Rupert Charlesworth wins London Handel Singing Competition

Rupert Charlesworth, who won the 2013
London Handel Singing Competition

Tenor Rupert Charlesworth has won the 12th London Handel Singing Competition, which took place as part of the London Handel Festival. At the final on 11 April 2013 at St George's Church, Hanover Square, Charlesworth sang arias from Rodelinda, Theodora and Belshazzar. Charlesworth won both the First Prize - the Regina Etz Prize, and the Audience Price - the Michael Normington Prize. He won a performance at next year's London Handel Festival as well as a cash prize. The winner of the second prize, Stephen Chambers (also a tenor), will also sing at the 2014 festival. The Adjudicators were Ian Partridge, Edward Blakeman, Catherine Denley, Michael George and Rosemary Joshua. Rupert Charlesworth is a 2011 Academy Laureate of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. He covered the role of Angel 3/John in George Benjamin's Written on Skin at Aix en Provence and Covent Garden and will be singing the role at the 2013 Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. He sang the role of the Solider in ETO's Emperor of Atlantis in 2012.

Gaelle Arquez & James Baillieu recital

Last night (17 April) we attended a private recital by mezzo-soprano Gaelle Arquez and pianist James Baillieu, given in preparation for their Wigmore Hall concert on Sunday 21 April 2013. Arquez studied musicology at the Paris Conservatoire, going on to win the 2009 Gold Medal Singing Competition, and she is a recipient of the Wigmore Hall/Independent Opera Voice Fellowship. Their recital was of French and Spanish song, combining songs by Reynaldo Hahn, Francis Poulenc and Henri Duparc, with Georges Bizet and Leo Delibes in Spanish mood, plus songs by Agustin Lara, Manuel de Falla and Fernando Obradors.

Buxton Festival 2013 launch

Richard Strauss - Intermezzo
Buxton Festival 2012
with Stephen Gadd
and Janis Kelly

To the Houses of Parliament yesterday (17 April 2013) for 2013 Buxton Festival launch, which took place in the Terrace Room, with its glorious views of the Thames (thankfully at high tide). The event was hosted by Andrew Bingham, the MP for High Peak within whose constituency Buxton lies. Speakers included the Chairman of the Buxton Festival Dame Janet Smith, Andrew Bingham MP, the Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport Maria Miller MP and Stephen Barlow, the artistic director of the festival. This year's festival includes a tempting and varied programme with operas by Mozart, Gounod, Saint-Saens, Vivaldi, Sciarrino and Messager plus extensive other programmes.

Dame Janet explained that one reason for having the launch in London, in so prominent a place, was to help spread the word about the festival. The festival has over 3000 loyal friends, who come each year to show their support but this is not enough for festival finances and they hopes to attract more people. Both she and Andrew Bingham emphasised that Buxton was not that far away from London. In fact one innovation, which was introduced last year and continues this year, was the presentation of the main operas at matinees to make it easier for people who might wish to travel.

Handel's L'Allegro at the London Handel Festival

Elisabeth Duparc
'La Francesina'
soprano soloist in
premiere of Handel's
L'Allegro

George Frideric Handel's oratorio L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato was always intended to be a crowd pleaser, a role that it still occupies today. In late 1739 Handel informed Charles Jennens that he would not yet set the libretto that Jennens had sent him (it would eventually become Messiah). Instead for his 1740 season he planned to 'please the Town with something of a gayer Turn'. Instead of being miffed at having his own suggestion turned down, Jennens went into overdrive to organise something suitable for Handel to set. By suitable, Jennens and a number of Handel's other English friends would have meant something by one of the major English writers. Like Milton for instance.

Handel's English friends were keen for him to apply his genius not just to the Bible, but to English writers equal to his genius. He had set Dryden but Dryden was not a poet of the first water. Milton had come back into favour, a monument to him had been raised in Westminster Abbey in 1737. But suggestions that Handel might use Paradise Lost seem to have fallen on deaf ears (Handel was offered at least two libretto's based on Milton's work).

