Bärenreiter's Schubert edition, BBC Singers & Bathrobe recitals: baritone Jamie W Hall's remarkable journey to making his first solo disc, Schubert's 'Die schöne Müllerin '

Jamie W Hall

If you kept an eye on the Twittersphere during 2020 then the name Jamie W. Hall may be familiar, as he became something of a phenomenon with his bathrobe recitals. Jamie's day job is as a member of the BBC Singers but his adventures with his on-line recitals last year has emboldened him to explore further and when we spoke he had just successfully finished crowdfunding for a recording of Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin which he was planning to record the following weekend to be issued on the Convivium Records label.

 

The success of the crowdfunding had been something of a surprise for Jamie and he calls it extraordinary, having gone into the project with a 'suck it an see' attitude. As regards choosing Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin as the work to record, he admits that pragmatically it might have been better to go with something that had not been recorded before. But the Schubert cycle is one that he wants to record, he has been working on the music for over two years and he regards this as a once in a lifetime opportunity.

 

Jamie's journey began well before March 2020. In 2019 he was bought volume one of Bärenreiter's Schubert lieder edition. Jamie has had a crush on Schubert since he was a teenager but has had not time to explore Schubert's songs as a singer. He decided to learn a song a week, till he lacked the stamina. By chance, he started with the 16th song of Die schöne Müllerin and then continued with the rest of the cycle. This went on during the year leading up to March 2020, and he was just at the point of thinking about performing Die schöne Müllerin when lockdown happened.

 

Jamie W Hall at the recording session for Die schöne Müllerin
(Photo Mike Cooter)

Like many performers, Jamie felt numb as events in his professional diary disappeared. The bathrobe recitals were never designed as such, it is just that for the first video he never really noticed that he hadn't got dressed. It made people laugh, creating fun over what was very much a disjoint in their lives. He recorded each song in the morning, which gave a sort of structure to the day and the feedback brought a sense of community. He admits that there might have been an element of falseness to this, but the feedback made him feel as if he had a purpose. The BBC took a very long time to gets its corporate head around COVID-safe measures so that Jamie was doing stuff remotely for weeks, which made for a lonely existence.

 

For the bathrobe recitals, he drew on his experience as a BBC Singer, where all the singers come to the choir trained to some degree as solo singers and the repertoire includes a lot of opera. But some of the performing elements Jamie drew on went back to his school days when he would perform show songs, and the bathrobe recitals quickly left classical behind to popular song and musicals. And Jamie loved it.

A new trombone concerto, a focus on Shostakovich and his pupil Galina Ustvolskaya, Minute Masterpieces and more: Opera North's Kirklees Concert Season

Conductor Nil Venditti makes her Opera North debut
(photo Marco Borrelli)

After a year of silence, Opera North and Kirklees Council's Kirklees Concert Season is returning to Huddersfield and Dewsbury town halls for a season of concerts running from 23 September 2021 to 7 April 2021. The season marks Opera North's new musical director, Garry Walker's concert debut with the orchestra and also marks the retirement of David Greed as leader of the orchestra since 1978! 

The season includes a focus on 20th century Russian music, a new bass trombone concerto inspired by a railway engineer, a work by Mark-Anthony Turnage inspired by writings by William Golding and entries from Opera North's Minute Masterpieces competition.

A season full of rather striking events opens with Garry Walker conducting Elgar's Cello Concerto with soloist Guy Johnston (artistic director of the Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival) alongside music by Shostakovich and Britten. Opera North's principal guest conductor Anthony Hermus joins the orchestra for the premiere of Gresley, a concerto for bass trombone and orchestra by Benjamin Ellin. The work was written for Orchestra of Opera North’s Christian Jones and is an exploration of the rebuilding of the human spirit after great loss, inspired by the life of the railway engineer and inventor of the Mallard and the Flying Scotsman. Anthony Hermus will also be conducting a programme which combines the Symphonic Poem No. 2 by the Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006), with the First Violin Concerto by Shostakovich (Ustvolskaya's teacher) with retiring leader David Greed as soloist, plus Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra.

Nicholas Watts (Peter Quint in the company's recent performances of Britten's Turn of the Screw) is the tenor soloist in Britten's Serenade for tenor, horn and strings conducted by Garry Walker with horn player Richard Watkins, who first performed the work in 1983 with Sir Peter Pears. Also in the programme is Mark-Anthony Turnage's Drowned inspired by a terrifying account of death in the Atlantic written by William Golding, alongside Elgar's Enigma Variations.

Sian Edwards and pianist Joanna MacGregor join the orchestra for a piano-inspired concert, Gershwin's Piano Concerto alongside Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's piano masterpiece Pictures at an Exhibition. And the piano remains a theme with pianist Howard Shelly in Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 in an all-Beethoven concert re-scheduled from 2020. There is also the annual Christmas concert featuring the orchestra and chorus plus the company's youth ensembles. Whilst a young Italian-Turkish conductor Nil Venditti, principal guest conductor of Orchestra della Toscana, makes his company debut with a programme of Strauss waltzes for New Year's Eve.

