CD review

It's almost Christmas again, and here's a suggestion for something to get for a pianist who wants to venture into the unknown a bit ...

Eric Craven: Pieces for Pianists volume 1 (performed by Mary Dullea, Métier msv 28601).

Eric Craven is a composer who knows his own mind but doesn’t impose his own will. These 25 short pieces for piano, published in ‘progressive’ order like an old-fashioned collection of classics designed to be an aid to learning, are notated in an unusual way.

There are no key signatures (though the score is entirely precise about which notes are to be played and their relative time values, and there are bar lines) and the performer can decide their own tempo, dynamics, phrasing, articulation and pedalling. Craven calls it ‘my Non-Prescriptive Low-order format’.

Mary Dullea is a distinguished musician and recording artist who appreciates the freedom this gives in executing them and the element of improvisation and potential continuing variation that’s essential to their realization in practice. Recording them inevitably archives one particular way on one particular day, and I was a bit surprised at first how little extra characterization she seeks to impose on the music in these versions – but I guess she’s keen to let the music ‘speak for itself’ even under Eric Craven’s conditions.

She rightly divines echoes of a variety of other composers’ styles to be found in them, and just occasionally you ask yourself why she took certain decisions (such as keeping the pedal down for a bar or bars when a seemingly sequential or parallel passage had different treatment) … but the point of the recordings, which vary in duration from 1 minute 20 seconds to 4 minutes 49 seconds, is really just to say ‘Here they are – make of them what you will’, and I can only repeat that invitation.

 

Review of the Hallé concert with Marc-André Hamelin and Ryan Wigglesworth, at the Bridgewater Hall

Marc-Andre Hamelin (credit Sim Cannety-Clarke) 

 

Ryan Wigglesworth is one of those musicians who are practically perfect in every way. The greatest thing to come out of Sheffield, musically, since Sterndale Bennett, he’s pianist, conductor, academic and composer.

So with him as Artist in Association the Hallé get lots of options. Last night we witnessed two of them: him as composer, and as conductor in charge of his own work as well as that of others. His Piano Concerto was premiered at the BBC Proms in 2019 with the brilliant Marc-André Hamelin as soloist, and Hamelin was here in Manchester to play it again.

I can’t pretend that I’d expect it to become a popular favourite (the whole idea of concerto as solo showpiece with big tunes, originating in vocal aria forms and making great box office in the 19^th and pre-Second World War 20^th centuries, seems to have rather run out of steam more recently), but it gave both pianist and orchestra plenty to think about – and it rewards its audience with four varied movements which rarely lose concision in concept or expression.

The third of four movements (where the orchestra is reduced to strings and harp and the piano sings a Polish folk song, with decorative imitation of itself, both higher and fainter) is in many ways its centre of gravity – probably its longest section in terms of pure duration. Before it there’s a brief, prelude-like movement with long-breathed string phrases and then a Scherzo with almost helter-skelter perpetual motion from the piano; after it there’s a finale more in traditional piano-v-orchestra-battle style, which ends as the piano “wanders” (Wigglesworth’s own word) to a close on a single, very low, note – not really destined to produce any roar of applause.

Two of the concerto’s movements have the same names as two of the pieces of incidental music Mendelssohn wrote for A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1843, which formed the opening of the concert (done in the order they would come in the play): both a Scherzo and a Nocturne, which were both played as the little jewels they are by the Hallé under Ryan Wigglesworth’s baton (and led by Paul Barritt). He has a calm and precise stick technique which on this occasion gave rise to delicate, lively, dynamically flexible and precisely articulated playing, full of charming touches in part-playing balance and first foot-tappingly joyful and then gloriously rich and romantic.

And finally there was Schumann’s Symphony no. 2: romanticism of a kind that followed very soon afterwards but with bigger architectural ambitions. British writers of Schumann’s own generation used the word “Schumannism” as a one-word cypher for over-wrought expression and neuroticism in music (as they considered it), but Ryan Wigglesworth knew how to handle its idiom: the waxing and waning emotional intensity of the first movement became a structure of slowly evolving optimism, despite shocks and surprises along the way, and its unorthodox finale seemed to keep slowing to a halt, as if unsure how to find the right frame of mind, before it suddenly got there.

But the third, Adagio espressivo, movement is what makes this symphony worth hearing, really: it’s a song without words to begin with and end, and there was, as in the Mendelssohn, lovely playing from the Hallé’s gifted wind principals.

Review of Manchester Camerata's livestreamed 'Mozart in Motion' concert at the Stoller Hall

Alexander Sitkovetsky and Timothy Ridout play Mozart with Manchester Camerata

Mozart played by Manchester Camerata is always a treat, and in addition to their recent public concert at the Stoller Hall they did another one last Thursday in the same hall – this time empty of people in the auditorium but live-streamed as ‘Mozart in Motion’.

Alexander Sitkovetsky shared the direction with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, as each appeared as director-and-soloist – and Sitkovetsky directed the ‘Jupiter’ symphony, from the leader’s position (and jumping up out of it), for good measure. Caroline Pether was alongside him as ever-alert leader in the first two items: the Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola (with Timothy Ridout as viola soloist) and Piano Concerto no. 9 (the Jenamy, or ‘Jeunehomme’ as it’s long been called).

Nicely presented in the hands of Apple & Biscuit Productions, with Camerata principal flute Amina Hussain filmed in the hall stalls doing a brief introduction and later talking to Jean-Efflam Bavouzet about the concerto, and Caroline Pether ushering in the symphony, it was an extraordinarily good night of music-making.

