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.