Review of Hallé performance of Verdi's Requiem, conducted by Sir Mark Elder

Sir Mark Elder conducting the Hallé

Verdi’s Requiem has often been described as an “operatic” setting of a sacred text.

There’s no doubting that Sir Mark Elder sees it that way. It makes fairly frequent appearances in concert programmes, but of all the versions I’ve heard I don’t think there’s been any quite as determined to make it into a drama as this.

Each of the soloists is known for their prowess in Italian opera, and it seems each had been encouraged to see their role in this performance as a character study of some sort, whether pronouncing judgment, pleading for mercy, or floating to the heights of beatification.

When it came to the big choral and orchestral highspots, all was spectacle – the Dies Irae with not one but two big bass drums, and especially the Tuba mirum, with Aida-style stage trumpeters appearing on high, to properly put the fear of God into us.

The opening of the whole work was so minimalist as to be almost inaudible (pity so many of the audience decided to show their appreciation with paroxysms of coughing at that precise moment),so much so that the stentorian sound of the men leading off with Te decet hymnus was quite rough by comparison.

It was all much appreciated for its showmanship, and the contribution of the soloists. Natalya Romaniw was a heavenly prima donna, wonderfully sustaining her purity of tone and accuracy to the very end of the Libera me. If the Romantic notion that anyone can be saved through the love of a good woman was what Verdi had in mind there, her voice exemplified it.

Alice Coote, too, so imperious in her depiction of the Last Judgment in the Sequence, was the perfect Secunda Donna when it came to the Agnus Dei, which was one of the most beautiful parts of the whole performance. Thomas Atkins shone as every Italian tenor at prayer should do, in Ingemisco, and James Platt caught something of the pleading tone of Germont father in his singing of Confutatis maledictis (though in ensemble his foundation of the harmony didn’t always seem quite precise enough).

Whatever Verdi did or didn’t believe about the hereafter, he got something right with his setting of the Sanctus in this work: the dwelling place of God must be a scene of supreme rejoicing, which is what he caught in that wonderful fugue for double chorus. For me, it’s the climax of the whole work, though Sir Mark took it quite gently, with rhythmic life – unusually – somewhat lost in the part-singing for some of the time … until the last glorious cadence.

This work should always be something special for the Hallé: its founder, not known for operatic ventures into the Verdi canon particularly, was quick off the mark in appreciating it when it first appeared: he gave it here in Manchester in spring 1876, only about a year after Verdi, with his hand-picked Italian troupe, had toured it to London (and thus performed the British premiere). But Hallé was almost certainly the first to do it with all-British forces.

Review of BBC Philharmonic 'centennial' concert

Eva Ollikainen conducting the BBC Philharmonic

Calculating the age of an orchestra is a funny business. You might think that continuous existence as a group who played together under the same name, with slow membership changes over time, would be definitive.

By that standard the BBC Philharmonic is still quite young. Even allowing for changes of name (via the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra and the preceding BBC Northern Orchestra), but looking for its existence as a body of players on full-time contracts, you can’t go before 1942, or, allowing for almost universal freelance orchestra membership in earlier times, only back to 1934, when its players were basically those of the Hallé anyway (and also appeared as the Liverpool Philharmonic). Before that there was a BBC Nonette – the “Northern Studio Orchestra” – although attempts had been made in 1930 to establish something bigger.

So how do we get the idea that the orchestra’s lifetime stems from the 2ZY radio station in Manchester of May 1922, which started even before the BBC existed? (It’s not too long since Margaret Wyatt wrote a little book for the BBC called BBC Philharmonic: A celebration 1934-1994, so even by that count the Phil is 88 years old now).

Only on the basis that a body that employs musicians can “own” an orchestra, even if it’s simply paying for one-off concerts, and using various names from time to time (“2ZY Orchestra” and “Northern Wireless Orchestra”, from 1926).

It’s been considered thus before – Charles Hallé employed his band from 1857 to 1895 either from gig to gig or on six-month contracts (though for many years he paid some a weekly wage for that winter season), and it was most often known as “the Manchester Orchestra” then.

