Wilton's Music Hall - development progress

It is good to see that the plans for the development and preservation of Wilton's Music Hall, in London's East End, are coming together at last. They started this summer, with their phase 1 development which encompassed major works to the roofs and basement, plus sound-proofing, ventilation and electrics. This has been funded by the Foundation for Sport and Arts along with numerous charitable trusts. The theatre has also received one of the first grants from the Theatres Trust's Theatres Protection Fund. They have now been awarded a first round Heritage Lottery Fund grant which will enable them to develop phase 2 of the development work.

If you want to avoid the carols

Not everyone wants to get into the Christmas spirit by singing carols, and even if, unlike me, you actually enjoy carols then a little can go a long way. But  there are now a number of events around London which provide interesting music for those wishing to escape. The Spitalfields Winter Festival is now on, running from 7 December to 18 December at venues in and around Spitalfields. St Johns Smith Square's annual Christmas festival runs from 13 December to 23 December. And there are one or two intriguing events at the Barbican, plus The Flying Dutchman lands at the South Bank.

CD Review - Villazon Verdi

On this ambitious new disc from Rolando Villazon, the tenor traverses 10 of Verdi's operas from the earliest, Oberto, to the last, Falstaff, taking in some well known arias but also some lesser known ones. Supported by Gianandrea Noseda and the Orchestra Teatro Regio Torino it is an ambitious undertaking, because few tenor voices can do justice to every tenor role that Verdi wrote. Whilst Villazon does not include Otello, he does include both lyric roles and the more dramatic title role in Don Carlo.

Renaissance Christmas Vespers in Brighton

Missing the Brighton Early Music Festival already? 

The BREMF Consort of Voices is back on Sunday 16 December at St. Bartholomew's Church, Ann Street Brighton, East Sussex BN1 4GP, with their programme Renaissance Christmas Vespers. We are promised music from the Vespers service for Christmas Day by Victoria, Josquin, Michael Praetorius, Rore, Palestrina, Lassus and still more wonderful Giovanni Gabrieli. The music will be interspersed with chant and the venue will be candle-lit.

Sounds quite magical.
And tickets are only £12 (concessions £10).

ETO's Christmas Stocking

ETO have put together a Christmas list, things they would like in their Christmas stocking. Its not full of the usually exotica and playstations, instead it includes lots of practical help: batteries, electrical tape, food and drink, stage make up, lump of coal (!). Prices start at a pound, so its easy enough to spend a little and do some good.

Go one, visit their website.

Oxford Baroque in London

Next Tuesday (18 December) there is a chance to catch Oxford Baroque in London. The up and coming early music ensemble are making their debut at St. John's Smith Square as part of the venue's Christmas festival. Oxford Baroque's programme O Magnum Mysterium - Music for Christmas from Venice and Dresden is based on the Venetian polychoral style both with Venetian composers and those influenced by it, with music by G. Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Schutz, H. Praetorius and Bovicelli.  They are directed by Jeremy Summerly and will be joined by members of the English Cornett and Sackbut ensemble.

Robert le Diable at Covent Garden

I have long been fascinated by French grand opera, the style which developed between Auber's La Muette de Portici and Verdi's operas for Paris in the 1850's. It is a style which is still not really understood in terms of modern performance and the best known operas of the genre are those where major composers had to interact with the Parisian genre: Donizetti's La Favourite, Rossini's Guillaume Tell, Verdi's Don Carlos and Wagner's Rienzi. Covent Garden gave a concert performance of Halevy's La Juive a few years ago (2006), but their new production of Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable was their first staging of a French grand opera from this period. Well, the first staging since the war. In fact, the performance we attended on 9 December of Robert le Diable though it was the 2nd performance of this production was Covent Garden's 75th performance of the work. In the 19th century, Meyerbeer's operas were incredibly popular. So Laurent Pelly's production was our chance to find out whether Meyebeer's operas work on stage today.

The fascinating Mrs Mahler-Werfel

Manon, Walter and Alma Gropius
in 1918

When I was a student I got to know the songs of Tom Lehrer, and his song Alma (hear him sing it on Tube) was my first introduction to Alma Mahler-Werfel (1879 - 1964)  and the way her love-life intertwined the artistic consciousness of the 20th century, mainly via her choice of husbands and lovers. She was also a composer and, though initially discouraged by Mahler, wrote and published songs. On 18 January 2013 at at St. David's Hall, Cardiff, the Welsh National Opera Orchestra under conductor Lothar Koenigs, are giving a concert which explore's Alma's legacy.

Michelle Breedt will be singing songs by Zemlinsky and Alma Mahler, David Adam's will be playing Berg's Violin Concerto. And the orchestra plays the Adagio from Gustav Mahler's 10th Symphony. And all are linked.

Brodsky Quartet at 40: Angels and Maidens

Brodsky Quartet

As part of their 40 year celebrations last night the Brodsky Quartet performed Franz Schubert’s (1797-1828) Death and the Maiden and GeorgeCrumb’s (b1929) Black Angels at King’sPlace.

Schubert’s string quartet (no. 14) in D minor D810, also known as ‘Death and the Maiden’, was written in 1824 when Schubert had just been hospitalised with syphilis. As one of his last three string quartets ever written Schubert must have been feeling his mortality – and it is his struggle with impending death which fills this poignant piece.

The name ‘Death and the Maiden’ comes from the song which Schubert wrote seven years earlier, based on a poem by Matthias Claudius. This tune forms the basis of the second movement, and is the theme borrowed by Crumb in Black Angels.

