The other concertos: Mendelssohn's Double Concerto & Piano Concerto from the Stankov Ensemble

Mendelssohn Piano Concerto No. 1, Double Concerto; Ivo Stankov, Lachezar Stankov, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Linus Lerner; Meridian
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 5 January 2020 Star rating: 3.5 (★★★½)
A chance to explore Mendelssohn's other concertos

The sheer fame and beauty of Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto seems to blind us to the virtues of many of his other concertos. On this new disc from the Stankov Ensemble on Meridian Meridian, brothers Ivo Stankov (violin) and Lachezar Stankov (piano) give us Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor Op.25, and Double Concerto in D minor (Concerto for Violin Piano and Orchestra), with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Linus Lerner. The Double Concerto is performed in Mendelssohn's later version with woodwind, brass and timpani rather than the original with just string orchestra.

Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 1 was written in 1830-31 around the same time as his Italian Symphony. It seems to have been inspired by pianist that he met at a party in Munich, but though dedicated to her in fact Mendelssohn premiered it himself. It uses a few techniques which we now associate with the Romantic concerto and is arguably one of the first of its type. At the opening the piano comes in almost immediately, without the conventional orchestral peroration, and though in three movements the three are linked as one continuous whole.

From Rossini in Germany to Mozart in Wales: Max Hoehn directs La Cenerentola in Bremerhaven and Cosi fan tutte for WNO

Rossini: La Cenerentola at Stadttheater Bremerhaven, directed by Max Hoehn

In May 2020, Welsh National Opera (WNO) launches a new production of Mozart's Cosi fan Tutte which is being performed at mid-scale venues across England and Wales. The production is directed by the young British-Swiss director Max Hoehn, who has just directed Rossini's La Cenerentola for the Stadttheater Bremerhaven, where it opened on Christmas Day and runs until 29 March 2020. Judging from the photos it looks to be a lively and engaging production, and features some wild spaghetti!

Rossini: La Cenerentola at Stadttheater Bremerhaven, directed by Max Hoehn

Max Hoehn was a nominee for Best Young Director at the 2016 International Opera Awards, the first recipient of the Independent Opera Director Fellowship [for whom he directed Simon Vosecek's Biedermann and the Arsonists in 2015, see my review] and a prize-winner at the 9th Europäischer Opernregie-Preis. We also caught his production of Cimarosa's Il matrimonio segreto for Pop-Up Opera in 2017 [see Anthony's review]

WNO's new production of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte opens on 23 May 2020 in Swansea and travels to Newport, Yeovil, Mold, Brecon, Winchester, Birmingham, Hereford, Milford Haven, Shrewsbury, Bangor, Oxford, Malvern. The production is directed by Max Hoehn, conducted by Frederick Brown, designed by Jemima Robinson, with Rhodri Rhys Jones as Ferrando, Ross Ramgobin as Guglielmo, Quentin Hayes as Alfonso, Katie Bray as Dorabella, Nazan Fikret as Fiordiligi and Elizabeth Karani as Despina. Set in the 1970s, it will take audiences ‘back to school’ as it follows four sixth formers learning about first love and all its complications.

Full details from the WNO website.

Sheku Kanneh-Mason joins the London Mozart Players for their first concert of 2020 at the newly restored Fairfield Halls in Croydon

Sheku Kanneh-Mason with the London Mozart Players in 2017

Cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason joins the London Mozart Players for their first concert of 2020 at the newly restored Fairfield Halls in Croydon on Sunday 12 January 2020, performing Saint-Saens' Cello Concerto No. 1. 

This won't be the cellist's first appearance with the orchestra, in 2017 he performed the Haydn Cello Concerto with them at one of their community concerts at the church of St John the Evangelist in Upper Norwood. Kanneh-Mason, who is not yet 21, has had an extraordinary career since winning the BBC Young Musician in 2016 and this month sees him continuing with the release of his recording of Elgar's Cello Concerto with Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra on Decca (but this does not make Kanneh-Mason the youngest instrumentalist to record an Elgar concerto, that prize goes to Yehudi Menuhin who was 16 when he recorded the Elgar Violin Concerto with the composer conducting).