Opera North's Minute Masterpieces competition is open to to emerging composers from all backgrounds and traditions, Minute Masterpieces offers the chance to write 60-second works for full symphony orchestra, which will also be recorded by the ensemble. Successful entries will feature throughout the season's concerts.

Sitarist and composer Jasdeep Singh Degun performing the world premiere of his sitar concerto with the Orchestra of Opera North, Huddersfield Town Hall, February 2020 (Photo Justin Slee)

Lunchtime concerts in Dewsbury will feature members of the orchestra alongside guests including soprano Katherine Broderick, singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Alice Zawadzki, and sitarist and composer Jasdeep Singh Degun.

Full details from the Opera North website.

Streamed, live-audiences or both? As ensembles consider innovative ways of returning to performance with live audiences, Middlesex University has been doing some research

Ely Cathedral

As restrictions are gradually released, arts organisations are mulling the conundrum of how to incorporate what has been learned and explored during their on-line seasons into live with audience events. Whilst all performers would agree that a live audience is essential for a performance, the use of live streaming has led many ensembles to develop both new audiences and new relationships with their audiences.

Research from Middlesex University has included a survey of fans and musicians, both classical and popular music. 

• 90% of musicians and 92% of fans agreed live streaming will in future be a successful tool to reach audiences unable or unwilling to go to physical venues
• 72% of live music fans and 74% of musicians agreed that live streamed performances should be paid for
• 95% of fans say emotional engagement from the artist during live stream concerts is important to them. 

Read more at the Live Streaming Music website.

The trick, of course, is quite how you choose to incorporate streaming with live.

Voces8 has been running a popular series of on-line concerts Live from London which are live-streamed from their Gresham Centre (a former church) in the City. So far the Live from London festivals have sold over 130,000 digital seats in 75 countries. They are returning on 4 July 2021 with Live from London - Summer, where Voces8 will be performing with a wide range of invited ensembles from Chineke! and ORA Singers to London Contemporary Orchestra, Cappella Amsterdam, and Danish band Efterklang. The festival is widening its reach beyond choral music, and is bringing back live audiences. But only in a limited way, this remains an on-line festival and the small live audience will give preference to VOCES8 Foundation education attendees and Decca Bursary members. Full details from the Voces8 website.

But The Sixteen's annual Choral Pilgrimmage is as much about the venues as the music, the chance to experience this great music in the stunning acoustics of Britain's major churches and cathedrals. The ensemble has kept a lively on-line presence during the last year, but this year's Choral Pilgrimmage is about live audiences in historic venues. There are differences, programmes are shorter, and audiences will be socially distanced, which means smaller, and hence the economics will be harder but at least with a large cathedral you can socially distance a decent number of people. 2020 was to be the Choral Pilgrimmage's 20th anniversary, so this year's tour is a deferred 20th anniversary with The Call of Rome, a programme of music from composers associated with Rome from Victoria and Josquin to Allegri's Miserere, including three modern takes on this iconic classic. 

The tour opens at St Mary's Church, Warwick on 5 June 2021, and moves on to Winchester Cathedral, Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, Hereford Cathedral, Derby Cathedral, Peterborough Cathedral and Kings Place; each venue is different and each person will experience the concert in a different way. Full details from The Sixteen's website.

The Britten Sinfonia has also been thinking about what it actually means to have a live performance with audience. Artistic director Meurig Bowen explains "The pandemic, and ongoing restrictions, have made us think hard about the relationship between musicians and audiences, and the need for something positive to be drawn from a period that has been intensely difficult: it’s required us all to reassess so many aspects of our lives and work.  Surround Sound puts some of these thoughts into practice, exploring the way that live music can be experienced both as a visual, and as an aural experience, and how our perception of music can alter through evocative interaction with architecture. We are looking forward to developing this further over the coming months and years." 

The result is Surround Sound, a project which will take the ensemble to non-traditional venues and present a live experience that more resembles a drivetime radio sequence - or a playlist/mixtape - and to make it inexpensive and informal. The first is Surround Sound: Ely Playlist which opens the Ely Arts Festival on 12 June 2021 at Ely Cathedral. Like The Sixteen, these performances are about the space itself as much as the music. 

The music is staged on five performance spaces within the Cathedral, with socially distanced audience groups placed throughout the building. Each audience member’s experience will be influenced by where they are sitting.  Choral and chamber music, solos, the cathedral organ and a 20-piece orchestra all feature, with members of Britten Sinfonia joined by South African cellist/vocalist Abel Selaocoe, percussionist Bernhard Schimpelsberger, and members of Ely Cathedral choir. What one audience member might hear at a distance, another will see directly in front of them, with music resonating from the chapels, transepts, arches and along the 161 metre length of the majestic Ely Cathedral, parts of which date from the 11th century. The Ely Playlist features 18 pieces with repertoire ranging from well known pieces by Bach, Handel, Debussy and Grieg to music by Britten, Tavener, Giovanni Sollima, Kerensa Briggs and Abel Selaocoe himself. Full details from the Ely Cathedral website.

