The giant puppet from L’Homme Debout’s Mo and The Red Ribbon which will roam the streets of Norwich
One of the oldest-established festivals in the UK, the Norfolk & Norwich (running for an astonishing 17 days in the merry month of May from Friday 10th to Sunday 26th) offers a cultural package like no other taking in music, drama, literature, circus, outdoor and family events as well as the all-important visual arts.
Artists from round the world and across the region will gather in Norwich and, indeed, across the county to present a huge variety of work and events in a programme featuring a host of ‘stories’ providing guided routes through the festival and bringing together shows and events that share common themes.
Anselm McDonnell: Kraina; Joshua Ellicott, Laura Sinnerton, Dermot Dunne, Rebecca Murphy, Cahal Masterson, Elizabeth Hilliard, Alan Smale, Annette Cleary, Rachel Quinn, Nicole Rourke, Dermot Dunne; Reviewed 26 February 2024
New music for voice and instruments tackling the complex and the difficult, creating music that is more than just a song, and pushing performers to emotional and expressive limits.
Kraina is a word in Old Polish meaning edge, borderland, or frontier. Belfast-based composer Anselm McDonnell's latest disc, Kraina, is his second album, released on his own label [see my review of Light of Shore, McDonnell's first disc]. The new disc features four works for voice and instruments (I hesitate to call them songs, some are far more substantial than that), all concerned with the edges and crevices around home: depicting people searching for home, caught between homes, or our destructive relationship with our planetary home. The performers are Joshua Ellicott, tenor, Laura Sinnerton, viola, and Dermot Dunne, accordion; Rebecca Murphy, soprano and Cahal Masterson, piano; Elizabeth Hilliard, soprano, Alan Smale, violin, Annette Cleary, cello and Rachel Quinn, piano; Nicole Rourke, spoken word and Dermot Dunne, accordion.
Manchester-based writer, performer, producer and maths educator Keisha Thompson has been announced as the fifth winner of the annual DARE Art Prize. DARE is a partnership between the University of Leeds and Opera North, and in association with the National Science and Media Museum and The Tetley, Leeds, and the prize challenges artists and scientists to collaborate on new approaches to the creative process.
Keisha Thompson’s project DeCipher takes a playful look at mathematics, aiming to place the subject at the heart of everyday life – literally ‘deciphering’ what many people perceive to be a difficult topic to underline its relevance and make it more accessible to everyone. Recognising that knowledge around mathematical topics, such as coding and economics, gives individuals an advantage in society, Keisha is looking to create an interactive performance piece which delves into the power dynamics attached to mathematics as content, history, pedagogy, and culture. Her work also acknowledges that the history of mathematics needs to be ‘decolonised’ with Asian and African voices having effectively been forgotten in the classroom.
Keisha Thompson explains: "Mathematics has always been a creative subject for me. I was introduced to it via puzzles and games before I started school. When I got in the classroom, it was like meeting an old friend. However, as I moved through the education system, I found that I was in the minority in this experience. I want to use my skill, experience, and enthusiasm to create engagements and outputs that support a new cultural appreciation for mathematics."
In 2021, Keisha Thompson was awarded one of Opera North's Resonance residencies to develop The Bell Curve, a new play exploring the ethics of DNA hacking technology commissioned by Eclipse Theatre, Yorkshire Theatre Royal and Pilot Theatre.
The four past Prize winners have each interacted with the work of the University and Opera North in unexpected, illuminating and very different ways, from working with infrasound, climatology, the environment and the paranormal, to exploring AI and insect biodiversity. Last year’s recipient, Essex-based sculptor Katie Surridge, worked with teams at the University to address the problem of e-waste and the valuable resources, including gold, silver, copper, platinum, aluminium and cobalt, that are present in discarded electronic devices. Katie used these to produce new sculptures, one of which has been purchased by the Science Museum in London, redefining perceptions around what is considered redundant and worthless.
Handel: Theodora; Louise Alder, Tim Mead, Anna Stéphany, Stuart Jackson, Adam Plachetka, Arcangelo, Jonathan Cohen; Alpha Classics Reviewed 20 February 2024
A performance of Handel's late masterpiece that combines musical beauties with a sense of the inner meaning of the words, with a wonderful central performance from Louise Alder
Considering that Handel evidently regarded it as one of his favourite oratorios and that any performance of it is something of an event, Handel's Theodora has rather a sparse history on disc, though the converse of that is that most of the recordings are that little bit special. Paul McCreesh and Gabrieli recorded it in 2000 with Susan Gritton and Susan Bickley, Maxim Emelyanychev and Il Pomo d'Oro recorded it in 2022 with Lisette Oropesa and Joyce DiDonato, whilst further back there is the recording with the unforgettable Lorraine Hunt Lieberson from 1992 as well as the famous Glyndebourne production.
Jonathan Cohen first conducted the work with Arcangelo at the BBC Proms in 2018, and since then the group has done further performances. Whilst the cast of the Prom was largely different to that on the disc, a common thread running through all the performances has been the Theodora of Louise Alder and the ensemble's most recent London performance in March 2023 was linked to the recording of the disc.
Persona Arts, a new Birmingham-based opera company, is starting big, staging Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer in German in July. Persona Arts is a BME-led West Midlands based arts company that aims to stage the opera and choral arts to the highest possible standards.
The artistic director is Byron Jackson, a Birmingham-born baritone off Jamaican heritage. He aims to use Persona Arts to promote the cause of opera within local communities and contribute to breaking down barriers. He is a keen advocate of diversity and the underserved which are major issues within the current UK opera arts industry; something he has faced especially due to the colour of his skin.