John Beard, tenor soloists
in premiere of Handel's
L'Allegro

Charles Jennens' friend James Harris had an idea for a scheme based on Milton's poems L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, interleaving the two so as to provide the sort of vivid contrasts which appealed to Handel. This worked, and Handel's new oratorio was set in motion. The text, however, was too short and after looking through his edition of Milton, Handel lighted upon At a solemn musick (nowadays known to us for Hubert Parry's musical setting). But this would not do, the sacred nature of the ode contrasting oddly with the secular nature of the first two parts of the oratorio. Jennens commented in a letter to Harris that 'It has no sort of connection with the other', so Jennens wrote a third part Il Moderato (The Moderate Man) as conclusion. This was how L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato was premiered by Handel in 1740 (with soloists including Elisabeth Duparc 'La Francesina' and John Beard). But soon afterwards Hand made changes, introducing Italian singers and Italian texts. He seems to have lost confidence in Il Moderato replacing it by his 1739 St Cecilia Ode.

For the London Handel Festival performance at St George's Church, Hanover Square, London on Tuesday 16 April 2013 (the final event of the 2013 festival), Lawrence Cummings conducted the London Handel Singers and Orchestra with soloists Rosemary Joshua, Anna Dennis, Stuart Jackson and George Humphreys. Cummings had reconstructed the form of the work from its premiere performances, so that we had the first two movements of Handel's  Concerto Grosso Opus 6 no. 1 as the overture to part one, the first two movements of Concerto Grosso Opus 6 no. 3 as the overture to part two, and Organ Concerto Opus 7 no. 1 between parts two and three. This latter was played by Cummings on the new organ at St. George's. The result was surprisingly satisfying without the patchwork effect that you might have expected.

Fazil Say convicted

I wrote last year about Turkish composer Fazil Say's trial in Turkey. He has now been convicted of blasphemy and given a ten month suspended prison sentence for inciting hatred over a series of comments made on Twitter. He was tried for denigrating Islam, in a series of tweets he quoted the verse of Omar Khayyam attacking pious hypocrisy. The suspended sentence means that if he commits the same offence again in the next five years, he will go to prison. A recent Amnesty International report called the lack of freedom of speech in Turkey one of the country's 'most entrenched human rights problems'. Say's supporters have been re-tweeting the verses.    The young Turkish pianist, AyseDeniz Gokcin, will be playing some of Fazil Say's music at a concert on 25 April at St James's Piccadilly, London, where she is appearing with the Talent Unlimited Chamber Ensemble. 

From opera to good cause.

The suit in action, Dario Dugandzic
as the man, When a Man Knows

One of the items left over from the staging of my opera When a Man Knows in 2011 was the suit, worn by the baritone Dario Dugandzic who sang the lead male role. The character was supposed to be a successful businessman, so we acquired a stylish suit for him. Too small for either me or my partner to wear, since then the suit has been sitting in our house awaiting a new role. Now it has found a new starring role as we've donated it to the Suit for Success campaign, which re-cycles suits to provide interview wear for young people who are disadvantaged as a result of homelessness or lack of employment.

Cherubini - Lodoiska - CD review

By one of those curious workings of fate Lodoiska, a French opera by an Italian composer, is best known today for the influence it had on a German composer, Beethoven. Luigi Cherubini's Lodoiska was premiered in Paris in 1791. It proved popular and was premiered in other cities, with performances in Berlin in 1797 and Vienna in 1802. Such was its success in Vienna, that three other operas by Cherubini were performed. We know that Beethoven had scores of other operas by Cherubini, and it is clear that the composer must have seen Lodoiska, such is the influence of both plot and style on Beethoven's opera Fidelio. Despite its influence, Lodoiska has not featured much in the record catalogues, Cherubini's preference for using spoken dialogue perhaps putting performers off. This new recording, (naive ambroisie AM 209) the first on period instruments, is complete (with a small amount of spoken dialogue) recorded live in 2010 by the French ensemble, Le Cercle de l'Harmonie with Les Elements and a cast consisting of Nathalie Manfrino, Hjordis Thebault, Sebastian Gueze, Philippe Do, Armando Noguera, Pierre-Yves Pruvot and Alain Buet, conducted by Jeremie Rhorer.