On Sunday 12 January 2019, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the London Mozart Players, conductor Jaime Martin (himself a former flautist with the orchestra), perform Saint-Saens' Cello Concerto No. 1 as part of an all-French programme including music by Ravel and Bizet, alongside Mozart's Symphony No. 31. The symphony was written when the 22-year-old composer was in Paris, and features the largest orchestra that he had yet written for as the Concert Spirituel, where it was premiered, allowed him to write for double woodwind (flutes, oboes, bassoons AND clarinets), two trumpets, two horns and timpani.

Further details from the London Mozart Players' website.

Sonatas, Friendships and a search for Bach: My pre-concert talks at Conway Hall

Robert Hugill (Photo Robert Piwko)

I will be back at Conway Hall on Sunday 19 January 2020 for the first of four pre-concert talks as part of the hall's Spring 2020 Sunday Concerts Series. The first talk, Breaking new ground looks at the development of Beethoven's violin sonatas from the early works based on 18th century models to the large-scale grandeur of the Kreutzer sonata, with performances of three of the sonatas including the Kreutzer to follow (further details). 

On 23 February, it is the turn of the cello sonata as I look at its development, tracking the gradual liberation of the cello from the keyboard towards the full-scale drama of the 19th & 20th centuries, in advance of performances of cello sonatas by Beethoven, Brahms and Shostakovich (further details).

A Tale of Two Friendships on 5 April, looks at the fascinating and complex web of friendship between the young Brahms and Robert and Clara Schumann, and also at the important, creative friendship between Shostakovich and Weinberg in post-war Soviet Russia, in advance of performances of works for piano trio by Brahms, Robert Schumann, Shostakovich and Weinberg (further details).

Finally, on 10 May we go In search of Bach as I talk about Bach's cello suites, iconic works for which we have no autograph score, little background and don't know for whom they were written, and some commentators even discuss the type of instrument for which they were written, in advance of performances of  all six suites (further details).

Full details from the schedule on my website, and concert tickets from the Conway Hall website.

Britten and Dowland from Allan Clayton, Sean Shibe, Timothy Ridout and James Baillieu at Wigmore Hall

Julian Bream and Peter Pears

John Dowland songs, Britten Songs from the Chinese, Lachrymae: Reflections on a Song of John Dowland, Nocturnal after John Dowland, The Way to the Tomb, Winter Words; Allan Clayton, Timothy Ridout, Sean Shibe, James Baillieu; Wigmore Hall
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 4 January 2020 Star rating: 5.0 (★★★★★)
A brilliant exploration of the intertwining of Britten and Dowland's music

The latest in the Wigmore Hall's Britten Series explored the interlinking between Britten's and Dowland's music. Tenor Allan Clayton and guitarist Sean Shibe performed songs by Dowland, with the remainder of the programme being Britten, the lute song from Britten's Gloriana and the guitar-accompanied Songs from the Chinese, two works inspired by Dowland Lachrymae: Reflections on a Song of John Dowland from viola player Timothy Ridout and pianist James Baillieu, Nocturnal after John Dowland from Sean Shibe, and finally the song cycles The Way to the Tomb and Winter Words from Allan Clayton and James Baillieu.

It was an interesting and illuminating programme, a chance to hear two of Britten's Dowland-inspired works alongside the music that inspired them, plus Britten writing for similar forces of voice and guitar, and all of it in superb performances.

Performing Dowland's songs is a knack, being able to scale the voice down to an intimate level whilst keeping the expressivity and bringing out the wonderful musical detail. Performing sitting alongside Sean Shibe, Clayton sang with a lovely sense of intimacy yet full of expressive detail. There was a relaxed sense of partnership between the two performers, with Clayton adding ornaments in later verses of the songs. Sean Shibe performed Preludium and Sleep, wayward thoughts as solos, and with he and Clayton giving us Come again, sweet love doth now invite, Away with these self-loving lads and Come, heavy sleep. It was an intense, magical experience and I do hope that we hear more lute songs from the two.

Memories from My Land: Margaret Fingerhut's new single in support of City of Sanctuary

During 2019, pianist Margaret Fingerhut devoted a significant amount of time to an amazing piano recital series, Far from the Home I Love which aimed to raise money for City of Sanctuary, an organisation that supports refugees in the UK. 

Margaret's programme for the recital looked at music by composers who were exiled or lived away from home. 