Britten Sinfonia are also giving more conventional concerts, on 10 June 2021 at the Barbican Hall it is celebrating Thomas Ades' 50th birthday with Ades as composer, conductor, pianist and programmer. But, in a sign of the brave new world in which we live, the concert is also available streamed as part of the Live from the Barbican series. Full details from the Barbican website.

The Turk in Hampshire: Longhope Summer Opera's performances of Rossini's opera feature a cast of early-career singers

Longhope Opera

Rossini's delightful (and surprisingly complex) comedy, Il Turco in Italia is going to pop up in Hampshire in July thanks to Longhope Summer Opera and Scherzo Ensemble. The opera its being performed on the Longhope Estate in Newton Valence, Hampshire on 2 and 3 July 2021. The director is Charlotte McKechnie, who is the is the artistic director of New Voices Theatre, a company dedicated to performing theatrical works by women, and the conductor is Matthew O'Keefe, who is the director of Scherzo Ensemble as well as being the founder of Lunchbreak Opera (which performs short opera at lunchtime in the City of London) and founder of my local ensemble, the Brixton Chamber Orchestra.

Scherzo is a professional development platform for young singers who have recently completed their training. The company offers a year-long programme of performance and training projects as well as classes in business to a cohort of singers selected annually at audition, and the cast features an interesting line-up of talented early-career artists.  

Fiorilla is Russian soprano Galina Benevich as who is a graduate of the Israeli Opera Young Artists Programme. Zaide is mezzo-soprano Clare Ghigo who won the Malta International Singing Competition and was a semi-finalist in the 2016 London Handel Singing Competition. Prince Selim is Indian baritone Oscar Castellino who completed a degree in Physics and pursued a career in software programming before he was scouted for his singing talent in Mumbai in 2010 by a visiting professor from the Royal College of Music [You can hear more about Oscar's journey on Welsh National Opera's podcast, The O Word]. Albazar is tenor William Searle as who covered Lensky in Buxton International Festival's 2019 production of Eugene Onegin. Narciso is tenor Brenton Spiteri as who is currently at Guildhall School where we saw him in Donizetti's Rita [see my review]. Prosdocimo is shared between Canadian tenor James Schouten, who recently graduated from the Royal College of Music, and baritone Geoff Williams, who was recently performing in Marco da Gagliano's La Dafne with BREMF.

Full details from the Longhope Opera website.

The Harmonious Echo: there are plenty of delights in this second dip into Sullivan's neglected song repertoire

The Harmonious Echo - Songs by Sir Arthur Sullivan; Mary Bevan, Kitty Whately, Ben Johnson, Ashley Riches, David Owen Norris; Chandos
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 12 May 2021 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★)
There's a strong dose of sentimentality in David Owen Norris' second dip into the songs of Sir Arthur Sullivan, but plenty of delights too including some rattling good tunes

The Harmonious Echo is the second volume of pianist David Owen Norris' recordings for Chandos exploring the songs of Sir Arthur Sullivan. In this volume soprano Mary Bevan, mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately, tenor Ben Johnson and bass-baritone Ashley Riches perform 25 songs setting texts ranging from Shakespeare & Fletcher to Longfellow to Adelaide Procter to Kipling, and of course Gilbert. The best-known amongst the songs is Sullivan's setting of Procter, The Lost Chord.

The recital starts with a song which embodies Sullivan's style at its melodic best, King Henry's Song. This is from his 1877 incidental music for a production of Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII (at the Theatre Royal in Manchester), but the song could just as easily be from one of Sullivan's Savoy Opera. And this mood continues with The Lady of the Lake from an 1864 masque, Kenilworth. Over the Roof has a similar origin, it comes from The Sapphire Necklace, Sullivan's first opera, which was never produced.

But the melodic felicity should not blind us to Sullivan's remarkable emotional range. The songs here cover quite a wide range of ground, and certainly challenge the singers' technique, though Sullivan's fondness for the strophic form is not always idea. But not every song on the disc is from the workroom floor, most were written for a purpose. They were intended for the parlour and the salon, so that the wonderfully charming I heard the Nightingale was 'Sung by Mr. Sims Reeves at the Monday Popular Concerts' and Will He Come?, the first Adelaide Procter setting on the disc, was 'Composed expressly for Madame Sainton Dolby’. These were songs which were written for a new breed of professional singers to perform in concerts, in salons and in the hope and expectation that the songs would be popular and be published.

Will He Come? transformed Sullivan's finances, it was the first song that he published with Boosey & Hawkes and for the first time Sullivan did not sell the song outright but received a royalty, and he did very well with the song.

Four new productions, three revivals and some interesting debuts: English National Opera's brave new 2021/22 season

English National Opera has announced its 2021/22 season and a brave return to normality. There are four new productions and three revivals, with Richard Jones' new production of Wagner's The Valkyrie (which should have debut this Spring) still intact and now debuting in November. Cal McCrystal, who directed Gilbert & Sullivan's Iolanthe in 2018 [see my review], is returning for HMS Pinafore, Jamie Manton directs Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen and Annilese Miskimmon, directing her first ENO production, directs a new production of Paul Ruders' The Handmaid's Tale. 