Never mind: the BBC in the North West is celebrating 100 years of paying musicians to perform for it, which is a good thing whether you call that having an orchestra or not. The Philharmonic marked this with a great performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the Bridgewater Hall, conducted by Eva Ollikainen. It was full-bodied Beethoven, with 60 strings and effectively triple woodwind, and the vocal line-up of Tuuli Takala, Kitty Whately, Steve Davislim and Simon Shibambu, abetted by the CBSO Chorus, made a strong body indeed.

Big bodies can still be light on their toes. Ollikainen brought energetic tempi to the first two movements, resulting in playing of incisiveness, vehemence even, and the timps pounded by Paul Turner were emphatically prominent in both. The Adagio was all suavity and songfulness, and the finale eloquent, full of gloriously realized counterpoint and surging and bounding in rhythmic energy to its climax.

Before it there were just two short orchestral pieces; the first the overture, Chanticleer, by Ruth Gipps, which the orchestra has recently recorded. Written in 1944, it’s a bit of a stop-start piece, but with plenty of instrumental colour. Oddly enough, its fairly conventional mid-century harmonies end on a strange cadence – as if it was meant to lead straight into the opera it was originally written for.

Present-day composer Erland Cooper wrote his Window over Rackwick to a BBC commission, and it had its world premiere in this concert. It’s a kind of tribute to Peter Maxwell Davies, the son of Salford who was associated with the Philharmonic for many years, inspired by the Orkney spot where he had his home, and setting a poem by his friend and collaborator, George Mackay Brown. The soprano soloist was pure-toned Héloïse Werner.

It’s like a simple, oft-repeated song refrain, beautiful to hear in its string chamber ensemble garb, and, like Max himself, very pleasant to encounter, but leaving you in no doubt of his being amply content with his own company.

Review of Hallé concert with Tami Pohjola, conducted by Taavi Oramo

Violinist Tami Pohjola and conductor Taavi Oramo pictured with the Hallé (credit Tom Stephens)

This week’s repeated Hallé programme (I heard it on Wednesday afternoon) was an intriguing one. Not so much for the headline works – Mendelssohn’s Italian symphony and Sibelius’ Violin Concerto – but for the two overtures by women composers added to those, and the two guest artists.

They were both Finnish and young, and going places. The conductor was Taavi Oramo and the soloist Tami Pohjola.

She is a wonderful player. She has both a gorgeously lyrical sound and some very big tone, allied with formidable technique. Standing against around 50 strings in the tutti orchestra was no problem, and the first movement cadenza was not just confidently negotiated but heartfelt in style. That makes a difference: the slow movement, too, was soulful in spades, and the finale much more than a mere fireworks display.

Oramo ensured that the orchestral role in the concerto had plenty of emphasis, energy and expression, and the Hallé wind players lightened the atmosphere with their usual expertise.

The two overtures were Fanny Mendelssohn’s in C major and Louise Farrenc’s no. 1 in E minor. They were near-contemporaries in life, and the overtures are near-contemporary in date – but, for me, there was a world of difference. Fanny Mendelssohn, for all her technical accomplishments, seems to borrow effects from others (Mozart, and maybe even Beethoven at some points) but has a tendency to repeat herself in shortish phrases, and her harmonic progressions are not always too adroit. Taavi Oramo made sure her writing was pushed along to create real tension, but even he could not make this overture into more than a curiosity.

Louise Farrenc, on the other hand, was a composer of imagination and originality, as well as technical accomplishment. Her harmonic changes are sure-footed and she writes remarkable counterpoint almost throughout, so that her themes intertwine to great effect. What a pity she doesn’t seem to have written very much more for orchestra than this and one other overture.

Felix Mendelssohn, the Italian’s composer, gave us a masterepiece and it’s now a familiar one. I specially liked the charm Taavi Oramo and the musicians drew from the Con moto third movement (a Goldilocks tempo there, with some very individual touches from the horns), and the finale was definitely fast and furious – perhaps a tad too much ...

Review of Hallé concert with Guy Johnston, conducted by Delyana Lazarova

 

Delyana Lazarova conducts the Hallé 

There could have been few orchestral works more appropriate to reflect our thoughts after the death of a sovereign than two we heard played by the Hallé yesterday.

