Susan Graham - concert review

There is a sense that, with an artist of the stature of Susan Graham, they can perform whatever and wherever they want and still get an audience. Judging by Saturday February 9th's performance at the Wigmore Hall, close communication with her audience is important to Graham. So it was not surprise that she was performing in the Wigmore Hall rather than a bigger venue such as the Barbican, which she could undoubtedly have filled.

Accompanied by Malcolm Martineau, she presented a programme which took few prisoners - an extended peregrination through French song from Gounod (Ou voulez-vous aller?, 1839) to Poulenc (La Dame de Montecarlo, 1961). In one sense the programme was unchallenging, the material was all attractive, well written and melodic. But there were few undoubted masterpieces and many excursions into the by ways of the repertoire. Much depended on the quality of the performance and the audience's willingness to follow Graham and Martineau, to make connections and pick up the threads between the works suggested by Gerald Larner's excellent programme notes.

There were eccentricities, neither Faure (2 songs, one a vocalise), nor Debussy (2 songs) nor Ravel (one song) were represented by examples of their greatest works.
Poulenc completed the journey with his scena La Dame do Montecarlo.

The programme was presented roughly chronologically. This meant that in the first half, a generous 12 songs from the 19th century, there were slightly too many attractive encore type pieces, such as Paladilhe's Psyche (popularised by Maggie Teyte and Grace Moore) or Bachelet's Chere nuit (written for Melba and popular with singers such as Nan Merriman). But Graham was on excellent form, caressing each item with her lovely voice, giving each song its own distinctive dramatic presentation. And in items like Debussy's Harmonie du Soir, giving much more.

For the 20th century group a welcome element of wit and cleverness crept into the songs. Few songs were quite as comfortable as their 19th century counterparts, even Ravel's La Paon, with its vivid depiction of the Peacock. Perhaps Graham tried a little to hard with Satie's Le Chapelier, where he combines of Rene Chalupt's poem about the Mad Hatter with a melody from Gounod's Mireille - surely the joke should be in understated here rather than over-done. But Honegger's Trois Chansons de la Petite Sirene were perfect.

For the 2nd half Graham and Martineau gave us 11 songs, quite a respectable content and I'm sure that everyone would have been happy if the concert finished there, many distinguished divas have got away with performing few songs in a recital. But Graham and Martineau gave us Poulenc's substantial La Dame de Montecarlo, a brilliant tour de force in conclusion.

But it was in pieces such as the Poulenc where Graham's glorious voice could almost be said to be something of a limitation, there were times when I wanted less voice and more word.

Having sung Hahn's Tyndaris during part 2, Graham and Martineau gave us his A Chloris as a further treat as an encore. Graham followed this with Noel Coward's song about the 'filthy' French. Here, as in the Poulenc, I wanted more word and less voice.

Graham was well supported by Malcolm Martineau, surely becoming one of our finest contemporary accompanists. Their recital was generously programmed, some 24 songs, and by exploring the byways of the French melodie, they enabled us to get to knwo some lesser known gems in stunning performances.

Concert press release

The press release for our Feb 23rd Concert is on-line here, at PressBox.

Recent CD review

My review of a fascinating disc which mixes Schumann's music for male voice chorus with contemporary works is here, on MusicWeb International.
This is a fascinating disc and if you are open to experiment then you are sure to find much here, especially with such confident performances ...

Approaching the Sublime

On Saturday February 23rd 2008 at 7.30pm at St. Peter’s Church, 119 Eaton Square, London SW1W 9AL, FifteenB, conductor Paul Ayres and organist Malcolm Cottle will be performing a programme which explores different approaches to the sublime. Haydn’s Little Organ Mass, with its sublime soprano in the Benedictus, will be contrasted with Rabindranath Tagore’s evocative religious imagery in Robert Hugill’s cantata Crossing setting 2 of Tagore’s poems. A different approach is taken in the poetry of Black American poet Carl Cook, whose contemporary religious imagery suffuses Robert Hugill’s Choruses from “Passion”. The concert also includes the premiere of Robert Hugill’s Annunciation for solo soprano, solo tenor and organ.

Tickets for the concert, price £10 (concessions £6) are available on the door or in advance from Islington Music, tel. 020 7354 3195. Online booking available at:-
http://www.sphericaleditions.co.uk/celebration.html

Singing actors?

Should actors in musicals be able to sing? Is it necessary for them to be able to sing well, or are untrained voices acceptable? These thoughts occurred to me whilst reading reviews of the new film of Sondheim’s Sweeny Todd. I have yet to see the film but find myself disturbed by the comments on how unused to singing the leading actors were.

For me, I must admit, the answer to the question is a resounding yes, an actor should be able to sing, and sing well if they are to appear in a musical. I realise that not everyone will agree with this and find it acceptable it the performers can get by in a reasonably expressive manner.

But it is this little word expressive which is a big sticking point. An interesting example of my problem is the National Theatre production of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music with Judi Dench. Now Dench is a superb actress and an adequate singer, she was after all the first London Sally Bowles. But I felt it noticeable in the musical that she was less flexible, less expressive in her musical numbers. Her lack of (regular) musical experience meant that she was a little constrained; she could not be as expressive musically as she could with words.

And musicals are meant to be sung. I can still remember a revival of one of the great American musicals in the West End where virtually none of the cast could properly hold a tune. Very few actors are the equal of Rex Harrison who could be very expressive in musical numbers even though he just talked his way through the songs in My Fair Lady. Of course, with the advent of microphones and improved recording technology, it is possible to make a poor or inadequate singer seem fascinating on film. Of course, this requires the performer to be in some way charismatic so that, in the Rex Harrison mould, other qualities come to the fore and replace the musical ones.

Music is a language and if a performer is unused to it, then they simply will not be able to express themselves as well as they can in words. And when ballet dancers turn actors or singers, they have a double hurdle to leap as they are unused to expressing themselves with their voice at all. I saw Irek Mukhamedov in The King and I and though his acting and singing were creditable, it was noticeable that he was at his most relaxed and most expressive when dancing.

Live performance suffers in a similar manner because of the use of microphones, meaning that a singer who would be expected to be able to project their speaking voice in an auditorium does not have to do this when singing. I have seen a few musicals over the years where amplification was not used. Carousel at the National Theatre was done without, I believe, and it revealed an entirely different set of strengths and weaknesses in the cast. The big advantage was that you were hearing the performers for real and this forced them to consider how to be expressive musically. My abiding musical memory of that performance was Patricia Routledge singing You’ll never walk alone. But then I heard Routledge upstage June Anderson and a clutch of other opera singers in a concert performance (unamplified) of Bernstein’s Candide.

Grange Park Opera have a tradition of doing the occasional musical and, given the smallness of the theatre, doing them unamplified. They mix young opera singers and actors. Listening to these performances, it makes you realise that the performers in the early musical must have been fine, musical actors with decent, if not strong voices.

But you can take things to the opposite extreme, and a musical cast entirely from opera singers is not necessarily a lovely thing either!

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Chant as sung in a real Benedictine community ...

From this month's Opera

Gleanings from this months Opera magazine.

A couple of snippets from the profile of Gianandrea Noseda. He was the first foreigner since Albert Coates to be a regular conductor at the Kirov, and Coates worked there before the Revolution. He makes an interesting comment about the sort of conductors he is interested in encouraging in TurinI don't want singers to have an easy life with conductors who will simply follow them not matter what they do. It was Noseda's Beethoven cycle for the BBC in Manchester which had the remarkable download success, attracting 1.4 million downloads in 3 weeks. (Something the BBC have never repeated).

Over in Scotland there is an interview with Alex Reedijk, Scottish Opera's new head. Another fascinating fact, Scottish Opera's educational arm was the first to be established by a UK company. It is heartening to hear that in the 2008/09 season all of the company's 4 productions will be new ones, rather than rentals. But still a little depressing that they are only doing 4 productions, no matter how necessary this is economically. Still, their forthcoming evening of 5 1-act operas, all brand new and commissioned by Scottish Opera, is exciting. They plan to develop these further, let us hope that they have some success. But the workshop method, much beloved of opera companies, does not often seem to pay major dividends when it comes to operas; somehow the process often squeezes the life out of pieces.

An article on Balfe prompts much interest, but you'll have to go down to Haslemere if you want to hear his work, Opera South are staging The Bohemian Girl. Balfe's musical connections were remarkable. He sang at La Scala with Maria Malibran (in Rossini's Otello) and at La Fenice with her in La Sonnambul. He was in Milan when both Norma and La Sonnambula had their premieres.

An interesting conflation of obituaries - Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gudrun Wagner.

In Rio de Janeiro, Lithuanian mezzo Liora Grodnikaite gets fine reviews; I'm looking forward to seeing her in Massenet's Cendrillon when Chelsea Opera Group do it later this year.

Chicago has staged a new Die Frau ohne Schatten. I'd love to have heard it, with Christine Brewer as the Dyers Wife and Deborah Voight as the Empress. In NY the Met did its first Iphigenie en Tauride since 1917!

Back in Europe, Anger Nantes Opera gave the premiere of Susumu Yoshida's Sumidagawa, based on the same Noh play that Britten used for Curlew River. Remarkably the singers (one Canadian, Argentinian) sang the piece in Japanese, quite a feat. And in Frankfurt Richard Jones's new production of Billy Bud is set in a 1940's Naval College. Still in a Britten kind of mood, Turn of the Screw cropped up in Cremona sung in English by a mostly Italian cast. It is always heartening when this happens as too often you read about unusual repertoire cropping up in places with largely imported casts.

