Santa Fe Bound

Interior of Santa Fe Opera Theatre

Next week we fly off to the USA for a visit to the Santa Fe Opera. The season runs from 29 June to the end of August. The theatre, set on a hill just outside of Santa Fe, has one of the most magical locations, with views of the desert and the possibility of glorious sunsets. The operas this season are Santa Fe's usual canny mix of familiar and unfamiliar (they have given a number of world premieres and US premieres).

Music@Malling - celebrating Dickens

St Mary's West Malling, (photo Hywel Williams)

Thomas Kemp's Music@Malling festival takes place from 27 to 30 September in venues in and around West Malling in Kent.  Dickens lived at Gad's Hill, which is 7 miles from Wast Malling and the author was a regular visitor to the town. So this year the festival celebrates the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth by featuring composers that he most admired, Mendelssohn, Mozart and Chopin, and interleaving them with some of today's contemporary voices, Huw Watkins and Judith Bingham. The festival features  Thomas Kemp's own group Chamber Domaine plus the Sacconi Quartet, soprano Yeree Suh and baritone Jonathan McGovern.

The Wolves Descend

An upper room in a pub isn't the place that you would normally expect to come across the world premiere run of a new opera. But the enterprising Bristol-based Little Room Productions presented Matthew Pearson's new opera at the upstairs theatre at the Lion and Unicorn Pub in Kentish Town, London. We saw the performance on July 27, so there was an unfortunate clash with another event happening at the Olympic Stadium, but there was still an enthusiastic audience for the 60 minute chamber opera, The Wolves Descend.

This is Pearson's second opera, his first Sanctuary was produced by Little Room Productions at the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe. Sanctuary was the winner of the 2012 Raymond Warren Composition Prize, awarded by Bristol University where Pearson is currently studying for a PhD in composition.

Recent CD Reviews

My review of the new recording of Handel's incidental music to Tobias Smollett's play Alceste, from Christian Curnyn and his Early Opera Company with Lucy Crowe, Benjamin Hulett and Andrew Foster-Williams is here, on MusicWeb-International.com -  Chandos CHAN0788

If you haven't yet made the acquaintance of Handel's personable score, then this is the time to do so and this is the recording to go for. 


And my review of Bach's Mass in B Minor from Philippe Herreweghe and Collegium Vocale Ghent, with Dorothee Mields, Hana Blazikova, Damien Guillon, Thomas Hobbs and Peter Kooij is here, also on MusicWeb-International.com - Phi LPH004

If you are looking for a good middle of the road modern recording then this is one to consider. 

Save Sibelius

As mentioned in an earlier post, Avid Technologies (which now owns Sibelius) has announced its intention to close the Finsbury Park office where Sibelius is based and move the product development to one of Avid's existing sites. This is what big companies do, they streamline, and Avid is furiously busy streamlining at the moment in order to improve its financial situation. There have now been further developments.

Good news for V&A redevelopments

Frieze detail from showing
Queen Victoria in front of the 1851 Great Exhibition.

London’s Victoria and Albert Museum has had two pieces of good news recently when it comes to the museum’s redevelopment plans. First off, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has given them planning permission for the Exhibition Road project. And secondly the Heritage Lottery Fund has given them a chunk of funding for the redevelopment of the Europe 1600-1800 galleries.

Le Roi malgre lui - time for a re-assessment?

Chabrier's Le Roi malgre lui has always rather reminded me of Bernstein's Candide. A work admired for its music but which struggled with the text, going through a variety of versions. But where Bernstein re-worked the music, and lived long enough to settle on a viable version and to record the work, Chabrier hardly tinkered with the music, other people worked on various versions of the opera and the composer died too young to see the opera to its perfect form.

There were two versions produced in his life-time, that of the premiere in 1887 and the 1888 performances at the Theatre Lyrique in the Place du Chatelet. The 1888 performances seem to have included cuts, but in fact Chabrier himself decided to drop Alexina's aria as it held up the action. But 1888 saw the libretto reworked and it was again in 1929 when Albert Carre produced his own version for the Opera Comique. In fact, it is this 1929 version which is generally used; Carre changed all the text but not the music. Alas, Carre's improvements hardly make dramaturgical sense of the plot either.

Ibragimova and Tiberghien in Schubert

Last night, 25 July, we heard a private rental last night by violinist Alina Ibragimova and pianist Cedric Tiberghien. They are coming to the end of a run of performances of Schubert's music for violin and piano, prior to going into the recording studio.

Florence Easton

Florence Easton
in Gianni Schicchi

The English soprano, Florence Easton (1882 - 1955), has come up in conversation a bit recently. In my interview with Claire Rutter, Claire mentioned Easton because, though Easton was regarded as a dramatic soprano, she was an early Butterfly and sang Lauretta in the premiere of Puccini's Gianni Schicchi. She sang everything in Wagner except the Gotterdammerung Brunnhilde, whilst keeping the rest of her repertoire. She is one of the few sopranos to have sung Brunnhlde and Norma in the same season (at the Met I believe), something that was only repeated at the Met when Rita Hunter appeared there.

Now soprano Helena Leonard has put together a one-woman show about the soprano, The Nightingale of South Bank. In it, Leonard sings many of Easton's arias and tells the story of Easton's long and varied career. The show was at the Buxton Festival Fringe, though alas I missed it, but there is a review of the show here.

Herne Hill Festival

Herne Hill junction

Your chance to see this blogger and composer as performer as my ensemble, the FifteenB Consort, are performing at this year's Herne Hill Festival. The festival takes place in and around Herne Hill in South London from the 11 to 20 October 2012. There is an eclectic programme with jazz and cabaret, skiffle, the flute choir Opal Flutes celebrating Black History month, Verity and Giles Thirkettle in music for piano and violin, Medieval minstrels, London Consort of Winds, an oboe and cello duo and Vivace Brass, these latter two at the Half Moon Pub. There is even a Composition Competition.