As well as music by Chopin, Grieg, Handel, Prokofiev and Rachmaninov, she commissioned a new piece from Arian, the Kurdish Syrian composer who wrote the stirring Refugee Nation Anthem for the 2016 Rio Olympics.

To help support City of Sanctuary Margaret has now released her performance of Arian's Memories from my Land as a single, and all you have to do is download it. For the cost of a cup of coffee, we can all help support City of Sanctuary. The download link is here:

https://margaretfingerhut.bandcamp.com/

or from iTunes,  AmazonMusic, or Spotify.

You can read Margaret's article about her Far from the Home I Love project on the International Piano website, and on her own website.  If you would like to support Margaret's fundraising for City of Sanctuary further, you can donate directly.

Margaret has already raised over £78,000 and her goal is to raise £88,000, £1000 for every key on the piano.

Jordanian-Palestinian pianist Iyad Sughayer explores the brilliant piano music of Aram Khachaturian on this debut disc

Aram Khachaturian - piano music; Iyad Sughayer; BIS
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 4 January 2020 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★)
In an impressive debut disc, Jordanian-Palestinian pianist Iyad Sughayer explores the piano music of the Soviet Armenian composer

The name of the Soviet-Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian is forever wedded to his two ballets, Gayaneh (1942) and Spartacus (1954), music from which is firmly welded into the popular consciousness. But he composed much else over a long career.

This enterprising new disc on BIS from Jordanian-Palestinian pianist Iyad Sughayer explores the range of Aram Khachaturian's piano music, with the Piano Sonata (1961), Two pieces (1926), Children's Album, Book 1 (1947), Poem (1927), Sonatina (1959) and Toccata (1932).

Born in Tblisi, Georgia in an Armenian family, Khachaturian was much influenced by the folk music around him. He studied in Moscow with Gliere and then with Myaskovsky. Though he was denounced in the 1948 decree which also denounced Shostakovich and Prokofiev,  he was soon rehabilitated probably because it was not his music which was found to be objectionable but his administrative role in the Composers Union. Khachaturian remained a Communist throughout his life, regarding the Sovietisation of Georgia as being key to his being able to become a musical artist.

Holy Week Festival at St John's Smith Square

Easter 2020 sees the Holy Week Festival returning to St John's Smith Square, where it is curated in partnership with Nigel Short and Tenebrae. Running from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday (5 to 12 April 2020), this year's festival features performances from Musica Secreta, the King's Singers, Polyphony and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, The Tallis Scholars, Tenebrae, the Choir of Merton College and Florilegium, Armonico Consort, and Siglo de Oro.

Musica Secreta will give the first London performance of Laurie Stras' new complete version of Antoine Brumel's Lamentation [see my review of their disc], and both of Bach's Passions feature in the festival with Benjamin Nicholas conducting the choir of Merton College and Florilegium in the St Matthew Passion with James Oxley as the Evangelist, Giles Underwood as Christus, and Stephen Layton directing Polyphony and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in Bach's St John Passion with Nick Pritchard as the Evangelist and Neal Davies as Christus, plus Bach's Mass in B Minor with Christopher Monks conducting the Armonico Consort and soloists including Elin Manahan Thomas.

Siglo de Oro will celebrate Holy Week in Hamburg with music by Hieronymous Praetorius, the Tallis Scholars perform Victoria's Responsories for Tenebrae, Royal Holloway Choir perform two settings of the Crucifixus by Lotti alongside settings by Kenneth Leighton and Geoffrey Gordon, and Tenebrae give two concerts including one with saxophonist Christian Forshaw where he joins the choir for new versions of music by Tallis and Gibbons.

In addition to the concerts there are three late-night liturgical events, with Tenebrae performing Gesualdo's Tenebrae Responsories for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, and lay clerks from Westminster Cathedral performing Victoria's Tenebrae Responsories for Holy Saturday. Tenebrae will be running a workshop on music by Gibbons, Bach and Bruckner. Siglo de Oro's opening concert of the festival will be preceded by a guided meditation led by Triyoga teacher Chris Miller, and there is also a panel discussion on music and lamentation, The neuroscience, theology, history and art of behind music and grief.

Full details from the St John's Smith Square website.