Over in Milan, Tristan und Isolde in a new production by Patrice Chereau, with Ian Storey as Tristan; he's a British singer who I've not really heard, he seems neglected over here. His Isolde was Waltraut Meier, and Michelle de Young was Brangaene, so no Italian speakers here. The role sounds as if it might be stretch of Meier (after all she is technically a mezzo) and I'd be interested to hear her doing it with a period band at a slightly lower 19th century pitch (assuming I'm right about the pitch being slightly lower).

It seems scarcely believable that Dennis O'Neill is 60 but there was a gala to celebrate this at the Wales Millennium Centre. And, having been cataloguing my old programmes, I must admit that his name crops up rather a lot in the operas I saw in Scotland in the late 1970's.

Stephen Petitt, in his thoughtful review of The Magic Flute performed by the South African Isango/Portobello Company makes an comment that there was not a single black face in the audience the night he was there. It would be interesting to know whether this changed over the course of the run or whether opera is just as problematic in London when performed by a black South African company.

We hear that... notes that Jeanne Michele Charbonnet will be Kundry in ENO's 2010 revival of Parsifal. I'm not sure about this one, I was less than thrilled with the concrete bunker production when new and Charbonnet failed to delight when heard in John Foulds World Requiem. Fascinatingly, John Copley has replaced Jude Kelly as the director of the new Merry Widow; definitely a sea change in the sort of production we might expect. We can anticipate that Copley will turn in a well made, very revivable production (unlike some recent ENO outings). Sarah Connolly is going to be doing Dido (Purcell) at Covent Garden. The big question being, what else are they putting on the bill? And Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Florez will be appearing in a new Donna del Lago, another of these travelling productions (Paris, London, NY, Milan). Still, I can hardly wait, definitely a mouthwatering cast. Amanda Roocroft is doing the Countess (Capriccio)for the first time with Opera North in 2010, now we'll have to find time to go and see that.

The Great Herbert

An article by Norman Lebrecht (published in the London Evening Standard, but available on the web at La Scena Musicale raises the spectre of Herbert von Karajan's centenary.

It was when I was a student in Manchester (from 1976 to 1981) that I first really came across Karajan's work. When we could afford it we were buying LP's and inevitably Karajan's name came to our attention. This was before I came to know his stunning records of the 1950's. This was the era when he was increasingly prizing glossy perfection in his orchestra, sometimes at the expense of his singers. Further into the 1980's I came to notice the way he was pushing some singers into roles which would seem to heavy for them (Katia Ricciarelli as Aida for instance).

I heard comments about the eerie perfection of his stage productions and the stories that he would not countenance long runs as the staging started to fail to meet his exacting standards.

All this conspired against my liking for his style of music making. To this day, I have few of Karajan's recordings and only admire his early ones. For this reason we coined a name for him, The Great Herbert. To understand this you have to understand our local (Northern English) idiom, in which the phrase you daft herbert, refers to someone who has done something stupid.

Recent CD Review

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Charming pieces and anyway well worth searching out if you are interested in the musical life in 19th century Paris ...

Interview with David Hill

My interview with David Hill is now live, here, on Music and Vision; we covered the Bach choir's forthcoming première of Carl Rütti's Requiem and the choir's return to the Royal Festival Hall for their annual performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion

Concert Review - Handel La Resurrezione

On Tuesday we went off to Christ Church, Spitalfields for a performance of Handel's La Resurrezione given by Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort and Players. It was the first time that I had visited the church since the 1980's, when I saw Arleen Auger and Della Jones in Handel's Alcina (quite superb) and Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea (less so). Since then the interior has been gloriously restored, making it one of the wonders of London, but rather less suitable for a concert venue.

Seats were rather crammed into the nave (no rake of course) and the singers and players were on a high platform, so that sightlines (from Row R) were decent but leg room and general personal space was at a premium. At the interval complimentary drinks were served (included in the ticket price) which meant that a remarkably speedy bar service could be provided.

The cast for the performance was remarkably starry. Rosemary Joshua was the Angel, Gillian Webster was the Magdalene, Sonia Prina was Mary Cleophas, Topi Lehtipuu was St. John and Jonathan Lemalu was Lucifer. There was, of course, no chorus but each half finished with an operatic style coro in which all the singers participated.

Though the work is an oratorio it was written to get round the Roman ban on opera and performed in static settings in Prince Ruspoli's Palazzo. Ruspoli engaged a huge orchestra (21 violins, 5 double basses), McCreesh's was smaller but still on a generous scale (16 violins, 2 double basses). The plot, such as it is, interleaves Christ's Harrowing of Hell with the activities on earth between his Crucifiction and Resurrection. Christ himself never appears, neither does his mother, though both are referred to in the libretto (by the court poet of ex-Queen Christina of Sweden, then living in Rome).

The opera opens with a spectacular aria for the Angel, with a descending phrase almost describing his/her descent into Hell. From then on Christ's Harrowing of Hell and his triumph over Death are described in a series of duologues between the Angel and Lucifer. Rosemary Joshua's Angel was technically quite brilliant and rather charming, but her habit of keeping her nose in her score for much of the time was rather annoying. Especially as there was no sense of her being unprepared, her performance was dazzling. Jonathan Lemalu made a charming villain as Lucifer and it is not his fault that we are never allowed to see him DO anything, it is all reportage.

Back on earth, Mary Magdalene (Gillian Webster) and Mary Cleophas (Sonia Prina) are both lamenting Christ's loss and have various degrees of trust in his return. Magdalene was written for Margerita Durastantini, one of Handel's long time supporters, but she could only sing one performance; the Pope objected and she was replaced by a castrato (no women allowed). Magdalene gets most of the show's hit numbers and is probably the most fully rounded character, beautifully realised by Webster. Mary Cleophas was sung by the wonderfully dark voiced Sonia Prina, though in her fast numbers her tight vibrato tended to occlude her passage work somewhat.

The two women are comforted by St. John (Topi Lehtipuu) whose great confidence in Christ's forthcoming resurrection is indicated by his series of trusting, pastoral arias (no trouble and questing here); beautiful but I came to want a little more edge, though some of Handel's orchestration was ravishing, and ravishingly realised by McCreesh and his performers.

The problem is that nothing actually happens, the 3 simply lament and recount. We don't even get St. John's encounter with the Virgin, he simply reports it. The language is a little over-heated at times which does not help the drama.

The piece is a relatively concise work and received a fine performance from McCreesh and his ensemble. If I seem a little reserved it is because though I enjoyed the performance it did not hold me the way the best Handel performances can. This might be because of a lack of sympathy with the work itself. I have a sneaking regard for Handel's other Italian oratorio, but only because much of it is familiar from other works. As this was the first time I had ever heard La Resurrezione live, I have few other performances to compare against. So the critic in me is only left to puzzle, was it them or was it me?

Recent CD Review

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You will not be disappointed by this lively and vivid account ...

Saturday's concert went superbly well, it was lovely to hear Lucis Creator Optime and my new Evening Service sung and played so well, and with a fine, strong organ to accompany it. There was an enthusiastic response from the audience. I now look forward to hearing the recording.

This lunchtime I was lucky enough to be able to interview David Hill, the director of the Bach Choir and chief conductor of the BBC Singers. The Bach choir will be premièring Carl Rütti's Requiem in February, further details in the forthcoming a forthcoming article.

Total immersion (again)

As a final comment on my previous post I note that the BBC have announced that their Judith Weir weekend will be the last such event. Instead they will be producing series of single composer days. It is probably not a popular decision but for myself I could see it making me go more often rather than less.

Tonight

So, tonight we have the first concert in our 2 concert festival at St. Peter's Church, Eaton Square. I'm looking forward to the première of my Evening Service and re-acquaintance with the motet Lucis Creator Optime. It will be good to hear them both with accompaniment on a fine organ. When we recorded the ATB version of the Magnificat on our new disc, the organ was an electronic stand and Lucis was premièred at St. Mary's Church Cadogan Street where the organ is relatively small scale. We'll also be varying the programme with a pair of solo pieces, one of which The Prayer of Humble Access will be especially welcome as it hasn't had an outing since its première in 1998.

And another review

This time on Music and Vision, the CD is reviewed by Patric Stanford. I've never been described as gently inoffensive before. Read the full review here.

Another Review

We've had another review for the CD, this time on the website MidwestRecord.com, based in Illinois.

PAUL BROUGH/Testament of Dr. Cranmer: A celebratory church music recording marking the 450th anniversary of the death of the doctor in the title. Us Yanks might not get it so much, but this is a high end Church event across the pond. A well played performance, anyone with a hankering for getting deeper into some church oriented programs is well advised to open an ear in this direction.

Preparations

Having 2 concerts within a month (on Sat 26th Jan and Sat 23rd Feb) means that preparations for both concerts are rather overlapping. Whilst we have rehearsed for Saturday's concert and are now in the midst of last minute admin. and production of programmes etc., last night we had the first rehearsal for the Sat. 23rd Feb concert. This has meant that at home I have had competing piles of music and paperwork for both concerts. Still I have disposed of nearly 2 dozen sets of music for my choir FifteenB which makes the space situation rather better.

Contrary to our practice in the last few FifteenB concerts, the concert on Feb 23rd will have the choir singing just 3 larger works, a Haydn Mass, my cantata Crossing and my Choruses from Passion. This latter work is the only piece the choir have never sung before. The concert will also include 2 pieces for smaller groups, one of which is a premiere and I've not heard it yet so that is something to look forward to!

