Street Scene

The Young Vic are bringing back their production of Street Scene in the Autumn, from 15 Sep to 1 Oct. We missed it the first time round, so we are looking forward to it this time. Directed by John Fulljames, choreography by Arthur Pita with the BBC Concert Orchestra and the Southbank Sinfonia sharing the honours in the pit (not that the Young Vic actually has a pit).

I first saw the piece in a one-off charity West End performance one Sunday night with a terrific cast which include Janis Kelly as Rose (a role that she would repeat with ENO) and also including various celebrities in smaller roles, Alec McCowen doing a rather nice soft shoe shuffle. The piece had immense power and energy. Something which wasn't quite repeated in David Pountney's production for ENO, with its big set piece production numbers. The first half of the musical is rather long, with so much plot to expound, and Pountney didn't quite solve this. So I'm looking forward to seeing the piece again.

Fairy Queen at the Queen Elizabeth Hall

When originally produced, Purcell's The Fairy Queen was the equivalent of a collaboration between the Royal Opera and the National Theatre with sets which would have been a credit to Cecil B de Mille. In its time it was a popular and fashionable show, raising enthusiasm seen nowadays in musicals rather than more high-brow art.

The problem from our point of view, is that Purcell's music has only a tangential relationship to the play's plot. And of course, the restoration play is only vaguely reminiscent of Shakespeare's original. No amount of research can recapture the original spirit in modern performances. We learn that the scene with the Chinese Man and Woman makes reference to Queen Mary's passion for Chinese vases and orange trees which were King Williams symbol, hence the whole scene would be seen as a compliment to their Wedding Anniversary. This doesn't help us in modern performance, where we struggle to make the finale fit our modern day concepts of how a work should be coherently constructed.

Perhaps we wouldn't struggle with it if Purcell's music wasn't so great. The music, some 2 hours of it, forms a substantial item in its own right but does not quite make a satisfying whole, consisting as it does of a series of disjoint masques with linking numbers. Benjamin Britten attempted to solve the problem by re-ordering and re-shaping the music, but this sort of interventionist approach dropped out of fashion with the period performance movement. Now Philip Pickett and the New London Consort have had another go. At the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Friday they performed The Fairy Queen in a production by the Mexican director Mauricio Garcia Lozano.

Pickett has re-ordered Purcell's music to create a more satisfying and coherent whole. And Lozano has applied a new plot to this. The results could have been rather precious. 9 singers and 5 circus artist come together and travel to Arcadia, after a degree of social and erotic interaction they pair off happily. It is debatable whether Pickett's new ordering of the music is any more satisfactory than before, but I hold no torch for performing the piece exactly as originally; so that if it worked for the New London Consort, then fine.

The programme included detailed back story for all the characters, who were modern day archetypes (the shop girl, the career girl etc.). But frankly, we could just as well have been watching a group of people undergoing some sort of new-age group therapy. The sheer preciousness of the concept could have been annoying, but Pickett and his cast performed Purcell's music with such conviction and with some style, that little else mattered.

Lozano's production utilised suitcases to provide structure and context on stage (there was no set as such). Within this there were some striking moments and some supremely beautiful ones. Ed Lyon's beautiful account of If Love's a sweet passion was followed by I press her hand gently sung by a small group of singers sitting casually at the back of the stage. Simple, but somehow moving.

The main roles were sung by Joanne Lunn, Ed Lyon and Michael George, supported by Dana Marbach, Faye Newton, Christopher Robson, Tim Travers-Brown, Joseph Cornwell and Simon Grant.

Lunn gave a stand out performance, with Juno, Night and the Plaint; this latter performed almost as a piece of catharsis after therapy, which luckily did the piece no harm. Lyon was Autumn and the Chinese Man, bringing what is quite a strong and vibrant voice to bear in a stylish way. Veteran Bass Michael George was of course the drunken Pot, Sleep, Winter and Hymen. George's voice is perhaps not as resonant as it was once but he retains a sense of style in this music, a good range and a strong stage presence.

