Young composers and old music at the National Centre for Early Music in York

The National Centre for Early Music (NCEM) in York has been having a busy time of it. NCEM hosted the final of its 14th Young Composer Award earlier this week, presented in partnership with BBC Radio 3. And NCEM has also announced the details of this year's York Early Music Festival which runs from 12 to 16 July 2021.

For this year's Young Composer Award, NCEM and BBC Radio 3 invited aspiring young composers to create a new work for recorder quartet Palisander based on dance-forms, choosing whatever dance-form they liked across all eras and cultures, from the bransle and the galliard to the Charleston and the tango. The Award was judged at NCEM on Thursday 13 May when the shortlist of entries was performed by Palisander and earlier in the day the shortlisted pieces were rehearsed by Palisander in a workshop with the young composers, led by composer Christopher Fox. 

Young Composers Award winner Delyth Field (centre) with Palisander at the National Centre for Early Music, York

This year‘s Young Composer Award winner in the 19 to 25 years category is Delyth Field with Kagura Suite for Recorders inspired by Kagura, the oldest form of dance in Japan. The winner in the 18 years and under category is Jacob Fitzgerald with murmuration inspired by the natural dance performed by starlings. Both works will be premiered by Palisander on 20 September 2021 at St John’s Smith Square, London as part of the London Festival of Baroque Music and be recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3's Early Music Show. You can catch the film of the awards on NCEM's website.

Looking ahead to July, the theme of this year's York Early Music Festival is one of encounters, most vitally between audience and artists, which seems particularly pertinent at a time when the festival can welcome audiences back to an array of York’s historic venues. A particular emphasis is on the music of Josquin des Prez, celebrating his 500th anniversary.

Soprano Hannah Ely and the Monteverdi String Orchestra kick things off with The Madrigal Re-imagined (and the ensemble's leader Oliver Webber is giving a talk, Un non so che di frizzante: the madrigal as a cauldron of creativity) and then there is violinist Rachel Podger, EEEmerging artists La Vaghezza (specialising in music from 17th and 18th centuries), harpsichordist Steven Devine and Robin Bigwood in The Bach Circle, The Society of Strange and Ancient Instruments' wierd and wonderful The Trumpet Marine Project, and bass Matthew Brook & harpsichordist Peter Seymour in cantatas for bass voice.

There is Josquin from Stile Antico, lutenist Jacob Heringman [see my review of his disc of Josquin transcriptions], and Ensemble Clement Janequin. And the festival closes with Spanish Baroque ensemble L’Apothéose, back to York as part of the Young Artists Showcase. [I very much enjoyed their 2020 Handel disc, see my review] L’Apothéose last appeared in the York in 2019 when they won the York Early Music International Young Artists Competition and The Friends of York Early Music Festival prize. This year they will be recording a CD with Linn Records which was part of their prize.

For those unable to travel to York, the festival will also be available online from 15 to 18 July and will include concerts recorded during the festival alongside commissioned highlights with guests including Gesualdo Six and the Rose Consort of Viols. 

Further information from the NCEM website.

Making goodness interesting: a new recording of Handel's Rodelinda from the English Concert with Lucy Crowe, Iestyn Davies and Joshua Ellicott

Handel Rodelinda; Lucy Crowe, Iestyn Davies, Joshua Ellicott, Jess Dandy, Brandon Cedel, Tim Mead, The English Concert, Harry Bicket; LINN
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 18 May 2021 Star rating: 4.5 (★★★★½)
The English Concert's new recording belies any lockdown restrictions to give us a full account of the opera, finely sung and vividly characterised

Handel's 1725 opera Rodelinda is not only one of his acknowledged masterpieces but also an opera where Handel's approach to the opera seria form created an opera that resonates with contemporary audiences in a way that many others do not. The opera was based on pre-existing sources and, as with his other operas written for London audiences, Handel and his librettist, Nicola Haym, heavily trimmed the source material; Londoners were not keen on vast quantities of explanatory recitative (which usually meant following the translation in the printed libretto) and some of Handel's later operas get positively telegraphic. With Rodelinda, Handel and Haym seem to have made this compression serve the plot, as well as tieing the arias more directly to the action. Unusually for an opera seria, Rodelinda almost unfolds as a linear narrative in a way which modern audiences identify with, and some distance away from the rather knotty plotting of some opera serias which rather resemble a complex historical novel than the more direct narrative arc of many later operas.

As a result, Rodelinda has done rather well in performance and on disc. For some years, Harry Bicket and The English Concert have been doing an annual Handel opera tour in collaboration with the Carnegie Hall with casts which mix operatic luminaries from both sides of the Atlantic [see my 2019 interview with Harry Bicket]. 2020 was to be no different, but inevitably the planned tour was cancelled. However, the orchestra decided to go ahead and recorded Rodelinda in September 2020 at St John's Smith Square with socially distanced performers. Inevitably, giving restrictions on travel, the cast is somewhat less international than previous recordings but is a very strong one. Handel's Rodelinda is on LINN Records; Lucy Crowe is Rodelinda with Iestyn Davies as Bertarido, plus Joshua Ellicott as Grimoaldo,  Brandon Cedel as Garibaldo, Jess Dandy as Eduige and Tim Mead as Unolfo, with Harry Bicket directing The English Concert from the harpsichord.

