Why?

Some projects you read about and simply wonder why? Why would they want to do that and who on earth thought it would be a good idea. As part of the Young Vic's 2012/13 season, there are details of American Lulu which is being performed there in September 2013. A co-production with the Opera Group, Bregenz and Scottish Opera in association with the London Sinfonietta, it promises to be a version of Berg's Lulu set in New Orleans. But not Berg as we know it; we are promised a 'radical reworking of Berg's unfinished opera', composed by Olga Neuwirth and directed by John Fulljames. Oh dear.

Inside Out Festival

I have to confess that until I read about the forthcoming recital of Viktor Ullmann song at St. Johns Waterloo I had never heard of  the Inside Out Festival. It is running from 22 to 29 October and this year is the third festival. The aim is to celebrate the contribution of London nine universities to cultural life. There are a wide variety of events, music, talks, exhibitions, workshops etc. Performances take place at the various campuses in and around London.

‘On Some Threshold of the Air’ – Songs of Viktor Ullmann

ETO: The Emperor of Atlantis
image credit Richard Hubert Smith

Following on from their performances of Viktor Ullmann's astounding opera The Emperor of Atlantis (see my review), English Touring Opera are promoting a recital by soprano Paula Sides (who appeared in ETO's performances of Ullmann's opera). Accompanied by pianist Jonathan Gale, Sides will be singing songs by Ullmann, celebrating the composer's life and work. The concert is on Tuesday 23 October at St. John's Waterloo. It will be followed by a discussion about Ullmann, the historical context of his works and the art of Terezin. If you thought that The Emperor of Atlantis was amazing, then this is your chance to explore Ullmann's work further. His catalogue runs to some 40 opus numbers, plus a startling 20 or so works written whilst he was in Terezin.

The concert is part of the Inside Out Festival, further details from the festival website.

Coming up - Saul, Magic Flute and much more

The good news is that Glyndebourne are producing more Handel, unfortunately not another opera. Though given my doubts about Handel's previous two operatic outings there (Rodelinda and Giulio Cesare), perhaps that's a good idea. In fact, with the new Julius Caesar at ENO I am beginning to doubt whether any of our major opera companies are capable of staging Handel's opera seria any more. Anyway, rant over. Glyndebourne are staging Handel's Saul in 2015, with William Christie conducting and Barrie Kosky directing. It was Kosky who directed the recent Rameau opera at the London Coliseum, so we can presumably expect lots of theatricality, not much naturalism and perhaps some nudity! The cast includes Lucy Crowe and Sophie Bevan. (see my article about staging Handel oratorios)

Russian music in London

An intriguing concert in London tomorrow night (19 October), at St James' Church, Piccadilly. The Moscow Svyato-Danilovsky Monastery Choir will be performing Russian sacred music and poetry. The concert 'is dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the Diocese of Sourozh and 5th anniversary of the Reunification of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Motherland and abroad.' Suffice it to say that the Svyato-Danilovsky Monastery (the St Daniel Monastery) is in Moscow, it was founded in the late 13th century by Alexander Nevsky's son, Daniel. It was one of the last monasteries to be closed under the Soviet regime, in 1929, and the first to be restored to the Orthodox Church, in 1983. It is now the headquarters of the Russian Orthodox Church.

No detailed programme is available, but there are more details on the concert from St. James' Church website, more information on the monastery from its website, where there are pages in English.

FifteenB review

There is now a review on the Bachtrack.com website of FifteenB's gig at the Herne Hill Festival on Saturday.

http://www.bachtrack.com/review-herne-hill-festival-fifteenb-consort

The Grange - book launch

Northington Grange today

To Berry Bros & Rudd in St. James' Street yesterday for the launch of The Grange, Richard Osborne and Wasfi Kani's new book about Northington Grange, the house which hosts Grange Park Opera each  summer. The house, currently owned by Lord Ashburton, is of great historical interest and has been through a great many vicissitudes in the 20th century. The book aims to fill in the gaps, with a glorious selection of 250 pictures and Richard Osborne's linking narrative.