The string Sinfonia Concertante (K364) is one of those pieces of youthful Mozart that’s pure pleasure from start to finish. Sitkovetsky and Ridout faced the orchestra from the front of the stage (why turn away from them with no one in the audience seats?) and were a superbly matched duo, neither stealing the limelight but both bringing lyrical beauty and eloquence to their role. The Camerata players followed suit, with suave and graceful playing that was also neatly pointed where necessary and had real weight and attack in its crescendi – and could turn sombre on a sixpence, too. The slow movement had a lovely lilt and long, smooth phrasing, and the finale was great fun, perky and playful.

For the piano concerto (K272), Bavouzet, too, could face the orchestra, and his performance had all the distinction I remember from their concert performance of it together in September 2019. The piece reached depths of expression in the slow movement that he’s explored so well before, and the finale had all its pace and exuberance again.  The piano (it’s got a big tone anyway) was pretty closely mic’d for Mozart – it may sound like that to performers in a ‘normal’ concert, but the on-screen experience should, I think, match that of an audience sitting at a distance as we usually do.

The Symphony no. 41 (K551) is a winner is any circumstances and was given exemplary treatment under Sitkovetsky, the wind players as ever providing much of the distinction to the sound. That amazing finale bubbled and bounced – it never fails to lift the spirits.

 

Review of Maestro Glorioso, by John Holden

 

Maestro Glorioso: Ten Essays in Celebration of Sir John Barbirolli, by John Holden (Kennington, the Barbirolli Society, 2021). Price £20.

 It’s amazing how the magic of John Barbirolli’s conducting still entrances, 50 years after his death.

Partly that’s because of the recordings he made in the later years of his life, captured as they were with the technical quality to be completely rewarding in today’s digital age. But for those of us who saw him in person, in action, there’s more than that, something completely mesmeric about his personality and platform manner that never leaves the memory.

Who can forget his entrances, hand on breast in ‘Little Corporal’ style (and he would never even walk on to a platform unless there was complete silence in the auditorium), his royal-style waves, his conducting of the National Anthem facing the hall as if daring all present to join in – and of course the electric charge in his every movement once the music proper began?

He was a ‘showman’, people said. Yes, but a showman in the service of great music: everything arose from his earnest, sincere dedication to his craft. And he was a complete professional: performances that often seemed full of spontaneity were prepared in painstaking detail and rehearsed so lovingly that the music felt spontaneous, and the ‘affection’ and even ‘indulgence’ that critics described in his readings were always finely calculated and intentional. There was a feeling about so many pieces that when you heard the way Barbirolli did them, there could really be none better.

That’s an aspect of what Raymond Holden has described in these anniversary essays, published recently by the Barbirolli Society. He brings the insights of a practising conductor and the thoroughness of a scholar. Some of his chapters (which are based on his lectures, broadcasts and articles over the years) comprise details of Barbirolli’s life and career that are relatively well known and available in other sources – though always cogently assembled.

But the most interesting chapters, to me, are those where he analyses the marked performing scores that JB used, now available to researchers in the British Library, and the outcomes of his preparation as we hear them in some of his greatest recorded performances – in Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ symphony, Bruckner’s eighth and Elgar’s In the South in particular. You can see his musical mind at work – not just in his ever-meticulous bowing of the strings’ parts (which he never tired of and which undoubtedly had much to do with the famous ‘Barbirolli sound’), but also in his tempo calculations and dynamic control. 

His approach to great musical structures was one common to the great 19th century maestros from Richard Wagner onwards and also the early 20th century conductors from whom JB learnt directly – ‘architectonic’ is a word Raymond Holden uses frequently to describe it – and saw tempo change as essential to building shape, and highlighting each work or movement’s supreme climax (look at Mahler’s scores to see how he intended these to be patent in performance).

The reference notes to these essays are magisterial and many-faceted: though one little oversight seems to have crept in, as he describes Barbirolli’s famous 1964 recording with the Halle of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius as a ‘studio recording’, though I think there are those who still remember it being made, at least mainly, in the Free Trade Hall.

 

 

Review of the Hallé's filmed concert at the Bridgewater Hall, released 29th July 2021

Sir Mark Elder conducts the Hallé in The Firebird suite  c.The Hallé

The Hallé ‘Summer Season’ of live music in Manchester has included streamed film versions of three of the concerts, and the final one, which I had to miss seeing in person, is now available. Sir Mark Elder conducts and the programme is all Russian music: Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky.

A ‘Russian night’ was often a popular formula in the orchestra’s summer Proms a decade or so ago, but this was no set of Tchaikovsky and others’ greatest hits: though Stravinsky’s The Firebird suite would be a draw any time, the other two pieces are comparative rarities and it was a great idea to include them.

As through the entirely filmed ‘Winter Season’, the production standards of this document of the orchestra’s playing are extremely high. The virtuosity of the camera operation and mixing and the splendour of the recorded sound are almost the equal of the musicians’ playing in itself. And again there are bits of chat between items, from Sir Mark and a number of orchestra members and staff, which are fascinating to hear and bring light to the whole experience. There’s also something unexpected, both at the beginning and the end: the former a rather superfluous succession of thank you statements from and about Siemens for their sponsorship (not that those are undeserved, but they dampen the atmosphere a bit at the start) – the latter I’ll tell you about later.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s suite from his opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan proved a rich mine of sonic jewels and musical storytelling. Its opening depiction of the Tsar setting out on a journey leapt into life with precise and spritely jollifications, and the following seascape (not completely unlike the one in Scheherazade) had plenty of subtlety in Sir Mark’s reading – the rolling billows had to be kind enough for a princess and baby to survive floating on them in a barrel, according to the story. The music worked up a head of steam, however, for the finale’s picture of golden-helmeted knights and their galloping steeds, in which the orchestra, led by Kanako Ito and spread out on the extended stage as so often before in their lockdown era, sounded magnificent.