As a recording project we get a remarkably complete view of Rodelinda, even Unolfo gets all three of his arias. The result has a luxury of length (three acts of 68 minutes, 66 minutes and 65minutes) which, whilst not approaching Giulio Cesare, is certainly more suitable to home listening than the modern opera house. Handel and Haym's changes mean that the title role is most definitely the prominent one, but a point worth making is that after Rodelinda, Bertarido and Grimoaldo have the same number of arias (though Bertarido also has a duet with his wife and an accompanied recitative). Grimoaldo is an unusually prominent tenor role, written for Francesco Borosini who had created the role of Bajazet in Handel's Tamerlano the previous year.  It is a similarly complex role and makes the opera unusually intriguing to modern audiences.

Birthday celebrations indeed: Cecilia McDowall at the BBC, the London Festival of Contemporary Church Music, Presteigne and more

Cecilia McDowall

Amazingly, Cecilia McDowall is celebrating her 70th birthday this year and not surprisingly her music has been popping up in concerts and services, including recent performances of her anthems in services at St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh and at Merton College, Oxford. The BBC Singers, conductor Owain Park, performed her anthem The Lord is Good on Afternoon Concert on BBC Radio 3 on 11 May 2021 (and you can still catch it on-line).

But on Saturday 22 May 2021, as part of the London Festival of Contemporary Church Music there is a chance to hear a whole evening of McDowall's fascinating and varied music. At St Pancras Parish Church, Christopher Batchelor conducts the festival’s own professional vocal ensemble, The LFCCM Festival Singers (which expands the Choir of St Pancras Parish Church with additional singers from London’s world-class choral institutions). The programme is all-McDowall, ranging from sacred works such as Three Latin Motets to Standing as I do before God, her reflection on the death of Edith Cavell, to Everyday Wonders: The Girl from Aleppo, a cantata which tells the remarkable story story of Nujeen Mustafa, a Kurdish teenager with cerebral palsy forced by war to flee her home and embark on an arduous journey to Europe with her sister. 

Full details from the London Festival of Contemporary Music website, and Cecilia McDowall is giving a pre-concert talk before the concert.

London Oriana Choir, conductor Dominic Ellis-Peckham, has announced that Cecilia McDowall has become the choir’s first patron. In September, the choir will begin the fifth and final year of its five15 initiative in support of women composers and, in 2023, will be celebrating its 50th birthday.

Looking further ahead, Cecilia McDowall is the composer in residence at this year's Presteigne Festival, 26-31 August 2021.

Welcoming live audiences back at Conway Hall

Conway Hall

The 2020/21 season at Conway Hall Sunday Concerts is coming to a close with something of a bang as, for the first time this year, the hall is able to welcome audience members to the hall for the final concert. 

On Sunday 30 May 2021, the Oculi Ensemble is performing a fascinating programme of quartets and quintets. Webern's early Langsamer Satz is being performed alongside quintets by Mozart and Brahms with both composers favouring a line-up which included two violas (rather than a quintet with two cellos such as that by Schubert).

This will be a welcome opportunity to hear music live in Conway Hall, though it is being live-streamed as well. Full details from the Conway Hall website.

Remembering Denys Darlow at this year's Tilford Bach Festival

Denys Darlow

This week we have already marked the centenary of the horn player Dennis Brain, and now comes another remarkable centenarian.

For concert goers of a certain age, the name Denys Darlow (1921-2015) is inextricably linked with the music of Bach and of Handel, and with the two festivals that he founded, the Tilford Bach Festival (founded 1952) and the London Handel Festival (founded in 1978). He was an inspirational figure in the early music revival in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as being Professor of Organ, Theory, Aural and History at the Royal College of Music for 30 years. He commissioned numerous composers, composed a number of works himself and championed the lesser known works of Bach and Handel long before it became fashionable to do so.

This year is his centenary and the Tilford Bach Festival, which takes place on 12 and 13 June 2021, will include a special tribute to Darlow. Students from the Royal College of Music, directed from the harpsichord by Tolga Un, will be joined by soprano Joanne Lunn at 12 noon on Saturday, 12 June for a performance of Darlow's final composition, High Hills, which he wrote for Joanne Lunn and the London Handel Players in 2005.

On the Saturday evening, Adrian Butterfield (current artistic director of the festival) directs a Bach programme from the violin, featuring the London Handel Players in two Brandenburg Concerto related cantatas and the Kyrie and Gloria of the B minor Mass, with singers from the Royal College of Music (supported by the Josephine Baker Trust). Cantata BWV 52 Falsche Welt, dir trau ich nicht features the opening sinfonia which comes from Brandenburg Concerto No. 1, and Cantata BWV 174 Ich liebe den Höchsten von ganzem Gemüte takes a movement from Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 as its opening sinfonia, but with added instrumental parts. Then on Sunday afternoon there is a performance of all six Brandenburg Concertos performed by the London Handel Players directed by Adrian Butterfield. Not coincidentally, this year is the 300th anniversary of the creation of the Brandenburg Concertos.

The festival programme (with details about reserving tickets) is available as an online flipbook.

Pianist George Fu introduces his EP which launches Listenpony Sessions

George Fu at Listenpony #16

On Friday 28 May 2021, Listenpony is releasing the first of a planned series of EPs, Listenpony Sessions, which will allow artists to create programmes based around their past live Listenpony concerts. For the first EP, Chinese-American pianist George Fu recorded in St Giles Cripplegate in November 2020 a programme which combines Listenpony commissions by Daniel Fardon, William Marsey and Josephine Stephenson with music by Messiaen and Rachmaninov, and is based on a programme Fu first performed for Listenpony in May 2018.