Review of Judith Weir weekend - Friday evening

My review of Friday's Judith Weir concerts at the Barbican is here, on Music and Vision.

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Lacks the spark of genius but this should not stop us enjoying this fascinating disc ...

A review of Friday's concert will appear soon, but whilst at the concerts a couple of further points occurred to me on the subject of Friday's post. The first was as a result of overhearing a couple talking. Metropolitan concert goer that I am, an advantage of the weekend binge format which I had overlooked is that out of town people can come in an get a substantial amount of music in a short time. I suppose that this is one of the biggest advantages of the format and one that I can't argue with.

But, I was surprised as the sparseness of the audience at the Friday evening concert in the Barbican Hall. Only the stalls level was open and that was not full, though there were quite a lot of musical luminaries there. By contrast the late evening choral concert was completely full, though of course this venue is far smaller. But the relative disparity of audience levels was not really something that I would have predicted.

Total Immersion

Tonight we are going to one (or maybe two) concerts in the BBC's weekend celebration of the music of Judith Weir at the Barbican. For a devoted music lover, prepared to give the whole weekend over to attending events at the Barbican, there is a brilliant mix of concerts, films and events.

The BBC's annual single composer jamboree is a fine example of a particular type of promotional event, one that allows the interested parties to undergo total immersion in the music of choice. Of course, this is not for everyone but the advantage of such events is that those interested can cherry pick.

For me the problem with such total immersion festivals is that I want to hear/see everything, but not in such close proximity. I need time to digest and recover. Tonight is a good case in point. There is a concert in the Barbican Hall at 7pm is followed by a BBC Singers concert at 9.30pm in St. Giles Cripplegate.

At the BBC's James MacMillan jamboree this format was also followed on the Friday evening and that time, I did attend both concerts. By the time it came to the late evening concert, I was feeling a little jaded having done a full day's work and attended a complete concert already. As it was the combination of the BBC Singers fabulous performances with MacMillan's haunting choral music made a big impression. I only hope the same can happen this year, as I am sure it will.

One of the advantages from the BBC's point of view is that single composer choral concerts (such as the all MacMillan concert or the all Weir concert) are perhaps not quite as 'sexy' as the bigger events. So it might be easier to attract an audience when they are performed in such a festival circumstances. This is of course an interesting moot point. Would the BBC Singers get a good audience if they simply turned up and did an all Weir or all MacMillan concert at 7.30pm one Friday during the year?

Such jamborees are, of course, tiring for the performers. The BBC forces are appearing at a number of events throughout the weekend and so the singers and musicians have quite a heavy load of rehearsal and performance. This is not necessarily all bad as, for a difficult composer, it gives the performers time to accustom themselves to the style. Another interesting point, is it easier to perform the music of, say, Gubaidulina, if you are giving a sequence of 3 or 4 concerts rather than just a single one?

My own preference would be for a festival spread over a greater period of time, say three weekends. Close enough so that the marketing people could still create the buzz of a festival, but with enough distance between the events so that old fogies like myself could recover!

Park Lane Group - Friday 11/1/2008

Apologies for this late posting, but I've been busy promoting my CD with radio stations.

On Friday 11/1/2008 we attended the last of the Park Lane Group's 2008 season at the Purcell Room and the Southbank. The recital was shared between the duo of Eulalie Charland (violin) and Maiko Mori (piano) and the duo of Peter Sparks (clarinet) and Matthew Schellhorn (piano),

Charland and Mori opened with Judith Weir's Music for 247 Strings, the title referring to the combined no. of strings on the piano and the violin. The intention of these 10 short pieces was to make the violin almost the 3rd hand of the piano. They featured much contrary motion and Mori's hands were frequently at the opposite extremes of the piano. In contrast to Weir's epigrammatic and concise piece, Philip Cashian's Wynter Music for violin and piano was passionate, technically demanding and delighted with frequent references to jazz rhythms. Both pieces drew fine playing from Charland and Mori.

The stage was then taken by Sparks and Schellhorn. They first premiered Nicola Lefanu's Sea Sketches, 10 little fantasy pieces which were written for Peter Sparks. They start from quiet, atmospheric music with the piano offering sustained echoes, then gradually storms develop in wonderful unspoken narrative. As someone born beside the North Sea, I could empathise completely with this wonderful piece especially in Schellhorn and Sparks's performance. At times Sparks seemed to be trying to get the utmost quiet out of his instrument and was beautifully matched by Schellhorn.

They followed with Harrison Birtwistle's Linoi, written originally for Alan Hacker in 1968. Birtwistle explores the extremes of range of the bassett clarinet and accompanies the instrument with lyre like music created by getting the pianist to play inside the piano. Shellhorn showed remarkable dexterity in this, giving a fine pairing to Sparks's brilliant clarinet playing.

A further Judith Weir piece Sketches from a Bagpiper's Album was played in Weir's original version which requires each of the 3 movements to be played on a different clarinet. The results help to articulate the implicit story of the life of James Reid, a bagpiper in Bonnie Prince Charlie's army. The music was always Weir, economic and brilliant, but she embedded in it many references to the music of the bagpipes, notably the pibroch like references in the final Lament.

Sparks and Schellhorn concluded their set with the premiere Peter Wiegold's Aulos. In this, fast and furious passages inspired by Bacchanalian dance, alternate with quieter moments reflecting the stillness and coldness of the night. The result is almost a rondo and concludes with a puzzling coda where the clarinettist has to wander off the stage.

Finally Charland and Mori returned with Hugh Wood's Poem and Graham Fitkin's Bolt. Poem was a remarkably lyrical piece, its spiky romanticism felt as if a Big Romantic Tune was struggling to get out, but just failing.

The Fitkin, by contrast, was rhythmic and mostly very insistent. It came at the end of quite a long programme and seemed to outstay its welcome, though that might have been my fatigue and I would welcome hearing it again.

All 4 performers produced some brilliant playing in some very challenging music. The earliest piece in the programme was in some ways the most challenging - the Birtwistle written in 1968. Thus neatly encapsulating the way that music has become more diverse in the last 40 years.

Charland, Mori, Sparks and Schellhorn are definitely players to watch. Schellhorn has a number of projects underway for this year including a Wigmore Hall recital in May. Watch this space.

Tonight's concert

Tonight we plan to visit the Purcell Room for the first time in ages. The Park Lane group are putting on one of their estimable concerts, with music by Judith Weir, Graham Fitkin, Philip Cashian, Nicola LeFanu, Harrison Birtwistle and Hugh Wood! Played by a quartet of up and coming young musicians, Eulalie Charland - violin, Maiko Mori - piano, Peter Sparks - clarinet and Matthew Schellhorn - piano.

This year's Park Lane Group concert series showcases some 33 artists in 50 works written between 1934 and 2007

Reviewer's Log

After a long gap, I've somewhat caught up on my reviewer's log for Music Web, so if you wonder what I think about when reviewing discs, you might care to look here.

And off we go

Monday saw the re-starting of rehearsals for London Concord Singers working towards the next concert on Saturday March 15th at Hampstead Town Hall. The programme will include John Gardner's Five Partsongs to Poems by Wallace Stevens, Philip Cranmer's Three Parodies on "Lloyd George knew my Father" and my new setting of Do not go gentle into that good night for choir and French Horn. The programme also includes part-songs by Elgar and Song of Sorrows by Mary Jane Leach.

My piece is a world première, the 3rd such this year. As usual, the first run-through is always a little nerve-wracking but the piece seemed to go down well with the choir.

Recent CD Reviews

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As a fine exploration of Allegri’s talents this disc is highly recommendable. ...

My review of Penderecki's Te Deum on Naxos is here.
Both reviews are on MusicWeb International.
In many ways an admirable disc … If Penderecki’s challenging music appeals then do try this disc. ...

CD on Music and Vision

News of my CD, The Testament of Dr. Cranmer, has made it to the Music and Vision web-site, here.

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Fine musicianship and commendable curiosity. Ideal listening ...

And my review of Gerard Lesne's Purcell disc is here. Both reviews on MusicWeb International.
In many ways, Gerard Lesne has the perfect voice for Purcell … up to a point ...

Gleanings from this month's Opera magazine

Gleanings from this Month's Opera Magazine.

David Grant writes in the Letters page that he is producing a new, Urtext, edition of Wallace's Maritana. Evidently the original, some 150 minutes of music, has not been heard for over 150 years. It will be interesting to compare this version (due to be published in time for the bicentenary in 2012) with that which has been recorded on Marco Polo (with Majella Cullagh in the title role), where the entire set lasts some 110 minutes or so.

Susan Bullock, having successfully stood in for Lisa Gasteen in the Covent Garden Ring, has 3 further Ring Cycles (not in London!), her first Kundry and is recording Salome (for Chandos in English I believe). So, when do we get to hear her Brunnhilde in London?

Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking has made it to Vienna. Christopher Norton Welsh is very sympathetic to the opera, though a Viennese critic has dismissed it as well-crafted film music. I have my own prejudices about the piece, but until we get to hear a fully staged production in London then it will be a bit difficult to tell. But Martin Bernheimer has come out against Barber's Vanessa. I must confess to have missed the concert performances of this opera in London so can't comment. But loved Bernheimer's comment that 'the music seems redolent of cheap perfume, wrong-note harmonies and orchestral busy-music supporting vocal indulgence amid knowing nods to Puccini and Strauss'. At the New York performances Rosalind Elias (Erika 48 years ago) was the Baroness, quite a lineage.