Don Giovanni at London Coliseum

ENO Don Giovanni:
Iain_Patterson, Darren Jeffery
(c)Richard Hubert Smith

ENO have revived theatre director Rufus Norris’s 2010 production of Don Giovanni, which was Norris’s operatic debut. Bringing in directors from outside the operatic world has always been a way of introducing interesting and innovative ways of thinking about opera, but does not guarantee it. Sometimes operatic inexperience can generate something truly innovative, but other times just a mess or even worse. Norris is musically literate and has staged musicals but Don Giovanni was his first attempt at a full opera. He avoided the worst solecisms and did not make the mistake of staging the libretto rather than the music. Of course, with this revival, there was also the chance to tidy things up a bit as well.

Co-Opera Co workshops

Co-Opera Co have announced their 2012/13 season of training and development workshops. The company is dedicated to helping professional singers and other opera professionals at the early stages of their career. In addition to their annual season of operas, they arrange workshops with distinguished practitioners. This year they have some pretty impressive names giving workshops, Rosalind Plowright, Diana Montague, David Rendall, Toby Spence, Ryland Davies and John Graham-Hall.

A day with Bach

The new Richards, Fowkes & co organ
at St George's Hanover Square

The London Bach Society and the Royal College of Organists' London Organ Forum are presenting a one-day event at St. George's Church, Hanover Square on Saturday 3 November. Entitled Hearing Bach's Voice: Organ, Chorale and Passion, the event is a mixture of talks, discussions, a masterclass and a concert. There is even a chance for the audience to join in at the evening concert.

The Space goes on - for now

The Space, the new digital arts website developed by the Arts Council and the BBC, is to continue in its present form until March 2013. In its first six months of existence the service provided free, live and on demand content to 900,000 visitors and enabled people to experience events from London 2012 which they would not have been able to do live. The service was intended by the Arts Council to help build digital skills within the arts. The Arts Council supported The Space with £3.5 million in new commissions. Whilst everyone praises the website as a shining example, such things don't come cheap and the Arts Council invested over £8 million. A comprehensive evaluation has been commissioned with results due in the new year; sounds ominous.

London Handel Players on the road

London Handel Players

The London Handel Players are the resident house band for the London Handel Festival, performing a number of concerts each year at St. George's Square, Hanover Square and Wigmore Hall as part of the festival, including accompanying the performances of Handel's oratorios and dramatic works. The group made their debut at the 2000 London Handel Festival. They also have a life outside the festival and will be making an appearance in Oxford tomorrow, 17 October.

Opera Holland Park - season dates

Opera Holland Park has announced its  productions and dates for next season. Cav and Pag - first night June 4, Madama Butterfly - first night June 8, Les Pecheurs de Perles - first night June 25, L'Elisir d'Amore - first night July 16, and of course the production that we are all waiting for, Wolf-Ferrari's I gioielli della Madonna (with Natalya Romaniw) - first night July 23. The Christine Collins Young Artists will be performing Madama Butterfly on June 14. Further information from the Opera Holland Park website.

The missing pillar - music and the Ebacc

The Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM) has started their Bacc for the Future Campaign to persuade the Government to remedy plans for the the EBacc. Currently, plans indicated that the English Baccalaureate will require a pupil to have achieved a certificate in five subject areas, maths, English, sciences, languages (ancient and modern) and humanities (defined as only history or geography). This leaves music and the other practical arts out in the cold, with no incentive for the pupils to study them. There are already indications that such a change might have a poor effect on the number of children studying music.

New Direction at WNO

David Poutney's tenure at Welsh National Opera was always going to be interesting and now the company's programme is taking a striking new direction with the production of a group of contemporary works, all UK premieres, over the next few years, in a series entitled British Firsts. We already knew that WNO were giving the UK stage premiere of Jonathan Harvey's Wagner Dream (given its first UK performance at the Barbican in a semi-staged production). Thanks to a $2 million gift from the Getty Family, there are now a selection of others in the following years.