Dance, Theatre, Opera, Passion: Britten Sinfonia's Spring season including Nico Muhly, Britten, Bach, Donizetti and Thomas Mann

There is a significant strand of theatre in the Britten Sinfonia's Spring season. In March the ensemble is at Sadlers Wells playing Nico Muhly's music for a triple bill of new dance works, choreographed by Julie Cunningham, Michael Keegan-Dolan and Justin Peck, using three of Muhly's pieces, The Only Tune, Drones and a new work. (19-21 March 2020)

Still in March, Ian Bostridge returns to the role of the Mad Woman in Britten's Curlew River (which he sang with Britten Sinfonia in staged performances in 2013) for a pair of concert performances of the opera, with Ashley Riches, Neal Davies and Britten Sinfonia Voices, conducted by Martin Fitzpatrick. (26/3 - Milton Court, 27/3 - St Andrew's Hall, Norwich, 28/3 - Saffron Hall).

For Easter there is a pair of performances of Bach's St Matthew Passion, with Nicholas Mulroy as the Evangelist and Roderick Williams as Christus. (9/4 - Theatre Royal, Norwich, 10/4 - Barbican Hall, 12/4 - Snape Maltings).

In April, Death in Venice is coming to the Barbican, not Britten's opera but a stage piece based on Thomas Mann's novella. Directed by Ivo van Hove, the novella is adapted by former Dutch poet laureate, Ramsey Nasr, who plays Aschenbach and the adaptation weaves Thomas Mann's own life with the plot of the novella, and uses music by Nico Muhly, Richard Strauss and Schoenberg, conducted by Ben Glassberg. (16-19 April)

During June, the ensemble returns to Britten with The Turn of the Screw which is being performed at Covent Garden's Linbury Theatre, conducted by Finnegan Downie Dear, directed by Natalie Abrahami and designed by Michael Levine. (3-13 June)

Then in June it is time for a real rarity, Donizetti's Il furioso all'isola di San Domingo [which was given its UK stage premiere by English Touring Opera in 2015, see Hilary's review]. Loosely based on one of the stories from Cervantes' Don Quixote, Donizetti's 1833 opera (which came just after L'Elisir d'Amore), will be performed in concert at the Barbican and recorded by Opera Rara, with Carlo Rizzi conducting a cast including soprano Albina Shagimuratova. (22 June)

In concert, the ensemble will be joined by violinist Thomas Gould for a programme of Bach, Shostakovich and Part (18/1 - Leeds Town Hall, 19/1 - The Apex, Bury St Edmunds), and by trumpeter Alison Balsom for music inspired by Purcell from Berio to Britten, plus Birtwistle, and John Woolrich's new trumpet concerto inspired by Purcell (14 & 16 May, Milton Court).

And the ensemble's At Lunch series continues, with the premiere of a new piece by Freya Waley-Cohen, and a programme of music by Tim Watts performed by counter-tenor Iestyn Davies.

Full details from the Britten Sinfonia website.

Happy New Year

A Happy New Year from all at Planet Hugill

 

This year we have posted a total of 655 articles, Tony, Anthony, Ruth, Colin and I, starting with my preview of Hervé Niquet's concert with Le Concert Spirituel at the Barbican showcasing requiems by Cherubini and Plantade, and ending with my review of BBC National Orchestra of Wales & Andrew Constantine's disc of Elgar and Chadwick.

Along the way we have covered events in London and the South East, plus visits to Cardiff, Leeds and Aldeburgh, as well as travelling to Antwerp, Ghent and Brussels in Belgium, Eisenstadt and Erl in Austria, Oslo in Norway, Paris, Nice, and Strasbourg in France, Dresden, Berlin, Bayreuth, and Cologne in Germany, and Geneva in Switzerland.

Our top performing post this year was my preview of Alistair White's new opera ROBE, whilst our top 10 included my review of Fulham Opera's Die Meistersinger, my interview with Desmond Earley, musical director of The Choral Scholars of University College Dublin, my review of Dani Howard's new opera Robin Hood,  my interviews with violinist Jennifer Pike, and conductor Harry Bickett, the Royal Opera's new production of Britten's Death in Venice and ENO's recent revival of Simon McBurney's production of Mozart's The Magic Flute.