Over the last two years, Persona Arts has been recruiting community singers from across the West Midlands to take part in the special Flying Dutchman opera chorus supporting our project partner, Birmingham Choral Union. From regional choral societies, amateur singing groups and opera companies, a diverse number of people have selected to take part in the project, and After staging three successful community chorus workshops in Small Heath and Moseley, they have inspired a good contingent of singers, a number of which have never performed in an opera before. Recruitment continues, especially for their diverse children’s chorus, and further community activities are planned.
Next up is a public opera masterclass with Susan Bullock for aspiring singers on Friday 19 April 2024, giving the audience the opportunity to see what it takes in preparing opera singers to reach their full potential.
Persona Arts presents Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire on 7, 10 and 13 July 2024, directed by Iqbal Khan. Jack Ridley conducts the Central England Camerata with soloists including Anando Mukerjee, Mari Wyn Williams, Laura Woods, Christian Joel, Gerrit Paul Groen and Byron Jackson. Full details from the Persona Arts website.
Stephen McNeff: A Star Next to the Moon - Jacob Harrison (Pedro Páramo) - Guildhall School of Music & Drama (Photo: David Monteith-Hodge)
Stephen McNeff: A Star Next to the Moon; director: Martin Lloyd-Evans, conductor: Dominic Wheeler; Guildhall School of Music & Drama Reviewed 26 February 2024
Stephen McNeff's powerful new opera tells a disturbing story with a performance that pulls no punches and outstanding contributions from the young cast
Stephen McNeff's opera, A Star Next to the Moon debuted at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama's Silk Street Theatre on Monday 26 February 2024. With a libretto by Aoife Mannix based Juan Rulfo's novel Pedro Páramo, the opera has had a long journey to fruition as Stephen McNeff discussed in my recent interview with him, but creating a large-scale new opera in two acts with a cast of eleven, chorus and orchestra is no small achievement indeed. Martin Lloyd-Evans directed and Dominic Wheeler conducted with designs by Anna Reid. Jacob Harrison was Pedro Páramo, Holly Brown was Susana, Steven van der Linden was Juan Preciado, plus Emyr Lloyd Jones, Rachel Roper, Joe Chalmers, Shana Moron-Caravel, Vladyslava Ionascu-Yokovenko, Jonah Halton, Yolisa Ngwexana and Ana-Carmen Balestra.
Following a death-bed promise to his mother, Juan Preciado (Steven van der Linden) travels to Comala to seek out his father, Pedro Páramo. In Comala, Juan finds people that knew his mother but he comes to realise that the town is populated by ghosts and he becomes more fevered and confused. The story is divided into two halves, for Act One we see Juan's search in Comala intercut with scenes from the early days of Pedro Páramo (Jacob Harrison). As we watch Juan becoming increasingly distraught, we witness Pedro manipulating those around him including Dolores (Shana Moron-Caravel), Juan's mother.
Stephen McNeff: A Star Next to the Moon - Steven van der Linden (Juan Preciado) - Guildhall School of Music & Drama (Photo: David Monteith-Hodge)
It becomes apparent that Comala is entirely inhabited by ghosts and that Pedro Páramo corrupted all around him, so that all those Juan encounters have something to atone for. At the end of Act One Juan undergoes a transformation and seems to join the ghosts. In Act Two, he and Dorotea (Rachel Roper) witness further scenes from Pedro's life as Pedro struggles with his childhood sweetheart, Susana (Holly Brown) from whom he has been parted for 30 years but who returns mad. The ending of the opera is bleak, as Pedro lays waste to the town and realises that he is unredeemed and unredeemable.
From April to June 2024, Jocelyn Freeman's SongEasel is celebrating a whole clutch of anniversaries in a series of concerts across South East London featuring performers including Roderick Williams, Mark Padmore and Elin Manahan Thomas. Spreading her net widely, a delighting in discovering that the word 'obscurity' can mean a collective noun for a group of poets, pianist Jocelyn Freeman's series A Vast Obscurity brings together the 460th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, the bicentenary of Lord Byron’s death and 65th birthday of Dr. Joseph Spence, plus Gabriel Fauré's centenary.
Things commence on 11 April at St. George the Martyr, Borough with baritone Roderick Williams, pianist Iain Burnside and double bass player Leon Bosch in The Land of Lost Content with music by Butterworth, Burleigh, Clarke, Beach, and McLachlan.
Gabriel Fauré's centenary is celebrated with a pair of concerts, the 1893 version of the Requiem with Elin Manahan Thomas (soprano), Malachy Frame (baritone) and The Corbett Consort at St Mark's Church, Kennington on 11 May, then Gwilym Bowen (tenor), Jared Andrew Michaud (bass-baritone), Lucy Gibbs (mezzo-soprano) and SongEasel Young Artists will be performing the composer's complete songs across an entire afternoon on 12 May at St Laurence's Church, Catford.
Then on 31 May at St. Catherine‘s Church, Telegraph Hill, soprano Ella Taylor and pianist Jocelyn Freeman chart the course of Lord Byron's poem Don Juan in music including the first performance of a new commission from Emily Hazrati setting texts by Dr Joseph Spence (Master of Dulwich College and librettist of Dani Howard's opera, The Yellow Wallpaper).
Soprano Francesca Chiejina joins Jocelyn Freeman at St Laurence's Church, Catford on 16 June for a concert celebrating Shakespeare with music by from the Baroque to the present day including Arne, McDowall, Samuel, Ruiz, and Finzi's Let us garlands bring.