Rachmaninov’s The Rock is an early work and interesting if only for the signs of the genius to come, but it was played with such care and love that the beginnings of his extraordinary gift for uncurling, everlasting melodies proved a wonderful vehicle for the woodwind players and for heartstring-tugging tone from the violins. And the sweet and thrilling sounds continued in Stravinsky’s The Firebird suite (1945 version), the Final Hymn, dramatically punched out in its emphatic ending, no less than the thunderous Infernal Dance.

One of the memorable things about these filmed performances (and I seemed to notice it more in this than most others) is the chance to see the conductor as the orchestra see him … and indeed in close-up, too. It’s an experience in itself, and gives you an insight into the art of the musician who never makes a sound but enables all the others to do so as one.

And the unexpected final bit? Rimsky-Korsakov wrote The Flight of the Bumble Bee for The Tale of Tsar Saltan, though it’s not in the suite. It comes as a bonus (or an encore if you like to think of it so) at the end of the film.

 

The recording of the concert is available until 29 October: link thehalle.vhx.tv/products/

Review of The Barber of Seville at Clonter Opera

Elsa Roux Chamoux as Rosina in 

Clonter Opera's production of The Barber 

of Seville. Credit Edward Robinson 

The “Glyndebourne of the North” really came up trumps on Thursday evening, with the smell of haymaking in the air (Clonter Opera’s base is surrounded by farmland) and glorious sunshine to revel in.

I don’t remember choosing to have a picnic outside there before (there’s always space inside for dining, too), but it was the natural choice as well as the advisable one in these Covid times. Inside, the seating was well spaced on alternate rows, the only slight worry being that here, as in some other classical venues I’ve noticed, the clientele includes some geriatrics who don’t seem to realise that wearing a face covering means you actually cover your face, not just dangle it from your chin.

The production of Il Barbiere di Siviglia (in Italian, with English sur-title translation) was lively and entertaining. Director Greg Eldridge (who has had a special post created for him at Covent Garden) must be responsible for that, but the youthful cast were also very much to be credited, working hard and singing with distinction.

Of them, the standout was Henry Neill, as Figaro. He sang the same-named role in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (which, based like this one on Beaumarchais, continues the story begun by The Barber) for Clonter in 2017, making a big impression, and has gone on to an international career. The other low-voiced roles – Dr Bartolo (Adam Maxey) and Don Basilio (Benjamin Schilperoort) – were also powerfully sung and comically adroit.

Rosina, the heroine, was a very feisty Latin lady in Elsa Roux Chamoux’ interpretation (exactly as she should be) and showed a lovely mezzo tone, and Samuel Kibble, taking the taxing role of Count Almaviva with wit and charm, is a very promising tenor. George Reynolds, filling up the cast as variously Fiorello, police officer and notary, is another excellent baritone, and Faryl Smith – who really only gets her solo chance in one aria near the end – proved a great dumb-show actress, a fine ensemble singer and estimable solo soprano. Philip Sunderland conducted the small Clonter Sinfonia in great style and kept everything well controlled.

And the set, designed by Bettina John, was something special for Clonter: a revolve! They don’t have much a stage to put one on, and it has to be hand-operated like a children’s playground roundabout, but it gave the opportunity for four little interiors to be represented, with doors between some of them, and was cleverly exploited at every turn.

Review of Acis and Galatea by the Early Opera Group at Buxton International Festival

Samuel Boden as Acis and Anna Dennis as Galatea 

in the Early Opera Company's Acis & Galatea at 

Buxton International Festival. Credit Genevieve Girling

Handel’s “serenata” for five singers and small orchestra is a lovely piece of concisely varied musical invention, the product of the necessities of a particular time and place but richly crafted and beautiful to listen to.

It can be done with very little production resources beyond imaginative vocalists (there was a great little version from the St Asaph Festival years ago which popped up at Manchester Cathedral and featured live doves for the “pretty warbling choir” and a bovver-booted Christopher Purves as Polyphemus in one of his first professional roles after being part of Harvey and the Wallbangers).

It's based on a snippet of Ovid, as versified by John Gay of Beggars’ Opera fame (and probably other authors): a pastoral myth about a nymph and a shepherd whose amours are disturbed by the cyclops, resulting in death of said shepherd (Acis), and comforting of said nymph (Galatea) in the thought that his spirit lives on in a bubbling stream.

That’s it, really. So how do you turn it into an opera fit for a festival such as Buxton’s? The Early Opera Company’s production directed by Martin Constantine goes for the sensual delights of a “Human Sciences International Symposium 1962” as the reconceived setting. Academic gatherings can have their romantic side – Open University residential weekends used to be known for it, I’m told – but the concept does seem to stretch the original material a bit.

Acis, Galatea, Polyphemus and the two friends who offer them advice (the five combine for choral numbers) are represented by the convenor and contributors of the symposium, and their investigation of the “worldly and unworldly love” of Handel’s piece develops into fiercely competitive lustfulness on the part of the Polyphemus character, and of course a physical attack on “Acis”, whom “Galatea” really fancies much more.

It all starts calmly enough, as these things do, but by the time the two innocents are singing “Happy, happy we” they’re getting quite frisky, and their nemesis makes his first move by squelching Galatea’s pet caged songbird. The monster Polypheme’s “trusty pine” (club) is his brolly here, but he finds a real rock to hit his rival with, as in the original scenario.

There are some nice touches, such as the way “Polyphemus” tries a spot of meditation as a way of dealing with his anger (unsuccessfully), but I didn’t get why the built environment gave way to a surprise field of corn for the consolatory ending.

Musically, though, the performance under conductor Christian Curnyn was practically perfect in every way, and Anna Dennis, Samuel Boden, Jorge Navarro Colorado, Edward Grint and David de Winter all sang with great distinction.