Coming back are Phelim McDermott’s production of Philip Glass' Satygraha, Jonathan Miller's production of Puccini's La Boheme, and Phelim McDermott’s production of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte. The result is a season which is clearly aiming to appeal to multiple types of audiences, and seems to successfully minimise The Ring effect, whereby companies have to focus so many resources on staging Wagner's operas that the rest of the season suffers. Though it is to be noted that of the seven operas in the season, only two are 19th century with no Verdi at all.

Casting places a welcome emphasis on British, British-based or British-trained along with an interesting sprinkling of artists from around the world. During the season, 15 roles will be taken by current Harewood Artists, with seven being taken by former Harewood Artists, and the ENO Mackerras Fellowship for emerging conductors continues into the new season and is currently held by fellow Olivia Clarke. Free tickets will now be available for under 21s for all opera performances, with an allocation on every level of the theatre, and there are extensions to other ticket schemes.

The Chorus and Orchestra Fellowships and Director Observership programme, which launched in 2019, will continue to run into the new season. A five string fellows and four choristers from an ethnically diverse background will join the ENO Orchestra and Chorus respectively for the 2021/22 season, while the ENO’s paid Director Observership programme offers the opportunity for four emerging directors from an ethnically diverse background to work alongside world-renowned opera directors, observing the entire process of directing an opera from start to finish. 

As in previous years, the announcement only covers the main stage from October to April, the remainder of the seasons performances at venues other than the London Coliseum is yet to be announced.

Together, apart: The House of Bedlam's Enclosure on NMC explores how musicians make music when not physically able to be together

Enclosure - Larry Goves, Claudia Sessa, Matthew Sergeant, Sarah Hennies, Amber Priestly; The House of Bedlam; NMC
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 12 May 2021 Star rating: 3.5 (★★★½)
Experimental music group The House of Bedlam ask what it means to perform together with an album recorded entirely by the individual players at home

Enclosure from The House of Bedlam on NMC records examines what happens when you try and make music together when you are not together. The disc features music by Larry Goves, Claudia Sessa, Matthew Sergeant, Sarah Hennies, and Amber Priestly performed by members of the ensemble The House of Bedlam (Larry Goves, director/electronics, Kathryn Williams, flutes, Carl Raven saxophones/clarinets, Tom McKinney guitars, Stephanie Tress cello).

In his programme note Larry Goves explains how his interest in not quite collaborative composition started before 2020, but last year it came to the fore when musicians wanted to make music together but were not able to be physically together. The recordings on the disc were all made during lockdown (and around half the pieces were created at the same time), with players performing at home and sending the results to Goves for mixing and editing. He describes the collection as including "music played in obsessive unison, played entirely independently, composed after the sounds were recorded, and in one case downplaying the importance of the instrumentalist entirely".

From pedal-power to new poetry: London Sinfonietta return to live audiences

Composer Laura Bowler (photo Bob Clewey)

The London Sinfonietta is returning to live performance with audiences with something of a bang, and a series of premieres from Luke Bedford, Kerry Andrew, Gavin Higgins, Robert Mitchell, Larry Goves, and Laura Bowler, involving everything from pedal-powered drama to new poetry.

Tenor Mark Padmore joins London Sinfonietta on 5 June 2021 at Kings Place for the premiere of Luke Bedford's Lessons from the Past, a song cycle inspired by a quotation from American historian Stephen Greenblatt, “I began with the desire to speak with the dead." And Padmore will also be performing Peter Warlock's bleakly desolate masterpiece, The Curlew, setting words by WB Yeats, and there will also be music from Charlotte Bray.

On 23 June 2021, Notes about Now will feature new songs setting poems created in special projects curated by Poet in the City in collaboration with different communities, just before and in the recent months of the pandemic. The event will mix reading of new poetry with new songs by Kerry Andrew, Gavin Higgins, Robert Mitchell and Larry Goves.

Laura Bowler's new work for London Sinfonietta, House Slides premieres on 9 July 2021 at the Royal Festival Hall. In order to put climate change at the centre of both the piece and the performance, there will be up to 16 bicycles on stage powering the performance in what seems to be an industry first (though it also perhaps evokes the 2013 animated film Belleville Rendez-vous). Katie Mitchell directs, Sian Edwards conducts and Jessica Aszodi sing the solo soprano role. The work describes the 'intimate psychological journey of a woman's response to the climate crisis', and Cordelia Lynn's text uses submissions from members of the public.

On-line, the ensembles World Premiere Wednesdays continue with new works from Naomi Pinnock and Hannah Kendall. And there is also a chance to hear members of the next generation of performers with members of the London Sinfonietta Academy.

Full details from the London Sinfonietta's website.

Celebrating 10 years of lieder in Leeds - Leeds Lieder's 2021 festival welcomes audiences back for an action-packed weekend in June

Leeds Lieder, artistic director Joseph Middleton, is 10 this year and having kept the lieder flag flying in Leeds with a series of live-streamed concerts from Leeds Town Hall, Leeds Lieder is plannnint to welcome audiences to Leeds Town Hall for its 2021 festival from 17 to 20 June 2021, though the concerts will be live-streamed as well.