Finally, Mark Padmore and Jocelyn Freeman close the festival with The Wanderer and the Scholar on 21 June at St Stephen's Church, Dulwich by returning to two figures associated with Lord Byron, his Dulwich classmates, the celebrated pedestrian Captain Robert Barclay and Major-General John Gaspard Le Marchant, with music by Beethoven, Schubert, C. Schumann, Vaughan Williams, and Macmillan. Audiences can revel in the summer solstice with a day trip to Dulwich, enjoying a guided, historical walk around Dulwich Wood before settling in for this evening of exquisite song.
There are less formal events too. A special Fauré Listening Club event on 21 April, curated and introduced by Dr. Emily Kilpatrick, will celebrate some of the composer’s best-loved works in an informal setting, free and welcome to all. There are also schools performances, and two fringe pop-up performances bringing cabaret, art song, chanson, and music hall favourites into the local community, free for all to enjoy.
Léo Delibes: Lakmé; Haegee Lee, Elgan Llŷr Thomas, James Platt, Julien Van Mellaerts, Lorena Paz Nieto, Caroline Carragher, Sarah Pring, Polly Leech, Magnus Walker, Chelsea Opera Group, Matthew Scott Rogers; Cadogan Hall Reviewed 25 February 2024
Strong performances and a serious approach to the music ensure that the pleasures of this performance of Delibes' rarity extended well beyond coloratura delights
The very full Cadogan Hall suggested that audiences are keener on this type of rarity than companies sometimes give them credit for and that the major opera companies' continuing neglect is strange. After all the issues surround the Orientalism and colonial-era plot are no more problematic than Madama Butterfly or Les pêcheurs de perles. Though written with sung dialogue, the work's style exists in the borderlands between grand opera and operetta (Delibes' had already written popular operettas) whilst the work's dramatic pacing in the later two acts can be a little slow. But there are plenty of musical pearls, well beyond the two best known numbers, and this concert performance showed that there was indeed much to enjoy when you take the piece seriously.
Chorus of Opera Holland Park, the City of London Sinfonia, conductor John Andrews with soloists David Butt Philip and Ross Ramgobin (Photo: Opera Holland Park)
Puccini: songs & arias, Messa di Gloria; Eleanor Broomfield, Fflur Wyn, Philip Costovski, Joseph Buckmaster, José de Eça, David Butt Philip, Ross Ramgobin, Chorus of Opera Holland Park, City of London Sinfonia, John Andrews; Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Street Reviewed 22 February 2024
Opera Holland Park launches its Puccini celebration early with a fine account his early and intriguing mass setting, plus a chance to preview the tenor hero in the Summer production of Tosca
2024 sees 100 years since Puccini's death and Opera Holland Park are marking that by performing Tosca (in Stephen Barlow's iconic 2008 production) and Edgar (a great rarity on the operatic stage) this Summer. But on Thursday 22 February 2024 the company launched its Puccini commemoration early with a concert at Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Street. The centrepiece was Puccini's Messa di Gloria performed by chorus of Opera Holland Park (chorus master Dominic Ellis-Peckham), the City of London Sinfonia (marking the 20th anniversary of its collaboration with the opera company) conducted by John Andrews with soloists David Butt Philip and Ross Ramgobin. In the first half there was a selection of Puccini's songs and operatic excerpts performed by sopranos Eleanor Broomfield and Fflur Wyn, and tenors Phillip Costovski, Joseph Buckmaster and José de Eça, accompanied by a quartet from the City of London Sinfonia.
The large venue with its resonant acoustic brought out the operatic element in Puccini's songs, and indeed several of the songs ended up in the operas. Though the reuse did not stop there because bits of the Messa di Gloria pop up too (Anna Picard's article in the programme gave us the delightful details).
Jacques Cohen: The Lady of Satis House - Marie Vassiliou at Tete-a-Tete: The Opera Festival in 2012 (Photo: Claire Shovelton)
Jacques Cohen's operatic monodrama The Lady of Satis House premiered in 2012. A commission from Bill Bankes-Jones' Tete-a-Tete: The Opera Festival, it was directed by Joe Austin, designed by Emily Harwood and performed by soprano Marie Vassiliou and the Piatti Quartet. 2012 was also the bicentenary of Charles Dickens' birth and faced with writing the opera in six weeks, Jacques chose Miss Havisham from Great Expectations as the subject, drawing his text from Dickens' book.
Jacques Cohen (Photo: Lester Barnes)
Now, some 12 years after those first performances, the work has appeared on disc, on the Meridian label, again performed by Marie Vassiliou with the Tippett Quartet. The disc also features two of Jacques' works for string quartet, When the Bough Breaks: Three Lullabies for String Quartet and From Behind Glass: Tone Poem for String Quartet.
The recording came about because Jacques had several recording projects in mind, of which The Lady of Satis House was one. Jacques is the music director and founder of the Cohen Ensemble and is known for his arrangements for string orchestra. He explains that throughout his whole career, there has been something of a pull between being a conductor and being a composer but his confidence as a composer has increased as his technique and style have developed. He has always composed but has realised that he is writing more.
His first disc with Meridian, Music for Strings, featured a variety of composers including one of his own works, whilst his second disc, Transcriptions for Strings, was his own arrangements for string orchestra. His disc of carols, Cohen's Carols on Willowhayne Records, was the first disc to contain only his music, so he was moving in the direction of a disc of his compositions. The Lady of Satis House felt it needed to be recorded, but it was also economic, just needing soprano and string quartet.
Jacques admits that he usually considers that operas need to be seen to be properly appreciated, but as a chamber piece, he feels that The Lady of Satis House can be appreciated on disc, more than some other operas. Also, opera is harder and more expensive to stage, so the opportunity to preserve it on disc was ideal.