Delectable music - Nash Ensemble season continues

The Nash Ensemble opened their 2012/13 season at the Wigmore Hall last month with a pair of programmes featuring British music from the first half of the 20th century, Bax, Britten, Bridge, Grainger, Bliss, Quilter and Elgar. Their season continues in a similar vein on Saturday 27 October with tenor John Mark Ainsley, and Ian Brown, piano, in a lovely concert which includes Britten's Three Divertimenti, music by Bridge, songs for tenor and string quartet by Warlock, some of Elgar's lighter chamber music and RVW's On Wenlock Edge. There are 10 concerts in all in the season, with some very delectable music to come.

FifteenB at Herne Hill Music festival - the photos

Photos of us performing on Saturday at the Herne Hill music festival. The full set can be seen on the Festival's Facebook page.

Handel's Castratos - Senesino and Carestini

Senesino in 1735

The singers who were the great stars of Handel's day were not the sopranos or the tenors, but the castrati. There were only ever one or two at the prime position, and these men could command huge salaries and generate amazing public enthusiasm. Handel worked with a number, but he never managed to work with the best known castrati of the day  Farinelli. There just two who had a significant role in his operas, Senesino and Carestini. Senesino created the most remarkable number of roles for the composer.

Francesco Bernardi (1686 - 1758) was the son of a Siennese barber so, not unnaturally his stage name was Senesino. He started in the Sienna Cathedral choir, made his stage debut in Venice in 1707 and by 1717 was creating quite a stir whilst singing in Dresden. His salary in Dresden was huge and even included the use of a carriage. He objected to his part in the opera Flavio Criso by the Dresden court composer Heinichen in 1720; this meant that when Handel came by, looking for singers for the Royal Academy in London, Sensino agreed to join him. Handel had heard him singing in Dresden (in 1719 in Teofane) and had been instructed by the directors of the Royal Academy to try and engage him.

CD Review - I remember

Ben Moore-Morris is a young pianist/songwriter/composer who has just released his first album I remember eleven tracks each of which features Moore-Morris’s piano playing along with Karin Fransson’s vocals. Moore-Morris is a self taught pianist with an interest in film music and his web-site describes him as a cinematic composer. The disc has eleven tracks on it, all reassuringly long (over five minutes) with an indication that Moore-Morris is not frightened of trying to develop his material, in fact I would rather have liked a couple of seriously long tracks with substantial, more highly developed pieces on them. Of the eleven tracks, five are purely instrumental.

My turn

Well, its my turn in the spot-light tonight. Rather than writing about a performance, I'll be performing myself with my ensemble the FifteenB Consort. Being as there are only seven of us performing, we'll be very definitely in the lime-light. The centre-piece of the concert is Palestrina's glorious six-part  Missa tu es petrus, I never like performing mass setting at one sitting, so the concert is structured like a mass, with plainchant propers and motets based on the propers. To provide further punctuation, clarinettist Peter Cigleris will be playing some unaccompanied music for clarinet, Malcolm Arnold, Anton Stadler, Harvey/Gershwin and Stravinsky (at the positions in the mass where you'd normally get the sermon and the consecration). We are including Stravinsky's three Latin motets to complement the clarinet pieces. Its all at 7.30pm tonight at St. Faith's Church, Herne Hill, part of the Herne Hill Music Festival. More details at my website.

To Bristol - Evensong and Judging

Bristol Cathedral

To Bristol yesterday for a concert at Colston Hall. As we made good time travelling from London, we took advantage to catch Evensong at Bristol Cathedral sung by the lay clerks under Mark Lee. The Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis were by Humphrey Clucas (born 1941), whose music I had not come across before. He seems to have been a lay vicar at Westminster Abbey. The setting was unaccompanied and written with a nice practicality, suitable for an ensemble of just 7 men; though perhaps it did sound as if the composer had rather OD'd on Vaughan Williams before writing it. The anthem was In Manus Tuas by John Sheppard, a perfect piece of early Tudor polyphony, beautifully sung as the sun was setting.