If you have missed out on anything over the year then our archive lists Performances we've heard, CDs we've listened to and People we've interviewed are now up to date and well worth a browse.

In December we were featured on Expertidos' 16 Best Opera Blogs, a list which includes a wide variety of opera websites.

According to Google Analytics we had over 140,000 pages viewed by over 90,000 users during 2019, the majority in the UK (48%) and the USA (22%) but many all over the world, many thanks to everyone who reads the blog.

Don't forget that you can also sign up for my mailing list with gives you our e-Newsletter, This month on Planet Hugill direct into your inbox. You can get a preview of our forthcoming e-Newsleeter, December on Planet Hugill: Charpentier, Handel, Praetorius and Offenbach here.

2019 in concert and opera reviews

Britten: Death in Venice -  Tim Mead, Leo Dixon - Royal Opera
((c) ROH 2019 photographed by Catherine Ashmore)

2019 seems to have been a good year for rarities, particularly French opera. We caught both Verdi's Don Carlos (in French) and Halevy's La Juive in Flanders, Berlioz' Benvenuto Cellini exploded onto the stage at the BBC Proms, Offenbach's fantastical Fantasio received its first UK staging at Garsington, Berlioz La Damnation de Faust was done in concert in Strasbourg, the London Handel Festival performed Handel's Berenice at Covent Garden, Chelsea Opera Group gave us a chance to see Boito's Mefistofele in London, Welsh National Opera performed Prokofiev's War and Peace, Opera North staged Martinu's The Greek Passion and English Touring Opera toured Kurt Weill's Silverlake. 

Berlioz: Benvenuto Cellini - Duncan Meadows, Monteverdi Choir - BBC Proms (Photo BBC / Chris Christodoulou)

Small-scale Wagner made its mark too, with Fulham Opera's memorable Die Meistersinger and Das Rheingold at Grimeborn, whilst on a larger scale Tony Cooper visited Bayreuth and caught The Ring at the Berlin Staatsoper. Striking Britten productions included Death in Venice and Billy Budd at Covent Garden, and The Turn of the Screw marked the last ever production at Bury Court Opera, they will be sorely missed.

Offenbach: La belle Helene - Catherine Backhouse, Anthony Flaum - New Sussex Opera
Photo Robert Knights

Our 2019 opera selection:

2019 in CD reviews

2019 seemed a year for scholarship and rarity in recordings. Retrospect Opera gave us the first recording of Ethel Smyth's Fete Galante, whilst John Butt and the Dunedin Consort recorded every note of Handel's Samson as the composer originally wrote it, and the Academy of Ancient Music recorded a new edition of Handel's Brockes Passion. Palazzetto Bru Zane's new recording of Gounod's Faust explored many variants not usually performed, and their new recording of Spontini's Olimpie gave us a new view of the opera.  Opera Rara reconstructed Donizetti's L'Ange de Nisida, an opera thought lost, whilst Vladimir Jurowski recorded the original version of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake.

Contemporary discs included a terrific recital from pianist Adam Swayne, whilst the symphonies of the Scottish composer Thomas Wilson (1927-2001) made you wonder why his music is still relatively neglected.

Dramatic Elgar and rare Chadwick from BBC National Orchestra of Wales & Andrew Constantine on Orchid Classics

Elgar Falstaff, Chadwick Tam O'Shanter; BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Timothy West, Samuel West, Andrew Constantine; Orchid Classics
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 20 December 2019 Star rating: 3.5 (★★★½)
A dramatic version of Elgar's symphonic study alongside music by his New England contemporary

Do we actually need another recording of Sir Edward Elgar's symphonic study, Falstaff? Well, considering how the work seems to be still somewhat under appreciated when compared to the composer's other symphonic works, then perhaps we do, particularly one as vivid as this one. But there is twist.

Conductor Andrew Constantine and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales have recorded Elgar's Falstaff for Orchid Classics, but it is on the discs twice. The second time as Elgar imagined it, as a purely orchestral work, the first time as a more dramatic entity with Elgar's music interleaved with scenes from Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1 and Part 2 performed by Timothy West and Samuel West. The companion work is a piece by Elgar's American contemporary George Whitfield Chadwick, Tam O'Shanter.