Whilst the last few decades have seen a remarkable increase in the amount of exploration of neglected 19th and 20th century British music, there has still been a tendency to view individual composers through quite a narrow lens. So, Stanford's most popular opera during his lifetime, Shamus O'Brien is only now getting its first studio recording, whilst Parry's oratorios, highly popular and influential in their day, have similarly only recently arrived properly on disc.
Ethel Smyth is another one of those composers. Whilst The Wreckers has long been available on disc, it took Glyndebourne in 2021 to finally explore the composer's original version of the opera and her other operas have all had a patchy life and though finally we have all but one (the score of which has disappeared) available on disc. But what about the rest of Smyth's oeuvre? The early Mass certainly, but the rest of her work is only patchily covered.
I discovered her late oratorio/symphony The Prison back in the 1990s when I came across the re-issue of H.B. Brewster's philosophical treatise The Prison: A Dialogue in an edition with Smyth's valuable memoir of HB. This book was issued in 1931 at the same time as the first performances Smyth's The Prison but for some reason Smyth's symphony for soprano, bass-baritone, chorus and orchestra never seemed to have anything of a life after her own death.
The work was finally recorded and issued in 2020 on Chandos in a terrific performance, by an American choir and orchestra [see my review]. Now the work is getting a proper outing in concert in London when Murray Hipkin conducts the North London Chorus and Meridian Sinfonia with soloists Rebecca Bottone and Alex Otterburn in a performance of Ethel Smyth's The Prison at St James' Church, Muswell Hill on Saturday 16 March 2023.
It is fatally easy to be lazy and assume the work has rightly been confined to the dustbin of musical history, but exposure to the piece makes you realise that it is past generations who were being lazy. As Smyth's German-influenced, late-Romantic, tonal music went out of fashion, as Smyth herself, elderly, very deaf and still a combative character, was easily dismissed as a crank, people simply stopped bothering.
The Prison came at a time when the composer might have been expected to stop work (she was over 70), but a planned visit to Greece made her re-read one of her friend (and probable lover) H.B Brewster's philosophical books, The Prison which was originally published in 1891. This is a dialogue between a group of characters, as Elizabeth Wood's excellent booklet note from the Chandos recording explains "HB devised the book of 'The Prison' as a Platonic dialogue among four friends who meet to read a newly discovered text, presumed to have been written by a prisoner on the eve of execution. Each reader voices a different philosophical method – supernaturalist, neo-Platonist, Christian, and positivist, respectively – to comment on moral and philosophical problems found in the text." Not an obvious source for a large scale choral work, but Smyth thought so.
HB - Henry Bennet Brewster (1850-1908), a member of the American diaspora, born in Paris and resident in Florence. He wrote philosophical works, in English, and poetry in French (hence his original version of the text for The Wreckers being in French. He was married to a friend of Ethel Smyth's whom she got to know in Leipzig. She and HB would become close, close in fact and commentators speculate that some of the torridness of in the illicit affair of hero and heroine in The Wreckers comes from this reality.
Henry Brewster (HB) in 1897
She and HB remained close, albeit purely as friends, until his untimely death in 1908. He had not only written the librettos of her operas Der Wald and The Wreckers but continued to form a strong influence on her.
The Prison was thus something of a final envoi to a dear friend. Smyth extracted the Prisoner's thoughts from HB's longer text, and used these to create the symphony. Here we have the Prisoner, and his Soul, and their discussion about how best he prepare for his forthcoming execution. "He aspires through contemplation and ethical conduct to detach the self from the ego and free the imprisoned mind, body, and soul from the shackles of desire, so as to attain spiritual deliverance."
The result is a thoughtful, almost contemplative piece, in a style that we don't associate with Smyth because the mental image of her remains Sir Thomas Beecham's figure conducting The March of the Women with a toothbrush through a prison window, or the passionate harridan from Virginia Woolf's diaries. What we hear in The Prison is a composer formed by training and personal contact with the Leipzig circle around Schumann and Mendelssohn's families, for whom the First World War was a great cultural and musical wrench. The post-war Smyth adjusted her style, but she never wrote music in the manner of her English contemporaries, and this performance of The Prison gives us a chance to find out more.
Domenico Scarlatti painted in 1738 by Domingo Antonio Velasco
Stabat Mater: Lotti, Monteverdi, Domenico Mazzocchi, Alessandro Della Ciaia, Domenico Scarlatti; Vox Luminis; Wigmore Hall Reviewed 21 February 2024
An imaginative programme that moved from an anonymous 13th century solo lai to the ten voices of Scarlatti's Stabat Mater, each work rendered with vivid intensity and profound expressivity
The vocal ensemble Vox Luminis returned to Wigmore Hall on Wednesday 21 February 2024 with Stabat Mater, a programme centred on Domenico Scarlatti's glorious ten-part Stabat Mater but which also took in an anonymous 13th century lai, Lamentation de la Vierge au Croix, Antonio Lotti's Crucifixus a8, Monteverdi's Adoramus te Christe and music by two lesser-known 17th century figures, Domenico Mazzocchi and Alessandro Della Ciaia, all focusing on the crucifixion and the lamentation of the Virgin at the foot of the cross.
Vox Luminis fielded an ensemble of eleven singers, directed from within by artistic director and bass Lionel Meunier, plus theorbo (Simon Linné), harp (Sarah Ridy), violone (James Munro) and organ (Anthony Romaniuk), though until the encore (further Monteverdi) we never heard all the singers on stage at once and the programme moved between a single voice right through to the ten voices, always one per part.