It is an exciting programme and an action packed four days including:

• Alice Coote (mezzo-soprano) and Christian Blackshaw (piano) in Mahler's Rückert Lieder
• Iain Burnside's exploration of Richard Wagner and the Wesendoncks,  A View from the Villa
  
• Natalya Romaniw (soprano) and Iain Burnside (piano) in Strauss, Rimsky-Korsakov, Grieg and Rachmaninov
• Britten's five canticles with Mark Padmore (tenor), Joseph Middleton (piano), Iestyn Davies (counter-tenor), Peter Brathwaite (baritone), Olivia Jageurs (harp), Ben Goldscheider (horn)
• A late-night show from the Hermes Experiment with music by Errollyn Wallen, Raymond Yiu, Ayanna Witter-Johnson, Emily Hall, Hannah Peel, Clara Schumann, Lili Boulanger
  
• Ema Nikolovska (mezzo-soprano) and Joseph Middleton in a striking programme exploring the singer's British, Canadian, American and Germanic links
• Soraya Mafi (soprano), Ema Nikolovska (mezzo-soprano), William Thomas bass and Graham Johnson (piano) in a programme entitled I f Fiordiligi and Dorabella had been Lieder singers which I remember Johnson doing with the Songmakers Almanac in the early 1980s!
• James Gilchrist (tenor) and Anna Tilbrook (piano) in Jonathan Dove's Under Alter’d Skies, plus some of Barber's Hermit Songs and music by Purcell and Schubert
• Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Roderick Williams baritone and Joseph Middleton in He Sings, She Sings, They Sing, You Choose, a programme which combines a new commission from Hannah Kendall with an examination of gender politics in song and an invitation to the audience to contribute to the debate

Plus of course, pre-concert talks, lectures, masterclasses and a concert from the young artists being coached during the weekend. 

Full details from the Festival website.

 

A vivid and restless talent: music by Serbian composer Isidora Žebeljan in the first disc issued after her death last year

Isidora Žebeljan

Isidora Žebeljan Three Curious Loves, Psalm 78, When God created Dubrovnik; Daniel Rowland, Stift Festival Orchestra, David Cohen, Netherlands Chamber Choir, Peter Dijkstra; The state51 Conspiracy
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 10 May 2021 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★)
A live performance of the violin concerto by the late Serbian composer is at the centre of this fascinating disc of her vivid, restless and endlessly inventive talent

The Serbian composer Isidora Žebeljan died last year at the age of 53, one of the most internationally acclaimed contemporary-classical Serbian composers [note her website, linked to here, is a valuable source of information but has not been updated since before her death]. Whilst her music is available in the record catalogue, Žebeljan does not seem to be widely known. Last month The state51 Conspiracy in association with Mascom Records released the first disc of Žebeljan's music to be issued after her death, featuring a wide range of her music in a mix of live and studio recordings. Under the title Three Curious Loves the disc features Žebeljan's violin concerto Three Curious Loves, Psalm 78, When God Created Dubrovnik, Dark Velvet, Sarabande, Bačka Melancholy, Hum Away, Strings!, Tears are O. K and Leda: Tango-Foxtrot.

Isidora Žebeljan studied Composition at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade with Vlastimir Trajković (a student of Olivier Messiaen), and she went on to become professor of composition at the same faculty in 2002.  As well as five operas, Zora D, The Marathon, Simon the Chosen, Two Heads and a Girl, and Simon the Foundling she wrote a considerable amount of incidental music for the theatre, including for the National Theatre in Belgrade and Belgrade Dramatic Theatre. 

Her opera Zora D (2002/2003) premiered in Amsterdam in June 2003 (a co-production between Opera studio Nederland and Wiener Kammeroper) directed by David Pountney. It was the first Serbian opera that had a world premiere abroad and the first Serbian opera that has been staged outside Serbia since 1935.

The compilation opens with the violin concerto Three Curious Loves which was written for the violinist Daniel Rowland who performs it here from the Stift Festival in 2017 with the Stift Festival Orchestra conducted by David Cohen. I am not sure what the significance of the title is, but the work itself is vivid and gripping. Lasting a little of 20 minutes, the work starts with an anxious-sounding solo violin over an ominous bass, but from then on we are taken on a roller-coaster of vividly changing textures and emotions.  There are moments of calm, and a fantastic section mid-way for a solo horn with answering orchestra. The final section is notable for its vivid, almost daemonic energy and there are hints of popular dance rhythms. The climax is followed by a short, thoughtful solo violin moment, an orchestral bang, then nothing.

In between light and shade

As part of the Institut Français' Beyond Words French Literature Festival (which runs on-line from 17 to 23 May 2021), pianist Anne Lovett and multi-instrumentalist Agathe Max will be giving a performance, In between light and shade, which mixes classical and contemporary music with electronics along with a visual installation. 

The concert will feature music by Eric Satie, Lili Boulanger, Fritz Kreisler and Henry Purcell along with Anne Lovett's Margate and What We Are and Agathe Max's White Mill Under Sun Ra's Control. Alongside the music will be a multi-media installation Obscure clarté from Li Chevalier. Li Chevalier was a member of the Opera Ensemble of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, before studying Art and Philosophy in Europe including Central Saint Martin's College of Art, and she continues to exploit her musical background in her installations.