Dana Marbach and Faye Newton divide the remaining soprano solos, each impressive and appealing with Marbach as a glamorous Femme Fatale singing Mysterie and Spring. Newton was a soprano Mopsa to Simon Grant's Corydon in a straight-forward non-camp version of the duet. Elsewhere Grant was a slightly disappointing Phoebus

Veteran counter-tenor Christopher Robson turned in a hauntingly beautiful solo as Secresie. Timothy Travers Brown was a slightly unlikely Summer, performing the solos as a gay school teacher in shorts. Joseph Cornwell as a middle aged biker provided strong support.

Instead of dancers, Lozano used circus artists from the Circus Space (Kaveh Rahnama, Lauren Hendry, Jose Triguero Delgado, Tink Bruce, Boldo Janchivdorj). These 4 were embedded with the singers forming a seamless blend of characters. The acrobatics proved surprisingly evocative and effective in the dance movements. Never have I seen juggling so poetic.

The singers in the ensemble formed the chorus, sometimes singing en masse and sometimes just 4 voices. Pickett's instrumental ensemble was similarly small, just 1 instrument per part, a total of 15 players.

The performance was surprisingly involving, with all singers contributing stylish accounts of Purcell's music. Whilst one could fault Lozano's production for the preciousness of the concept, the main sign of a good production is surely the strength of the performances the director gets from the singers. on this basis Lozano and Pickett's Fairy Queen was a great success indeed.

Grainger Edition

This year is the 50th anniversary of Grainger's death. Next weekend there is a weekend long commemoration at Kings Place. But also, Chandos have re-issued their Grainger Edition recordings in a glorious 19CD box set, containing some 23 hours of music. Whilst the recordings do not cover every single thing that Grainger wrote, they certainly do give a fine overview of the wonderful breadth of his work. There is an illuminating review of the box set here, on the MusicWeb International web-site. The set is available for around £45.00, so what are you waiting for!

Recent CD review

My review of Weser-Renaissance Bremen's disc of Lassus's Sybilline Prophecies and Christmas Motets is here, on MusicWeb International.

Cordes and his musicians fall just short of bringing these pieces to life.

Estonia Philhamonic Chamber Choir

To the Cadogan Hall on Tuesday for a concert by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under their conductor Daniel Reuss. Whilst the hall was busy, it was by no means full which was surprising given the reputation of the choir and the fact that the concert included two very substantial works by Arvo Pärt.

They opened with Mendelssohn's Three Psalms Opus 78, which are are works that I know from singing them rather than listening to them in concert. Reuss's tempi seemed somewhat on the swift side, losing something of the grandeur of Mendelssohn's piece and it was only in the final psalm, Mein Gott, warum has du mich verlassen? that the performance seemed to come together. Things were not helped by the rather indifferent solo singing in the first psalm, Warum toben die Heiden?. All the soloists in the Mendelssohn and the other pieces in the programme came from the choir and, the opening psalm apart, were excellent.

The remaining items on the programme were all either Scandinavian or Estonian and something in the temper of these works seemed to suit the choir better. Whereas, in the Mendelssohn, their rather characterful, focussed tone seemed to lack warmth and grandeur, in Pärt, Sibelius and Kreek they seemed entirely apposite.

The performance of Sibelius's Rakastava, in the mixed choir version, was entirely apposite and everything it should be, wonderfully atmospheric. The first half concluded with Pärt's Magnificat, written in 1989. This is a magnificently austere piece and the choir's performance was nearly faultless, their tone quality suiting the work's character perfectly. All that was lacking really was a suitable acoustic, Cadogan Hall is really rather too dry for this style of choral music.

The second half opened with a sequence of works by the Estonian composer Cyrillus Kreek (1889 - 1962), who was highly influential in creating a body of work for Estonian choirs and who devoted much of his time to collecting folk songs. He collected around 6,000 tunes and produces more than 500 folk song arrangements. His Psalms of David were written in 1923, these are sober, austere works which impress by their balance, clarity of word setting and directness of harmony. They deserve to be better known within choirs in this country. There then followed 3 of Kreek's arrangements of Estonian religious folk songs, works which had a far more direct appeal and charm.