Cafe Oto

I have to confess to not having heard of Cafe Oto, and then it cropped up twice. First as a venue for a recent performance of the Cage Song Books and now as a result of them getting the inaugural Genesis prize. The cafe is based in Dalston and acts as a cafe during the day, then in the evenings host an eclectic programme of adventurous live music. Their website says that they were created in 2008 with the aim of providing a home for creative music that lives outside the mainstream. Their programme for the next month is eclectic and well worth exploring.

Diamond Songs @ Colston Hall - Tonight

Tonight's recital at Bristol's Colston Hall, Diamond Songs, is organised by the English Poetry and Song Society and being given by Sarah Leonard and Stephen Varcoe, with Nigel Foster on piano. The theme of the concert is composers who were Master's of the King's (or Queen's) Music. My special interest is that the  concert also includes performances of the four finalists in the English Poetry and Song Society's Diamond Jubilee Composition Competition and my song For David on His Birthday is amongst them (You can hear the tenor version of the song on Sound Cloud). Read on for the complete programme.

London Song Festival

The London Song Festival returns on Wednesday 31 October for six concerts of lieder and song, at St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden. Artistic director Nigel Foster accompanies Yvonne Kenny, Roderick Williams and a fine array of young singers. Anniversaries touched on are John Ireland, Frederick Delius, Claude Debussy and Samuel Coleridge Taylor. These ensure that the recitals often have a 20th century theme running through them and we are going to be treated to some interesting and undeservedly neglected songs.

John Cage - Song Books

John Cage's Song Books were published in 1970, they are a collection of solos in which Cage mixes notations, varying from the traditional to completely abstract, some works consist of instructions for actions rather then conventional notation. In the work, Cage is challenging the very idea of what a work of art constitutes. Having read Kay Larsson's book about Cage and Zen, I have come to a better understanding how Cage was attempting to remove himself from the artistic process. Quite a challenging idea for a composer.

Anyway, on 20 October at Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, E1 6AB you can experience the Song Books for yourself, performed by ex-Scratch Orchestra members alongside a younger generation of performers and composers. Further information from the New Work Network website.

"It seemed to me impossible to leave this world before I had completed that for which I was destined"

You may recognise the title of this post as a quotation from Beethoven's Heiligenstadt Testament. There is a conference at the Southbank on 27 and 28 October 2012 which seeks to explore Beethoven's dilemma. Entitled The Beethoven Question: Can Art Make Life Worth Living, the conference organised by The Musical Brain, is led by the writer and broadcaster Stephen Johnson and the artistic director is Ian Ritchie, director of the City of London Festival.

E.J. Moeran and his cello concerto

E.J.Moeran and Peers Cotemore
on the cover of her recording of the
Cello concerto written for her

E.J. Moeran (1894 - 1950) was perhaps one of the last English composers to be significantly involved with and inspired by folk-song. He trained with Stanford at the Royal College of Music, returning there after the First World War to study with John Ireland. But the big musical influence on his life was his friendship with Peter Warlock, with whom he lived for some years. A late love affair and marriage with the cellist Peers Coetmore brought forth his Cello Concerto and his Cello Sonata. The concerto, still a relatively neglected work, has been taken up by cellist Guy Johnston. He has recorded it with the Ulster Orchestra and JoAnn Fallatta for release in 2013 and will be playing the work on 4 November at the Cadogan Hall, with the English Schools Orchestra for their Jubilee Concert.

Verdi's birthday

Today is Verdi's birthday. So you might like to celebrate by listening to one of the great Verdi tenors of the past, or perhaps one of today's crop. Just to get you thinking, Rolando Villazon is releasing a new, all Verdi album next month. It will be interesting to hear how the music suits his voice after his interesting vocal trajectory of recent years. But I have to say that when I heard him live in Massenet's Werther (a big sing if ever there was one) recently, I was impressed. Anyway, here is is on Youtube, singing Verdi. And more about his Verdi album on the Deutsche Gramophon site.