British conductor Andrew Constantine was a name new to me. He won the first Donatella Flick Conducting Competition and studied at the Leningrad State Conservatory. Since 2004 he has been based in the USA and is currently music director of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic Orchestra and of the Reading Symphony Orchestra.

Judging by this vividly detailed account of Elgar's 1913 work Constantine has a great love of the piece and understanding of Elgar's late style, and the BBC NOW responds brilliantly to him. The performance moves between the grandiloquence of Prince Hal's theme to the pawky humour, but still a gentleman, of Falstaff. And vividness of the orchestral detail very much reminds one of Richard Strauss' tone poems, and of course Elgar's music was much admired on the continent by admirers of Strauss', and the two are somewhat akin.

The first time that someone has written something major on composer Roger Sacheverell Coke since the 1990s: I chat to pianist Simon Callaghan about his forthcoming disc and his academic research into the neglected composer

Simon Callaghan recording in Glasgow with Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
(Photo Oscar Torres)

Pianist Simon Callaghan has been devoting a lot of time recently to the music of Roger Sacheverell Coke (1912-1972), in fact Simon has just submitted a Ph.D thesis to the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) on the subject and has his viva later this year. The latest in Simon's sequence of recordings of Coke's music, his and Raphael Wallfisch's recording of Coke's Cello Sonatas, is released on Lyrita this month. Simon and I recently met up to talk about his work on Coke's music, both finding, editing and recording it, and how he came to make it the subject of academic study.

The Ph.D came about because, whilst Simon was recording music by Coke he met the director of research at the RNCM who suggested the idea. It wasn't something that would have normally occurred to Simon to do, but he would be able to do a Ph.D in performance. And so he has submitted recordings and editions of Coke's music, along with a dissertation of 20,000 words. And given that Coke's manuscripts have been rather scattered, and in sometimes in poor condition, the result is definitely a unique contribution to knowledge.

Simon has submitted four CDs of Coke's music as well as typesetting five or six pieces, thus making them available for further performances. On 3 January 2020, Simon and cellist Raphael Wallfisch's disc of Coke's Cello Sonatas will be coming out on Lyrita, whilst Simon's editions of the sonatas are being published by Nimbus Music Publishing.

Roger Sacheverell Coke was born into a wealthy family in Derbyshire, [and was inspired to take up music after hearing pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch performing. [there is an interesting sequence of early family photos and photos of their home, Brookhill Hall, on the House and Heritage website]. Coke's family had a strong military background and his father, who died during the first Battle of Ypres, has his name on the Menin Gate in Ypres. Coke's love of music was indulged by his mother, and he studied music privately, including piano lessons from a pupil of Theodor Leschetizky and composition with Alan Bush. Independently wealthy, but homosexual, a heavy smoker (100-a-day), a sufferer from depression and struggling with schizophrenia, he worked in a studio in the grounds of the family home and created a significant body of music. Never completely mainstream, he counted Rachmaninov as a friend and Coke's piano music can often seem influenced by this composer and is the complete antithesis of much of the music being written in the 1940s and 1950s. Despite performances and broadcasts during his lifetime, Coke and music effectively disappeared from view after his death.

Roger Sacheverell Coke's Music Room in the converted stables at Brookhill Hall.
It was later converted into a seven-bedroom property. (Photo Derbyshire Countryside)

And it seems that Simon's dissertation is the first time that someone has written something major on Coke since an article in the British Music Society Journal in the 1990s!

Happy Christmas from Planet Hugill

The view from the Sara Hilden Art Museum, Tampere in December 2018

Merry Christmas

and a

Happy New Year

from

Robert

and all at Planet Hugill

Thank you to everyone for their support during 2019, and we look forward to a musical 2020 on Planet Hugill, with Verdi in Cardiff, Weill in Leeds, Meyerbeer in Berlin and much more.

Mahogany Opera's Various Stages Festival will be returning to the ICA on 19 March 2020.

Audience and chorus at Mahogany Opera Group's
Various Stages Festival 2017

Mahogany Opera's Various Stages Festival will be returning to the ICA on 19 March 2020. The festival provides the opportunity for five new operatic projects, all at various stages of development, to showcase material from the work-in-progress and receive feedback from the audiences and from industry professionals. 