Finally, we heard 5 movements from Pärt's mammoth Kanon pokajnen (Canon of Repentance). The movements performed were Ode VI, Kondak, Ikos, Ode IX, Prayer after the Canon. This is Pärt at his most austere and gnomic. At times the ikon-like unchangeability of the pieces threatened to degenerate into stasis, but the choir's secure grip of Pärt's vocal lines and the intensity of delivery from both choir and excellent soli ensured that it did not. Some of the vocal writing is rather merciless and the choir were superb in their delivery and confidence. I think that the performance would have been helped a great deal by a warmer, more resonant acoustic would would have allowed Pärt's tintinnabulations to resound rather more; we were sometimes aware of the spare textures, without the benefit of an aura of harmonic resonance from the acoustic. But this was a welcome opportunity to hear an intense performance of a wonderful piece.


Finally the choir gave us a clutch of folk songs as encores.

Winterreise

As part of pianist Gary Matthewman's Lied in London, we heard a private recital of Schubert's Winterreise on Sunday, with bass Matthew Rose. I must confess that I've always been uneasy about performing Schubert's songs in transposition, though I have to agree that this is me being rather precious. After all, the sound and pitch of Schubert's own pianos would have been vastly different from a contemporary grand piano such as the one Gary Matthewman played on Sunday. And any objections I might have had about adjustments that might have been made were swept away by the sheer interpretative power of Rose's voice. Heard in a large drawing room with an audience of less than 100 people, this was both intimate and powerful and we certainly needed a strong drink after Rose and Matthewman had finished the recital.

But to return to Schubert's songs, I supposed the biggest problem I have is when the vocal line is transposed an octave so that a person of a different sex can sing it. Now, Schubert might have been happy to let this happen? Did he perform his songs for female voice himself? If he did, then I can hardly complain. But Schubert's piano parts are so perfectly constructed, that to completely alter the relationship between piano and voice by moving the voice part up an octave (or down) is surely an awkward move. Perhaps I need to do more research into this subject.

Review of Lucrezia Borgia

My review of the ENO's new production of Lucrezia Borgia is now on-line here, at Music and Vision. Its a subscription sight but you do get hi-res images of the production.

Recent CD reviews

My review of a reissue of Offenbach from the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra is here.

For a bit of fun at budget price you can’t go wrong.

And my review of the rarity from Rossini's maturity, La Gazzetta, is here.

Charmingly effective … you might well be entranced.

And finally, my review of the 1950's recording of Menotti's The Consul is here. All three reviews are on MusicWeb International.

The original recording of The Consul is a vividly dramatic and highly atmospheric.

Load.CD

I've started making some of my music available at the load.CD website (http://www.load.cd/) and am currently featured on the front page!

Radio Silence

Apologies for the lack of posts, I've been busy doing admin and promotion work for the stage premiere of my opera When a Man Knows at the end of next month. I've signed up to ArtsMediaContacts and have been busy planning and sending press releases (with more to come as we get closer).

We have also taken delivery of 5,000 A6 flyers, and very handsome they look too. I'm not certain what I'm going to do with 5,000, but have started addressing envelopes! We have commissioned and image from an artist friend and we hope to use this on the posters and on the programmes; she's currently hard at work on it and we look forward to seeing someone else's visual interpretation.

I've had meetings with the two lead singers and the director to help plan and finalise things, plus discussions about costumes.

I'm currently working on a mailing list for people who might be interested in our attractive group booking offer (15% off plus 1 free seat if you phone up the box office and are a group of 8 or more).

CD Review

My review of the disc of scenes from Strauss operas, entitled Amor, featuring Natalie Dessay and Felicity Lott is here.

This disc is something of a curiosity.

Juan Diego Florez review

My review of Thursday's Juan-Diego Florez Rosenblatt recital at the Royal Festival Hall is here, on Music and Vision (subscription site).

On Thursday we went to a private recital of Mahler lieder. The accompanist was Joseph Middleton who will be accompanying Wolfgang Holzmair in a similar recital at Westminster School on Friday 4th February. On Thursday, mezzo-sopranos Catherine Hopper and Anna Huntley and baritone Richard Latham shared a programme of Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Lieder einters fahrenden Gesellen, 3 songs from the Ruckert Lieder (Liebst du um Schonheit, Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder, Ich bin der Weld abhandenen gekommen), plus 6 solo lieder. The singers shared the Wunderhorn and the single songs between them; inevitably Richard Latham was allocated the more military of the Wunderhorn songs. Anna Huntley give a poignant performance of Lieder einer fahrenden Gesellen and Catherine Hopper was beautifully moving in the Ruckert Songs.