Chelsea Festival 2012

The Chelsea Festival has been through various incarnations. For many years it was a pretty large scale event, celebrating all that Chelsea had to offer, with substantial sponsorship from the Cadogan Estate. My ensemble, FifteenB, gave a number of concerts at the festival between 2000 and 2006. With the Cadogan Estate concentrating their arts sponsorship on the Cadogan Hall, the festival metamorphosed into the Chelsea Arts Festival, which is alas no more. Now some brave souls have stepped in to fill the gap and created a new Chelsea Festival. This takes place from 13 to 20 October with a variety of events, including some rather interesting concerts.

CD Review - Paper Clips

New music for an old instrument.

The trombone as a long and varied history in Western Classical music, but it has not featured highly as a solo instrument. This is ironic as the instrument itself is flexible and relatively ubiquitous in a variety of other contexts. So if you are a trombone player wanting to extend the repertoire, what to do? If you are Andy Malloy, Julliard trained and based in Los Angeles for the last 30 years, then you commission people to write for your instrument. On this pair of discs he and pianist Karolina Rojahn have recorded a selection of works written specially for Malloy.

Glyndebourne new season 2013

Glyndebourne is in many ways the model of what an modern opera house should be, in that in financial terms its main season is completely sponsored and there is no public money involved (they receive support from the public purse for their Education and touring activities). But there are affordable tickets available, a third of all 2013 tickets will be under £100). And the 2012 festival achieved box sales of 96.2% They also do productions interesting enough to tempt even the most jaded of opera queens. Next year's festival is a case in point with Ariadne auf Naxos slated for a new production, and appearances from Sarah Connolly, Mark Padmore, Soile Isokoski and a host of others

These things shall be in Blackburn

If you are in the Blackburn area on Saturday 13 October, then there is a chance to catch John Ireland's These things shall be and Greater Love hath no man at Blackburn Cathedral, performed by The Appeal Choir of Blackburn Cathedral, the choir of Stonyhurst College and the Northern Sinfonia conducted by Samuel Hudson with Mark Rowlinson baritone. The programme also includes music by Vaughan Williams, Elgar and Walton and is in aid of the Blackburn Cathedral Appeal. More information and tickets from Blackburn Cathedral website.

As with Rosy Steps

The London Handel Festival's autumn season gets underway, and prepares us for the delights of next year's London Handel Festival. On Monday 19 November at Claridges in Brook Street they are holding a fund raising concert, an important event which helps to provide funds for the festival. Ukrainian mezzo-soprano Anna Starushkevych, winner of the 2012 Handel Singing Competition, will be joining Adrian Butterfield (violin/director) and players from the London Handel Orchestra.

Opera Review - Rusalka - Glyndebourne on Tour

Glyndebourne on Tour
Rusalka
Credit Tristram Kenton

Dvorak’s Rusalka has been quite lucky recently with its UK outings, with strikingly different productions being presented by Grange Park Opera, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Covent Garden and English Touring Opera. Now Glyndebourne on Tour have revived Melly Still’s Glyndebourne Festival production for their autumn tour. I caught the second performance of the tour, at Glyndebourne, the first night with the alternative cast, Wioletta Chodowicz in the title role and Ladislav Elgr as the Prince.

Lennox Berkley at Oxford Lieder

On 20 October at 2pm at the Holywell Music Room on Oxford, Johnny Herford (baritone), Stuart Jackson (tenor) and William Vann (piano) present a concert focussing on A.E Housman's A Shrophire Lad with music by Lennox Berkley, Butterworth, Somervell, Gurney and Ireland. The event is part of Oxford Lieder, a festival which runs from 12 October to 27 October and which is well worth exploring.