George Fu explained the programme a little more, "This program is more or less a version of the program I played for Listenpony On Tour in 2018 (Birmingham, Manchester and London). On this tour, I played short pieces by Messiaen and Rachmaninov, which had both been written around the same time (early 20th century) and yet reflect very different sensibilities. Rachmaninov was one of the final great composer-pianists in the Romantic tradition. His Études-Tableaux are not only great to listen to, they also give me such pleasure to play, as they are so pianistic and reflect the sensibility of a seasoned musician who understands the instrument so well. On the other hand, Messiaen’s Préludes seem to create a mystical universe with new colors, textures and shapes. These pieces by Messiaen and Rachmaninov were a foil for the Listenpony pieces by William Marsey, Josephine Stephenson and Daniel Fardon, which all treat the piano in such different and interesting ways. The variety of music being written nowadays proves that now, more than ever, is a very exciting time to be a musician.

When Listenpony approached me about recording this EP, we were in the midst of a national lockdown, and I had not played to a full live audience for months. I felt inundated by countless online streams and recordings, but what I missed most was live music. There already exists countless recordings of perfectly engineered piano recitals; what is the point of recording an EP now, at this present time, when we were all isolated? In reaction to this, we wanted to capture the spirit of a live Listenpony concert. We set up this EP to record an experience that closely duplicates what you might have heard on that day we recorded in St Giles Cripplegate. When I listened back to some of the tracks, I was surprised at how different this recording sounded from others; it took me a little bit of time to get used to it. But once I did, I felt that I had found something in it that I missed from this entire year of lockdown. I hope listeners feel the same."

Further information from the Listenpony website

Legacy: A Tribute to Dennis Brain from horn player Ben Goldscheider

Legacy: A Tribute to Dennis Brain - Watkins, Arnold, Poulenc, Britten, Panufnik, Maxwell Davies; Ben Goldscheider, Huw Watkins, James Gilchrist; Three Worlds Records
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 17 May 2021 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★)
A remarkable centenary tribute to the great horn player by one of the younger generation's finest horn players, spanning music written for Brain, music written in his memory and new music created for this programme

How does a young contemporary horn player pay tribute to the memory of the great horn player Dennis Brain whose centenary is this year. Brain was notable not just for his playing but for the way he brought the instrument into the spotlight and helped develop the repertoire. This fascinating new disc, Legacy, from horn player Ben Goldscheider on Three Worlds Records takes a highly intelligent approach to commemorating Brain. Goldscheider is joined by pianist Huw Watkins and tenor James Gilchrist for a programme which includes two works by composers associated with Brain, Benjamin Britten and Malcolm Arnold, two works written in his memory by Francis Poulenc and Peter Maxwell Davies, and two new works written specially for the disc by Huw Watkins and Roxanna Panufnik.

We begin with Huw Watkins' Lament. This beging with long lyrical horn lines over piano support, very much bitter sweet but developing in intensity and finally the harmony becomes ultimately disturbing. Watkins explains in his booklet note that he wanted to use the Poulenc Elegie's combination of lyrical beauty and anger, and indeed the result is a terrific piece, terrifically played.

Huw Watkins, James Gilchrist, Ben Goldscheider during recording sessions at Henry Wood Hall

In complete contrast, Goldscheider follows Watkins with the Fantasy for Horn by Malcolm Arnold, who wrote his Horn Concerto No. 2 for Brain in 1957. Arnold's Fantasy for Horn was written in 1966 for the Birmingham International Wind Competition (commissioned by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra). Written for unaccompanied horn, the work is a striking exploration of what is possible on the instrument, beginning with a lively opening fanfare which is hunting horn-like yet bears the imprint of Arnold's music too. There are meditative moments, and virtuosic ones too, with Arnold compressing a lot into under five minutes, ending with some pretty vivid fast moments which are joyously pure Arnold.

Polska Scotland: Celebrating a rich cultural history

Scotland's links to Poland date back to trade routes in the 15th century and by the end of the 17th century 30,000 Scots had migrated to Poland, whilst musical links include the fact that Chopin visited in 1848. More recently, the influx of Polish soldiers during the Second World War led to many choosing to settle and the number of Polish residents in Scotland today numbers around 90,000, making it the largest migrant population in Scotland.

All these links are celebrated in the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's continuing digital series Polska Scotland. Concerts broadcast in May and June in the series include Marta Gardolińska conducting Lutosławski’s Mala suita, the RSNO Chamber Ensemble, Adrian Wilson and Lena Zeliszewska in Szymanowski, Lutosławski and Bacewicz, pianist Benjamin Grosvenor  in Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 plus music by Kilar and Lutosławski, and Szymanowski’s second Violin Concerto with Nicola Benedetti, conducted by Elim Chan. Already available are Nicola Benedetti’s performance of Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 1 alongside Weinberg’s Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes and Andrzej Panufnik’s Sinfonia Sacra, conducted by Thomas Søndergård.

The Polish series also reflects the RSNO’s long association with Polish music and musicians, dating from Emil Młynarski (Polish Principal Conductor of the then Scottish Orchestra from 1910 to 1916 and early champion of Szymanowski’s music) to composers who conducted their own works – Andrzej Panufnik in 1956, Krzysztof Penderecki on three occasions in the 1970s, and Witold Lutosławski in 1979 and 1981.

Full details from the RSNO website.

Summer at Snape

Snape Maltings

Britten Pears Arts is not presenting an Aldeburgh Festival this year, but they have announced an action-packed Summer at Snape season running until early September with the concerts in June having a strongly festival feel with an emphasis on new work and on the music of Britten. Things kick off on the weekend of 21 to 23 May, when performers include the BBC Symphony Orchestra and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth in music by Mozart, Julian Anderson and Ryan Wigglesworth (and the performances are given in memory of pianist and conductor Steuart Bedford, who died in February this year and was an Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival from 1974 - 1998), and mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly and pianist Joseph Middleton in music by Brahms, Mahler, Bridge and Tippett.