Featured will be five entries chosen from an open call, which received over 150 applications from across the country and internationally, alongside two projects from long-term Mahogany Opera collaborators, Rolf Hind and Gwyneth Herbert.

The artistic advisors on the project will include Jessica Walker, singer, writer and educator, Martin Berry, head of learning & participation, Nottingham Playhouse and Frederic Wake-Walker, artist director of Mahogany Opera. They will collaborate with the selected artists and bring their knowledge into the development of the project they are working on; representing a range of disciplines from across the sector, they will share their thoughts, observations and knowledge about how new work is developed.

Read my article about the works presented at the 2017 festival.

Further details about Various Stages 2020 from the Mahogany Opera website.

The third instalment of the Leeds-based DARE Art Prize is now open for applications

Samuel Hertz recording source material for Gunslinger 2 (Photo Reba West Fraser)

The DARE Art Prize, awarded by the University of Leeds and Opera North, challenges artists and scientists to collaborate on new approaches to the creative process. Previous winners' work as a result of the prize has included a musical transcription of a glacier melting, and employing an algorithm to process musical scores. The third instalment of the prize will be awarded to an innovative, ambitious artist who is motivated by the opportunity to work in partnership with leading scientific researchers at the University of Leeds.

The DARE Art Prize is now open for applications with a prize of £15,000, closing date 30 January 2020. The winners of the two previous Prizes each spent a year working on strikingly different, but equally inventive projects, both of which established shared vision between artists and scientists, bridging the gap between two fields that are often seen as mutually exclusive.

Winner of the inaugural prize, composer Samuel Hertz [see my interview with Samuel] worked with low-frequency infrasound, delving into climatology, the environment and the paranormal, with outcomes including a musical transcription of a glacier melting and a piece of music featuring sounds inaudible to the human ear.

Artist and researcher Anna Ridler, who won the 2018-19 Prize, has spent her tenure investigating the points at which artificial and human intelligence intersect, teaching a machine to draw, and employing an algorithm to process musical scores.

Further information from the DARE website.

A hugely rewarding journey: I and Silence, Marta Fontanals Simmons & Lana Bode in Aaron Copland, Dominick Argento, Peter Lieberson, Samuel Barber, and George Crumb

I and Silence: Women's voices in American song - Copland, Argento, Barber, Lieberson, Crumb; Marta Fontanals Simmons, Lana Bode; Delphian
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 20 December 2019 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★)
A hugely imaginative and ambitious debut disc, which combines two major contemporary American song cycles

This imaginative disc takes its title, I and Silence, from a phrase in one of Emily Dickinson's poems set by Aaron Copland. The disc gives us music by five 20th century American male composers, but also embodies the disc's subtitle, Women's Voices in American Song. Three of the women so embodied are writers, Emily Dickinson whose work is set by Copland in Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf whose work is set by Dominick Argento in From the diary of Virigina Woolf, and Sara Teasdale who is set by George Crumb in one of his Three Early Songs.

Two of the women embodied are singers. Peter Lieberson's cycle Rilke Songs was written for his wife, the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, with her voice completely in mind, and Hunt Lieberson was very much identified with the cycle. Dominick Argento's cycle, From the diary of Virginia Woolf, was written for the mezzo-soprano Dame Janet Baker, who gave the work's first performance and again, Argento had Baker's artistry in mind when creating the work.

On this Delphian disc, I and Silence: Women's voices in American song, we have the British-Spanish mezzo-soprano Marta Fontanals Simmons and American-British pianist Lana Bode performing three of Aaron Copland's Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, Dominick Argento's From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, Samuel Barber's Nocturne, Peter Lieberson's Rilke Songs, and George Crumb's Let it be forgotten from Three Early Songs.

I have to confess that the disc was released in August 2019, and Marta Fontanals Simmons is very much a singer whose career I have followed, [I interviewed her in 2018, saw her as Hel in Gavin Higgins' The Monstrous Child at Covent Garden, and caught her recently in Handel's Messiah at the Royal Albert Hall], but, rather embarrassingly this disc somehow got pushed to the side.