The concert is open to a socially distanced audience (subject to government guidelines) as well as being live-streamed on Facebook and YouTube at 8.30pm on 20 May 2021, including the visual installation.

Full details from the Institut Français website

Baritone Tom Mole wins the 2021 Gold Medal at Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Rossini: La cenerentola - Thomas Mole
British Youth Opera 2019 (Photo Robert Workman)

Congratulations to baritone Tom Mole who won the Guildhall School of Music and Drama's 2021 Gold Medal last week. The prize is awarded to singers and instrumentalists in alternate years, and 2021 was the turn of the singers, with the final taking place on Thursday 6 May and being broadcast on Guildhall School’s website on Saturday 8 May (and available on-line for two weeks).

The final featured Tom Mole, tenor Thando Mjandana, soprano Laura Lolita Perešivana and soprano Olivia Boen, and each singer performed a group of songs (accompanied by Inês Costa, Josh Ridley and Toby Hession) and a group of arias (accompanied by the Guildhall Symphony Orchestra, conductor Natalie Murray Beale).

Tom Mole's winning programme consisted of songs by Rachmaninov, Wolf and Finizi plus Moss' The Floral Dance, and then arias from Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Bizet's Carmen (the Toreador's Song),  and Verdi's Macbeth. The judging panel consisted of Jonathan Vaughan (Guildhall School's Vice Principal and Director of Music), Huw Humphries (Head of Music at the Barbican), Gweneth Ann Rand (soprano and alumna of Guildhall School), Jordan de Souza (conductor) and Natalie Murray Beale (the evening's conductor).

We have caught Mole on a number of occasions. Last year he featured in the Guildhall School's on-line performances including as Aeneas in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas,  and in 2019 we saw him as Alidoro in British Youth Opera's production of Rossini's La Cenerentola [see my review] and as Horn in Opera Holland Park's Young Artist performance of Verdi's Un ballo in maschera [see my review]. And we look forward to seeing him in plenty of future performances.

Mole is a Jerwood Young Artist at Glyndebourne where he will be making his festival debut this Summer as Kuligin in Janacek's Kát’a Kabanová.

"Heard a practice mighty good of Grebus" - Samuel Pepys and the tantalising Louis Grabu

The Old Palace of Whitehall by Hendrick Danckerts, c. 1675

On 20 February 1666 (1667), Samuel Pepys noted in his diary that the leader of King Charles II's band of violins (which the King had created in emulation of his cousin King Louis XIV's violin band), John Bannister, was "mad that the King hath a Frenchman come to be chief of some part of the King’s musique, at which the Duke of York made great mirth." This is the first of four tantalising references in his diary that Pepys makes to Louis Grabu (whom Pepys would call Grebus). 

Grabu was a Catalan, who trained in Paris, but the entirety of his documented career was in London. He seems to first appear in the mid-1660s, Charles II appointed him as a composer for his own private music in 1665, and with the death of the composer Nicholas Lanier (1588-1666) Grabu became the second person to hold the title Master of the King's Musick. Grabu was both a composer and a violinist and seems to have been brought in to improve standards with the violin band and the spat with Bannister (as reported by Pepys) seems to be related to this, Grabu had Bannister replaced with allegations of impropriety.

There are a few more comments about Grabu in Pepys. In October 1667 Pepys hears a piece by Grabu in Whitehall, "an English song upon Peace. But, God forgive me! I never was so little pleased with a concert of musick in my life. The manner of setting of words and repeating them out of order, and that with a number of voices, makes me sick, the whole design of vocall musick being lost by it." Though even Pepys has to admit that in instrumental music, Grabu's regime of practice with the violin band had paid dividends. 

London Mozart Players' Spotlight On:

London Mozart Players is returning to live concerts with a series, Spotlight On: which focuses on young artists. Over four concerts in June and October, at Fairfield Halls and Cadogan Hall, the orchestra will be joined by cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, saxophonist Jess Gillam, pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason and violinist Leia Zhu.

On 4 June 2021, Sheku Kanneh-Mason joins the orchestra for a concert which opens Fairfield Halls live concert season this year including Dvorak's Cello Concerto alongside music by Mendelssohn conducted by Jaime Martin. Jess Gilliam and the orchestra will be at Fairfield Halls on 24 June, for a concert conducted by Jonathan Bloxham which pairs Michael Nyman's contemporary saxophone concerto, Where the Bee dances, with Glazunov's Saxophone Concerto which was written in 1934 and was the composer's final work.

On 26 June 2021, Isata Kanneh-Mason performs Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the orchestra at Cadogan Hall in a programme which includes Beethoven's Symphony No. 2. The concert is conducted by Stephanie Childress, making her debut with the orchestra. The final concert in the series is on 9 October 2021 at Fairfield Halls when Leia Zhu performs Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto conducted by Gerard Korsten, alongside Beethoven's Symphony No. 8.

All the concerts will be filmed and will be available on-line. As part of the orchestra's 100k Challenge, aiming to reach at least 100,000 children and young people in 2021 , each concerto performance will be filmed and will be made available free to schools across the country with specially designed 'listening guides', targeted at different age groups from 4-18.