Further performances are on 18 and 20 July.

 

Review of Pauline Viardot's Cendrillon at Buxton International Festival

Nikki Martin as Cendrillon at Buxton International 

Festival. Credit Genevieve Girling

Pauline Viardot’s reputation in her day was as a performer: one of the great mezzos of the 19^th century, she was the sister of Maria Malibran, whose untimely death after a Manchester Musical Festival vocal sing-off in 1836 is sometimes, rather ill-adroitly, clung to as a distinction in the city’s cultural history. She also lived in a cheerful ménage-à-trois with her husband and the novelist Turgenev.

Atta-girl! She spent much of her time in the company of the aristocratic and cultured elite, as did most serious artists, and of course she taught private pupils (ditto, ditto).

Her compositional gifts, though considerable as befitted someone good enough to take lessons from Liszt, seem to have been practised mainly in creating entertainment for her own salon and giving her pupils performance opportunities along the way.

Hence her piano-accompanied comic opera (a piece with spoken dialogue), Cendrillon, written in the early years of the 20^th century when she was in her eighties.

It’s not Offenbach or Gilbert and Sullivan, but it’s not very far away. There’s a succession of charming and pleasant ditties, with some duets and ensembles of which the most notable is a sextet that ends Act One.

The “Young Artists” of Buxton International Festival – mainly studying in Manchester’s halls of musical academe – have brought her adaptation of the Cinderella story back to life, under the direction of festival head of music Iwan Davies, who accompanies. Director is Laura Attridge, who has provided adapted dialogue in English though the musical numbers are sung in the original French (side-titles translate), with design by Anna Orton, costume design by Michelle Bristow and lighting by Rachel E Cleary.

The story is a mild-mannered version of the familiar European Cinderella, as told by Perrault and set to music by bigger names than Viardot. So the sisters are not so much ugly as vain, and not even very nasty, and Prince Charming appearing disguised, mainly as his own Chamberlain (Buttons, as we now know him) is simply assumed from the start. Prince Charming is a woman’s “trouser” role, and the main event at the ball is when the girls are each invited to sing (Viardot leaves it to the performers to select their own contributions here, and Iwan Davies has the sisters sing the Barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann, while Cinderella gives us a slice of Massenet) – though we learn later that dancing came into it, too.

But Cinders’ father really is a Baron Hard-Up, and Viardot’s text makes much of the fact that he’s not much of a real baron because he once made his money as a grocer – in trade, my dear!

It’s all frothy and sentimental stuff, and, on the occasion I saw it, was very well sung by Pasquale Orchard (Le Fée), Nikki Martin (Cendrillon), Camilla Seale (Prince Charming), Olivia Carrell and Flora Macdonald (the sisters), Ross Cumming (the Baron), and Andrew Henley (the Chamberlain).

Further performances are on 16 and 24 July.

 

Review of Dido's Ghost at Buxton International Festival

Isabelle Peters as Anna in Dido's Ghost 

at Buxton International Festival, Buxton 

Opera House. Credit Genevieve Girling

Purcell’s Dido And Aeneas (book and lyrics by Nahum Tate, otherwise mainly known for penning “While Shepherds watched”) has long been recognized as a masterpiece on the cusp of the change from masques to real opera in English.

But it’s quite short, part of the original music is lost, and no one quite knows how it was presented in its day, apart from a version at an all-girls boarding school. It does contain one utterly moving song: Dido’s Lament, as it’s often known, beginning “When I am laid in earth …”

How can we bring it on in a version for today, except by quite a lot of imaginative reconstruction and restoration, possibly inserting bits of other music by Purcell or even his contemporaries – as Jonathan Miller did in the production seen at Buxton Festival in 2008 and (rightly) welcomed internationally?

Errollyn Wallen has come at it quite differently. With text by Wesley Stace (aka John Wesley Harding), she’s composed her own chamber opera, set some time after the Tate-Purcell snippet from Ovid’s Fasti, and taking up aspects of the classic original to ask What Happened Next?

Into that she dovetails the original Dido and Aeneas, almost complete, as a “masque” staged at court by Lavinia, the second Mrs Aeneas, to recall the broken love affair that he, now king of the New Troy in Italy, can never forget (and the curse that goes with it). Dido’s lookalike sister, Anna, has turned up on his shores, and she becomes Dido, while Aeneas acts himself. Of course nothing can possibly go wrong.

The piece was co-commissioned by BIF, premiered at the Barbican last month and is on its way to the Edinburgh Festival, among other places. It’s performed by the Dunedin Consort, the superb Scottish specialists in baroque music, directed by John Butt – so you get the Purcell score performed with scholarly authority and typical liveliness, but Errollyn Wallen’s instrumentation adds modern percussion including a xylophone, and a prominent role for bass guitar. It’s an intriguing update of the textures of baroque music, where the balance of free-flowing melody and independent bass line is the key to much beauty (and never more so than in the original Dido’s Lament).

The composer intertwines her own music with Purcell’s and uses references to it, too: her witches’ dance has a short, pounding bass guitar riff as Anna is woken from Lavinia’s spell. Aeneas sees Anna (or is it Dido?) and the accompaniment starts the Lament, but he sings it and she adds a counter-melody. The Lament finally emerges in full from Aeneas’s lips as he prepares to end it all, and the chorus sing Purcell’s finale (with a little postlude from Wallen).