Oxford Early Music Festival

The inaugural Oxford Early Music Festival runs from 4 to 6 May 2013 (ironically the same weekend the Cambridge Handel Festival are performing Handel's Atalanta, so choices must be made!).  The concerts are concentrated into a single weekend, but the organisers hope that the festival will grow. This festival seems to concentrate on young and exciting groups including the International Baroque Players, Oxford Baroque and Stile Antico. The opening concert is Bach's Mass in B minor in the University Church, played by the wonderful International Baroque Players with  Ensemble 45, an ensemble made up of young professionals and top choral scholars, conducted by Daniel Hyde. The fine group of soloists  mixes youth and experience with Catherine Bott, James Bowman, Nicholas Mulroy and James Birchall . On Sunday afternoon there is more Bach, this time music for unaccompanied violin and viola da gamba with Bojan Cicic and Susanne Heinrich, then the evening  sees Stile Antico, back from their US tour, in a programme of Renaissance polyphony, plus a piece written for the group by John McCabe in 2009.  The final pair of events on Monday had Oxford Baroque giving an open rehearsal followed by a concert of music arising outer of Luther's Reformation, with music by Schutz, Schein and Bach. Oxford has some great venues for early music and the festival is sing a variety of them. The deserve every support and have put together an interesting programme for what I hope is the first of many festivals. Further information from the Oxford Early Music Festival website.

Italian Tudors and Fallen Women - WNO 2013-14 season

Welsh National Opera's 2013-14 is the first season to feel the real benefit David Pountney's themed groupings of performances, with the company's year divided into the Tudors, Fallen Women and Faith. The Tudors encompassing Donizetti's Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda and Roberto Devereux, Fallen Women being Manon Lescaut, La Traviata and Henze's Boulevard Solitude, and Faith pairing Schoenberg's Moses und Aron with Verdi's Nabucco.

I usually moan about UK companies performing Maria Stuarda rather than one of Donizetti's other serious operas, but in the context of two of his other Tudor operas it makes sense. The three productions will use the same set, with two being directed by Alessandro Talevi and the designs for all three being by his regular collaborators designer Madeleine Boyd and lighting designer by Matt Haskins. Rudolf Frey directs Maria Stuarda. Casting includes two Queen Elizabeths, English soprano Judith Howarth in Maria Stuarda and French-Canadian soprano Alexandra Deshorties in Roberto Devereux. Serena Farnocchia and Linda Richardson share the title role in Anna Bolena. (Farnocchia sang the role at last year's Maggio Musicale Fiorentino conducted by Roberto Abbado). Alistair Miles is Henry VIII (and Talbot in Maria Stuarda). Christine Rice is Maria Stuarda. Other cast includes Bruce Sledge (whom we saw in Santa Fe in Rossini's Maometto Secondo) as Leicester, the Italian American tenor Leonardo Capalbo as Roberto Devereux (he returns as Alfredo Germont later in the season), and Leah-Marian Jones as Sara.

Rustem Hayroudinoff piano recital

Russian pianist Rustem Hayroudinoff (strictly he's a Tatar by nationality, he was born in Kazan) was probably the first student to come straight out of Soviet Russia and into the Royal Academy of Music and has now become one of the youngest Professors of Piano at the RAM. His solo recital at St John's Smith Square on Saturday 13 April 2013 was a highly ambitious affair, with a programme starting with J.S. Bach's Partita no. 2 and C.P.E. Bach's Sonata in F sharp minor and finishing with Rachmaninov's mammoth Piano Sonata No. 1 Opus 28. In between we had Liszt's Sonnetto 123 del Petrarca (Petrarch's Sonnet 123) and Liszt's Mephisto Waltz No 1.

Bach's own description of his keyboard partitas is surprisingly depreciating, referring to them on the title page as 'Keyboard Exercises', though they are of course more substantial than this. Bach sticks to the traditional use of dance movements in the suites, Partita no. 2 consists of a substantial Sinfonia followed by an Allemand, Courante, Sarabane, Rondo and Capriccio. As with most of Bach's dance-based forms, you could not imagine dancing to the music, the movements are instead striking explorations of the polyphonic keyboard art. If we compare Bach to his great contemporary Handel, both renowned keyboard virtuosos, both were quite free with their keyboard suites. Bach stuck to the traditional sequences of dance music, but stretched to the forms to suite his purposes, whilst Handel didn't use the traditional dance sequences at all.

CD Review - The Heart that Flutters - Lawrence Brownlee

This recital disc from American tenor Lawrence Brownlee and pianist Iain Burnside, is from the first batch of discs in the new collaboration between Rosenblatt Recitals and Opus Arte. The disc mixes items from Brownlee's two Rosenblatt Recitals (May 2010 at St John's Smith Square and September 2012 at Wigmore Hall) with items recorded in the studio. The result is an attractively eclectic mix including  Spirituals, arias from Rossini's Il Turco in Italia and Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment, songs by Henri Duparc and Ben Moore and Alberto Ginastera's Cinco canciones populares argentinas, but is perhaps notable for the live recording of Franz Liszt's Three Petrarch Sonnets. These have been rather absent from the catalogue in their proper tenor version and it is pleasing to have a newly recommendable version.