Full details from the orchestra's website.

A Life On-Line: reinventing Josquin, rare late Richard Strauss, early Handel on TV, Sir John Eliot Gardiner in Elgar, Britten & Tippett

Josquin: Mille Regretz - Ella Taylor,  William Towers, Jorge Navarro Colorado, Richard Dowling, Stephan Loges - English Touring Opera (taken from live-stream)

This week began and ended with strikingly modern stagings of early music, Josquin from English Touring Opera and Rameau from Mannheim, we also caught early Handel on Sky Arts, rare late Richard Strauss and Nino Rota in symphonic mode from the London Symphony Orchestra, and Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Philharmonia in Elgar. The character of Phaedra was a feature too, cropping up in Rameau's Hippolite et Aricie and in Britten's very different late cantata.

English Touring Opera are releasing a series of videos as part of their ETO at Home digital season. Last week we caught Mille Regretz, a staging of music by Josquin. Conducted by Jonathan Kenny and directed by Liam Steele this brought together a group of Josquin's secular pieces with one sacred work, all performed by Ella Taylor (soprano), William Towers (counter-tenor), Richard Dowling and Jorge Navarro Colorado (tenors), and Stephan Loges (baritone), filmed in Stone Nest (the evocative interior of the former Welsh church in the West End). Whilst a number of the singers in the cast have admirable historically informed performance credentials, this wasn't a period-style performance, anything but. In the pre-concert talks Kenny talked about how he had wanted to bring out the modernism in Josquin's music.

So here were young opera singers performing Josquin accompanied by an intriguing ensemble of violin/viola (Jim O'Toole), violin (Guy Button), theorbo (Toby Carr), accordion (Ilona Suomalainen), vibrophone and percussion (Jonny Raper). Liam Steele's approach was very physical, there was a lot of movement including pieces done almost as choreographed choruses. The costumes were highly stylised with much makeup and the result had something of a look of Mad Max, a group of stylised, stylish transients gathering to sing about personal joys and griefs. And it worked.

Messe da Pacem: conductor Rupert Gough and the choir of Royal Holloway rediscover a mass by Pierre Villette, unperformed since the 1970s

Rupert Gough and the Choir of Royal Holloway in the chapel at Royal Holloway (Photo Christopher Willoughby)

Rupert Gough and the Choir of Royal Holloway's latest album, on Buckfast Abbey's Ad Fontes label, focuses on French sacred music with works by Pierre Villette from the 20th century, and more recent music by Yves Castagnet alongside the remarkable reinvention of a familiar piece by Maurice Ravel. Whilst the music of Pierre Villette is becoming better known, particularly in the UK, the centrepiece of the album is his Messe da Pacem which has not been performed since the 1970s and is here performed for the first time in Rupert Gough's new version for choir and organ. The album was recorded on the recently restored Cavaillé-Coll organ at the church of Notre-Dame d'Auteuil in Paris. I recently met up with Rupert via Zoom to chat more about Villette, Castagnet and making the album, along with what makes the choir of Royal Holloway such a distinctive collegiate ensemble.

Pierre Villette (1926-1998) was born in Normandie and as a boy sang in the choir of Rouen Cathedral. From the age of 14, he studied with Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986) and attended the Paris Conservatoire where Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) was a fellow student (the two shared the first prize for harmony in 1945). Ill health forced Villette to move to the south of France and he was head of the Conservatoire de Besançon (1957–67) and later as director of the Conservatoire d’Aix-en-Provence (1967–87), with composition as a somewhat part-time activity. It was Donald Hunt (1930-2018) who was Master of Choristers and Organist of Worcester Cathedral (1976–96) who did much to bring Villette’s music to a wider audience in the UK in the 1970s.

Pierre Villette at the Conservatoire d'Aix, 1988 (Estate of Pierre Villette)

Rupert was already interested in recording a disc of French sacred music and had identified the music of Yves Castagnet as something he would like to record when, by chance, he was sent the music of Villette’s Messe en Français which was first performed at the Three Choirs Festival in 1981. Villette only wrote two masses, and his other mass was the Messe da Pacem. Scored for choir, echo choir, soprano soloist, full symphony orchestra, and one or two organs, the Messe da Pacem was premiered in Aix-en-Provence in 1970 with Villette playing the main organ part. Judging from the orchestral parts, Rupert does not think the Messe da Pacem has been performed since the 1970s.

Celebrating Latvia's centenary with music: the State Choir "Latvija" records 16 new works from a project creating a grand total of 77 new pieces by Latvian composers

Aeternum; State Choir "Latvija", Māris Sirmais; SKANI
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 7 May 2021 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★)
Fourteen new pieces by contemporary Latvian composers created as part of a larger project for a new body of music for professional and amateur choirs to celebrate Latvia's centenary

Latvia celebrated its centenary on 18 November 2018. To mark the celebrations the State Choir "Latvija" and its artistic director Māris Sirmais brought to conclusion a three-year project where they premiered a repertoire of new songs, with seventy-seven composers in all writing for the choir, with the intention of creating a body of works suitable for both professional and amateur choirs. The choir premiered these songs at a series of concerts which culminated in concert on 4 May 2018 when the choir was joined by other Latvian ensembles, both professional an amateur, to perform 14 of the songs.