New Lamps for Old - Chapelle du Roi

Last night, 7 December, Chapelle du Roi and Alistair Dixon performed their New Lamps for Old programme at St. John's Smith Square. The programme paired renaissance music with contemporary settings of the same texts with music by Tallis, Guerrero, Palestrina, Sheppard, Victoria and Daniel Burgess, Nicholas O'Neil, David Braid, Anthony Mudge Antony Pitts, Roxanna Panufnik and myself, Robert Hugill.

Rena Harms and Anyssa Neumann in recital

Rena Harms

American soprano Rena Harms is best known to UK audiences from her performances as Amelia in ENO's recent production of Simon Boccanegra. She will be appearing with Florentine opera as Michaela and with Staatstheater Braunschweig as Fiordiligi and we caught her and accompanist Anyssa Neumann at a private recital in London on Thursday, 6 December, at the end of a run recitals that the two have been doing in the UK.

NMC appeal - new operas

NMC Recordings celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2014 and as part of this they have launched an appeal to raise funds to issue recordings of three significant contemporary operas, by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Judith Weir and Gerald Barry. Amazingly, NMC is a charity run as a not-for-profit and started with substantial support of the Holst Foundation. This means, of course, that they can take a long view and issue recordings which a commercial organisation would not. So far they have recorded over a dozen contemporary British operas to-date. The new appeal needs to raise £43,0000 to support Birtwistle's Gawain, Weir's The Vanishing Bridegroom and Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest.

Jonathan Harvey

Jonathan Harvey, who died this week at the age of 73, was one of those quiet souls who become eminent without you quite noticing. He studied at St. John's College, Cambridge, and was advised by Britten to take lessons with Erwin Stein. (Stein, formerly Schoenberg's assistant, was an editor for Boosey and Hawkes where he worked with Britten). But Harvey's influences developed quite widely; on a Harkness Scholarship at Princeton, Harvey would meet Milton Babbitt, he discovered Stockhausen and was invited by Pierre Boulez to work at IRCAM.

New Music 20x12 now on-line

The PRS for Music Foundation's New Music 20x12 project involved commissioning 20 works, each 12 minutes long, to be performed in the UK in 2012. The composers and partner organisations were highly diverse, including Sally Beamish writing for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Howard Skempton writing for the Central Council of Bell Ringers, Graham Fitkin writing for the London Chamber Orchestra, Luke Carver Goss for the Black Dyke Band, Gavin Higgins writing for the Rambert Dance Company.  Now you can view the works on-line.

Last month on Planet Hugill

Vanity Fair scene from Pilgrims Progress

at ENO (c) Mike Hoban

Just in case you missed it! November opened with the launch of this year's London Song Festival and the tragic news of Robert Poulton's death. We closed with a guest review of the last night of the festival and I participated in the Courtauld Community Choir.

Guildhall School of Music and Drama presented an enterprising triple bill of operas by Massenet and Martinu, ENO were equally enterprising with their production of Vaughan Williams's Pilgrims Progress and Chelsea Opera Group performed Massenet's Don Quichotte with Robert Lloyd.

Cool poster - cool concert

I couldn't resist featuring this concert because of the rather striking flyer design. The London Gay Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Christopher Braime are performing their Christmas themed programme on Sunday 9 December, at St. Sepulchre without Newgate. The programme consists of Dvorak's Slavonic Dances,  Sibelius's Finlandia, Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite and a suite from Rimsky Korsakov's The Snow Maiden. It is the last item, taking music from Rimsky Korsakov's rarely performed opera which rather lifts the programme out of the ordinary.

Motets from Tempus per Annum in London this month

Two motets from my collection Tempus per annum will be performed this month. On Thursday 13 December London Concord Singers, conductor Malcolm Cottle, will be giving the premiere of the Advent motet Propre es tu and on Friday 7 December, La Chapelle du Roi, conductor Alistair Dixon, will be performing Puer natus est nobis which they premiered in 2009.

British Composer Awards

The winners of this year's British Composer awards were announced this week, and the full list can be seen on the British Composer Awards website. Sir Harrison Birtwistle's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra won the orchestral category. The work was premiered by Christian Tetzlaff with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Boston, and received its UK premiere at the Proms with Tetzlaff, this time with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The stage awards went, for the second year running, to a non-operatic work. This time DESH, Jocelyn Pook's evocative score for Akram Khan's astonishing stage work. DESH means homeland in Bangladeshi, and the piece is a journey with Khan discovering his roots. Pook's score mixes in found material from trips to Bangladesh. You can buy a disc of the piece from Pook's website.

Universe of Sound - The Planets Remix

The Universe of Sound was a brilliant installation/exhibition which enabled visitors to experience what it was like to be really inside an orchestra whilst it was playing Holst's The Planets (see my review of the exhibition at the Science Museum). At the centre of the installation was an HD recording made by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia with films being made from various points of view within the orchestra. Now these are available on-line at The Space, the Arts Council's digital download site.

Big Give: The English Concert

The English Concert's Big Give project is to raise £52,000 to support a week-long Master Class on Handel's Radamisto for young singers and players at the Centre for Early Music Performance and Research in Birmingham. There will also be public showcases of excerpts from the opera at the Barbican and at Birmingham Town Hall. Their 2011 Big Give project was a residency at the Foundling Museum which included a master class for young harpsichordist directors. Further information, and donations, from their Big Give project page