Then last night we were at a recital of an entirely different cast. Juan-Diego Florez at the Royal Festival Hall. Florez managed to fill the hall with audience quite easily, the concert was sold out. But I doubt that the venue is entirely ideal for his voice and would have loved to hear him in somewhere smaller. It was a very old-fashioned recital, with the audience having to work very hard for the 4 encores. I can still remember the old days when Montserrat Caballe used to do recitals a Covent Garden; she made the audience work but could be relied upon for up to 7 of them.

Voices Now

Voices Now is an amazing choral festival which is celebrating 75 years of Making Music (which used to be the National Federation of Music Societies), at the Round House. For 4 days you can hear and take part in a whole variety of choral music. There are come and sing events with the Holst Singers and the Camden Township Choir, and there is the Making Music open stage for all interested choirs to take part.

Performers include the BBC Singers, the Latvian Radio Choir, the Holst Singers, the Clerks and the London Symphony Chorus in a wide range of repertoire from Taverner's Missa Gloria Tibi Trinitas to music by Gabriel Jackson, Arvo Part and James MacMillan.

From this month's Opera

I see from this month's Opera magazine that Antonio Pappano and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia have performed Rossini's Guillaume Tell in French with Gerald Finley in the title role and have recorded it live for EMI. A particularly interesting prospect because they seem to have performed the work un-cut. I don't think I am familiar with the tenor John Osborn who sings Arnold, but the magazine's review speaks very highly of his performance in the concert in Rome.

In their obituary of Joachim Herz, Mark Elder remembers him from the 1975 ENO Salome as an awe-inspiring presence with a fearsome intellect and a 'powerful dictatorial style' so it is rather a relief to find that in more recent years he used to refer to himself as 'Das Fossil'.

David Alden is doing a new Giulio Cesare for ENO in 2012. Lovely that they are doing another new Handel production, and I can understand why they need a production to replace the old John Copley one. But can't help wishing that they had decided to extend the repertoire slightly and choose an opera not yet performed at the Coliseum, like Tamerlano or Rodelina.

Tempus per Annum - Respice in me, Domine

Here's the motet for the 9th Sunday in Ordinary time, Respice in me, Domine, for five-part choir, with two soprano parts. 'Look thou upon me, O lord, and have mercy on me'.

Crouch End Festival Chorus at the Barbican

Crouch End Festival Chorus are celebrating their 25^th anniversary this year. Their first concert in an exciting year saw them performing at the Barbican Centre on Saturday 15^th January. Under their founder conductor David Temple and accompanied by the London Orchestra da Camera, they performed and exciting and challenging programme consisting of John Adams's Harmonium and Roberto Gerhard's The Plague.

Harmonium was one of Adams's first major works for chorus and orchestra and, with Shaker Loops, is an important work in Adams's minimalist period. Though Adams has always had his own firm view of his musical development and Harmonium is a distinctively personal take on minimalism. The title comes from a collection of poetry by Wallace Stevens, though in fact Adams did not set any of the poetry, choosing instead poems by John Donne and Emily Dickinson. And here we must come to one of my problems with this work, why worry about exactly what poems you are going to set if you set them in a such a way as to render the text inaudible. Despite the choir's brave efforts, only the text of the middle movement was audible.

Adams musical background in California was in electronic music and much of his music for orchestra and choir is influence by this, in fact much of his symphonic output is expected to be performed modulated by an electronic sound control. So, the orchestra really needs to be able to play the music with precision, turning on a pin. Though the London Orchestra da Camera were capable, they failed to give the important orchestra part the crisp definition it need.

The chorus, though they worked hard with a will, were fighting the rather unfortunate Barbican acoustic, which is less than ideal for large scale choral pieces. So that much of the choir's hard work and enthusiasm seemed to go for nothing as detail was obscured, or never made it over the orchestra. This was especially true of the final movement, a setting of Dickinson's poem Wild Nights, where the energy of the chorus did not completely cross the foot-lights.