Prayer of the Heart: the Brodsky Quartet & the Gesualdo Six in a sequence of music from Tavener to Panufnik (father and daughter)

Gesualdo Six (Photo Ash Mills)

Prayer of the Heart - Tavener, Morales, Esenvalds, Hildegard von Bingen, Rimkus, Kraggerud, Gesualdo, Roxanna Panufnik, Andrzej Panufnik; THe Brodsky Quartet, Gesualdo Six; Kings Place
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 20 December 2019 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★)
Marking the end of Venus Unwrapped this sequence of music for voices and strings proved a powerfully concentrated and sophisticated evening.

It made a rather lovely change that the final concert in Kings Place's Venus Unwrapped series, which took place on Friday 20 December 2019, had nothing to do with Christmas. Instead, we had a sequence of music from the Gesualdo Six (Owain Park, Guy James, Andrew Leslie Cooper, Joseph Wicks, Josh Cooter, Michael Craddock, Samuel Mitchell) and the Brodsky Quartet (Gina McCormack, Ian Belton, Paul Cassidy, Jacqueline Thomas) which played without an interval and took us from John Tavener, through Cristobal de Morales arranged by Eriks Esenvalds, Hildegard von Bingen, Owain Park, Sarah Rimkus, Henning Kraggerud and Andrzej Panufnik, with the music of Roxanna Panufnik at its centre including her Dante setting, This paradise.

The Brodsky Quartet (photo Sarah Cresswell)

The pieces flowed continuously, with no applause between, and lighting was low-ish and atmospheric. The quartet was on stage at all times but the singers came and went, starting in the balcony, and for some later items standing with the instrumentalists including, rather memorably, interleaving themselves amongst the players. The sheer logistics of the evening were impressive, as the music flowed naturally, people moved yet you were never aware of a hiatus or a need to shuffle. All beautifully done.

My main gripe was in the low lighting level, which rendered the printed words unreadable so we were left to simply listen with our ears. This worked for many of the pieces, but for Roxanna Panufnik's large-scale Dante setting this was a problem. Roxanna had provided a lucid printed explanation of the piece, which of course we could not follow and none of the singers' words were very comprehensible, and I felt I could have appreciated the work more if I had been able to follow the programme notes.

We started with John Tavener, his Prayer of the Heart where the Brodsky Quartet provided quiet sustained chords over a recorded heart-beat, as individual members of the Gesualdo Six, placed half out of sight in the balcony, intoned a sequence of quasi chant-like passages. This is one of those pieces which rather divides people, on the one hand Tavener creates something profoundly contemplative and rather magical from quite simple materials, yet his very willingness to repeat meant that the work felt longer than it needed to be with the musical material over stretched.

But Tavener would have argued that that was not the point, his own programme note says 'Then you are singing no longer with your own emotion or your own intellect, but with the eye of the heart in the intellective organ of the heart. This can save millions of souls, and change the world.'

Bach, Feery, Maconchy, Beamish, Imogen Holst: music for solo viola from Rosalind Ventris

Imogen Holst

Bach, Feery, Maconchy, Beamish, Imogen Holst; Rosalind Ventris; City Music Foundation at the Church of St Bartholomew the Less
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 18 December 2019 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★)
An imaginative programme of music for unaccompanied viola by British and Irish women composers, works which all deserve to be better known.

As part of the City Music Foundation's lunchtime concert series at the church of St Bartholomew the Less, on Wednesday 18 December 2019, viola player Rosalind Ventris gave a solo recital, performing JS Bach's Cello Suite No. 3 in C major (in a version for solo viola) alongside music for unaccompanied viola by Amanda Feery, Imogen Holst, Sally Beamish and Elizabeth Maconchy; four women composers, two contemporary and two writing in the mid-20th century.

We started with the Bach, and of course his unaccompanied cello music works well on the viola because the viola's strings are tuned to the same pitches, but an octave higher, as the cello so that where Bach is working with the natural resonances and open strings of the cello, this carries over into the viola. Of course, it helps that Ventris has a lovely mellow tone with a nice depth to it. In the 'Prelude' we could appreciate her sense of line in the long sequences of descending scales, whilst the 'Allemande' was very much a perky dance, albeit with elegance too. The 'Courante' was full of brisk energy, and the 'Sarabande' slow and thoughtful. The first 'Bourree' was an elegant dance with lively rhythms, whilst the second was more haunting with somewhat veiled tone. Finally, we had a 'Gigue' full of rhythmic energy.