Neither was planned with such an event in mind, but Dobrinka Tabakova’s Cello Concerto has a central movement that ends in so still and elegiac an atmosphere as to seem as if written as a meditation on profound loss, and Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony is itself a journey into finality and silence.

Delyana Lazarova, the assistant conductor to Sir Mark Elder, conducted this opening concert of the 2022-23 season, beginning it, and others, by playing the National Anthem. It wasn’t the stirring version, begun with a side-drum call to arms, that older audience members remember from the years last century when war was still a keen memory, but Britten's, with a quiet beginning, as befits the prayer it really is.

We were soon into the whirl of Ravel’s La Valse, begun under Lazarova’s baton in a manner as rhythmically numinous as it was in other ways, but soon full of impetus and precision, the richness of its textures fully realized and the tensions effectively rising to its shattering close.

Dobrinka Tabakova, now the Hallé’s artist in residence, was present to hear Guy Johnston play the solo in her concerto of 2008. It’s a readily appreciable piece: three movements, clear themes and motifs, harmonious chording and real tunes. What a refreshment to hear new music like that! It’s also very hard for the soloist, who’s frequently up in violin register in the early part of the piece, by Guy Johnston was unabashed by those demands and brought eloquence and sweetness to the melodies – especially the lovely dialogue with solo viola in the central movement.

The Tchaikovsky symphony is one most listeners and all players will have been familiar with for years. I’m a child of the 1960s, when conductors (including John Barbirolli) were more inclined to use tempo flexibility as a vehicle for expounding structure, and Lazarova’s safe and steady tempo for the third movement (Allegro molto vivace, it says) ensured crisp and accurate articulation but lost out a bit in the hysteria department, which can be an important part of the symphony’s emotional journey (the finale has even been “diagnosed” by the learned as exhibiting clinical evidence of hysteria in the way those chromatic upward rushes are shared from first to second violin parts in the score).

The first movement was magisterially presented, careful baton beating bringing springy rhythms throughout and brightness and brilliance characterising the development part of its structure. The last pages were beautifully intense and tragic.

The orchestra was led by Magnus Johnston (Guy’s brother, as it happens), and though several of the regular section leaders (noticeably in the strings) weren’t present, the guest principal bassoon, Daniel Handsworth, made an eloquent contribution to his solos in the Tchaikovsky symphony.

Guy Johnston and Dobrinka Tabakova acknowledge

applause after the performance of her cello concerto

Reviews of the National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company at Buxton

Emily Vine (Mabel) and chorus in the National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company's

production of The Pirates Of Penzance at Buxton Opera House 2022

The Pirates of Penzance

The Gilbert & Sullivan Festival is back at Buxton – hurrah! A full week of performances at the Opera House there precedes two weeks of continued festival in Harrogate, so there’s the best of both worlds for G&S lovers.

The shows diary is very much the same as it used to be in the days when Buxton had the festival to itself: a different title almost every day, with the festival’s own National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company leading the way (they’re also doing Iolanthe and Utopia Ltd, a relative rarity), plus the pick of the crop of other specialists in the Savoyard repertoire – this week that’s The Gondoliers (Forbear! Theatre), The Mikado (Peak Opera), HMS Pinafore (Opera della Luna), and Charles Court Opera with their own concoction called Express G&S plus Patience.

The Pirates of Penzance was done with the familiar painted sets but re-costumed for director Sarah Helsby Hughes’ fresh take on the piece. She kept all the original script and music, but sent us on a kind of time-warp to the 1930s, where, even if professional pirates still looked the same, Major-General Stanley’s daughters were beach belles in Act One and appeared in fluffy nighties for Act Two, and lovers Mabel and Frederic at one point transformed into Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. There was plenty of dancing by a gifted cast and chorus (choreographer Eleanor Strutt), and just a few knowing tweaks of the familiar lines and situations. I loved it, and the Opera House audience hardly ever stopped laughing.

The music was in the expert hands of John Andrews (of Red Squirrel Opera fame) and the playing by the festival’s own National Festival Orchestra was unimpeachable – a small but well balanced ensemble, under a conductor who knew that getting the words across was the thing that mattered most.