 

The centenary of horn player Dennis Brain will be marked by performances of two works written for Brain, Britten's Serenade for tenor, horn and strings and Canticle III: Still falls the rain, along with Britten's In Memoriam Dennis Brain. Horn player Ben Goldscheider will be performing music by Tansy Davies and Peter Maxwell Davies. 

 

There will be premieres of a series of new versions of Britten's music, Colin Matthews' string orchestra versions of the Double Concerto (a student piece written when Britten was just 18) and Charm of Lullabies, Robin Holloway's orchestration of the song cycle Winter Words (with tenor Nick Spence, London Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor Edward Gardner), Joseph Phibbs' new chamber version of Our Hunting Fathers (with soprano Elizabeth Watts and the Hebrides Ensemble).

 

There will be a chance to hear Britten's folk-song arrangements alongside the folk originals when folk-singer Maz O'Connor joins pianist Roger Vignoles and Britten Pears Young Artists soprano Milly Forrest and tenor Laurence Kilsby.

 

During June, there are several projects which should have premiered at last year's festival along with new works for 2021, including the first public performance of Colin Matthews' Seascapes (with soprano Clare Booth and the Nash Ensemble, who premiered the work at the Wigmore Hall earlier this month),  and music by Tansy Davies, John Tavener, John Woolrich and Stephen Hough. There are two new music-theatre pieces, soprano Juliet Fraser in Samuel Beckett and Morton Feldman, and soprano Nadine Benjamin's new piece which follows one woman’s journey from fragmentation to wholeness. Tenor Allan Clayton (who was due to be artist in residence at the 2020 festival) joins pianist James Baillieu and the Aurora Orchestra for performances of music by Mark-Anthony Turnage, Priaulx Rainier and Britten, plus the complete Britten canticles.

 

Full details from the Snape Maltings website.

Side-stepping with deft elegance the issue of what instrument the music was written for, Andrew Wilder reinvents Bach's Lute Suites on classical guitar

Bach Complete lute music; Andrew Wilder
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 14 May 2021 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★)
A young American classical guitarist in stylish and engaging transcriptions of the music Bach wrote for lute or lute-harpsichord

On this new digital release from classical guitarist Andrew Wilder we get the complete set of works which are regarded as being written by Johann Sebastian Bach for the lute, the Suite in G minor BWV 995, the Suite in E minor BWV 996, the Suite in C minor BWV 997, the Prelude, Fugue and Allegro BWV 998, the Prelude in C minor BWV 999, the Fugue in G minor BWV 1000 and the Suite in E Major BWV 1006a.

Now Bach did own a lute (there was a valuable one listed amongst his musical instruments after his death), and used the instrument as colouring in several works but whether he wrote any solo music for lute is debatable. It is worth quoting lutenist Nigel North on the matter, "Instead of labouring over perpetuating the idea that the so-called lute pieces of Bach are proper lute pieces I prefer to take the works for unaccompanied Violin or Cello and make them into new works for lute, keeping (as much as possible) to the original text, musical intention, phrasing and articulation, yet transforming them in a way particular to the lute so that they are satisfying to play and to hear."

Also in Bach's possession at the time of his death were two gut-strung lute-harpsichords, and it is almost certainly for these that the music was written, especially as identification with the lute itself is something which seems to have come after his death.

The Suite in G minor BWV 995, is a transcription of the fifth Cello Suite, BWV 1011 and is marked Suite pour la Luth par J.S. Bach. The trouble with this is that it extendes down to a note which was not available on lutes commonly used in Leipzig. Also, from the layout of the work it is clear that Bach was working at the keyboard. The music exists in a lute tablature which dates from 1760 and which makes significant adaption of the original which must, however have seemed rather old-fashioned compared the the lute music of the period.  

A Life On-Line: Recovering The White Rose, rediscovering Grainger, rethinking Bach, reimagining Elgar

Jorge Jimenez - Rethinking Bach (Capture from stream)

This week we have been busy rediscovering, rethinking and reimagining whether it be The White Rose's non-violent resistance to the Nazi's, the sheer strangeness and imagination of Percy Grainger's music, a journey towards Bach's Goldberg Variations via a new transcription for violin or David Matthews' reworking Elgar's string quartet.

The White Rose, the non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany, has been in the news recently partly because 9 May 2021 was the centenary of the birth of Sophie Scholl, one of the founders of the group. There have been a number of artistic responses to the group and its message, from new music [David Chesky's The White Rose Trilogy] to new opera [Udo Zimmerman's Weisse Rose at Hamburg State Opera]. 

The choir Sansara and conductor Tom Herring joined forces with The White Rose Project, a research and engagement initiative at the University of Oxford, to create Voices of the German Resistance, a programme which interleaved music by Bach, Byrd, Rudolf Mauersberger, Max Reger, Philip Moore and Piers Kennedy with readings from the resistance group's writings in new English translations by students at the University of Oxford. 

The programme was recorded last year (for the 77th anniversary of the first White Rose trials) and finally broadcast last Sunday on Harrison Parrott's Virtual Circle platform. The first part featured Bach chorales and William Byrd's Ne irascaris Domine and Civitas sancti tui (which form two parts of a single large-scale work from his 1589 Cantiones Sacrae lamenting the desolation of the Holy City, Jerusalem) alongside readings from the White Rose's pamphlets, texts which have an extraordinary prescience when seen in the context of developments in contemporary politics.