Rosenblatt Recitals by the sea

The Pinnacle on Branscombe Beach

Ian Rosenblatt, founder of Rosenblatt Recitals, is starting a festival in Devon which aims to provide the Rosenblatt experience in a seaside setting, in Branscombe in Devon. Sounds delightful. This year's festival runs from 26 to 28 July and is curated by Iain Burnside. It includes soprano Ailyn Perez and tenor Stephen Costello (who happens to be her husband) with Iain Burnside, plus the Carducci Quartet, cellist Philip Higham in a programme of solo Bach and Britten, late night jazz and a beach front concert. What more could one want? (Good weather perhaps!). Further details from the Rosenblatt Recitals website.

Winchester Chamber Music Festival

This year's Winchester Chamber Music Festival takes place from 25 to 28 April 2013, with concerts taking place at the Discovery Centre and at St. Lawrence's Church in Winchester. The festival was founded in 2008 and is organised by the London Bridge Ensemble - Daniel Tong (piano), Laura Samuel (violin), Tom Dunn (viola), Kate Gould (cello). (Tong and Gould are the festival's artistic directors). This year the ensemble are joined by guests Esther Hoppe (violin), Krusztof Chorzelski (viola/violin) and Richard Lester (cello).  The programme has a thread of Shostakovich running through it with the Piano Quintet in G minor, Sonata for Cello and Piano in D minor and Piano Trio in E minor, plus an open rehearsal of the quintet. Other composers featured included Mozart (including a late night performance of his String Quintet in G minor, K516), Haydn, Debussy, Ravel and Borodin. The festival concludes with a performance of Tchaikovsky's Souvenirs de Florence.

Michel van der Aa - Sunken Garden

Sunken Garden
Kate Miller-Heidke & Jonathan McGovern; Photo by Joost Rietdijk

Michel van der Aa is a young Dutch composer and film-maker whose stage works mix live action and film. His music-theatre piece After Life (based on the Hirokazu Koreeda film Wonderful Life), used filmed interviews integrated into the live action. His latest music theatre work, Sunken Garden, (described as a film opera), is a co-commission between ENO and the Barbican, Luminato Festival and the Opera National de Lyon, with the co-production also travelling to the Holland Festival. Sunken Garden, van der Aa's fourth music-theatre work, is the first on which he has worked with a collaborator. The novelist David Mitchell wrote the libretto. Mitchell is the author of the best selling novel Cloud Atlas, but also wrote the libretto for Klaas de Vries' opera Wake performed by Dutch National Reisopera in 2010. Sunken Garden was premiered by ENO at the Barbican in a production designed by Theun Mosk and directed by the composer, with film sequences (including those using 3 D film) also directed by the composer. The singing cast consisted of Roderick Williams, Katherine Manley and Claron McFadden seen live, plus Jonathan McGovern and Kate Miller-Heidke seen on film. There was also a cast of actors seen on film (Stephen Henry, Harriet Dobby, Alwyne Taylor, Joanna Bond, Caroline Jay and Yiftach Mizrahi). Andre de Ridder conducted. We caught the much anticipated premiere on 12 April 2013.

ETO and many more nominated for Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards

Rupert Charlesworth, Jeffrey Stewart, Callum Thorpe,
Richard Mosley-Evans, Katie Bray, Paula Sides, Robert Winslade Anderson.
English Touring Opera // Bach, Christ lag in Todesbanden.
Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

The Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards, presented for outstanding achievement in 2012, announced this year's shortlist yesterday. The winners will be announced at a ceremony on 14 May 2012 at London's Dorchester Hotel with RPS Gold Medallist Dame Janet Baker presenting the winners trophies. This years RPS Music Awards are being presented as part of RPS200 celebrating the society's 200th birthday. The list of nominees reflects the amazing breadth of British musical life last year with nods to the Royal Opera House's Ring Cycle and Trojans, as well as ENO, ETO, Aldeburgh and Birmingham Opera Company. Contemporary opera features quite heavily, as does contemporary music in general. The list is so strong, that you rather feel sorry for the judges having to choose. And we'll have to wait until 14 May to find out.