The principals line-up was, as ever before, a mix of new talent and experience. Stalwarts from the old days included Bruce Graham as Sergeant of Police, Louise Crane as Ruth and James Cleverton as the Pirate King – all needing no introduction to the faithful and completely on top of their jobs. Matthew Siveter, as the Major-General (in a kind of Boy Scout uniform, to suit the time-warp), has already made his reputation in the G&S field and proved just how with a superbly rapid “I am the very model …” patter song.

RNCM-trained Aidan Edwards was an extremely strong and clear Samuel, and the three lead daughters, Catrine Kirkman, Kate Lowe and Alexandra Hazard, vamped things up delightfully. And for Frederic and Mabel we had two classy singers: David Webb’s tenor never less than noble and Emily Vine’s soprano hitting the high notes with panache.

 

Iolanthe

Iolanthe was the first of this year’s shows performed by the Gilbert & Sullivan Festival at Buxton and in John Savournin’s production very much follows the formula of tradition-with-tweaks.

Nothing to frighten the horses or the purists (no re-wording of “Oh, Captain Shaw …”, for instance), despite the fact that of all the G&S canon its references today seem furthest removed from the present-day world: we don’t even have a proper Lord Chancellor now, and our House of Lords is far from being made of blue-bloods alone.

But a visit to the festival at Buxton or Harrogate is almost like travelling back to Victorian/Edwardian times anyway, and no one seems to worry about a storyline whose point is all to do with a long-gone legislative and judicial establishment, with a Lord Chancellor in charge of wards of court and membership of the house of peers requiring nothing other than breeding – add to that the romantic Victorian fascination with fairies and you are soon into an innocent fantasy world with its own rules entirely.

There’s just the occasional sharp-eyed reflection on the nonsense (I liked Phyllis’s response to Strephon’s revelation that he was half-fairy and only half-man, as Emily Vine snapped out her line: “Which half?”), and today you can hardly avoid a titter over the line “She’d meet him after dark, inside St James’s Park, and give him one …”, but that’s as far as the double-entendres go.

Merry Holden is the choreographer, and the ever hard-working cast and chorus have moves that require some co-ordination and sometimes recall the much-loved skipping around of the old D’Oyly Carte routines (in “If you go in, you’re sure to win”, for instance – which got its equally traditional encore). The music was again in the expert hands of John Andrews, with the National Festival Orchestra providing flexible and sympathetic accompaniments.

And stand-outs among the principals, for me, were Matthew Palmer (Strephon), an excellent young tenor still at the outset of what should be a very successful career, and Meriel Cunningham (Iolanthe), who has a rich mezzo-soprano tone and real clarity. Matthew Kellett enjoys rattling off the patter as the Lord Chancellor; Matthew Siveter has his spot of glory as Private Willis; Emily Vine is a winsome Phyllis and Amy J Payne an imperious Queen of the Fairies; and Ben McAteer and Hal Cazalet enjoy prancing their way through as Earls Mountararat and Tolloller.

Utopia Limited

One of the orchestra members was using the audience loos (which are few anyway) before the show at Buxton on Friday night, so I asked him whether they didn’t provide enough of them backstage.

“Yes,” he said, “but they’re all full of the turns, warming up their voices.”

A tangential illustration of one facet of producing Gilbert & Sullivan’s next-to-last operetta, Utopia Ltd – there are an awful lot of “turns”, i.e. people in the cast.  That’s probably one reason why it’s not done very often.

So credit where it’s due: the International Gilbert & Sullivan Festival, this year beginning at Buxton and moving on to Harrogate, did us all a good turn by offering the first fully staged professional revival of it (apart from the D’Oyly Carte’s one attempt) back in 2011, and here it is again.

Jeff Clarke, of Opera della Luna fame, is the director, with Jenny Arnold his inventive choreographer, and John Andrews conducts the G&S Festival’s own National Symphony Orchestra.

The piece may, when written in the early 1890s, have been a bit derivative of past Gilbert-Sullivan glories: Gilbert’s plot is about a distant island that decides to improve itself by adopting all the benefits of Victorian English society – the rulers (and some members) of the Army and Navy, a lawyer, a county councillor, a Lord Chamberlain, and a crafty businessman on the make, and of course there’s much flouncing around in posh costumes and drinking of cups of tea. Cue jokes at the expense of all of that, and there are references in the script (and in the score for the latter of them) to both The Mikado and HMS Pinafore.