FifteenB and Peter Cigleris at the Herne Hill Music Festival

We are going to be joined by clarinettist, Peter Cigleris, at our concert on Saturday at the Herne Hill Music Festival. We, the FifteenB Consort, will be singing Plainchant, Palestrina (Missa Tu Es Petrus), Byrd, Bruckner, Stanford, Stravinsky and two of my own motets as part of a Mass for the Feast of St. Calixtus. Peter will be playing the Stravinsky Three Pieces, Malcolm Arnold's Fantasy Opus 87, Anton Stadler's Caprice no. 2 and Paul Harvey's Etudes on Themes of Gershwin. The concert takes place on Saturday 13 October at 7.30pm at St. Faith's Church, Red Post Hill, London SE24 9JQ

Further details http://mad.ly/6c4523 and http://www.hugill.demon.co.uk/The%20Rock%20and%20The%20Key.html

Gleanings from Opera Magazine

I love Opera Magazine's We hear that... column. I'm too lazy to go crawling the interweb for rumours of castings and perfectly happy to wait for Opera Magazine to arrive to find out what they have gleaned.  Tenor Will Hartmann will be playing the Shepherd in Kasper Holten's new production of King Roger in 2014/15 with Mariusz Kwiecien in the title role. After having heard the piece in Santa Fe, I simply don't want to have to wait.

The chance to fail better

Second Movement, the people who performed Emily Howard's Zatopek and who specialise in rarely performed and risk taking opera, are hosting rough for opera, a scratch night for new opera at the Cockpit Theatre, Gateforth Street, Marylebone, NW8 8EH on 14 October at 8pm. The idea is to allow young composers to try out ideas and afterwards there is a chance for audience feedback.

Composers Kate Whitely and Benjamin Lunn will both present brand new work. And an ongoing work by Kim Ashton completes the bill.

Bach Unwrapped

BWV 1001
Bach's manuscript

Kings Place's main focus for 2013 is their Bach unwrapped series with 14 weeks of concerts and events covering pretty well all aspects of Bach's output, including his influence on other composers. There are also a  wide variety of performers, pianos as well as harpsichords, period instruments and modern instruments, choirs of men and boys, choirs of men and women, a viol consort and a string quartet, so there is a real chance to compare and contrast.

Salomon Orchestra

The Salomon Orchestra are back at St. John's Smith Square on October 23 with a programme of symphonic music redolent of high romanticism, each work from a rather different tradition. The open with Wagner's Prelude to Parsifal. This is followed by music by a German composer from an entirely different camp, Brahms's Violin Concerto with Russian violinist Anna-Liisa Bezrodny. Finally over to France, for Franck's Symphony in D minor. The concert will be conducted by Robin O'Neill. Further information from the Salomon Orchestra website.

Ascension - In memory of Daniel Pearl

Daniel Pearl

In 2002, Jewish-American journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan. Daniel's father has commissioned Elegy for Daniel Pearl from David Heath. The work will be premiered on Friday 12 October at 7.30pm at St. Martin's in the Fields, Trafalgar Square, London. It will be played by Scottish saxophonist Andrew McNeill and organist Daniel Moult. The concert includes music by Chopin, Marcello and Vierne, along with Louange à L’eternité de jésus from Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time and two more David Heath works.

ETO - The Emperor of Atlantis

Christ Lag in Todesbanden
 © Richard Hubert Smith

Viktor Ullmann’s opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis oder die Tod-Verweigerung (The Emperor of Atlantis or The Refusal of Death) is an astonishing work. It would be so, even if we had no idea about the circumstances of its creation, but it was written in the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp. The libretto is by a fellow inmate, the poet Peter Kien. The work was actually rehearsed in the camp, but never performed as the Nazi’s saw the piece as a satire on Adolf Hitler (probably correctly). It is a short work, lasting only 50 minutes, and rather tricky to programme. For their performances of the work English Touring Opera prefixed it by a performance of Bach’s cantata Christ Lag in Todesbanden. Director James Conway linked the two works and this made a satisfying musical whole because Ullmann finished his opera with a version of a Bach chorale.

