Review of Lucia di Lamermoor

My review of Saturday's premiere of Lucia di Lamermoor at the London Coliseum is here, on Music and Vision.

Recent CD Reviews

My review of a disc of choral music by David Ashley White is here.
For those interested in contemporary sacred music then this disc would be excellent to dip into ...
And my review of Alfie Boe's new disc is here. Both reviews are on MusicWeb International.
Well performed and well produced, but ultimately I tired of his aping of the Italian manner ...

Recent CD Review

My review of a disc of Schumann's music for Male chorus interspersed with modern responses to it 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 ...

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!

Recent CD Review

My review of a disc of songs by Janos Fusz is here, on MusicWeb International.
By no means masterpieces but charming and the best are fascinating A glimpse into the world of the Kleinmeister ...

Recent CD Review

My review of a disc of Easter Chant is here, on MusicWeb International.
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

My review of a disc of Clemence de Grandval's works for oboe is here, on MusicWeb International.
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

My review of a disc of Plainchant for Pentecost is here on MusicWeb International.
Chant as sung in a real Benedictine community ...

Recent CD Review

My review of Handel's Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno is here, on Music Web International.
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.