Bärenreiter's Schubert edition, BBC Singers & Bathrobe recitals: baritone Jamie W Hall's remarkable journey to making his first solo disc, Schubert's 'Die schöne Müllerin '

Jamie W Hall

If you kept an eye on the Twittersphere during 2020 then the name Jamie W. Hall may be familiar, as he became something of a phenomenon with his bathrobe recitals. Jamie's day job is as a member of the BBC Singers but his adventures with his on-line recitals last year has emboldened him to explore further and when we spoke he had just successfully finished crowdfunding for a recording of Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin which he was planning to record the following weekend to be issued on the Convivium Records label.

 

The success of the crowdfunding had been something of a surprise for Jamie and he calls it extraordinary, having gone into the project with a 'suck it an see' attitude. As regards choosing Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin as the work to record, he admits that pragmatically it might have been better to go with something that had not been recorded before. But the Schubert cycle is one that he wants to record, he has been working on the music for over two years and he regards this as a once in a lifetime opportunity.

 

Jamie's journey began well before March 2020. In 2019 he was bought volume one of Bärenreiter's Schubert lieder edition. Jamie has had a crush on Schubert since he was a teenager but has had not time to explore Schubert's songs as a singer. He decided to learn a song a week, till he lacked the stamina. By chance, he started with the 16th song of Die schöne Müllerin and then continued with the rest of the cycle. This went on during the year leading up to March 2020, and he was just at the point of thinking about performing Die schöne Müllerin when lockdown happened.

 

Jamie W Hall at the recording session for Die schöne Müllerin
(Photo Mike Cooter)

Like many performers, Jamie felt numb as events in his professional diary disappeared. The bathrobe recitals were never designed as such, it is just that for the first video he never really noticed that he hadn't got dressed. It made people laugh, creating fun over what was very much a disjoint in their lives. He recorded each song in the morning, which gave a sort of structure to the day and the feedback brought a sense of community. He admits that there might have been an element of falseness to this, but the feedback made him feel as if he had a purpose. The BBC took a very long time to gets its corporate head around COVID-safe measures so that Jamie was doing stuff remotely for weeks, which made for a lonely existence.

 

For the bathrobe recitals, he drew on his experience as a BBC Singer, where all the singers come to the choir trained to some degree as solo singers and the repertoire includes a lot of opera. But some of the performing elements Jamie drew on went back to his school days when he would perform show songs, and the bathrobe recitals quickly left classical behind to popular song and musicals. And Jamie loved it.

A new trombone concerto, a focus on Shostakovich and his pupil Galina Ustvolskaya, Minute Masterpieces and more: Opera North's Kirklees Concert Season

Conductor Nil Venditti makes her Opera North debut
(photo Marco Borrelli)

After a year of silence, Opera North and Kirklees Council's Kirklees Concert Season is returning to Huddersfield and Dewsbury town halls for a season of concerts running from 23 September 2021 to 7 April 2021. The season marks Opera North's new musical director, Garry Walker's concert debut with the orchestra and also marks the retirement of David Greed as leader of the orchestra since 1978! 

The season includes a focus on 20th century Russian music, a new bass trombone concerto inspired by a railway engineer, a work by Mark-Anthony Turnage inspired by writings by William Golding and entries from Opera North's Minute Masterpieces competition.

A season full of rather striking events opens with Garry Walker conducting Elgar's Cello Concerto with soloist Guy Johnston (artistic director of the Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival) alongside music by Shostakovich and Britten. Opera North's principal guest conductor Anthony Hermus joins the orchestra for the premiere of Gresley, a concerto for bass trombone and orchestra by Benjamin Ellin. The work was written for Orchestra of Opera North’s Christian Jones and is an exploration of the rebuilding of the human spirit after great loss, inspired by the life of the railway engineer and inventor of the Mallard and the Flying Scotsman. Anthony Hermus will also be conducting a programme which combines the Symphonic Poem No. 2 by the Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006), with the First Violin Concerto by Shostakovich (Ustvolskaya's teacher) with retiring leader David Greed as soloist, plus Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra.

Nicholas Watts (Peter Quint in the company's recent performances of Britten's Turn of the Screw) is the tenor soloist in Britten's Serenade for tenor, horn and strings conducted by Garry Walker with horn player Richard Watkins, who first performed the work in 1983 with Sir Peter Pears. Also in the programme is Mark-Anthony Turnage's Drowned inspired by a terrifying account of death in the Atlantic written by William Golding, alongside Elgar's Enigma Variations.

Sian Edwards and pianist Joanna MacGregor join the orchestra for a piano-inspired concert, Gershwin's Piano Concerto alongside Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's piano masterpiece Pictures at an Exhibition. And the piano remains a theme with pianist Howard Shelly in Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 in an all-Beethoven concert re-scheduled from 2020. There is also the annual Christmas concert featuring the orchestra and chorus plus the company's youth ensembles. Whilst a young Italian-Turkish conductor Nil Venditti, principal guest conductor of Orchestra della Toscana, makes his company debut with a programme of Strauss waltzes for New Year's Eve.

Opera North's Minute Masterpieces competition is open to to emerging composers from all backgrounds and traditions, Minute Masterpieces offers the chance to write 60-second works for full symphony orchestra, which will also be recorded by the ensemble. Successful entries will feature throughout the season's concerts.

Sitarist and composer Jasdeep Singh Degun performing the world premiere of his sitar concerto with the Orchestra of Opera North, Huddersfield Town Hall, February 2020 (Photo Justin Slee)

Lunchtime concerts in Dewsbury will feature members of the orchestra alongside guests including soprano Katherine Broderick, singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Alice Zawadzki, and sitarist and composer Jasdeep Singh Degun.