Clarke has removed the locale from the “luxuriant and tropical landscape” of the original book to a generally Middle Eastern one, with palms and porticoes. He leaves it to the expertise of performers such as Robert Gildon and Giles Davies (as the Wise Men of pre-reform Utopian society) and Ben McAteer to get the story over in Act One, which they do with excellent diction, and there is a delightful character study from Monica McGhee (as Princess Zara, the daughter of the kingdom who returns from Girton College, Cambridge, to share all she’s learned of enlightened society) – she’s absorbed the Queen’s English so much as to sound like the Queen herself.

Meriel Cunningham and Rachel Speirs (the latter stepping up from chorus duties to take the role on 5 August) portray her sisters, the young princesses Nekaya and Kalyba as feisty young ladies with their own ideas … an aspect of Gilbert’s young heroines that’s increasingly drawn on these days.

Where Clarke really gets into his stride is the early part of Act Two, with nice touches from lighting designer Matt Cater for a night-time setting, and Anthony Flaum, as Captain Fitzbattleaxe of the First Life Guards (who we soon learn is Princess Zara’s love interest as well as security detail), is very funny as the romantic tenor singer who’s never quite able to deliver when he’s not in the mood. That’s soon followed by a song for the British gentlemen who represent the “Flowers of Progress” – complete with visual props, a mock encore and present-day references to the NHS and fuel prices in its final verse.

Of these Britishers I admired Tim Walton’s highly theatrical Lord Chamberlain and the cockney wide-boy given by Paul Featherstone as businessman Mr Goldbury, and Katharine Taylor-Jones also impressed as The Lady Sophy – the nearest Utopia Ltd gets to an elderly bossy-woman role. Cameron Mitchell, Aidan Edwards, Stephen Godward and Ciarán Walker all make strong contributions.

Review of Albert Herring at Clonter Opera

Jack Roberts (Mr Upfold), Flora Birkbeck (Florence Pike), Erin Rossington (Lady Billows), Jordan Harding (Mr Gedge), Thomas Stevenson (Supt Budd), Lydia Shariff (Mrs Herring) and Daniel Kringer in Clonter Opera's production of Albert Herring

Eric Crozier and Benjamin Britten, after Maupassant

Clonter Opera

Clonter Opera Theatre

14, 16, 17, 19, 21 and 23 July 2022, 2 hours 35 minutes plus supper interval (30 minutes, or 70 minutes in some performances)

I love it when an opera company announces Albert Herring. It’s an affectionate send-up of the hypocrisies and absurdities of rural British life, almost like The Archers set to music.

Not precisely the same, of course, but you have the figures of the vicar, the police superintendent, the headmistress of the village school, the mayor, the titled lady who lives in the big house and her housekeeper – and the younger generation: lovebirds Sid and Nancy, and a few schoolchildren.

Then there’s Albert. He’s the son of the greengrocer’s shop owner, Mrs Herring, and a young man very much under his mother’s thumb. The story begins when the worthies are seeking a girl of pure and impeccable character to be their Queen of the May … but none of the candidates actually qualifies, on moral grounds. Only shy Albert seems to be an innocent – so they make him King of the May.

Sid and Nancy spike his lemonade with rum at the village fete to celebrate his coronation (what better piece could have been chosen in this year of jubilee fetes left, right and centre?), and with his prize money in his pocket, all unknown to everyone and particularly his mum, Albert goes out on the razzle that night.

What happens next you need to see the opera to enjoy best, so I won’t spoil it, but this is operatic comedy, one of the best ever written. It’s a demanding piece, too, but Clonter Opera, the finishing school based on a Cheshire farm near Jodrell Bank, helping young singers find a bridge between conservatoire training and the professional world, has put all its resources into this production and come up with something rather special.

It's one of the few mainstream operas that a small-scale but well-equipped theatre such as Clonter’s can put on with the orchestral score exactly as written, as Britten wrote it for just 13 players, and the professional Clonter Sinfonia do sterling duty in the pit, under the acute and supportive baton of music director Philip Sunderland.