On the first night at Buxton, Isabelle Peters stepped up from the chorus to take the role of Anna/Dido, in place of the unwell Idunnu Münch. Peters, a WNO associate artist, was an outstanding Dorabella in a Royal Northern College of Music production of Cosí fan Tutte in 2016 and for those in Manchester had already made an impression as Rapunzel in the Royal Exchange Theatre’s Into The Woods shortly before. She is a gifted actress as well as an excellent singer, and unhesitatingly carried all the dimensions of the part on this occasion. Jessica Gillingwater brought incisive vocal strength and presence to the role of Lavinia, and Nardus Williams found an individual characterization of charm to Belinda, along with the richness of timbre that’s already charmed opera and concert audiences widely. Add to those the two witches’ performances from Lucy Goddard and Judy Brown of the Dunedin Consort ranks, and you have an exceptionally strong female line-up for John Butt to direct. Matthew Brooks’ Aeneas likewise sang strongly and with emotional awareness throughout, and Timothy Dickinson (Elymas) and Dunedin’s David Lee (Ascanius) were no less committed.

 

 

 

Review of Malcolm Arnold's The Dancing Master at Buxton International Festival

David Webb, Eleanor Dennis and Graeme Broadbent

 in The Dancing Master at Buxton International Festival. 

Credit Genevieve Girling

There was no doubt that Buxton Festival’s audience was glad to see it back in the glorious Peak District opera house, going by the applause for Malcolm Arnold’s The Dancing Master on Friday night. Even a half-full house sounded like a capacity crowd at the conclusion of its interval-less performance.

Live opera! Yes, and necessity has become the mother of invention for the festival this year. How to find shows that can be performed by smallish casts on a smallish stage with smallish orchestra pit, keeping the performers and musicians suitably distanced from each other – and the audience, too?

Buxton had several alternative plans for its festival until quite late in the preparation process this year: it had to, like everybody else in the arts recently. The final one has led it down the musicals road (and will do again next year), joining up with the Opera House itself and CEO Paul Kerryson in its own production of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. But for proper opera, in its tradition of shining light into little-seen corners of the tradition that deserve discovery, its first offering for 2021 is quite a find.

We’re in Malcolm Arnold’s centenary year, and here’s one he wrote very early on. It was rejected by the BBC (and then Granada TV) and never professionally performed until this year, when conductor John Andrews and his Red Squirrel Opera recorded it (and that’s already won an award). This production, directed and designed by Susan Moore (lighting by Ben Pickersgill), puts the CD cast, with one exception, on the stage, and John Andrews conducts it.

Seeing it now, you wonder why on earth the BBC’s panjandrums ever thought it “too bawdy”. The story is simple and based on stock characters from Restoration comedy: marriageable young heiress (Miranda) kept under close watch by her puritanical aunt while her father fandangoed in Spain has been betrothed to her foppish and Frenchified cousin; she wants out and enlists the help of her maid, Prue, but along comes a young admirer called Gerard, who manages to climb in through her bedroom window. She pretends to her father that Gerard is her dancing teacher (though neither of them can dance a step), and fun and games ensue, with a real romance between the two and a happy ending when daddy (Don Diego) lets true love win and Monsieur (the fop) throws in his lot with the maid.

How do you stage that with all the limitations of summer 2021? Answer: do it on the radio! Susan Moore has picked up on the BBC lapse of judgment in 1951 and reimagined the piece as a radio broadcast like The Archers or ITMA, with the cast positioned around a central microphone and bits of the action illustrated by “sound effects” of the day.

That gives her staging the extra dimension of being able to show the “actors” arriving in civvies, picking up their scripts (I think they had the actual scores, but they didn’t need to read them) and getting into character before they finally go off-air and revert to who they were … except that you suspect the romance between “Miranda” and “Gerard” might be going a little further in real life after the show is over.

The score is full of both gentle satire and lovely tunes. It’s from the era of the English Dances and the Oboe Concerto, and with Gerard as romantic tenor hero and Miranda as soprano heroine you get some very tuneful arias – his Over the mountains and over the waves and her “Book of love” ballad, for instance, while the slow waltz ensembles are both melodically beautiful and ingenious in contrapuntal interweavings. The satire comes out in the castanet-filled “Spanish” accompaniments for Don Diego (every cliché in the book in use there), the French fop’s Gaze not on swans (rightly sung “badly” by Mark Wilde), and even in Gerard’s “Miranda …” song – almost a Catalogue Aria in its own right.

 Arnold poured his gifts for melody and atmospheric orchestration into this piece, and with the theme of dancing ever in the air the rhythms are pretty snappy, too. There has to be a moral to the story, of course – quaintly expressed as a warning to parents not to try to restrain their children too much – and of course a final ensemble of general rejoicing, which Arnold rises to magnificently.

  

Review of Opera North's performance of Fidelio at The Lowry, 15th June 2021

Rachel Nicholls as Leonore in Opera North’s production

of Beethoven’s Fidelio. Credit Richard H Smith 

Opera North’s return to live performance at The Lowry received the same kind of reception that the Hallé’s to the Bridgewater Hall did almost a fortnight ago. My goodness, we’re glad to see and hear live music in our community again.

It was a one-nighter only, an in-concert presentation with a small and socially distanced, mask-wearing audience, of course, no set beyond a nicely lit backdrop colonnade of pillars effect, with fiery light glowing between them, and no interval. The cast were in a line at the front of the stage, with the orchestra behind, and had to cope with minimal acting, even when singing about being in each other’s arms when obviously they couldn’t be.

(The only other thing in the visit is a so-called ‘Night at the Opera’ of concertised excerpts, so hardly counts in my book. It’s funny how marketeers reach for that title when what they have to offer is specifically not a night at an opera, but a set of songs from the shows).

But at least it made some amends for the lost great Beethoven celebration of 2020. Opera North did get this version of Fidelio out in December by filming it in Leeds Town Hall and streaming, and our cast in Salford were exactly the same, the major change being that the conductor this time was Paul Daniel, not Mark Wigglesworth.