Over in Prague, they have just heard their first Norma in 70 years, rather amazingly. Another amazing gap, the producer Nikolaus Lehnhoff hasn't worked at Bayreuth since being on of Wieland Wagner's assistants in the 1960's. Considering that Lehnhoff is one of the major Wagner producing talents of our day, this is rather striking.

Over in the Deutsche Oper, Berlin they have performed Richard Strauss's Elektra along with Vittorio Gnecchi's rather fascinating 1905 prequel, Cassandra. A fascinating idea.

In Munich, the ideas were less fascinating. A new production of Eugene Onegin where Onegin and Lensky are depicted as a homosexual couple. Nice idea, except that that music just does not seem to go there. Evidently the Act 3 Polonaise was danced by a corps de ballet of bar-chested gay cowboys (inspired by Brokeback Mountain.) Eh?

Hugh Canning, in Amsterdam for Pierre Audi's cycle of the 3 Monteverdi Operas was suitably impressed. He refers to the 1978 Zurich Opera performances of the 3 in Ponnelle's productions, I think implying that it was the last time he heard all 3 in a cycle in strong productions. I saw the 1978 productions, and the Orfeo has stayed in my memory ever since.

Andrew Porter mused about adding music to a major dramatic text, and whether you need to do major surgery to the text before musick-ing it. This was in the context of Boesman's Miss Julie, which doesn't do violence to the text. But Porter's review gives the impression that the result is not quite an opera. I have always had a feeling of the unsatisfactoriness of operas where the text is set verbatim.

George Loomis, in his review of Max Emmanuel Cenci's aria disc, that Rossini wrote only 1 role for a castrato. In fact, it is curious to associate Rossini with castrati at all, making you realise how long his career is and how long they lasted on the opera scene. Loomis also comments on the casting of counter-tenors in roles in Baroque operas where the original was written for a woman. I have often wondered about this and have hankerings to buy yet another recording of Solomon so that I can have a woman singing the role rather than a counter-tenor.

Finally, in the We hear that.. column. Martin Duncan is directing the first British production of Martinu's Mirandolina at Garsington in 2009. Then in 2010 Angela Gheorghui is doing Adriana Lecouvreur, I can't wait. Della Jones is returning to ENO as Auntie in 2009, she has been woefully underused there in recent years. I wish she was doing something more than Auntie. Richard Jones is doing The Gambler at Covent Garden in 2010. Having seen it at Grange Park then I look forward to seeing John Tomlinson as the General. Tomlinson is also doing Sir Morosus in Schweigsame Frau with Toby Spence as Henry, but you'll have to go to Munich to enjoy it.

Recent CD Reviews

My review of Maria Bayo's Handel recital is here.
Lovely recital displaying Bayo’s talents in this tricky repertoire ...

And my review of Emma Kirkby's Vivaldi recital is here. Both reviews on MusicWeb International.
Kirkby’s light vocal timbre works extremely well … most enjoyable ... a vivid, lively and well structured programme ...

Recent Book review

My review of Erik Chisholm's 1971 introduction to the operas of Janacek is here, on MusicWeb International.
This volume remains a fine introduction to the music-drama of Janáček’s operas, illuminated by Chisholm’s intelligence and graced by his lucid prose ...

CD's I'm listening to

Over the holiday period our principal listening has been Granville Bantock's Omar Khayam and Thomas Tallis's complete oeuvre, recorded by Alistair Dixon and La Chapelle du Roi.

Omar Khayam is a 3 CD set from Chandos as part of their on-going series of discs of Bantock's music. So far the Chandos discs have generally been compilations of smaller items, though they have included the very striking Sappho song cycle and a couple of movements from the Song of Songs. But Bantock was notable for his large scale works and his complete setting of Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam is a case in point.

Using chorus, orchestra and 3 soloists Bantock expansively sets the text, creating gorgeous textures and hinting at the music by other contemporaries such as Rimsky Korsakov and Richard Strauss. This is wonderful music, but it is in no sense advanced. The work was written in pieces between 1908 and 1910, but rarely gets beyond, say, Elgar. Vernon Handley, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and soloists Catherin Wyn-Rogers, Toby Spence and Roderick Williams do the work complete justice. This is wonderful music to listen to, gorgeous, luscious and full of textures. But it is relatively undramatic, perhaps Bantock intended this but in a work this long (171 minutes in total), I think that a little more dramatic structure might have helped.

My other complaint is that the work sounds very firmly as if it comes from Edwardian England, it is unmistakeably Bantock. Despite some nice touches of local colour in the orchestration, it does not really conjure up the gorgeous east.

Again, that might be deliberate as Bantock was interested in the poem's main theme, the transience of existence, the underlying message being Waste not the hour.

I think, perhaps, that we need to get to know the work more. That its richness rather hides its subtlety. But though reviewers have generally been very positive, Andrew Clements in the Guardian (here) is far more temperate, describing it as a sumptuously brocaded if rather staid score.

The Tallis set is entirely different. For a start, the majority of the 9 discs are performed by just the singers of La Chapelle du Roi. The group varies in size according to need but there are generally 16 to 24 singers (expanding to fit the 40 part motet). The music is organised chronologically so that we start with the early stuff and the amazing late Henry VII period. This is followed by the beautiful but austere Edward VI period, when Tallis was concerned to suit his music to the predominating taste of the reformers, where words were paramount. Just think of If ye love me to get a feel for what he could do.

Then Mary Tudor re-appears and we have the late flowering of Latin complexity, including the mass, Missa Puer Natus est Nobis. Finally the full panolply of the Elizabethan works, including of course his 40-part motet. The set (10 discs in all) is a remarkable achievement and whilst you could pick individual items which could be different. Overall I find the performances beautiful and convincing, definitely a set to be played over and over.

Chapelle du Roi

On Friday we went to one St. John's Smith Square to hear Alistair Dixon and La Chapelle du Roi performing their programme, Christmas at the Chapel Royal. They were performing two movements from Tallis's Missa Puer Natus est Nobis which was probably written for Christmas 1554 for Queen Mary, when it was thought she was pregnant by Philip of Spain. Similarly the superb, and v. grand, motet Suscipe Quaeso was probably written for an earlier state occasion and may well have been performed by choir which included the members of Philip's chapel as the range of the piece is less than the standard range. Besides Tallis, the group also included a couple of Sheppard's Latin Responds, lovely pieces which were also written at this time. Plus a pair of carols.

The group numbered just 9 singers (3 sopranos, 2 male altos, 2 tenors, 2 basses) so for much of the time many of them were singing just 1 to a part. Dixon does not seem to go for a superbly blended sound as in some other English groups, instead we get fine musicianship, a lovely sense of line and a feeling that each voice/line is distinctive. That is not to say that the group don't blend, they do, but sensibly Dixon seems to value the distinctiveness of each of his talented voices.

The other large Tallis piece in the programme was his Te Deum for Meanes, a work which was probably written under Edward VI as it uses an earlier translation of the text. A superb work, given a stirring performance, it made a strong end to the programme.

This was a fine programme, beautifully performed, a good example of intelligent Christmas programming.

On a personal note, I should add that one of the Altos also appears in the eight:fifteen vocal ensemble and is featured on my new disc.

Recent CD Review

My review of a disc of Paderewski songs is here, on Music Web International.

A lovely recital and should be of interest to everyone with a fondness for songs ...

Review of "The Testament of Dr. Cranmer"

John Quinn's review of my new CD, has just appeared on Music Web International, here.

This well produced disc features committed performances from musicians who serve Robert Hugill well ... John Quinn

Poster

The poster for our Celebration mini-festival at St. Peter's Church, Eaton Square, when we'll be celebrating the release of the new CD.

The new folk song

On Sunday we caught part of the European Broadcasting Union's advent music jamboree, broadcast live on Radio 3. At one point we heard a couple of Christmas carols sung by an English cathedral choir. Afterwards the announcer gave full details of on carol, but the other was not explained. The carol in question was the arrangement of We wish you a merry Christmas from the Carols for Choirs book. This book has become so ubiquitous that perhaps the announcer did not think it necessary to explain. Certainly I recognised the arrangement immediately and could easily sing along, having performed it myself countless number of times.

With amateur choirs the use of the Carols for Choirs books is such that the arrangements of the popular carols from Books 1 and 2 are pretty well ingrained into folk memory. Proof of this came last night when we attended the annual Chelsea Green carols service. Whilst drinking mulled wine and eating food provided by the local shops, people sang carols accompanied by a choir from St. Luke's Church, Chelsea and a brass group. When it came to Hark the Herald Angels Sing and a couple of other carols, a group of young women launched quite unprompted into the Carols for Choirs descants for these carols. So natural do these feel that I am sure for many people, the carols without the Carols for Choirs descants feel rather odd.

So for a whole class of people, these versions of the carols are the dominant ones.

Through a glass darkly

When the composer Handel is mentioned, what image comes into your head - a large, overweight, elderly man wearing a full-bottomed wig, prone to gluttony and attacks on recalcitrant singers and rather a-sexual? Of course, this owes something to reality, but even in his later years Handel was also a good raconteur, had a coterie of extremely loyal and devoted friends and was a keen connoisseur of art (the inventory taken at the time of his death is quite mouth-watering.)

But, of course, it is the lively anecdote and highly coloured images of the elderly man which stay in our mind. As there is an absence of personal material, it makes the real man difficult to re-create.