AyseDeniz at the Hospital Club

AyseDeniz Gokcin at the Hospital Club

Last Friday, 28 September, the Turkish pianist AyseDeniz Gokcin celebrated the release on digital download of her Pink Floyd 'Lisztified' : Piano Fantasy (see my review) with a performance in the Hospital Club. The performance was in the fourth floor bar, which might have come as a bit of a surprise for some of the patrons who had come to drink cocktails after work. There was a background noise of cocktails being shaken, but the slightly surreal surroundings seemed to suit AyseDeniz's piece which takes three well-known Pink Floyd songs and turns them into a piano fantasy. Heard live, the results were rather more engaging than on recording, they are definitely bravura pieces which require one to see the pianist (including the moments in the final movement when she goes into the piano's innards). Also, played live the pieces seemed to flow more, and the effect was more Liszt and rather less jazz-piano than I had detected on the recording. The audience, both those who had come to hear her and those who had not, were very appreciative.  Click 'Read more' to see one more picture.

ETO - Albert Herring

Act 2 of Albert Herring
ETO at the Linbury Studio Theatre
© Richard Hubert Smith

English Touring Opera opened their Autumn season with a new production of a quintessentially English comedy, Albert Herring. Britten’s opera (with a libretto by Eric Crozier) has a very particular sense of time and place. So, though not immune to directorial tinkering, it is a work which responds well to productions which respect time and location and do not make too much of a directorial point. Christopher Rolls production was in many ways a model and he certainly brought out the comedy and social interaction. But above all, it was funny.

Autumn Festival in Queen Anne's Footstool.

Queen Anne's footstool

St. John's Smith Square (aka Queen Anne's Footstool), is having an Autumn Festival from 10 to 14 October, with a wide variety of events from song recitals and harmonie musik, to a folk duo and African jazz fusion. There are two events per evening, with a late night one at around 10pm with unreserved seating, plus some daytime events. There's even a Come and Sing Dream of Gerontius with Adrian Partington.

The Royal Opera House in the cinema - 2012/13

To the Odeon Cinema in Shaftesbury Avenue this morning, for the launch of the Royal Opera House's 2012/13 Cinema season. Now, I have to confess that so far I have never yet seen any of the recent offerings of live opera in the cinema, (the last time I saw an opera in the cinema it was Zeferelli's La Traviata when it was first released). Nor am I a great fan of seeing opera on the TV screen, but perhaps that's because I've only ever possessed rather tiny TV's! Anyway, at the Odeon, Tony Hall gave a brief speech and then we were treated to a 30 minute film profiling both the Royal Opera House's cinema activities and their forthcoming season of three ballets and six operas, seven given live. Then afterwards there was a Q&A.

English Concert at Wigmore Hall - Bach and Handel

For their concert at Wigmore Hall on Wednesday 3 October, the English Concert under Harry Bicket, teamed a pair of Bach orchestral works with vocal music by Handel, providing a showcase for the talents of soprano Carolyn Sampson, violinist Nadja Zwiener and oboist Katharina Spreckelsen.

The ensemble managed to fit 20 players onto the platform at the Wigmore Hall, including Harry Bicket directing from the harpsichord, and all the pieces were played by this ensemble thus giving us a good rich orchestral sound in the Wigmore Hall acoustic.

The chance to fail, but fail constructively

Alberto Franchetti.
Photograph by Giovanni Artico
circa 1906.

Have you ever heard of the Italian composer Franchetti and his best known opera Germania. I hadn't until called upon to review a DVD of the opera. But he wrote 10 operas in the space of just over 40 years.
Recently I was having a conversation about contemporary opera, always something that interests me, and how a new work was only a partial success. And I wondered whether nowadays we give composers of new work the space to try and fail.

The new opera in question had been given a moderately prominent premiere. When this happens it seems to me that there is the danger that the composer might either become disheartened if critical comment was too negative, or simply think that the sheer fact of getting the piece performed in such a prestigious venue was a reflection of success and that the piece worked well. In both of these cases, the composer does not really learn about the nuts and bolts of what makes a good opera.

Staging Handel - two different productions of Jephtha

Jephtha's Rash Vow (1807)
by James Gundee & M. Jones
London.