The opera is presented in the version edited by David Pountney, where all the spoken dialogue is replaced by a narrator device: the actor-singer who is Don Fernando (Matthew Stiff), and normally only appears at the end to save the hero and heroine and sort everything out, is on-stage the whole time, presenting his report of the story for a ‘truth and reconciliation commission’.

It actually works better this way than in the original, which is a Singspiel with somewhat indifferent narrative concepts and verbal writing and can often seem in the opening scenes as if it’s going to be in a similar vein to parts of The Magic Flute. (Pountney’s text was also used in the Hallé concert performance of Act Two under Sir Mark Elder in February 2020, in the Bridgewater Hall – and with two of the same cast).

All the virtues of the previous Opera North cast were present in this live performance, and more so: especially Rachell Nicholls as Leonore (the heroine who enters a prison disguised as boy to seek out her kidnapped and starving husband, Florestan – OK it’s not exactly everyday credible stuff, but the important thing is how Beethoven’s music lifts it), and Brindley Sherratt as Rocco, the head warder who has touches of a comic Everyman-in-any-humble-job about him. His daughter Marzelline (Fflur Wyn) falls for the supposed young ‘Fidelio’ who is really Leonore, somewhat upsetting her real aspiring suitor, Jaquino (Oliver Johnston).

The other two key roles are Don Pizarro, an out-and-out villain who is the reason for Florestan’s disappearance and who wants him murdered before help can arrive – he was wonderfully acted by Robert Hayward, who fixed the audience with an evil scowl from the moment he walked on the stage and never let up on the nastiness – and of course Florestan himself (Toby Spence), who has to languish unseen until Act Two but makes up for it with some glorious proto-Heldentenor style singing.

The orchestra was down to single (hardworking!) woodwind, two horns, two trumpets, no trombones, in a score reduction by Francis Griffin. The chorus on stage was pretty generous for a socially distanced ensemble these days.

It was good to see Paul Daniel, one of their great former music directors, back on the Opera North podium. His sense of rhythmic propulsion was as enlivening as ever, and he went for some effects (such as the near-inaudible introduction to the Prisoners’ Chorus – itself magnificently sung by the Opera North men) that were highly daring and not always rewarded by the purity of wind intonation that this adaptation of the scoring absolutely requires.

Vocal highlights included Rachel Nicholls’ ‘Abscheulicher!’ and ‘Komm’ Hoffnung’, as you might expect – fine though the other voices are, hers has a mesmerizing extra quality to it – and of course ‘O namenlose Freude’ with Toby Spence, and the final quintet, where each of Fflur Wyn, Oliver Johnston, Brindley Sherratt and the two just named show their all strengths and characterisation qualities at the same time.

 

Review of the Hallé's live Bridgewater Hall concert on 4th June 2021

Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé 

The Hallé was back playing for a live audience in the Bridgewater Hall – and what a sense of achievement that simple fact gave.

Sir Mark Elder told the evening audience (the second of the day) how much the orchestra had missed them. We’d missed seeing the band in person, too, but it surely raised their spirits to see most available seats filled and a standing ovation at the end, instead of just microphones and film cameras. A Thursday night reception for the Hallé’s music is, after all, something in Manchester’s lifeblood and has been since 1861.

If these were ‘normal’ times, we’d be seeing the Hallé Proms, and this concert and the ones to follow in the ‘Summer Season’ look in some ways like Proms programmes – but there’s been more to their planning than just providing a set of accessible, optimistically-charged orchestral pieces. There’s a bit of a Stravinsky commemoration built in, for instance, with both Petrushka and The Firebird figuring.

The first outing was certainly accessible and optimistically charged, though. Glinka’s overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla ensured that: Sir Mark gets just the right tempo to bring the bounding first tune (with a thrill of a crescendo on its upward scale) and the lilting second one both to life. And the full Petrushka score (1947 version) did that in spades, too, the opening Shrovetide Fair music, taken at a relatively steady pace, revealing secrets and details that aren’t always appreciable when the music emerges in slightly less rhythmically accurate form from a theatre pit, and later solo roles in the orchestra including sweet and winsome flute playing by Amy Yule and impactful and exciting trumpets.

Elgar’s Enigma Variations have been a Hallé staple almost from the day they were written, and Sir Mark and the orchestra brought them to glorious life once again: the opening theme as much caressed as played, the characters of the ‘friends pictured within’ brought vividly to life, and Nimrod, the great slow movement, made the centrepiece it was surely always designed to be; the strings, guest-led by Magnus Johnston, producing wonderful tone.

Indeed, one of the most rewarding things about this concert was the sense of aural splendour that seems to come with hearing the orchestra in its newly distance seating plan on the much expanded platform, with the brass firing salvoes from above in what would usually be choir seats. It’s like listening in quadraphonics rather than stereo and almost a new experience in itself … perhaps one we’ll miss if and when we can return to what we once called normal.

A streamed recording of the concert will be available from 10 June: link www.halle.co.uk/whats-on/summer-2021-concert-1-stream/

 

Review of the Hallé's filmed production of The Soldier's Tale

Martins Imhangbe in The Soldier's Tale: credit The Hallé

The final ‘episode’ of the Hallé’s digital Winter Season 2020-2021 is a triumphant vindication of the policy of turning music performance into world class film production that has animated it from the start.

After all, once you’re afloat in the great wide ocean of the internet, you’re up against the world: the potential audience is incalculable, but the competition for attention is enormous.

Re-thinking the idea of a ‘concert’ into an hour or so of audio-visual content for a smallish screen, and then selling it to people who want to choose when they engage is a task in itself. It’s not just a case (except for those with a dedicated following of a enthusiasts) of going into an empty venue, setting up a few cameras and microphones and doing what you’d do if there were an audience.