Full details from the Opera North website.

Streamed, live-audiences or both? As ensembles consider innovative ways of returning to performance with live audiences, Middlesex University has been doing some research

Ely Cathedral

As restrictions are gradually released, arts organisations are mulling the conundrum of how to incorporate what has been learned and explored during their on-line seasons into live with audience events. Whilst all performers would agree that a live audience is essential for a performance, the use of live streaming has led many ensembles to develop both new audiences and new relationships with their audiences.

Research from Middlesex University has included a survey of fans and musicians, both classical and popular music. 

• 90% of musicians and 92% of fans agreed live streaming will in future be a successful tool to reach audiences unable or unwilling to go to physical venues
• 72% of live music fans and 74% of musicians agreed that live streamed performances should be paid for
• 95% of fans say emotional engagement from the artist during live stream concerts is important to them. 

Read more at the Live Streaming Music website.

The trick, of course, is quite how you choose to incorporate streaming with live.

Voces8 has been running a popular series of on-line concerts Live from London which are live-streamed from their Gresham Centre (a former church) in the City. So far the Live from London festivals have sold over 130,000 digital seats in 75 countries. They are returning on 4 July 2021 with Live from London - Summer, where Voces8 will be performing with a wide range of invited ensembles from Chineke! and ORA Singers to London Contemporary Orchestra, Cappella Amsterdam, and Danish band Efterklang. The festival is widening its reach beyond choral music, and is bringing back live audiences. But only in a limited way, this remains an on-line festival and the small live audience will give preference to VOCES8 Foundation education attendees and Decca Bursary members. Full details from the Voces8 website.

But The Sixteen's annual Choral Pilgrimmage is as much about the venues as the music, the chance to experience this great music in the stunning acoustics of Britain's major churches and cathedrals. The ensemble has kept a lively on-line presence during the last year, but this year's Choral Pilgrimmage is about live audiences in historic venues. There are differences, programmes are shorter, and audiences will be socially distanced, which means smaller, and hence the economics will be harder but at least with a large cathedral you can socially distance a decent number of people. 2020 was to be the Choral Pilgrimmage's 20th anniversary, so this year's tour is a deferred 20th anniversary with The Call of Rome, a programme of music from composers associated with Rome from Victoria and Josquin to Allegri's Miserere, including three modern takes on this iconic classic. 

The tour opens at St Mary's Church, Warwick on 5 June 2021, and moves on to Winchester Cathedral, Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, Hereford Cathedral, Derby Cathedral, Peterborough Cathedral and Kings Place; each venue is different and each person will experience the concert in a different way. Full details from The Sixteen's website.

The Britten Sinfonia has also been thinking about what it actually means to have a live performance with audience. Artistic director Meurig Bowen explains "The pandemic, and ongoing restrictions, have made us think hard about the relationship between musicians and audiences, and the need for something positive to be drawn from a period that has been intensely difficult: it’s required us all to reassess so many aspects of our lives and work.  Surround Sound puts some of these thoughts into practice, exploring the way that live music can be experienced both as a visual, and as an aural experience, and how our perception of music can alter through evocative interaction with architecture. We are looking forward to developing this further over the coming months and years." 

The result is Surround Sound, a project which will take the ensemble to non-traditional venues and present a live experience that more resembles a drivetime radio sequence - or a playlist/mixtape - and to make it inexpensive and informal. The first is Surround Sound: Ely Playlist which opens the Ely Arts Festival on 12 June 2021 at Ely Cathedral. Like The Sixteen, these performances are about the space itself as much as the music. 

The music is staged on five performance spaces within the Cathedral, with socially distanced audience groups placed throughout the building. Each audience member’s experience will be influenced by where they are sitting.  Choral and chamber music, solos, the cathedral organ and a 20-piece orchestra all feature, with members of Britten Sinfonia joined by South African cellist/vocalist Abel Selaocoe, percussionist Bernhard Schimpelsberger, and members of Ely Cathedral choir. What one audience member might hear at a distance, another will see directly in front of them, with music resonating from the chapels, transepts, arches and along the 161 metre length of the majestic Ely Cathedral, parts of which date from the 11th century. The Ely Playlist features 18 pieces with repertoire ranging from well known pieces by Bach, Handel, Debussy and Grieg to music by Britten, Tavener, Giovanni Sollima, Kerensa Briggs and Abel Selaocoe himself. Full details from the Ely Cathedral website.

Britten Sinfonia are also giving more conventional concerts, on 10 June 2021 at the Barbican Hall it is celebrating Thomas Ades' 50th birthday with Ades as composer, conductor, pianist and programmer. But, in a sign of the brave new world in which we live, the concert is also available streamed as part of the Live from the Barbican series. Full details from the Barbican website.

The Turk in Hampshire: Longhope Summer Opera's performances of Rossini's opera feature a cast of early-career singers

Longhope Opera

Rossini's delightful (and surprisingly complex) comedy, Il Turco in Italia is going to pop up in Hampshire in July thanks to Longhope Summer Opera and Scherzo Ensemble. The opera its being performed on the Longhope Estate in Newton Valence, Hampshire on 2 and 3 July 2021. The director is Charlotte McKechnie, who is the is the artistic director of New Voices Theatre, a company dedicated to performing theatrical works by women, and the conductor is Matthew O'Keefe, who is the director of Scherzo Ensemble as well as being the founder of Lunchbreak Opera (which performs short opera at lunchtime in the City of London) and founder of my local ensemble, the Brixton Chamber Orchestra.