There was a convention with Handel’s opera and oratorio performances whereby dialogue not set by the composer could still be printed in the word books, thus giving the audience a more detailed picture of the action. And with the failure of his opera Ezio in 1732, Handel seems to have lost confidence in the London audience’s appetite for vast acres of Italian recitative, his following opera Sosarme had its dialogue cut to the point of incomprehensibility and he would never again set a long Italian text, in fact for the remaining 9 years of writing Italian opera, he would experiment with what the form exactly was.

Britten Sinfonia at 20 - Moondog, MacMillan and Muhly

More celebrations. The Britten Sinfonia is 20 this year and they are celebrating with a concert at the Barbican, where they are an associate ensemble, on Saturday 27 October. The concert showcases the orchestra's remarkable versatility with specially commissioned premieres from James MacMillan and Nico Muhly and features close artistic collaborators such as Alina Ibragimova, Pekka Kuusisto and Mark Padmore. Joanne MacGregor feature in a revival of the Britten Sinfonia's Mooddog project.

CD review - Songs of Solace

Christian Forshaw is a saxophonist with a distinguished pedigree - Guildhall trained and Professor of saxophone there when in his 20's, a varied career as performer, composer and teacher, performances with the Philharmonia, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Ricardo Muti, Icebreaker, the Michael Nyman band and the Graham Fitkin ensemble. On this, his fourth disc, he is joined by Grace Davidson, Alexander Mason and Rob Farrer as the Sanctuary Ensemble. The disc is a response to Julie Nicholson's book A Song for Jenny which details the death of her daughter Jennie in the 7/7 London bombings.

Messiah on Wednesday

The Purcell Singers, conductor Mark Ford, are performing Messiah on Wednesday at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London's South Bank, accompanied by the Baroque Collective, led by Alison Bury. The line up of soloists is very tempting indeed, Julia Doyle, Robin Blaze, Andrew Staples and Peter Harvey. During Handel's lifetime he never had He was despised sung by a man, always a woman, but with a singer like Blaze in the line-up the results should be terrific.

More details from South Bank Centre website.

More celebrations - BCMG at 25

The Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG) is 25. BCMG was founded in 1987 by players from the CBSO and Simon Rattle. Since then they have premiered over 140 new works, giving over 500 performance of the pieces both in the UK and on tour. The group have developed strong relationships with composers such as John Woolrich, Oliver Knussen and Thomas Ades. Their Sound Investment scheme invites members of the public to invest £150 in units which build up towards the cost of commissioning new pieces. The list of pieces commissioned through Sound Investment is remarkable, including works by Philip Cashian, Sally Beamish, Gerald Barry and Simon Bainbridge. The way the group has survived and flourished remains remarkable as there is no particular reason why Birmingham should support such a group, when other metropolitan centres do not; the group has strong local support.

Music@Malling - Bingham and Watkins

St Leonard's Tower

Music@Malling takes place in and around the Kent town of West Malling, and this year’s festival is the second. Under the artistic directorship of the young conductor Thomas Kemp, the festival took as its theme Charles Dickens and featured music by composers whom Dickens liked and met. But a second strand was the concentration on the music of a pair of contemporary composers, Judith Bingham and Huw Watkins. For the festival’s final concert on Sunday 30 September, Kemp’s own ensemble Chamber Domaine performed in St Mary’s Church, West Malling, in a programme of Mozart, Bingham and Watkins, which included a performance of Bingham’s The Hythe which was premiered by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment earlier this year.

Reviews from the Proms

I reviewed two proms for OperaToday.com and my reviews are now up on their website.

Glyndebourne's annual visit to the Proms with The Marriage of Figaro was not one of their best, despite the young and talented cast. But at least we were spared the worst excesses of Michael Grandage's 1960's production, though I pitied Audun Iversen having to wear that wig and that suit as the Count.
http://www.operatoday.com/content/2012/09/glyndebournes_m.php

John Adam's conducting Nixon in China was always going to be an event. Superbly played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, I was less than taken with Robert Orth's Nixon, but Gerald Finley gave a masterclass in how it should be done as Chou En-Lai. Adams didn't quite convince me that the work would not benefit from trimming.
http://www.operatoday.com/content/2012/09/nixon_in_china_.php