Jonathan Dove: The Enchanted Pig - Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, 2023 (Photo Greg Milner)
On Monday 29 February 2024, the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire debuts its Spring opera production, Massenet's Cendrillon at Gas Street Central in Birmingham. The production involves a collaboration between the London College of Fashion and the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire with a cast of students from the conservatoire's Vocal & Operatic Studies Department plus a team of student set-designers, language coaches, assistant directors, surtitle operators and so on. All directed by Matthew Eberhardt who has created a production set in the 1950s
The venue is a former gas works that originally supplied the gas to the lamps around the city and is now a church. The production will see the audience move through this interesting space.
The conservatoire does not have a specific postgraduate opera course and the performers will be undergraduate and masters vocal students, from the Vocal & Operatic Studies Department which has some 60 to 80 students. The head of department since 2017 is conductor Paul Wingfield. The lack of specific opera course means that undergraduates are able to gain stage experience, including principal roles where suitable, and in Cendrillon there are some 17 undergraduates in principal roles (the opera is double-cast).
There are usually three productions per year, staged scenes in November, a site-specific production in March and a concert performance in June. Previous productions have included Jonathan Dove's The Enchanted Pig (2023), Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen (2023), Charpentier's Les Arts Florissants and Offenbach's Mesdames de la Halles (2022), Stephen McNeff's Banished (2022), Mark-Anthony Turnage's Coraline (2021) and Jeremy Sams' Baroque pasticcio, The Enchanted Island (2020).
The conservatoire does not have it's own theatre, hence offering the students the added experience of working on a site specific production (Birmingham has a rich inheritance of this thanks to Graham Vick's work with Birmingham Opera Company) previous venues have included an old button factory, and a rave bingo venue in Digbeth – the Secret Space, whilst the Moseley Swimming Baths – an architectural wonder, is a possibility for the future.
Each project involves, of course, not just singers but orchestral musicians from the conservatoire, and student set designers (from Birmingham City University, of which the conservatoire is part), student assistant directors, student repetiteurs, student assistant conductors, student language coaches.
Since 2022, they have received funding from the Linbury Trust which has not only enabled the collaboration with the London College of Fashion but has enabled the department to extend its Learning & Participation work. 600 school children came to the Opera Scenes in November, and school children have also been involved in set design workshops for Cendrillon (their work will be displayed in the foyer) and there will be a children’s chorus for the Summer opera, Hansel and Gretel.
Cendrillon is at Gas Street Central from 29 February to 2 March, under 18s go free with a paying adult, full details from the conservatoire's website.
The Paradox Orchestra is a dynamic young Yorkshire-based ensemble of classically-trained musicians, many of whom trained at the Leeds Conservatoire, whose performances vibrantly reimagine rock, pop, and dance classics, with the aim of re-energising classical music, supporting classically trained musicians, and bring music to new audiences.
The orchestra has just launched a tour of Pink Floyd hits, with a candle-lit 25-strong string orchestra in hits from the seminal album, The Dark Side of the Moon with performances to come in Selby Abbey (11/5/2024), Sheffield Cathedral (16/5/2024) and Huddersfield Town Hall (17/5/2024). These follow sell-out performances last year at Conyngham Hall in Knaresborough, Leeds Minster and Manchester Cathedral.
The orchestra combines a high level of musicianship with showmanship in its performances, and they donate 5% of ticket sales to local charities. The orchestra also provides Inspire Days for local charities, including the Archers project in Sheffield, which supports the homeless and in May The homeless receiving support at the Archer project will be invited to watch a rehearsal of the orchestra for free.
Michael Sluman, founder, and artistic director of Paradox Orchestra, said: "Music, particularly classical music, has been proven to help reduce the stresses of life, and in our challenging times, we are passionate about bringing people together for an uplifting, transformative night out. We are committed to working with local music hubs, churches, town halls and charities to reach new audiences and break down the perceptions that classical music is only for a posh night out, for posh people and at posh locations."
Itō Noe (1895-1923) was a Japanese writer and feminist anarchist who was killed by Japanese state forces when she was just 28. A new song cycle by British composer Francesca Le Lohé celebrates the brief life of this brave and radical woman.
The song cycle has been written for Japanese singer and biwa player Akiko Kubota who makes her UK debut on a tour from 5 to 9 March 2024 for International Women's Day with concerts in London (5/3/2024), Huddersfield (7/3/2024), Manchester (8/3/2024) and Leeds (9/3/2024).
Kubota's programme, On an Endless Road: Itō Noe and the Women Composers of Her Time premiered in Tokyo in December 2023 and the UK tour is being presented by Hera, an intersectional feminist opera company, in association with Illuminate Women’s Music.
Kubota plays the satsuma biwa, a Japanese stringed instrument originally played by samurai and traditionally used to accompany songs chronicling the achievements of warriors in battle. At the concert Kubota will be joined by Midori Komachi (violin) and Yura Zaiki (piano).
As well as Le Lohé's song cycle, the programme includes music for violin and piano by three of Noe’s contemporaries who broke new ground writing in the Western Classical tradition - Kōda Nobu (1870-1946), one of the very first Japanese composers to write in the European classical tradition, Toyama Michiko (1913-2006), who forged an international career and reputation, Yoshida Takako (1910- 1956), a feminist and pacifist, who refused to write militaristic music and was jailed for her pacifist principles in 1940.
In 2015, composer Francesca Le Lohé received a Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Scholarship and relocated to Japan to study Japanese instruments, including the biwa. Her opera The Key won the Keizo Saji Prize in 2019.