There is all the more problem when it comes to the young Handel. During his period in Italy he was in his early 20’s. Handel as Orpheus, Ellen Harris’s book about Handel’s Italian Cantatas includes a portrait of him done at the time. We see, not the overweight philosopher of the late portraits, but a young, vibrant, slender and attractive man. No wonder Handel was popular with his patrons, his improvising was dazzling, and his music was brilliant. Combine this with his entertaining personality and attractive person and you can imagine that some of his patrons were rather smitten. Harris detects something of a whiff of the homo-erotic about the texts of Handel’s cantatas and the general atmosphere in the salons where he was employed.

This all adds up to a very different picture to our standard one of Handel. But the composer suffers from the problem common to elderly and productive composers; we tend to view their output and their personalities through the distorting glass of their later persona.

A similar thing happens to Ralph Vaughan Williams. He lived to his late 80’s and remained productive until the end. RVW was 63 when his ground-breaking 4th symphony was premiered. His 3 major symphonies (nos. 4, 5 and 6) span the years 1935 to 1946, so that he was 74 when the last of these was premiered. With its remarkably pianissimo final movement, it was regarded as his swan-song. But the composer went on to write 3 more!

In the face of all this public acclaim, the composer created a gruff persona for himself, prone to startling announcements “I don’t know if I like it, but it’s what I meant”, and hiding his sophisticated talent in a miasma of apparent amateurism.

So we tend to view the early RVW through this smoke screen. It means that we miss out on the passionate young man, one whose musical voice was late in coming. But just look at the pictures where you see a slimmer figured RVW with dashing dark wavy hair. This is a young student who was briefly considered as a trainee Apostle whilst at Cambridge and who had links with a number of Apostles at a time when the group had a very homosexual cast to it. RVW also had strong links to the Bloomsbury group (his first wife Adeline was a cousin of Virginia Woolf’s), he and Adeline did a great deal of entertaining and participating in the social whirl and demi-monde whilst they lived in Cheyne Walk.

This is the man who wrote the passionate piano concerto (for Bax’s mistress, Harriet Cohen) and the remarkable ballet Job, works which lead to the 4th symphony. It is this personality which can be glimpsed in the letters which RVW exchanged with his contemporary Gustav Holst (collected in the book Heirs and Rebels). Holst died when the composer was in his early 60’s so had little influence on the late, Grand Old Man of Music image.

For both these composers, RVW and Handel, we have to take a step back and make an effort to discard their later persona and view their younger passionate selves. It is interesting to consider how this sort of view might easily apply to others. One obvious candidate is Elgar, whose passionate music is so at odds with the persona of the crusty old colonel which he constructed.

Conversely it is fascinating to play what if and consider what might have happened to composers who died young? What would our view of early and middle Mozart be if the composer had lived to a productive and ripe old age, similarly with Beethoven?

Review of Last night's Barbican Concert

Emmanuelle Haim and Les Concerts d’Astree have a new CD to promote so they are doing a tour, performing the repertoire on the CD. They arrived at the Barbican Centre yesterday to perform Handel’s Dixit Dominus and Bach’s Magnificat (the 2nd, D major version).

This is all well and good. After all, any concert directed by Haim is never less than interesting and with her own group there is the good possibility that sparks will fly. Add to this the temptation of hearing Natalie Dessay singing the Soprano 1 solos and you had a delectable package; even though the total amount of music being performed totalled around 65 minutes.

I know that one should count quality not quantity, but even so the concert seemed a little under nourished as regards content. Surely the group could have added another overture or two, just to make the proceeding seem less like an exact re-run of the CD.

Though as regards cast, this was not a re-run of the CD. Only Dessay was common to CD and concert and she dropped out due to ill health. In fact Haim managed to lose both her 1st soprano and her tenor, but replaced them admirably with Amy Freston and Paul Agnew.

In fact, when you look at the solo roles in the two works, having such a stellar cast seemed rather over the top. In Handel’s Dixit Dominus the soloists have a tendency to interject into the choral textures. Handel uses a 5-part choir and the 5 solo roles match this. So much so that you can’t help feeling that he intended to have the solos sung by the choir leaders.

If this had happened it would have removed the rather annoying amount of walking about that the soloists had to do, getting up to sing a small interjection and then sitting down again.

That said the performance was certainly up to standard. Haim used a large-ish choir (25 strong); both they and the instrumental ensemble gave a good crisp performance. Haim seems to aim for dramatic textures when it comes to her choruses, no pale English reticence here. This means that some sophistication of texture and line is lost but the result is undeniably vivid and exciting. The soloists (Amy Freston, Salome Haller, Tim Mead, Paul Agner and Robert Gleadow) followed suit and contributed some fine, involving solo singing.

After the interval the band grew bigger as Bach adds wind and brass to Handel’s string band. Also he allots each soloist an aria apiece so that all the singers get the chance to show off properly. As they did, in fine style; Amy Freston was beautifully accompanied in her first aria by the oboe do’amore of Patrick Beaugiraud. Another highlight for me was the duetting of Tim Mead and Paul Agnew in Et misericorida.

Is it me, is it the Barbican or is it something else. But our concert tonight at the Barbican has a new pair of soloists, Natalie Dessay and Lothar Odinius are both ill and are replaced by Amy Freston and Paul Agnew. The last time this happened (in Handel's Ariodante) the replacement singer proved quite a find. But I remember another concert with Le Concert D'Astree when one of the singers was ill and the concert went ahead in reduced form.

The problem is that our concert going outside the Barbican is rather random, the Barbican is the only place where we actually have a subscription (to their excellent Great Performers series). So I cannot work out whether this run of cancellation and ill health is simply bad luck or something. Still, I look forward to hearing Miss Freston again. We have caught her a couple of times in smaller roles (Miss Wordsworth in Albert Herring for Glyndebourne on Tour), so it will be interesting to hear her in full Baroque Mode (Handel:Dixit Dominus and Bach:Magnificat)

PRS

We were away for the weekend, but waiting for me in the post was the latest distribution from the PRS (the Performing Rights Society). This inestimable body attempts to provide composers with some sort of recompense when their works are performed. If you are commissioned for a new work then, of course, you'll get the commissioning fee but if a group decides simply to perform on of your works whose music is available, then no fee is forthcoming. Instead, performing groups and venues pay a fee to the Performing Rights Society and the society attempts to divide the indivisible and spread these monies around all of the performed composers.

Inevitably live performances of contemporary classical music provides quite a small branch of the market and you would hardly get rich on royalties from these performances unless you were really prolific. Nonetheless it is heartening that such payments are made, recognising as they do the investment of time and effort that a composer puts into a piece and preserving the on-going link between performer and work.

After all, if an artist paints a picture and it is sold, the artist loses any commercial interest in the work if it is sold one (though I believe reproduction rights for the image are different). So someone could have pictures changing hands and being displayed without ever being aware of the fact or benefiting from it in any way.

Naturally, for a composer it is in the area of broadcast royalties and mechanical copyright protection that the larger fees are available. But live performance is the basic fabric of our art and the PRS ensures that we get some little recognition.

Review of Dr. Cranmer

There is a new review (in French) of my CD The Testament of Dr. Cranmer on resmusica.com here.

A Premiere per month

Not only do I have premières of works at the concerts I am organising at St. Peter's Church, Eaton Square in January and February, but on March 15th London Concord Singers will be premièring Do not go gentle into that good night for choir and French Horn. Then in April, a new Verse Anthem will be premièred at a friend's Wedding.

The choir and horn piece was inspired by a piece by Richard Rodney Bennett for male voice chorus and French Horn. This was written for the New York City Gay Men's Chorus. London Concord Singers gave the first UK performance of the work and it made a strong effect on me. My own setting though, is for mixed voice chorus and French Horn.

Celebration Leaflet - Page 2

Celebration Leaflet - Page 1

Here's the first page of the new publicity leaflet for the January and February concerts at St. Peter's Church, Eaton Square, London, when we are celebrating the release of my CD.

Concord Concert

Well, its that time of year and Thursday will see me performing in this year's Christmas Concert with the London Concord Singers. We'll be at the Grosvenor Chapel in Mayfair for a concert which mixes Christmas music from Sir Arthur Sullivan with seasonal sacred music from Martin Dalby, Kenneth Leighton, Gabriel Jackson, Pierre Villette and Stanford.

I have become particularly fond of Leighton's What Love is This? and rather alarmingly bits of the tenor part have been creeping into the piano accompaniment of my latest song.

Chelsea Festival

Thursday saw the end of season event for the Friends of the Chelsea Festival, this celebrated a very successful 2007 Festival and gave a brief preview of the 2008 Festival.

Things to look forward to in 2008 include concerts from Barbara Bonney, Nigel Kennedy and Nicola Benedetti, along with Dido and Aeneas with Phillip Picket and the New London Consort.

Recent CD Review

My review of John Nelson's recording of the Berlioz Te Deum is here, on MusicWeb International.
A highly recommendable recording, which captures something of the large scale of Berlioz's creation....

Recent CD Review

My review of the Rheinberger choral works disc on Chandos is here, on MusicWeb International.
Lovely works, well recorded … this should suit if you want to explore Rheinberger's choral music. ...

There are all sorts of things I ought to be doing - sorting out the music for next year's concerts, finishing the current scene of my new opera, adding to the motets in my sequence Tempus per Annum. I do have excuses, my toner is running low and so printing music will have to wait until I've ordered a new one. The new opera requires me to sit at the piano and bash away at it, digging into the accompaniment of the scene, which currently exists in skeleton form. This is something I tend to put off then do in a rush, usually making me late for work or whatever engagement I have.