Kathleen Ferrier Awards 2013

On Friday 26 April 2013, the final of the 2013 Kathleen Ferrier Awards takes place at the Wigmore Hall, with the semi final being held on Tuesday 23 April. The Kathleen Ferrier Memorial Scholarship Fund was founded in 1953 in memory of the contralto who died at the age of 41. The first awards took place in 1956 and this year's competition will be the 58th. Recent winners have included Natalya Romaniw (2012), Kitty Whately (2011), Njabulo Madlala (2010), Sarah-Jane Brandon (2009), Ben Johnson (2008) and Katherine Broderick (2007). The list of semi-finalists, who take part in the  semi-finals on 23 April, includes Louise Alder, Johnny Herford, Ashley Riches and Anna Starushkevych.

Veronique Gens and Julius Drake in Duparc, Poulenc, Gounod and Debussy at Temple Song

Veronique Gens does not make that many appearances in the UK so it was a particular pleasure to encounter her recital of French song as part of Temple Music's Temple Song 2013. Her recital, with Julius Drake at the piano, in Middle Temple Hall on Thursday 12 April  including eight songs by Henri Duparc (nearly half of his surviving output, plus two of Claude Debussy's earliest songs, four by Charles Gounod and concluded with a group of songs by Francis Poulenc including Banalites. Inner Temple Hall with its relatively intimate atmosphere and warm acoustic was the perfect setting to encounter an artist as communicative as Gens.

It is always a particular delight to hear French song performed by Francophone artists, and throughout the recital you were aware of Gens making the words, the poetry, as important as the music, without ever compromising the musical line. Highly communicative, you almost did not need the words. The description stylish, civilised, elegant, expressive, infinitely fascinating and mysterious could well apply both to the French song repertoire and to Gens as a performer.

Alessio Bax plays Mozart Piano Concertos nos 24 & 27

I have to confess that when this disc dropped through my letter-box I did not immediately think, Oh goodie, Mozart piano concertos. Yes, I was interested in Alessio Bax, the young Italian born, USA based pianist and the Southbank Sinfonia under their conductor Simon Over. But Mozart piano concertos? I heard quite a number in the 1980's when I attended the concert series given by the Halle in Manchester and then by the Scottish National Orchestra in Edinburgh, where the concertos were something of a staple in the concert programmes. Whilst I have come to love many aspects of Mozart's music, his piano concertos are still something of a puzzle, and this review is by way of an exploration.

The first piano in England

A 1720 fortepiano by Cristofori in
the Metropolitan Museum, New York

In 1749 an English engineer called John Grundy visited Charles Jennens' house, Gopsall Hall in Leicestershire. The new Palladian house was in the process of being built and Grundy provided a design for the grounds (never actually executed). In 1750 Grundy returned, to be entertained at the house. In his travel diary he describes the interior, with the particularly grand music room complete with stucco ceiling and carved marble fireplace. Luckily for us Grundy was inquisitive about things (as engineers might be expected to be). He describes Jennens' grand mahogany music desk, which had music stands (and associated candles) enabling 14 players to play at once. He also talks about the two keyboard instruments, a harpsichord and another made by a Venetian maker in which the strings were hit by small hammers covered with leather, making the tone softer and more melodious than a harpsichord, and with further small hammers to dampen the strings. Grundy had no idea what the instrument was called, but he gives us a very clear description. This was the first piano to appear in England.

Graham Johnson to receive Wigmore Hall medal

Graham Johnson
(c) Clive Barda

Graham Johnson has been awarded the 2013 Wigmore Hall medal 'in recognition of his unstinting championing of Song and his extraordinary achievements on the concert platform and in the recording studio'. The medal will be presented by John Gilhooly, the Director of the Hall, to Johnson during his concert on Saturday 13 April 2013 at the Wigmore Hall. The concert celebrates the launch of Graham’s three-volume encyclopaedia Franz Schubert: The Complete Songs, (published by Yale University Press). 

The concert features Schubert's settings of the British poets Colley Cibber, Abraham Cowley, 'Ossian' (James Macpherson), William Shakespeare and Walter Scott (including a complete performance of Seven Songs from Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake), as well as songs particularly associated with memories of the book’s dedicatees. The performers include Ailish Tynan, Sarah Connolly, Mark Padmore, Ben Johnson, Robin Tritschler and Christopher Maltman.