But it does give the brave a chance to show what they can do, to put their best goods in a shop window, and to make new friends and fans.

The Hallé production of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale is the best example yet. It’s a sui generis creation – ‘a kind of hybrid film’, if you like director Annabel Arden’s own description, though she insists it’s a product of an ‘improvised and under-funded’ time and captures the ‘poor theatre’ nature of the work’s beginnings (a world blighted by war and, in Stravinsky’s case, revolution, and also suffering the effects of a pandemic … so it’s not appropriate just because of the 50^th anniversary of its composer’s death).

Her co-director is Femi Elufowoju, and the soldier is played by Martins Imhangbe: they create an historical reference to a real-life soldier-musician called Lt James Reese Europe, a US army bandleader who died in 1919. It’s lightly symbolized: the piece is still the narrative-drama-dance piece by Stravinsky and C F Ramuz it always was, and the performers and filmic creatives (led by Gemma Dixon, the producer whose Maestro Arts has been behind all the Hallé digital productions of this season, and director Dominic Best) are the ones who make it what it is.

The best thing to say is, ‘Just watch and listen for yourself.’ It’s filmed in Manchester, mainly in and around the Rochdale Canal and Bridgewater Hall. The Devil lives in the hall’s cavernous undercroft – the world our Soldier longs for is glimpsed from the top of a multi-storey car park, and the village inn is ‘the Pev’ (Peveril of the Peak), an historic pub just round the corner.

The musicians are Hallé musicians Peter Liang, leader, Billy Cole, double bass, Sergio Castelló-López, clarinet, Emily Hultmark, bassoon, Gareth Small, trumpet, Katy Jones, trombone, and David Hext, percussion, conducted by Sir Mark Elder.

Richard Katz is Narrator, Mark Lockyer is the Devil (a particularly convincing and creepy impersonation!), and Faith Prendergast dances the Princess. If you don’t know the story, well, you need to watch: there is a moral to this tale.

I’ll just add that I found the whole thing fascinating, not only because of the skills of the performers but also in the mixing, sound editing and all the other things that go to make an imaginative piece of film. It’s just an hour long.

Link:  https://www.halle.co.uk/  Available until 29 July.

Review of Northern Chamber Orchestra Soloists filmed at the Carole Nash Hall, Chetham's

NCO leader Nicholas Ward

The Northern Chamber Orchestra, like so many other musical groups, has bravely kept its main concert series going by a combination of in-person performances where possible, streaming them in addition, and streaming-only where not. By tradition there is an ‘NCO Soloists’ chamber music programme in the mix around this time, and this week it’s a filmed recording of Mozart and Schumann made in the Carole Nash recital hall at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester.

Two utterly wonderful masterworks are on offer for your £15: Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, with NCO principal Elizabeth Jordan joining the string quartet of Nicholas Ward, Simon Gilks, Richard Muncey and Cara Berridge, and Schumann’s E flat Piano Quintet, where the same string players welcome Benjamin Powell as the player of the piano part originally written for Clara Schumann herself.

There’s an hour and six minutes of music, along with informal introductions by Nicholas Ward in the style very familiar to attenders at live concerts by the NCO. Lighting is slightly subdued, and the players sit in the wide V-shape now often adopted for chamber music combinations such as this (rather than the tight U we would have had in socially undistanced days). The cameras are set at various angles and deftly sequenced and merged to create a made-for-TV feel to the video (though the sound in the empty room came over slightly ‘boxy’ to me as a listener).

But it’s the music that counts, and that is beautifully played. Mozart’s quintet is balm for the soul at any time, and even more so just now. In the opening movement each player lets the contours of the melodies shape their phrasing, completely naturally, and the dreamy larghetto brings a lovely tapestry of muted violin sound around the clarinet’s solo line.

For a moment, intonation seems to wander in the minuet, but its trios bounce along, the second, rustic-sounding, one in particular, where Cara Berridge surmounts her exposed arpeggios with grace (and a suitable relaxation in the tempo). The finale manages to be both playful and relaxed at the outset, and by the end its brief adagio episode makes a telling foil to the merriment that precedes and follows it.

The Schumann work finally brings Ben Powell to perform with the NCO after his planned concerto appearance in 2020 had to be aborted at two days’ notice because of Covid. His role may be more modest in a quintet texture, but it has its moments and is nonetheless distinguished. The first movement is full of glorious lyrical exposition of its singing themes, and the ‘march’ tempo of the C minor movement that follows is not too funereal, thanks to a well sustained underlying momentum. The scherzo third movement, with its hammering marcato quavers, warms things up considerably, its first trio sweet and innocent, the second boiling up to great effect; and then things dovetail neatly into the finale, which is joyful, incisive, and builds (as it’s designed to do) to a huge, cumulative climax of musical and emotional power.

Link: https://bitly.com/NCOSoloists21 (£15 for unlimited streaming, available until 2^nd May).

Review of the Hallé filmed concert at the Bridgewater Hall, released 1st April 2021

Delyana Lazarova conducts the Hallé in Manchester (credit The Hallé)

Delyana Lazarova was the winner of the first Siemens Hallé International Conductors Competition in February last year, and became the orchestra’s Assistant Conductor last September.

Breathtakingly talented, she also exudes personality, even on film, and though she might have hoped for more live concert-hall exposure as the result of her competition win and new two-year appointment, she certainly makes up for that in Episode 7 of the Hallé’s ongoing series of filmed performances for this lockdown season.

It is in fact her official Hallé concert debut, made in the same cinematic style in and around the Bridgewater Hall as the most ambitious of Sir Mark Elder’s concert films here, with Maestro Arts and Stephen Portnoi’s sound team giving us the same quality product to watch at home. (The subdued lighting of the last film in the hall has been turned up enough to let us see the players properly without losing that sense of atmosphere that dimness engenders).