But I am not doing any of the things I ought to be, instead I am writing songs. Now it could be argued that this is a GOOD THING as 1) I don't write songs very often, always meaning to do more and 2) my recent settings of Ivor Gurney came 2nd and 4th in the English Poetry and Song Society's Ivor Gurney competition.

So I am writing a few more, even though I have constant trouble finding poems which appeal. Of course, when I do find them they are usually in copyright which creates additional problems. Having done a setting of a poem which perfectly appealed to me I am now working on something else setting a poem which is less appealing. The theory being that it is good for me to occasionally write settings of tricky poems.

Which brings me to another conundrum which I have never really solved. When setting modern verse, where the sense goes counter to the metre, which do you follow. With stanzas or lines ending mid-sense and the sense continuing into the following line, do you let the structure of the poem guide you or the sense of the prosody. Usually I follow the sense of the words but I then feel guilty that I am not making more of the structural feel of the poet's work.

Though I have always had a tendency to pull text apart. When setting prose I can usually be relied upon to edit the text, missing out, adding and repeating words to create a satisfying whole, satisfying to me that is! I have a similar habit in poetry, though I try not to miss bits out. Usually the results ignore the structural form of the piece. My setting of Lord Alfred Douglas's sonnet on the death of Oscar Wilde rather ignored the piece's sonnet form and set it like a piece of poetic prose.

This of course reflects my uneasy relationship with words. I work best setting poetic prose, like the Bible or Thomas Cranmer. When setting a poem which has metre and rhyme I feel constrained and, I think, rather worried that the result will simply turn into a te-tum te-tum te-tum te-tum type of song, familiar from my cabaret years.

Review of Turn of the Screw

Turn of the Screw is an opera which I admire rather than love. Partly it is my lack of sympathy with the ghost story form, but more importantly I have always found the governess to be faintly annoying. Her actions make me impatient and I long to give her a good shake and knock some common sense into her.

That said, there was much to admire in ENO's new production, which we saw on Saturday 3rd December. Borrowed from the Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, it is the first of two David McVicar borrowings this season. (The second is the Scottish Opera Der Rosenkavalier.)

Turn of the Screw is problematic in large opera houses, it uses only 13 instruments in the ensemble and is very much a chamber piece. The opera works best in small spaces, Grange Park Opera's production made quite an impression. McVicar and his designer, Tanya McCallin, do not attempt to make the acting space smaller. Instead it is opened up to its fullest to create the dark lowering spaces of Bly. Only occasionally does the dark backdrop open to let light flood in. These dark spaces are hauntingly lit by Adam Silverman's lighting scheme.

The stage is populated by odd items of Victorian furniture (beds, a piano, etc.) which are moved about by the servants. McVicar's Bly is a place full of people, servants coming and going. In a sense this only serves to highlight the Governess's isolation as the only person of her class in the house. This is further concentrated by the way the characters function in the wide open spaces, the space serving to concentrate the attention on the singer.

As the Governess, Rebecca Evans was truly impressive. Her rich toned voice filled the auditorium and she made every word tell, her diction rendering the surtitles redundant. She was ably supported by Ann Murray as Mrs. Grose. Usually this characters is played by a well-upholstered matron. But Murray created an angular, anxious maiden Aunt. The role suited her voice rather better than her previous excursion her, when she sang the Duchess of Plaza Toro.

The children, played by Jacob Moriarty and Nazan Fikret, were scarily impressive. Moriarty is very slight but sang with a true voice and was eerily controlled. The moment, at the end of Act 1, when he kisses the Governess was quite disturbing. Though McVicar did not play down the sexual charge between Miles and Quint, this sexualisation of the relationship between Miles and the Governess was quite fascinating.

The ghosts themselves were impressively played by Timothy Robinson and Cheryl Barker. Another of McVicar's innovations was to have Quint lifting Miss Jessel out of her grave, a very striking image coming so quickly after the children bury the doll. Robinson did not completely dispel the ghost of Peter Pears but his assumption of the role was perfectly complete. Barker surprised me at how her rich and dramatic voice was made to suit Miss Jessel perfectly.

The ensemble, under Garry Walker, played superbly and also managed to fill the auditorium. Never once did the ensemble sound undernourished.

This was an impressive and moving production; McVicar was in subtle and understated mode and there were none of the showy tricks which have found their way into his recent Handel productions and his Covent Garden Rigoletto. I hope that he is asked to do more Britten in London.

Review of Maria Stuarda

My review of the Chelsea Opera Group performance of Maria Stuarda is here, on Music and Vision.

ENO and bel canto

In the new issue of the ENO Friends magazine there is an interview with John Berry (ENO Artistic Director) about the forthcoming new production of Lucia di Lammermoor. ENO are not renowned for doing bel canto repertoire, they have never had a significant amount of Bellini or Rossini in their catalogue and Donizetti has mainly been represented by his two comedies.

Rather oddly, Berry says that Lucia is not categorised as core repertoire. Which seems a strange comment as it is surely a piece that appears regularly (if not frequently) in most opera houses. Berry goes on to say comment that the reason why the bel canto repertoire has been neglected is the translation issue, that it is difficult to find good translations and the singers to sing them. This seems a fair point, but in other areas of the repertoire, ENO has had no trouble finding singers to learn new translations of the operas. Surely casting Donizetti is no harder than casting Handelian opera seria?

Berry's comments are interesting and relevant, up to a point. But I can't help feeling that there is an additional unspoken point which ought to have been made, that in the past there has perhaps been a lack of sympathy with the bel canto repertoire.

Gleanings from December's Opera magazine

Franz Welser-Möst comments about the health of an opera house; the best indicator being, not the spectacular first nights but the revivals, if you have great Three Ladies in the Magic Flute or good Flower Maidens. And Mike Ashman unearths one of the original Flower Maidens, Carrie Pringle by name, who may even have been Wagner's mistress. One of those people who flit into history and then disappear.

Richard van Allen is one of those singers who seems to have disappeared from our stages. It turns out that he is suffering from cancer and undergoing chemotherapy. But his interview in Opera is interesting and illuminating. He trained as a teacher at Worcester Teacher Training College. Amazingly, the music tutor there was Harold Watkins Shaw, the Handel scholar. In his early days he sang with Opera for All. They took the scenery around with them and erected it themselves. Van Allen drove the scenery van because he happened to have a driving licence. Puts the current problems touring operas into perspective rather doesn't it?

Van Allen must be one of the last of the generation of singers who learned their craft without ever being able to read music, (Rita Hunter and Charles Craig were similar). In the early days Van Allen used to rely on a tape recorder weighing 45 pounds, hardly portable.

In Australia, the State Opera of Adelaide presented Un Ballo in Maschera conducted by Baroque specialist Graham Abbott. Sounds as if it might have been a fascinating evening, with the intimate preferred to the bombastic. This also happened at the Caramoor Festival in the USA where Il Trovatore was given in a fascinating Bel Canto version. There Conductor Will Crutchfield gave a very full edition of the score.

And in Sydney, Venus in Tannhäuser looked like Cruella de Vil and was a stern mistress of discipline, whatever turns you on I suppose. Cheryl Barker sang all 3 soprano roles in Il Trittico, quite a feat if you think about it. If she is singing the more dramatic Janacek and Strauss roles, it will be interesting to see whether she can keep her voice lithe enough for Suor Angelica and Lauretta.

John Allison went to Belgium to see the new Hans Werner Henze opera. Someone has described him as the Meyerbeer of our times - discuss! Still, Allison said that the final ecstatic dance sounded like Mahler on Prozac. Judging from the photo, the production itself was very stylish.

And in Canada, the Canadian Opera Company staged their first ever French Don Carlos, amazing as it seems. Though the reviewer then confuses this by saying that the 5-Act Italian version had been given in French in the past. So I'm not really sure what he meant, perhaps he means the original Paris version. Anyhow, the cast seem to have been pretty polyglot.

Marseille have premiered a new opera, Marius et Fanny by Vladimi Cosma based on the Marcel Pagnol tales. I wonder how it compares to Harold Rome's musical based on the same source, which provided Ezio Pinza's first Broadway role after South Pacific.

We saw Yannis Kokkos's production of Cherubini's Medea (Italian version) at the Chatelet in Paris with Anna Caterina Antonacci in the title role. The production has made its way to Greece where it was performed in the ancient theatre at Epidaurus, quite a venue. The same opera also showed up in Utrecht, also in the Italian version.

And Peter Maxwell Davies's The Lighthouse has made its way to Italy (to Montepulciano) for only its 2nd production in Italy (the last one was 20 years ago). The performers all had Anglophone names, so this was hardly full cultural assimilation. Over in Spoleto they did Handel's Ariodante with a production inspired by Princess Margaret in the 1950's.

In Boston it was the turn of Lully's Psyche, the operas first American outing. Rather bizarrely, the piece has its origins in a fete belliqueuse for some 30,000 soliders on the nearly built fortifications of Dunkirk. The mind boggles.

At the Met, theatre director Mary Zimmerman directed a new Lucia di Lammermoor and seems to have shown the same distrust of the operatic genre as some of the recent non-opera specialists over here.

Still in New York, Ethel Smyth's The Wreckers made its American debut. Unfortunately they performed it in the traditional English version - Martin Bernheimer comments on the prim Victorian verse and the clumsy libretto. I must confess that I was surprised at this latter comment as I have never found Brewster's libretto clumsy. Granted the English translation is cumbersome, but Smyth always admitted this and it was done in a hurry by a hack. Smyth and Brewster wrote the opera in French, though I don't think it has ever been performed in this version. Duchy Opera commissioned a new translation from Amanda Holden and it is a shame that this was not used.