George Jeffreys: Sacred Songs and Anthems; Solomon's Knot, Josep Maria Marti Duran, William Whitehead; Prospero Reviewed 19 February 2024
The almost forgotten 17th-century English composer George Jeffreys is revealed as a remarkable talent, writing Italian influenced-music in the depths of darkest Northamptonshire during the Civil War, vividly brought to life by Solomon's Knot
The name of the composer George Jeffreys is not well known and it is perhaps fatally easy to assume that his surviving output of instrumental fantasias, thirteen Italian madrigals, sixteen English songs, sixty-one Latin motets, five Latin canticles, two Latin mass movements, twenty-six English anthems or devotional pieces, and three settings of texts from the English Communion Service would be that of an eminently forgettable minor 17th century English composer working in a somewhat old-fashioned style. Yet the reality is remarkably different.
Born around 1610 and living until 1683, his lifetime coincided with a complex piece of English history and for most of his life he worked for Lord Hatton, much of the time at Hatton's seat of Kirby Hall in Northamptonshire. Now, the spotlight is turning onto Jeffreys and rightly finding a composer who has been unjustly neglected. His music is being made available via Musica Britannica and this new disc on Prospero Classical, Lost Majesty: Sacred Songs and Anthems by George Jeffreys, from Solomon's Knot (artistic director Jonathan Sells) including Josep Maria Martí Duran (theorbo) and William Whitehead (organ), not only features Jeffreys' sacred songs and anthems for four- and five-part voices and continuo, but was recorded in the great hall of Kirby Hall.
Solomon's Knot at Kirby Hall
Not much is known about Jeffreys' early life and he first shows up in Cambridge in the 1630s where he may well have come into contact with the Hatton family but from this period until his death he was in the family's service. This was mainly as Steward at Kirby Hall, where he remained during the Civil War with Lady Hatton whilst Lord Hatton fled to France. Despite the fact that Jeffreys was employed by Christopher Hatton primarily as a secretary/steward and not as a musician, he maintained a passionate interest in music throughout his life and music manuscripts in his hand survive from the 1630s through to the 1680s. What is perhaps most significant is that Jeffreys, who was born around 50 years before Purcell, was one of the few English composers of the period to be influenced by contemporary Italian styles and to write in a forward-looking style.
Fisher Center at Bard College (Photo: Peter Aaron '68/Esto)
The Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College in the Hudson Valley, New York City, presents an annual Summerscape festival and this year there are eight weeks of opera, theatre, dance and a music festival from 20 June to 18 August 2024. The theme of the music festival is Berlioz and His World. Alongside wide-ranging concerts of music by Berlioz and his contemporaries, there is a rare staging of Meyerbeer's Le prophète (26 July to 4 August) directed by Christian Räth, with the American Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein and featuring Robert Watson (Siegmund in Dmitri Tcherniakov’s new production of Die Walküre at the Staatsoper, Berlin) in the title role plus Jennifer Feinstein as Fidès.
Meyerbeer's Le prophète featured at the Metropolitan Opera in 1918 as a vehicle for Enrico Caruso, and returned in 1977 with James McCracken and Marilyn Horne, since then I am not sure whether the opera has had a performance in the USA.
In concert there is a chance to hear not only Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique but the far rarer Lélio, ou Le retour à la vie: monodrame lyrique, plus songs, the Te Deum, selections from Les Troyens, Le mort d’Ophélie, Harold en Italie and La damnation de Faust, alongside music by Reicha, Weber, Le Sueur, Spontini, Thomas, Gluck, Auber, Meyerbeer, Rossini, Liszt, Wagner, Saint-Saens, Bizet, Faure, Viardot, Farrenc, Bertin, Grandval, Cherubini, Paganini, Halevy, Adam, Strauss, Ernst, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Hiller, Gottschalk, Raff, Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Varese and Messiaen.
For those seeking to bring opera to more intimate spaces, Poulenc's La voix humaine would seem ideal both in terms of length and performing forces. A single, female protagonist, a single setting and a length of around 45 minutes. In fact, it seems to cry out for that intimate space as Poulenc and Cocteau's protagonist gets remarkably confiding.
But though it has developed quite a currency over the last decade or so, Poulenc was not fond on the version of the opera with piano accompaniment and for him, the piece needed a full orchestra. But opera companies have found that the sacrifice of Poulenc's orchestral colours is sometimes worth the gain in sheer immediacy and intimacy.
Remarkably, there are two different productions of Poulenc's La voix humaine coming up. In March, Green Opera is performing the work at the King's Head Theatre in Islington, the first time opera has been performed in the venue for ten years. In April, Pegasus Opera Company is presenting Poulenc's La voix humaine in a double bill with Philip Hagemann's Roman Fever at the Susie Sainsbury Theatre at the Royal Academy of Music.
Green Opera's critically-acclaimed production of Francis Poulenc's La Voix humaine returns for a strictly limited run, 14-16 March 2024 at the newly reconstructed purpose-built King's Head Theatre. New Zealand soprano Katherine McIndoe with Eleanor Burke as director and André Callegaro as music director, these latter two both Jette Parker Young Artists at the Royal Opera House.
Green Opera is the first and only environmentally-sustainable opera company; for every £10 donated or ticket purchased, Green Opera plants a tree with Eden Reforestation Projects. So far they have planted over 2,000 trees! The March performances are in support of the Maternal Mental Health Alliance to whom 25% of the box office proceeds will be donated.
Pegasus Opera's double bill features an all-female led cast and creative team. Both operas are directed by Josette Bushell-Mingo and conducted by Rebecca Tong. For Poulenc's La voix humaine, the protagonist is Nadine Benjamin, whilst in Philip Hagemann's opera, the cast features Alison Buchanan, artistic director of Pegasus Opera, and Bernadine Pritchett.
Philip Hagemann's Roman Fever is based on an Edith Wharton short story about two middle-aged women and their daughters on holiday in Rome. The work was premiered in Santa Fe in 1989 and this will be the work's UK premiere. The double bill runs from 12 to 14 April 2024.
