performed in Russian (again, with a simultaneous translation), and the Teacher and Medic are both played as a duet. If this sounds a little hectic, what it does is to keep the opera flowing rather as you’d expect the events they’re describing to unfold with similar urgency.

Emily Edmonds and Johnny Herford were hugely impressive. If the opera begins in a relatively straightforward way, requiring both singers to just paint the scene for us, it rarely remains this easy for them. Sometimes the sudden changes between one role and the next left the singers with little margin for error. But it was the ability to switch between multiple roles and make them sound distinctive which required a more creative and deft artistry. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that it was Edmonds’s The Neighbour and Herford’s The Teenager (both of which are sung in Russian) which proved the most distinctive. Herford’s Teenager was on the edge, brittle and innocently touching, and his singing was everything about these things - a very vivid contrast to Edmonds’s Neighbour who was an extraordinarily powerful figure. Perhaps this power stems from the very nature of The Neighbour - a character who has nebulous or ambiguous feelings about Denis and Katya, who is uncertain about the events because she only sees them from a distance. There is even something suggestive of Britten’s Mrs Sedley in the part - even down to both roles being sung by a mezzo, and the more sinuous scoring. If the Journalist and The Friend are the central figures narrating the story, and these were beautifully done by Edmonds and Herford, it’s tempting to argue that both The Teacher and The Medic might have been roles better absorbed elsewhere.

Denis & Katya by Music Theatre Wales (Emily Edmonds mezzo soprano and Johnny Herford baritone, musicians London (1).jpgEmily Edmonds (mezzo soprano) and Johnny Herford (baritone), musicians (London Sinfonietta). Photo credit: Clive Barda.

The orchestration for Denis & Katya is unusual, and even tighter than Venables used in 4.48 Psychosis, which was limited to twelve instruments. As with his first opera, Venables doesn’t use the orchestra as a means to an end but as a significant part of the narrative. The instruments blend with the voices, and the scoring is micromanaged to reflect this. Scored for just four cellos - amplified by microphones - they span the mezzo/baritone range well. More interestingly, and certainly the intimacy of the Purcell Room acoustic helped, was the sheer aural weight and potency of a quartet of them. With each cello arranged at a quarter edge of the stage, they would play either in absolute unity or as a quartet of soloists in their own right. The scoring is exceptionally well done, and perhaps is no finer than in the music given to The Neighbour which is both muscular and driven. The four cellists from the London Sinfonietta were superb, the virtuosity limitless.

Much of Andrew Lieberman’s scenic and lighting design remains on the minimalist side - extravagantly so for much of the opera’s seventy-minute running time. This emptiness is almost entirely focussed on the stage itself where only two chairs for the singers are used, the cellists spatially placed at each corner. But this isn’t about what the audience sees it’s about what they should imagine, not just in a staged sense but in a psychological one. That what we do see (Pierre Martin’s highly imaginative video design) relies entirely on the width of the Purcell Room’s stage - that unbroken span of screen a vast computer monitor of typed out messages, each letter accompanied by an electroacoustic click. Only towards the end of the opera is there any real action as a train begins to leave the Russian village of Strugi Krasnye where all of these events have taken place. As the train gathers speed and travels one way, the effect on the mind is to pull you the other. But this is, after all, exactly what the opera has been about: motives, decisions, choices, endgames and, in the end, unanswered questions.

What Venables and Huffman have given us in Denis & Katya is an opera which defies the form. In doing so, it goes substantially further than 4.48 Psychosis did. It is a tragedy, but its eponymous characters never appear at all. The audience see what happens but are also complicit voyeurs. And Venables and Huffman are no more nor less successful than others have been in unveiling the enigma of what happened to Denis and Katya, though this is not a major failing. If perhaps not as harrowing as their first opera, it is a haunting and powerful work and, in a performance as artistically compelling as this one, leaves a lasting impression.

Marc Bridle

Emily Edmonds (mezzo-soprano); Johnny Herford (baritone); Tim Gill, Adrian Bradbury, Zoe Martlew, Joely Koos (cellos, London Sinfonietta); Philip Venables (composer), Ted Huffman (Writer/Director), Ksenia Ravvina (Co-Creator), Andrew Lieberman (Scenic & Lighting Director), Millie Hiibel (Costume Design), Pierre Martin (Video Design), Rob Kaplowitz (Sound Design)

Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, London; 14th March 2020.

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):