Scherzo is a professional development platform for young singers who have recently completed their training. The company offers a year-long programme of performance and training projects as well as classes in business to a cohort of singers selected annually at audition, and the cast features an interesting line-up of talented early-career artists.  

Fiorilla is Russian soprano Galina Benevich as who is a graduate of the Israeli Opera Young Artists Programme. Zaide is mezzo-soprano Clare Ghigo who won the Malta International Singing Competition and was a semi-finalist in the 2016 London Handel Singing Competition. Prince Selim is Indian baritone Oscar Castellino who completed a degree in Physics and pursued a career in software programming before he was scouted for his singing talent in Mumbai in 2010 by a visiting professor from the Royal College of Music [You can hear more about Oscar's journey on Welsh National Opera's podcast, The O Word]. Albazar is tenor William Searle as who covered Lensky in Buxton International Festival's 2019 production of Eugene Onegin. Narciso is tenor Brenton Spiteri as who is currently at Guildhall School where we saw him in Donizetti's Rita [see my review]. Prosdocimo is shared between Canadian tenor James Schouten, who recently graduated from the Royal College of Music, and baritone Geoff Williams, who was recently performing in Marco da Gagliano's La Dafne with BREMF.

Full details from the Longhope Opera website.

The Harmonious Echo: there are plenty of delights in this second dip into Sullivan's neglected song repertoire

The Harmonious Echo - Songs by Sir Arthur Sullivan; Mary Bevan, Kitty Whately, Ben Johnson, Ashley Riches, David Owen Norris; Chandos
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 12 May 2021 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★)
There's a strong dose of sentimentality in David Owen Norris' second dip into the songs of Sir Arthur Sullivan, but plenty of delights too including some rattling good tunes

The Harmonious Echo is the second volume of pianist David Owen Norris' recordings for Chandos exploring the songs of Sir Arthur Sullivan. In this volume soprano Mary Bevan, mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately, tenor Ben Johnson and bass-baritone Ashley Riches perform 25 songs setting texts ranging from Shakespeare & Fletcher to Longfellow to Adelaide Procter to Kipling, and of course Gilbert. The best-known amongst the songs is Sullivan's setting of Procter, The Lost Chord.

The recital starts with a song which embodies Sullivan's style at its melodic best, King Henry's Song. This is from his 1877 incidental music for a production of Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII (at the Theatre Royal in Manchester), but the song could just as easily be from one of Sullivan's Savoy Opera. And this mood continues with The Lady of the Lake from an 1864 masque, Kenilworth. Over the Roof has a similar origin, it comes from The Sapphire Necklace, Sullivan's first opera, which was never produced.

But the melodic felicity should not blind us to Sullivan's remarkable emotional range. The songs here cover quite a wide range of ground, and certainly challenge the singers' technique, though Sullivan's fondness for the strophic form is not always idea. But not every song on the disc is from the workroom floor, most were written for a purpose. They were intended for the parlour and the salon, so that the wonderfully charming I heard the Nightingale was 'Sung by Mr. Sims Reeves at the Monday Popular Concerts' and Will He Come?, the first Adelaide Procter setting on the disc, was 'Composed expressly for Madame Sainton Dolby’. These were songs which were written for a new breed of professional singers to perform in concerts, in salons and in the hope and expectation that the songs would be popular and be published.

Will He Come? transformed Sullivan's finances, it was the first song that he published with Boosey & Hawkes and for the first time Sullivan did not sell the song outright but received a royalty, and he did very well with the song.

Four new productions, three revivals and some interesting debuts: English National Opera's brave new 2021/22 season

English National Opera has announced its 2021/22 season and a brave return to normality. There are four new productions and three revivals, with Richard Jones' new production of Wagner's The Valkyrie (which should have debut this Spring) still intact and now debuting in November. Cal McCrystal, who directed Gilbert & Sullivan's Iolanthe in 2018 [see my review], is returning for HMS Pinafore, Jamie Manton directs Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen and Annilese Miskimmon, directing her first ENO production, directs a new production of Paul Ruders' The Handmaid's Tale. 

Coming back are Phelim McDermott’s production of Philip Glass' Satygraha, Jonathan Miller's production of Puccini's La Boheme, and Phelim McDermott’s production of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte. The result is a season which is clearly aiming to appeal to multiple types of audiences, and seems to successfully minimise The Ring effect, whereby companies have to focus so many resources on staging Wagner's operas that the rest of the season suffers. Though it is to be noted that of the seven operas in the season, only two are 19th century with no Verdi at all.

Casting places a welcome emphasis on British, British-based or British-trained along with an interesting sprinkling of artists from around the world. During the season, 15 roles will be taken by current Harewood Artists, with seven being taken by former Harewood Artists, and the ENO Mackerras Fellowship for emerging conductors continues into the new season and is currently held by fellow Olivia Clarke. Free tickets will now be available for under 21s for all opera performances, with an allocation on every level of the theatre, and there are extensions to other ticket schemes.

The Chorus and Orchestra Fellowships and Director Observership programme, which launched in 2019, will continue to run into the new season. A five string fellows and four choristers from an ethnically diverse background will join the ENO Orchestra and Chorus respectively for the 2021/22 season, while the ENO’s paid Director Observership programme offers the opportunity for four emerging directors from an ethnically diverse background to work alongside world-renowned opera directors, observing the entire process of directing an opera from start to finish. 

As in previous years, the announcement only covers the main stage from October to April, the remainder of the seasons performances at venues other than the London Coliseum is yet to be announced.