Circus Dinograd; traditional, Jean-Luc Ponty, Purcell, Ravel, Jarmo Ramponen, David Faber, Hilary Summers, Maarten Ornstein, Mike Fentross, Marie-Louise de Jong, Marleen Wester, Judith van Driel, Byrd, John Dowland; Hilary Summers, Maarten Ornstein, Mike Fentross, Dudok Quartet Amsterdam; Zefir Records Reviewed 14 February 2024
Sui generis, a disc that moves between genre and style without embarrassment as the ensemble of contemporary and period performers cross from the historical to the contemporary to the improvised
Circus Dinograd on Zefir Records is an intriguing new cross-genre collaboration between contralto Hilary Summers, the bass clarinet and theorbo/vihuela duet of Maarten Ornstein and Mike Fentross, and the Dudok Quartet Amsterdam (Judith van Driel, Marleen Wester, Marie-Louise de Jong, David Faber). The idea behind the disc seems to be that there are no boundaries, so we have reimaginations of Byrd, Purcell, and Dowland alongside folksong, Ravel and pieces by the different members of the ensemble, notably a set of Seven Deadly Sins, one by each member of the ensemble.
The National Centre for Early Music's Beverley & East Riding Early Music Festival returns to the historic Yorkshire town from 24 to 26 May 20204 with a festival entitled Threads of Gold.
There is something of a Spanish theme this year, as El Gran Teatro del Mundo, a young instrumental group based in Spain that captivated audiences on their UK tour last year and opens this year’s festival with Life is a Dream (la vida es sueño), a magical journey through the mysteries of the night, whilst The Telling close things with their music theatre show Into the Melting Pot which tells the stories of the women of medieval Spain thrust apart by religious intolerance. At Beverley Minster, the choir Tenebrae, appearing at the festival for the first time, perform their Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Requiem – a masterpiece of the Spanish Golden Age. Other performers this year include the BBC New Generation Baroque Ensemble Augelletti, London Handel Players, violinist Bojan Čičić and harpsichordist Steven Devine, plus Song Path.
The town plays its own important role in the festival, with the programme reflecting Beverley’s unique and intriguing history. This year’s talks and tours include Medieval Pilgrimage to St John of Beverley, an illustrated talk presented by Dr John Jenkins, co-Director of the Centre for Pilgrimage Studies at the University of York and Ancient Threads and Enchanted Garments, stories of preserved textiles from Iron Age and Roman Yorkshire told by Melanie Giles, Professor in European Prehistory at the University of Manchester.
In Relations: Meyerbeer, Loewe, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Emilie Mayer, Frances Allitsen; Eva Zalenga, Doriana Tchakarova; hänssler CLASSIC Reviewed 13 February 2024
An engaging recital with an intelligent programme that explores the complex web that linked composers and poets, male and female during the 19th century
In Relations from hänssler CLASSIC features soprano Eva Zalenga and pianist Doriana Tchakarova in a programme that moves from Meyerbeer, to Loewe, to Mendelssohn, to Schumann, to Emilie Mayer and Frances Allitsen. So, a disc of Romantic composers both male and female, then, but the concept is a little deeper than that.
Whilst Schumann and Mendelssohn were friends, they were also linked to Meyerbeer as all three set poems by Marianne von Willemer, the only woman who ever co-authored one of Goethe's works. Carl Loewe made music with Mendelssohn, and taught Emilie Meyer, who set poems by Heine. Heine in his turn was enthusiastic about Loewe's settings of his poetry. And Goethe was most enthusiastic about the poetry of Elisabeth Kuhlmann, but she died at the age of 17. So the disc is one of fascinating cross connections and circles.
The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's Tectonics Glasgow festival, co-curators Ilan Volkov and Alasdair Campbell, is entering is second decade with the 2024 festival on 4 and 5 May 2024. This year's festival continues to blur boundaries between musical genres with artists including vocal and movement artist Elaine Mitchener reflecting and responding to the circumstances which gave birth to the centuries-old hymn Amazing Grace and its contemporary resonances; Koichi Makigami, leader of a Japanese experimental rock band, performing with the legendary drummer Roger Turner; New York based vocalist Ka Baird combining their live performance within minimalistic, visceral composition and Japanese improviser, recorder player Eiko Yamada.
Sarah-Jane Summers (fiddle) and Juhani Silvola (guitar) will interweave Scottish traditional music with Scandinavian influences alongside the BBC SSO strings; and Edinburgh-based artists Euan Currie and Marlo De Lara present a live improvisation drawing on voices, electronics and field recordings.
Ilan Volkov conducts the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in three world premieres and three UK premieres including BBC Commissions by British composer Jack Sheen and Swiss-Nigerian composer Charles Uzor, and composer and turntablist Mariam Rezaei is the soloist in 6 scenes for turntables and orchestra, co-composed with Matthew Shlomowitz. Violinist Ilya Gringolts performs two UK premieres by composers Salvatore Sciarrino and Mirela Ivičević. Yaron Deutsch performs two major contemporary works for solo electric guitar by Pierluigi Billone and Andreas Dohmen, both works UK premieres of works written specially for Deutsch.
The majority of performances will be recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3, while many performances will also be available to watch online.
Composer Paul Kopetz's album, Mythical Creatures, was released on Navona Records in October 2023. Based around Paul's song cycle of the same name, the disc features settings of poems by Svyetlana Hadgraft set for voice, piano, wind quintet and percussion.