Back in the UK, veteran composer Stephen Dodgson has had a new opera, Nancy, premiered by St. Albans Chamber Opera. Dodgson is now in his 80's, so there is hope for us all yet.

We hear that... notes that Patricia Bardon will be singing in ENO's new Riders to the Sea in the Autumn. Great news to hear that the opera will be returning to London at last.

Recording news

There is a review of my new disc, "The Testament of Dr. Cranmer", on the Classical Source web site, here.

Recent CD Review

My review of a reconstruction of an 18th century mass from Peking is here, on MusicWeb International.
Mixes scholarship with charm and intelligence in a way which illuminates a forgotten corner of Sino-European musical cross-fertilization ...

Recent CD Reviews

My review of a new organ recital is here, on MusicWeb International.
If you enjoy the sound of the American symphonic pipe organ from the 1940s and 1950s then buy this disc. Morris displays a superb technique and dazzling control of the tonal colour ...

And a recital by a promising new lute player here.
Sakamoto has a strong technique and much promise. I look forward to hearing more from him when he matures and develops ...

Maria Stuarda

In the early 19th century, England and Scotland were distant enough from operatic Italy to warrant them being seen as suitable locations for Romantic opera. Thanks to Scott's novels, historical Scotland was seen as a suitably exotic backdrop. Of course, these operas were no more historically accurate than any other location; Rossini's La Donna del Lago was no more Scottish than his Maometto secondo represents a real episode in Turkish/Venetian history.

The Romantic movement was very interested in the exotic other and this crops up in many ways in many operas. The other can be a foreigner in our land Il Turco in Italia or one of us visiting a foreign land L'Italiana in Algeri. Historical setting was, of course, de rigeur. But whereas in the 18th century Opera Seria, the historical setting was very much irrelevant, during the 19th century this came to reflect local colour. Rossini's La Donna del Lago is very important in this respect as it pre-figures in its Romantic view of Scotland, much that Rossini's succesors Bellini and Donizetti, would come to do. You only have to comapare La Donna del Lago to Semiramide. In the latter, Rossini pretty much ignores the historical background and location, his treatment of the story is in direct line to the earlier Opera Seria, whereas in La Donna del Lago Rossini goes to some trouble to evoke the lake-side setting. This is taken to the ultimate extreme in his
last opera Guillaume Tell with its stunning re-creation of the historical Switzerland, the Alps and the lake.

Historical England also came in for re-incarnation: Rossini's Elizabetta Regina d'Inghilterra bears very little resemblance to her historical counterpart, but is notable because her opening aria is the pre-cursor for Rosina's opening aria - a fascinating example of Rossini's re-use of material.

But it is in the operas of Donizetti that we come across a large number of English and Scottish settings. Whilst we have difficulty taking the exotic location of Emilia di Liverpool seriously, we can be more sympathetic to the historicism in Rosamunda d'Inghilterra which concerns the antics of Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry's mistress the Fair Rosamund. But where Donizetti really seems to score is in his sequence of operas based on the Tudor dynasty.

These start with Elisabetta al Castello di Kenilworth and continue with Anna Bolena, Donizetti's first big hit, then Roberto Devereux and Maria Stuarda. English Opera companies seem to have a fascination with Maria Stuarda above all the rest. It is, of course, a superb opera but not significantly better than some of Donizetti's other ones. Perhaps our fascination with the historical Mary Stuart has something to do with it, and Schiller's invented scene between the 2 queens is quite superb. But the role of Elizabeth is rather short, the original Elisabetta complained about the paucity of this role. Usually in UK performances this role is given to a soprano strong on Character (Pauline Tinsley, Rosalind Plowright) who can make much of the character's appearances in the opera.

Though ENO has done very little early Italian opera in recent years they have done 2 productions of Maria Stuarda, one for Janet Baker and one for Anne Murray. The opera was performed at Grange Park in recent years with Majella Cullagh in the title role and English Touring Opera toured it last year. So it was with some surprise that I learned that Chelsea Opera Group were planning the opera. But on reflection, the last ENO production was some years ago and the promised revivals have never come so apart from ETO in Hackney last year, Maria Stuarda has been pretty absent from the capital.

Chelsea Opera Group have a strong cast, headed by Majella Cullagh. This will be COG's last appearance at Cadogan Hall, for their next appearance in March 2008 they are back in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, when Nelly Miricioiu will be singing Lady Macbeth in the original version of Verdi's opera.

English opera at Buxton Festival

Next season's Vaughan Williams centenary seems to be persuading a number of companies to explore English opera. The Buxton Festival, currently on a roll having had a very successful 2007 season, will be performing RVW's opera Riders to the Sea along with Holst's Savitri and The Wandering Scholar. Savitri is a slightly severe 3-hander based on Indian mythology, in which a woman argues with death for the life of her husband. I remember seeing Dame Janet Baker in it, in performances with Scottish Opera in the 1980's. The Wandering Scholar is a very late work, Holst died before he could hear it, or correct the manuscript. Holst's operas are often curious works and I will be very interested to hear this one. RVW's Riders to the Sea of course needs no introduction.

Continuing in English vein, Buxton will also be doing a stage version of Handel's oratorio Samson with Tom Randle in the title role. More information here.

Review of Maconchy double bill

My review of Independent Opera's double bill of Elizabeth Maconchy operas is here, on Music and Vision.

Last Night's LSO concert

To the Barbican last night for an LSO concert; Richard Hickox conducting Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, Barber's Knoxvill 1915 and Orff's Carmina Burana.

For the Bernstein and the Orff Hickox used a very large orchestra (16 first violins and a total personnel roster of nearly 100 people). The Barbican stage can barely contain these numbers and I still remain unconvinced that it is the best place for such large scale works. From our seat in the front stalls, the orchestra seemed to dominate the choir in both works. In the Orff particularly I would have liked a greater number of choral singers than could be accommodated on the Barbican stage.

For the Bernstein the choral contribution was polished but I found the singing lacked the energy and incision needed in the piece. The most moving moment was the treble solo in the 2nd movement, beautifully sung by Jesus Duque from the Tiffin Boys Choir.

Barber's Knoxville 1915 is one of those pieces that I am sure I have never heard in concert before, but which is familiar all the same. The programme did not include the words so we had to hang on Laura Claycomb's every note. By and large she succeeded in getting all the words across and floated a beautiful sound in the lyrical passages.

I have always thought that Carl Orff had a lot in common with Gustav Holst. Both produced one very popular work and then showed no interest in following this up, but explored other less popular veins. Though the other 2 works in Orff's Trionfi trilogy explore some of the same areas as Carmina Buran, they do so without this works intoxicating melodic flair.

I first sang Carmina Burana as a student under a pupil of Orff's. He conducted the rehearsals with great emphasis on rhythm and articulation. We quite often practised without any pitch at all. He laid great stress on the words and they way we projected them, almost spitting them out. This is something which can create a strong effect in the piece, but is too often neglected by choirs. The LSO chorus sang beautifully but in the passages like the quiet sections of the first movement, O Fortuna, their delivery lacked energy and vividness. As in the Bernstein, they somehow could not get energy across the orchestra and there was rather an over emphasis on beautiful singing. In the louder passages the balance rather favoured the orchestra, but there was some beautiful singing from the semi-chorus in the quieter moments.

The soloists were probably about the best you could get in this work. The Swan was, correctly, sung by a tenor, Barry Banks, rather than a counter-tenor. His theatrical delivery was matched by an assured vocal performance, this was the Swan as it should be with the tenor at the top of, or beyond, his comfortable range. The baritone soloist is similarly taken to the very top (and bottom) of his vocal comfort zone. This seemed to hold no fears for Christopher Maltman who turned in a beautifully sung but very dramatic account of the baritone solos. Laura Claycomb did exactly what the soprano solo is asked to do, floated high notes beautifully.

In many ways this was a fine performance. The soloists were superb and the orchestra were on top form, if only the performance had taken place in a venue which would have allowed the chorus to expand to match them.

To Sadlers Wells last night to see Independent Opera's impressive double bill of operas by Elizabeth Maconchy. It turns out that the atmospheric lighting was by Matthew Haskins who lit my opera Garrett when we premiered it in 2001 at Hoxton Hall, small world.

Recent CD Review

My review of a disc of excerpts from Handel's Serse is here, on MusicWeb International.
We must be a little forgiving as it was recorded 20 years ago. Even so slightly disappointing. There is some fine musicianship on display but it does not add up to a satisfying disc ...

Tomorrow night we are off to see Independent Opera's enterprising double bill of Elizabeth Maconchy's operas at Sadlers Wells. This young opera company have constantly surprised me with their choices of opera. Designed to give young professionals opportunities and support (there is now a foundation which gives grants and help) they could have happily jogged along mining the small scale end of the standard operatic repertoire. But last year they mounted a very creditably production of Handel's Orlando and now the Maconchy double bill.

One thing, though, is nagging in my brain. I can remember reading an interview with Elizabeth Maconchy and her librettist, Ursula Vaughan Williams, at the time of a previous outing for their one act opera, The Sofa. Both were pretty elderly but very sprightly and lively to interview. Unfortunately I can find no trace of the interview. Frustrating.

Review of Turandot

My review of Midsummer Opera's performance of Turandot (with the complete Alfano ending) is here, on Music and Vision.