After the interval, things could not have been more different. Gerhard's The Plague is not strictly a choral work. Commissioned by the BBC in 1964, it is written for chorus, orchestra and narrator. Gerhard set an English text taken from Albert Camus's La Peste, the story of the African town of Oran suffering from the bubonic plague in the 1940's; a story which can be taken literally or read as an allegory of the Nazi occupation of France. Gerhard uses the chorus to represent the people of Oran, with a chorus part which moves from spoken effects, to fully sung lines.

The work is a melodrama, with the spoken part being the character of the doctor who is involved in treating the plague. Paul McGann, dress in period costume and sat at a table with period doctor's bag, performed the narration with in a laid back, dead pan manner which suited the understated nature of the part.

But the main protagonist in the work is really the orchestra, which underpins the narrations and provides interludes which illustrate and point up the text. Gerhard's music is uncompromisingly 2^nd Viennese school in tone, which exactly matches to taxing nature of Camus's narrative. Here the orchestra were on fine form in Gerhard's taxing music and the chorus provided vividly atmospheric interjections with some profoundly poignant singing.

The Plague is not an easy work, not only for the difficulty of Gerhard's writing. But also because of the harrowing nature of the spoken text, particularly in the long scene where Camus describes the death of the young boy; a scene which was handled in a nicely understated manner by McGann.

The result was a powerful and moving performance which did full justice to Gerhard's unusual and difficult work.

Recent CD Reviews

My review of Rossini's Petite Messe Solonelle from Basel Madrigal Choir is here.

Some moments of fine choral singing rather let down by the solo singing.

And my review of Ne me refuse pas, a programme of French 19th century operatic arias (including some interesting lesser known items) from Canadian mezzo-soprano Marie-Nicole Lemieux is here. Both reviews are on MusicWeb International.

A fine disc notable not only for some very fine singing but also for an intelligent and well put together programme.

When a Man Knows, tickets on sale

When a Man Knows has gone up on the Tower Theatre company's box-office web-site, with a very handsome page devoted to the show here.

40 go wild

To celebrate their 25th anniversary, I Fagiolini, director Robert Hollingworth, are releasing a new disc of music for 40-part choir. The centre-piece will be Antonio Striggio's 40-part mass Missa Ecco sì beato giorno, which was memorably performed at the Proms in 2007. It is this piece which a diarist, writing some decades later, remembered as inspiring the composition of Tallis's Spem in Alium, when a Duke (probably the Duke of Norfolk) heard the Striggio composition and challenged an English composer to do as good.

In fact, with Spem in Alium Tallis did far better. As anyone who heard the Proms performance of Striggio's Mass, Striggio does not handle his large scale forces as imaginatively as Tallis. But it will be good to get the piece on disc.

I Fagiolini's disc includes not only Striggio's Missa Ecco sì beato giorno, but the motet on which it is based along with a selection of Striggio's other motets. Plus Tallis's Spem in Alium. This latter is given in a new edition by Hugh Keyte, with instrumental accompaniment for the first time. Spem in Alium is of course a problematic work as the only manuscript we have for it, is in fact the contrafactum, with English words, which was produced for Prince Henry of Wales (elder son of James I). And the only reference to the work's first performance is the diarist writing some decades after the original performance.

Juan Diego Florez

On January 20th there is a chance to hear Juan Diego Florez in recital rather than on the opera stage. He's giving a recital at the Royal Festival Hall, details here And before you groan and complain about opera singers presenting bleeding chunks from their stage repertoire in recital, just look at his programme. It includes two items from Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito (now that I would like to hear on stage with Florez), songs by Rossini, by Lalo and by Prado, plus something from Lalo's Le Roi d'Ys and finishing with Pietoso al lungo pianto from Verdi's early comedy Un giorno di regno. (In case you are wondering, Almeida Prado (1943 - 2010) was one of the most important contemporary Brazilian composers, who studied with Lukas Foss, Nadia Boulanger, Messiaen and Ligeti). So not your normal celebrity recital at all and one which looks more than interesting.