When we spoke Paul was in tropically humid Brisbane, quite a contrast to cold and windy London. The album, Mythical Creatures came about because a few years ago Paul was having coffee with his friend, the poet Svyetlana Hadgraft. Paul wanted to write on a larger scale and asked her for a sequence of poems. He was interested in mythology at the time, and she produced poems about various mythological creatures. They made a list of possible creatures and she wrote poetry, and then he set a selection of poems. The resulting movements are Jaguar, Mermaid, Bunyip (a creature from the aboriginal mythology of South-Eastern Australia), Yeti, Unicorn, Coyote, Aziza (a type of beneficent supernatural race in West African mythology), Sphinx, Phoenix and Leprechaun.
Photo by soprano Julia Mariko before the sitzprobe for ETO's production of Puccini's Manon Lescaut via Twitter
English Touring Opera's Spring 2024 season opens at the Hackney Empire on 24 February 2024 with Puccini's Manon Lescaut, followed by Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress on 2 March, and the tour continues across England until 28 May. The tour also features a new family opera by Omar Shahryar and Hannah Khalil, The Great Stink.
The new production of Puccini's Manon Lescaut is directed by Jude Christian (who directed Tom Coult's debut opera Violet at Aldeburgh Festival in 2022) and conducted by Gerry Cornelius, with Jenny Stafford as Manon, Gareth Dafydd Morris as Des Grieux and Aidan Edwards at Lescaut. I recently caught up with Jenny Stafford in a gap in rehearsals to chat about Manon and Puccini.
When we chat, Jenny has been in rehearsals for just over two weeks and feels that they are 'whizzing through it', something she appreciates. Working through the piece at speed and then coming back to add more detail is great for the singers, she feels.
She had no prior exposure to the opera, except for knowing the duet, but when she learned the music for the audition she found that she really wanted to do it. Jenny is having something of a Puccini year, she covered Magda in La Rondine at Opera North [see my review of the production] and will be singing the title role in Suor Angelica with West Green Opera this Summer. These are two roles that she has never done before, and she is enjoying being involved in music of such heart and soul.
This concentration on the composer is a mix of happenstance and deliberate choice. She loves singing Puccini, enjoying the way he brings out the sound of the emotion in the music, and his music makes her cry. She knows La Boheme well and adds that she would happily sing La Boheme for ever! She is also fascinated how you can hear that opera in Manon Lescaut; Manon Lescaut was his first big success in 1893 and La Boheme followed in 1896.
The heroine in Manon Lescaut can often feel as if she goes through the opera being forced into things, but Jenny is enjoying the way that director Jude Christian giving Manon more of a sense of choice, that she chooses to do things. It is her decision to not go into the convent but to run away with Des Grieux. This Manon has a lot more guts than it might seem just from reading the synopsis. That said, of course, it is still a very sad opera.
During the audition for Manon Lescaut, Jude Christian directed Jenny a bit and the way that Jude explained Manon's feelings was completely different to how Jenny had thought. She comments that it was her sort of audition, much more like a workshop.
In Manon Lescaut, Jenny will be singing alongside Gareth Dafydd Morris as Des Grieux. She and Gareth have known each other a long time, as far back as the time they would singing little sections of La Traviata together in pubs to advertise Perroni. They worked together last year and so it is nice to work with an old friend again. Jenny also knows other singers in the tour, having worked last year with Nazan Fikret (who sings Anne Trulove in Stravinsky's The Rakes Progress), so it feels like working with a bunch of friends.
They will be doing 19 performances of Manon Lescaut all told, with a whole variety of venues. The length of the tour means that conductor Gerry Cornelius feels that they will be able to take some risks with the dynamics, showing the vulnerable side to the characters.
Jenny has a long experience with English Touring Opera, she started off in the chorus in 2019, also covering the title role in Rossini's Elisabetta Regina d'Inghilterra and she went on to sing Despina in Cosi fan tutte in 2020, a production whose run was cruelly cut short. More recently she was Musetta in La Boheme and Melissa in Handel's Ottone [see my review].
Of course, singing with the company means touring. During her first season in 2019 she enjoyed the touring and the camaraderie on and off stage, but for her next tour she was pregnant and found that though she enjoyed it, she lacked energy. This year she has a little one to think about as well, and plans to take him along with her to some performances. Jenny's husband is also a singer, and she comments that they sing to her son a lot!
English Touring Opera's new production of Puccini's Manon Lescaut is directed by Jude Christian, conducted by Gerry Cornelius, with Jenny Stafford as Manon, Gareth Dafydd Morris as Des Grieux, Aidan Edwards as Lescaut and Edward Hawkins as Geronte. Opening at Hackney Empire on 24 February [further details]. Stravinsky's The Rakes Progress will be directed by Polly Graham, conducted by Jack Sheen with Nazan Fikret as Anne Trulove, Frederick Jones as Tom Rakewell, Jerome Knox as Nick Shadow, Trevor Eliot Bowes as Father Trulove and Lauren Young as Baba. Opening at Hackney Empire on 2 March [further details]
-DavidMonteith-Hodge-ASNTTM1-(DMH_5790).jpg "Stephen McNeff: A Star Next to the Moon - Jacob Harrison (Pedro Paramo) - Guidhall School of Music and Drama (Photo: David Monteith-Hodge)")
-DavidMonteith-Hodge-ASNTTM1-(DMH_5264).jpg "Stephen McNeff: A Star Next to the Moon - Steven van der Linden (Juan Preciado) - Guidhall School of Music and Drama (Photo: David Monteith-Hodge)")
.jpg "Ethel Smyth: The Prison - North London Chorus flyer")
.jpg "Fisher Center at Bard College (Photo: Peter Aaron '68/Esto)")
.jpg "Pegasus Opera's Alison Buchanan, Bernadine Pritchett and Nadine Benjamin (Photo: Dominique Nok)")
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