New Andrzej Panufnik web-site

www.panufnik.com has just been launched, in preparation for centenary of the composer's birth in 2014. The site includes recorded samples and photos, many documenting the composer's remarkably dramatic life. Surviving in war-torn Poland, he lost most of his relatives and all of the music he composed before he was 30, as his manuscripts were destroyed by fire in the Warsaw uprising.

The audio samples are all taken from cpo's new series, Panufnik: The Symphonic Works. There is also an excellent discography, listing not only the current releases but those not necessarily currently available. One fascinating area is the selection of diagrams, which are designs for compositions, a remarkable insight into the way that Panufnik created his work. A single diagram encapsulates the entire design of the Sinfonia Concertante of 1973. There is also a section on Panufnik's early film scores with a clip from the 1938 film Strachy.

Stowe Opera - Just moved in

Winslow Hall

This week sees performances by Stowe Opera of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro at Winslow Hall in Buckinghamshire. Performances started on 21 July and run until 29 July. They are directed by Yvonne Fontane who sings the Countess and conducted by Robert Secret, founder of the opera company. This represents a welcome return for a company which from 1995 to 2006 gave a highly regarded annual summer season of opera at Stowe but his since been rather quiet. Previous successes have included Les Contes d'Hoffmann, La Traviata, Hansel and Gretel, Rusalka and Il Trovatore.

Opera on a Barge!

Today you can catch Ann Dudley's opera The Owl and the Pussycat, to a libretto by Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame). The opera is produced by the Royal Opera House's ROH2 wing, but to find the performance you'll have to first locate the barge. The performances all take place on a barge in and around London's waterways. And because of the barge, the subject matter has to be the Owl and the Pussycat and their beautiful pea green boat. It all sounds very gloriously mad. Jones's libretto is a prequel to Lear's poem; the opera finishes with the Owl and the Pussycat going off in the boat.

Change at the top for LPO

The London Philharmonic Orchestra has just announced that it is changing the structure of its Board. The orchestra is player owned; the shareholders are all the playing members of the orchestra and they have now decided to make changes. The orchestra was founded in 1932 by Sir Thomas Beecham, but when he left the orchestra in 1939 the company was re-founded as one entirely owned by the players.

Britten's Canticles at St. Brides

As part of their Olympic festival, St. Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, London, mounted an enterprising concert encompassing all five of Benjamin Britten’s Canticles performed by the church’s Director of Music (Robert Jones), assistant Director of Music (Matthew Morley) and a group of singers and instrumentalists, many of whom are associated with the church. Britten’s Canticles cover nearly the whole of his composing life. Each written for different forces, they were not necessarily designed to go together but make a highly satisfactory whole, with a remarkable coherence between each of them.

The single common factor in all five is the tenor voice, in particular the tenor voice of Peter Pears. At St. Bride’s Church, tenors Tom Herford and David de Winter shared the honours with Herford doing the first three Canticles and de Winter the last two.

Tenebrae - Proms Chamber Music Concert

I caught the second Proms Chamber Music concert, 23 July, on Radio 3 broadcast live from the Cadogan Hall. In it, the chamber choir, Tenebrae, conductor Nigel Short, gave a programme which mixed Orlando Gibbons’s The Cryes of London with Steve Martland’s more contemporary take on similar material, Street Songs. In the middle, the premiere of a BBC commission from Julian Philips, Sorrowful Songs.

Olympic event we won’t be seeing

The International Olympic Committee was treated last night, 23 July, to a private gala at the Royal Opera House. The event started with a specially written fanfare by Alex Wolff and performers included Bryn Terfel and those well known Britons, Placido Domingo and Renee Fleming. Things concluded with a performance of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy performed by singers, orchestra and dancers, but the highlight of the evening seems to have been Boris Johnson reading a newly commissioned Pindaric Ode (in ancient Greek) celebrating the Games. Shame we are never going to be able to see it.

Chamber music in Lincolnshire

Having been intrigued earlier this year by an arts festival in Skegness (Lincolnshire), I was pleased to note that Ashley Wass's Lincoln and Lincolnshire Chamber Music Festival goes from strength to strength. I have an interest because, like Wass, I am a Lincolnshire lad. The festival is based in Lincoln but uses venues in and around the county.  It runs from 15 to 19 August and this year's theme is Notes from Nature, from Biber's imitations of the animal world through to Messiaen's birdsong, with Sally Beamish as the Composer in Residence.

Village Romeo and Juliet - Back in London

The first performance in London for 50 years of Delius's A Village Romeo and Juliet takes place at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Tuesday 25 September in a concert performance. Amazingly, despite the Delius 150th anniversary celebrations, there doesn't seem to be a major production planned by any of the opera houses. So all credit to Ronald Corp and his New London Orchestra for filling the breach. They will be joined by a fabulous cast including Andrew Staples, Anna Devin, Christopher Maltman, Andrew Shore and David Wilson-Johnson. Further details from the New London Orchestra's website and tickets from the Southbank website.

Opera diary

I see from this month's Opera Magazine that Opera North will be giving complete cycles of their semi-staged Ring cycle in 2015, including one at the Festival Hall in London. Still in London, Renee Fleming will be giving her Covent Garden farewell performances in a new production of Der Rosenkavalier in 2016-17. The most curious thing is that the director is given as Christoph Waltz, the Austrian actor best known for his film roles (Inglourious Bastards), though it seems that Waltz did study singing.  Over in NY, the new Met Der Rosenkavalier in 2016-17 will be directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov with Eva-Maria Westbroek; now that will be interesting.