Delyana Lazarova has the technique of musical direction at her fingertips: a clear beat and communicative gestures, with an expressive face (and a smiley one), and even her eyebrows convey meaning. More than that, she injects energy and tension into music that needs it, and calm and relaxation into the other sort.

Sir Mark talks about her qualities in the conversation-piece clip that begins the film, referring to her control and poise (there’s a brief excerpt from her competition-winning performance with the orchestra at Hallé St Peter’s just over a year ago) – and also the sense of passion that comes over in her music-making. I’ll go with that: the first piece in this programme is her own choice, the Overture by Polish 20-century composer Grażyna Bacewicz, opening with scurrying strings (led by Paul Barritt) in celebratory style and introducing an eloquent and still passage for wind players before its return to liveliness. It was wartime secret-drawer music when it was written (1943, under occupation), but what a spirit of hope and courage it catches – one that Delyana responds to with zeal.

She talks as enthusiastically and urgently as she conducts, bridging the gap between the Bacewicz overture and the Suite from Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring music.

(It’s the 13-instrument version, the soundworld of the original ballet, incidentally the same one that Manchester Camerata members filmed and recorded in the Stoller Hall in January for Radio 3 and released as a one-day-only stream on 24^th February).

The Hallé principals and soloists (and notably Gemma Beeson on piano) play with tenderness and affection for Delyana Lazarova, producing a delightful and sweetly evocative sound – the Bridgewater Hall acoustic helps what is effectively a chamber music score to take a mellow tinge, like a stage performance seen through a gauze. The conductor has just told us she’s going to ‘let you see those characters and hear the story’ of the ballet, and she does just that, with the ending of the bride-and-groom interlude lovingly caressed.

Our concert-film continues with oboe Virginia Shaw, trumpet Tom Osborne, percussion Erika Őhman and Delyana herself briefly introducing Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 1 – a piece for these challenging times, as Virginia puts it. It’s also one of those major works the Hallé has the credit for premiering in the UK (under Harty back in 1932).

If its overnight success in the Russia of 1926 has one simple explanation, it could be that it was pretty advanced music that was not just clever but also moving. Delyana Lazarova presents it with a twinkle in the eye but with a darker presence also, the central movements giving opportunities for solo virtuosity in the orchestra to shine, and by the end her interpretation provides a degree of gravity in the orchestra’s playing that may not have been noticeable before but is deeply impressive.

Link:  https://www.halle.co.uk/ Available until 1 July.

Review of the Hallé filmed concert at the Bridgewater Hall, released 11th February 2021

 

The Hallé with conductor Stephen Bell  credit The Hallé

‘Episode 4’ of the Hallé’s ongoing series of filmed performances is different from the ones the came before. It’s the only one so far to be programmed in the style of the Saturday Pops concerts that conductor Stephen Bell has made deservedly popular in recent years, and he is the maestro on the Bridgewater Hall podium for this, with the orchestra laid out in socially distanced seating on the massively enlarged stage.

‘Movie Classics’ is the title, and all the short pieces have been used on film soundtracks at some point (or several points), but it could just as well have been a typical classical pops programme – except that the linking comments by Petroc Trelawny are nearly all about the films, and so are the write-ups in the online programme ‘booklet’ … and even the one piece of filmed conversation (it comes just half-way through, to introduce Elgar’s Nimrod), between Stephen Bell and the Hallé’s permanent guest leader, Paul Barritt, starts off that way. They do go on to talk about the music’s own qualities, thank goodness. 

There’s plenty to listen to here, nearly an hour and half in total, and it’s worth hearing even if you didn’t know the associations with both well-known and half-forgotten films.

The visual presentation, by the same team from Maestro Broadcasting that has brought us Episodes 1 to 3, is clearly on a different budgetary level from that provided for Sir Mark Elder’s concert: the lighting is relatively subdued, there are fewer camera positions and less ambitious editing, and some of the shots seemed to be of the soft-focus sort. 

But there are two soloists (the orchestra politely applauds them and the conductor, to avoid the sense of anticlimax that might otherwise occur): the Hallé’s own principal clarinet, Sergio Castelló-López, and mezzo-soprano Nardus Williams, a young British singer who is on the brink of an international operatic career. She is a confident, superbly controlled classical singer with a warm tone and rich vibrato, already, judging by her career notes, well able to take roles of mature and powerful women on the stage.

The music varies from Purcell’s ‘When I am laid in earth’ from Dido and Aeneas via Handel’s The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, Mendelssohn’s Wedding March for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Verdi’s La Forza del Destino overture, Dvorak’s Song to the Moon from Rusalka and Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours to the overture to Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld (described in the ‘booklet’ as just the Can-Can, but including more tunes than that). 

My favourites were the waltz from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty, showing the Hallé at its resonant best in its full-orchestra scoring, the slow movement from Mozart’s Clarinet concerto – I could listen to Sergio Castelló-López’s playing all day, in this or any other music, so beautiful is the sound he makes with a clarinet – the Blue Danube Waltz by Johann Strauss II (whisking us away to Vienna and the sound of another orchestra, which plays almost as well in the concert hall but got beaten by the Hallé when it came to football while they were both in Salzburg), Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ from the Enigma Variations, which they have played for Sir Mark Elder often enough and somehow seems to retain his passionate frisson whoever is up-front, and Verdi’s ‘Sempre Libera’ from La Traviata, where Nardus Williams really comes into her own as a dramatic singer of fire and power.

Link:  https://www.halle.co.uk/

          

Soloists Nardus Williams and Sergio Castelló-López credit The Hallé