This new disc, Aeternum, from SKANI, a division of the Latvian Music Information Centre, presents sixteen of the new songs performed by the State Choir "Latvija" and Māris Sirmais, with works by Ēriks Ešenvalds, Irīna Mihailovska, Valts Pūce, Andris Dzenītis, Pēteris Vasks, Rihards Zaļupe, Uldis Marhilēvičs, Vilnis Šmīdbergs, Maija Einfelde, Andris Kontauts, Anna Ķirse, Jānis Aišpurs, Ansis Sauka, Juris Kulakovs, Raimonds Tiguls and Jēkabs Jančevskis.

The styles of the composers involved is very wide with backgrounds from classical, folk, pop, rock, underground and electronic music. Each composer took as their theme one of five elements, fire, water, earth, sky, love, though some hew closer to their chosen theme than others. The age range of the composers is wide as well, on this disc we have birth dates from 1939 (Maija Einfelde) to 1992 (Jēkabs Jančevskis), and the two best known names for those outside Lativa are probably Ēriks Ešenvalds and Pēteris Vasks.

State Choir "Latvija" and Māris Sirmais

When listening to this music, we should perhaps remember the intention of the project.

Northern Ireland Opera launches second series of Northern Songs

Northern Songs - filming Andrew Irwin in Marble Arch Caves - Northern Ireland Opera

Northern Ireland Opera is launching a second series of Northern Songs, films of songs by composers from across the island of Ireland, performed in some of Northern Ireland’s most beautiful and historic locations. For the new series, sopranos Catherine Donnelly and Susie Gibbons, mezzo-soprano Margaret Bridge, tenors John Porter and Andrew Irwin and bass baritone David Howes, all winners or finalists of the company's annual Glenarm Festival of Voice, will perform a mix of art songs and contemporary songs in iconic locations, Enniskillen Castle, Marble Arch Caves, Ballintoy Harbour, the OM Dark Sky Park, Beaghmore Stone Circles, the Ulster American Folk Park, Armagh Robinson Library, the Armagh Cider Company and Belfast’s Maritime Mile.

You can watch series 2 of Northern Songs each Thursday at 8pm from 13 May on the company's YouTube channel; the first film features Catherine Donnelly and Margaret Bridge singing A River Runs Beneath Us by Duke Special and Andrew Doyle, on the Maritime Mile and Titanic Slipways in Belfast. 

Series 1 of Northern Songs is still available on YouTube and on the Northern Ireland Opera website, and was shared as part of the NI Bureau in Washington’s official St Patrick’s Day event, and at the recent NI Expo event for North America.

Further details of series 2 from the Northern Ireland Opera website.

Laura Kaminsky's chamber opera, As One, to make its UK debut at 8th London Festival of American Music

Odaline de la Martinez' London Festival of American Music is returning for its eighth iteration from 13 to 18 September 2021 at The Warehouse in Waterloo. This year, the festival will feature works by Florence Price, Daniel Asia, Margaret Bonds, Augusta Read Thomas, Fred Lehrdal and Odaline de la Martinez herself, plus the UK premiere of Laura Kaminsky's transgender opera As One.

Laura Kaminsky's 2014 chamber opera, As One, features a transgender protagonist who is played by two singers, here baritone Simon Wallfisch as Hannah before and mezzo-soprano Carolyn Dobbin Hannah after. The production is directed by Sarah Chew and Odaline de la Martinez conducts the London String Quartet. The opera was commissioned by American Opera Projects and premiered in 2014 at the Brooklyn Academy, New York, since then it has had more than 30 productions across the USA but this will only the second time that the work has been produced in Europe.

The festival also features Dr Samantha Ege performing the piano music of Florence Price [see my review of Ege's recent Price disc], mezzo-soprano Simone Ibbott-Brown, Lontano and Odaline de la Martinez in music by Augusta Read Thomas, Fred Lehrdal, Margaret Bonds, Florence Price and De la Martinez' Four Afro Cuban Poems by Nicolas Guillén, pianists Fanya Lin and Dan Linder in music by Daniel Asia,

What Power Art Thou: Dingle Yandell and the OAE channel Goyte in their new video of Purcell

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE) has produced another of their videos of Baroque arias done in the style of visually striking pop videos. This time, Goyte's Somebody that I used to know [see it on YouTube], which was directed by Natasha Pincus, has inspired a video of Purcell's 'What power art thou' (sung by the Cold Genius in King Arthur) performed by OAE's Rising Stars alumnus, bass-baritone Dingle Yandell. In the video the singer is covered in paint and gradually merges with the background; in the original song, a metaphor for the way the man's ex-girlfriend has wiped their relationship out of existence, and perhaps in the Purcell a metaphor for the Cold Genius' desire to return to the cold. 

Or perhaps we should just enjoy a visual and aural feast, and spare a thought for Yandell, spending 10 hours wearing very little and being covered in body paint!

Dingle Yandell and the OAE's What Power Art Thou is available on YouTube