EPSS and more

Off to Bristol on Sunday to the English Poetry and Song Society recital at Bristol Music Rooms - an attractive mix of the well known and the lesser known with songs by Gurney, Parry and Stanford, plus the winners from their most recent competition (including one of my own). This meant that we got 3 different settings of Gurney's most well known poem, 'Severn Meadows', which was fascinating. Bryan Blyth Daubney's song, I felt, shone out as the clear winner amongst the competition songs.

On the way home we managed to catch the BBC broadcast of the John Foulds World Requiem from the Albert Hall. It was a fascinating work, even over the car radio, and I look forward to hearing the recording though we did wish that we could have been present in the Albert Hall. It was interesting to hear the various moments in the work which seemed to almost approach Messiaen. Soprano Jean-Michelle Charbonnet had a rather too vibrato laden voice for my taste, but otherwise the performance seemed to be exemplary. May we hope for a repeat next year?

Gleanings from this month's Opera magazine

Jessica Duchen introduces Korngold's Wunder der Heliane which the LPO are doing on Nov 21st. This is one of these overblown symbolist laden plots where I sometimes think I'd be better off not knowing what's going on and just sit back and listen to the music.

And Nicola LeFanu introduces her mother, Elizabeth Maconchy's operatic output. Independent Opera are doing a double bill of Maconchy's works this week at Sadlers Wells. Rather poignantly, the libretto of The Sofa is by Ursula Vaughan Williams, who died recently.

Lilian Baylis always makes good copy:-
'Now then you bounders, I know you enjoy Faust and Torvatore, but you've jolly well got to like these other things we do for you or we shall have to shut up shop.'
In her article on Baylis, Elizabeth Schafer refers to Joan Cross's unpublished autobiography. From the bits quoted it sounds fascinating and I would hope we could have it published. Another source was the Old Vic/Sadlers Wells magazine; articles by Ethel Smyth on opera in England (was it a wash out), Edward Dent on Rossini and an introduction to the first English production of The Snow Maiden.

Rose Bampton has died. You might not know her name, but she was 99, a remarkably link with a bygone age. She sang alongside Ponselle and gave the New York premiere of Barber's Dover Beach.

In New York, Gerard Mortier has published news of his first season at NYCO (Rakes Progress, Francis of Assisi, Einstein on the Beach, Nixon in China and Death in Venice with Ian Bostridge. All very 20th century but nothing to really frighten the horses. Mortier has also said that he's not interested in taking NYCO into the Cinema (like the Met) but opera houses should be taking people out of the cinema and into the opera house. Quite So!

A 21st century opera, Margaret Garnier, made its way to New York. But Martin Bernheimer describes it as another let's pretend modern opera for people who hate modern opera.

In St. Louis, there was a gala for Colin Graham, including an old St. Louis discovery, Syliva McNair. She seems to be retired from opera which is a shame. One of those talented, where-did-they-go people. The new opera at St. Louis was another versio of Anna Karenina with a libretto by Graham. Graham emphasised less the social drama and more Levin's philosophical musings - probably not what people want when they think of Anna Karenina.

In Australia, Deborah Jones was less than convinced by Previn's A Street car Named Desire, commenting that it might have been better not to have set Blanche's famous phrase to music, leaving it spoken. Still, I'd have liked to have heard Yvonne Kenny in the role. Jones also felt that the word setting was 'uncongenial or the vocal line too high for comfortable apprehension'. Quite. Another plus seems to have been seeing Teddy Tahu Rhodes's washboard stomach!

In Vienna, a production of Le Nozze di Figaro centred round a football team, where do these ideas come from.

Over in Halle, the annual Handel Festival has finished. Again I've not been, though always mean to. The performances of Riccardo Primo with Lawrence Zazzo, Geraldine McGreevy and Nuria Rial sound as if they were well worth catching. Stephen Lawless's production of Ariodante was set on what seems to have been comic book Scotland. Still it did have Caitlin Hulcup in the title role and Gillian Keith as Ginevra. Bernd Hoppe and I seem to disagree over Christopher Robson in the old ENO production, so I'm not sure whether his approbation of Axel Köhler is good or bad.

Over in Potsdam they were enterprisingly doing Purcell's King Arthur and Lampe's The Dragon of Wantley. The productions sound as if they were promising, I think the Purcell was brought to England and played at the newly restored Theatre Royal in Bury St. Edmunds. The reviewer mentions another Lampe opera, Margery, or A Worse Plague than the Dragon, now I wonder what that's like?

Chris Merritt seems to have made a brief reappearance at Pesaro. The reviewer mentions his early career there in Rossini and then his later career in character roles. But the linking between this is, I think, a foray into bigger more dramatic tenor roles which may not have been entirely sound. Still the production of Otello, the Rossini one, did have Juan Diego Florez in it even if his wig was awful (and it doesn't look to bad in the photo.)

Max Loppert's review of the Robert Carsen Ring is interesting. Hugh Canning loved it when it was in Cologne, but Loppert disliked the Venice incarnation. Always a fascinating problem, do the 2 of them simply disagree or was there a fault in translation from Cologne to Venice. Sharing and borrowing productions can often be a tricky business and in a new atmosphere, things which previously worked no longer seem to.

Back in London, We Hear That... holds forth the promise of lots of Handel in London; David Daniels as Jonathan in ENO's new Saul, Rosemary Joshua in ENO's new Partenope directed by Christopher Alden and Graham Vick doin Tamerlano with Chrisianne Stotijn at Covent Garden. Quite wonderful. Also in London, Jonathan Miller is doing a new La Boheme in 2009 for ENO. It doesn't seem that long since the present one was new.

Susan Graham is going to be doing her first Marschalling, in Houston, and Renee Fleming will be doing Rossini's Armida at the Met.

Tomorrow we should have been going to hear John Foulds's A World Requiem at the Royal Albert Hall. But instead we are winging our way to Bristol where one of my songs is being performed at a recital devoted to Ivor Gurney and his teachers at Bristol Music Club in Clifton. Its an afternoon recital and has a beautifully put together programme which mixes Gurney and his teachers with 5 contemporary Gurney settings from the most recent English Poetry and Song Society competition. So we'll have to hope we can catch the John Fould's on the Radio on the way home.

Something to look forward to

We've just booked tickets for Opera North's London visit in February 2008 when they are bringing Peter Grimes (with Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts in the title role) and Pinocchio, the new opera by Jonathan Dove and Alastair Middleton. Dove and Middleton were responsible for the wonderful not-quite-opera that was the Christmas show at the Young Vic last year and I look forward to Pinocchio enormously.

The performances take place at Sadlers Wells and also there in June are a pair of semi-staged performances of Vaughan Williams's opera The Pilgrims Progress. This is sad in some ways as the presence of the opera at Sadlers Wells in semi-staged version almost certainly means that no-one is doing a fully staged version in London for the anniversary year. I have not heard whether ENO are reviving their production of Sir John in Love, but it would seem criminal for them not to bring it back in the autumn.

For the June performances of The Pilgrims Progress, Richard Hickox will be conducting a very fine cast including Roderick Williams as the Pilgrim, Neal Davies as Bunyan with Sarah Tynan, Pamel Helen Stephen, Timothy Robinson, James Gilchrist, Robert Hayward and Graeme Danby in the cast.

Oh, that's of course another reason why people don't perform the opera, it requires a large cast plus a good chorus. In fact, the only time I have seen it staged was at the Royal Northern College of Music in 1992, directed by Joseph Ward (who sang Lord Lechery in the premiere. This performance had Stephen Wallace, in drag, as Madam Bubble (he went on to play the Fairy Queen, in drag, for Grange Park Opera); Jeffery Lloyd-Roberts in a number of tenor roles, Henry Waddington as Pontius Pilate and even Alice Coote as an Angel of the Lord.

Review of La Straniera

My review of last Saturday's concert performance of Bellini's La Straniera is here, on Music and Vision.

The news of my new CD continues to find its way into the press and I continue to be tickled each time I come across a reference to it; most recently in Choir and Organ magazine.

After much logistical heartache, we have now managed to fix a date for our concert celebrating the launch of the CD. So on Saturday 26th January at St. Peter's Church, Eaton Square, the eight:fifteen vocal ensemble, organist Paul Ayres, and conductor Paul Brough will be giving a concert to celebrate the CD launch.

The choir will be performing Mundy's Vox Patris Coelestis complete; they sang part of the work at their first concert in 2005. My Evening Service will be premiered, in its version for 4-part choir and organ; the Magnificat from the Evening Service was recorded on the CD in the 3-part choir and organ version. They will also be performing my motet Lucis Creator Optime. Paul Ayres will also be giving some organ solos. The concert will be followed by a reception. More details to follow.

This means that we are giving a short, 2-concert season at St. Peter's because on Saturday 23rd February, FifteenB with Paul Ayres, this time conducting, and Malcolm Cottle on organ, will be giving a concert as well. They will be performing Haydn's Little Organ Mass, plus my Tagore setting Crossing, for choir and organ, and premiering the new version of the choruses from my 1998 Passion setting.

Recent CD Review

My review of a disc of Cesare Siepi's early recordings is here, on MusicWeb International.
An excellent introduction to the work of an outstanding Italian bass, heard in his impressively youthful prime. ...

Review of Londinium City Voices concert

My review of Thursday's concert by Londinium City Voices, conductor Nicholas Jenkins, is here on Music and Vision. The concert included Richard Strauss's rarely performed Die Göttin im Putzzimmer.

Review of Teseo

My review of English Touring Opera's production of Handel's Teseo is here, on Music and Vision.