Together, apart: The House of Bedlam's Enclosure on NMC explores how musicians make music when not physically able to be together

Enclosure - Larry Goves, Claudia Sessa, Matthew Sergeant, Sarah Hennies, Amber Priestly; The House of Bedlam; NMC
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 12 May 2021 Star rating: 3.5 (★★★½)
Experimental music group The House of Bedlam ask what it means to perform together with an album recorded entirely by the individual players at home

Enclosure from The House of Bedlam on NMC records examines what happens when you try and make music together when you are not together. The disc features music by Larry Goves, Claudia Sessa, Matthew Sergeant, Sarah Hennies, and Amber Priestly performed by members of the ensemble The House of Bedlam (Larry Goves, director/electronics, Kathryn Williams, flutes, Carl Raven saxophones/clarinets, Tom McKinney guitars, Stephanie Tress cello).

In his programme note Larry Goves explains how his interest in not quite collaborative composition started before 2020, but last year it came to the fore when musicians wanted to make music together but were not able to be physically together. The recordings on the disc were all made during lockdown (and around half the pieces were created at the same time), with players performing at home and sending the results to Goves for mixing and editing. He describes the collection as including "music played in obsessive unison, played entirely independently, composed after the sounds were recorded, and in one case downplaying the importance of the instrumentalist entirely".

From pedal-power to new poetry: London Sinfonietta return to live audiences

Composer Laura Bowler (photo Bob Clewey)

The London Sinfonietta is returning to live performance with audiences with something of a bang, and a series of premieres from Luke Bedford, Kerry Andrew, Gavin Higgins, Robert Mitchell, Larry Goves, and Laura Bowler, involving everything from pedal-powered drama to new poetry.

Tenor Mark Padmore joins London Sinfonietta on 5 June 2021 at Kings Place for the premiere of Luke Bedford's Lessons from the Past, a song cycle inspired by a quotation from American historian Stephen Greenblatt, “I began with the desire to speak with the dead." And Padmore will also be performing Peter Warlock's bleakly desolate masterpiece, The Curlew, setting words by WB Yeats, and there will also be music from Charlotte Bray.

On 23 June 2021, Notes about Now will feature new songs setting poems created in special projects curated by Poet in the City in collaboration with different communities, just before and in the recent months of the pandemic. The event will mix reading of new poetry with new songs by Kerry Andrew, Gavin Higgins, Robert Mitchell and Larry Goves.

Laura Bowler's new work for London Sinfonietta, House Slides premieres on 9 July 2021 at the Royal Festival Hall. In order to put climate change at the centre of both the piece and the performance, there will be up to 16 bicycles on stage powering the performance in what seems to be an industry first (though it also perhaps evokes the 2013 animated film Belleville Rendez-vous). Katie Mitchell directs, Sian Edwards conducts and Jessica Aszodi sing the solo soprano role. The work describes the 'intimate psychological journey of a woman's response to the climate crisis', and Cordelia Lynn's text uses submissions from members of the public.

On-line, the ensembles World Premiere Wednesdays continue with new works from Naomi Pinnock and Hannah Kendall. And there is also a chance to hear members of the next generation of performers with members of the London Sinfonietta Academy.

Full details from the London Sinfonietta's website.

Celebrating 10 years of lieder in Leeds - Leeds Lieder's 2021 festival welcomes audiences back for an action-packed weekend in June

Leeds Lieder, artistic director Joseph Middleton, is 10 this year and having kept the lieder flag flying in Leeds with a series of live-streamed concerts from Leeds Town Hall, Leeds Lieder is plannnint to welcome audiences to Leeds Town Hall for its 2021 festival from 17 to 20 June 2021, though the concerts will be live-streamed as well.

It is an exciting programme and an action packed four days including:

• Alice Coote (mezzo-soprano) and Christian Blackshaw (piano) in Mahler's Rückert Lieder
• Iain Burnside's exploration of Richard Wagner and the Wesendoncks,  A View from the Villa
  
• Natalya Romaniw (soprano) and Iain Burnside (piano) in Strauss, Rimsky-Korsakov, Grieg and Rachmaninov
• Britten's five canticles with Mark Padmore (tenor), Joseph Middleton (piano), Iestyn Davies (counter-tenor), Peter Brathwaite (baritone), Olivia Jageurs (harp), Ben Goldscheider (horn)
• A late-night show from the Hermes Experiment with music by Errollyn Wallen, Raymond Yiu, Ayanna Witter-Johnson, Emily Hall, Hannah Peel, Clara Schumann, Lili Boulanger
  
• Ema Nikolovska (mezzo-soprano) and Joseph Middleton in a striking programme exploring the singer's British, Canadian, American and Germanic links
• Soraya Mafi (soprano), Ema Nikolovska (mezzo-soprano), William Thomas bass and Graham Johnson (piano) in a programme entitled I f Fiordiligi and Dorabella had been Lieder singers which I remember Johnson doing with the Songmakers Almanac in the early 1980s!
• James Gilchrist (tenor) and Anna Tilbrook (piano) in Jonathan Dove's Under Alter’d Skies, plus some of Barber's Hermit Songs and music by Purcell and Schubert
• Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Roderick Williams baritone and Joseph Middleton in He Sings, She Sings, They Sing, You Choose, a programme which combines a new commission from Hannah Kendall with an examination of gender politics in song and an invitation to the audience to contribute to the debate

Plus of course, pre-concert talks, lectures, masterclasses and a concert from the young artists being coached during the weekend. 

Full details from the Festival website.