The production by Michael McCaffery, sets the story in 1947 – that was the year of the first performance, just 75 years ago – rather than 1910, and the set and costume design by Bettina John quietly underscore an important aspect of the score: the post-war sense of rejuvenation that was sweeping through Britain at the time. This is an opera that tells us, without ever stating it out loud, that the older generation, with their prejudices and stuffiness, are on the way out, and the future belongs to the young; and John’s design has detailed and authentic-looking sets of dull and faded interiors, contrasting with brightly coloured (and sometimes near-surreal) costumes for the characters who parade through them. The Clonter stage revolve is skilfully used to produce successive backdrops, as in the original scenario, and we hear the full musical entr’actes that cover the scene changes (one reason why the full running time is quite long).

As a vehicle for young voices to show their potential and young performers their abilities, Albert Herring could hardly be bettered. The character studies of  Erin Rossington (Lady Billows), Flora Birtbeck (Florence Pike), Jordan Harding (Mr Gedge), Jack Roberts (Mr Upfold) and Thomas Stevenson (Supintendent Budd) were all engagingly realized and strongly sung, and I think that Rosalind Dobson (Miss Wordsworth) has a particular gift for comedy, with just the right touch of exaggeration and an ability to keep reacting in character.

The three children were each played by first-year students of the Royal Northern College of Music – Eirwen Roberts, Myome Mortimer-Davies and Samuel Horton – who enjoyed their opportunities for fun and games; and Lydia Shariff, as Mrs Herring, was able to convince us (more than most) that she was a generation older than her real age.

But the stand-out performances in a gifted ensemble were from Daniel Kringer, as Albert, Thomas Chenhall, as Sid, and Frances Gregory, as Nancy. Albert is a difficult role to play: he’s not a village idiot, rather a young man who’s never had a chance to spread his wings until the incidents the opera portrays, and he shames his elders in the end. Daniel Kringer’s voice quality was very durable and his diction excellent, and his acting showed Albert learning from his experiences, right through to the fascinating line, “I didn’t lay it on too thick, did I?” (which leaves us wondering whether he’s smart enough to have been kidding the lot of them with his lurid account of a night on the tiles).

And in this he’s in cahoots with Nancy and Sid, the young couple who are well aware of the ways of the world, and the flesh. Thomas Chenhall and Frances Gregory showed themselves to be mature voices and accomplished actors, well equal to the world of the professional stage – in which they’re each already busily engaged.

 

 

Reviews of Buxton International Festival operas 2022

La Donna del Lago at Buxton International Festival:  Máire Flavin as Elena (red dress) 

Credit Genevieve Girling

La Donna del Lago

Tottola and Rossini, after Walter Scott

Buxton International Festival

Buxton Opera House

8, 12, 15,17, 22 July 2022, 2 hours 50 minutes

 

After the outright cancellation of 2020 and constrained conditions of 2021, Buxton International Festival is back and firing on all cylinders this year. And its operatic flagship is a masterwork by Rossini.

Written in 1819, it was inspired by Walter Scott’s poem, The Lady of the Lake, and is an early example in European opera of full-blown Romantic ideas coming to the fore – war and peace, love and rivalry, wild and remote locations, supposed ancient traditions and figures from the past. There’s even a reference (not taken from Scott) to characters in the writings of the mythical Scottish bard, “Ossian”, a literary fake that hoodwinked most people at the time.

And musically we find Rossini on the cusp of using new-fangled Romantic language in his otherwise cute-and-classical writing: off-stage horn calls, tremolando strings, the sound of the harp to convey local colour (no matter that there’s nothing specially Scottish about it). At the same time he was going all out for popular appeal, and one of the climactic numbers is a competitive duet for love-rival tenors in which the dramatic tension is reflected vocally by bursts of repeated high Cs (and more) from both of them.

The story is fairly simple: Elena (the Lady in question) is the daughter of a chieftain whose loyalty used to lie with the King but who’s now mixed up with rebel Highlanders. He’s betrothed her to their leader, but she really loves another. The King, disguised, comes across her and falls for her, too (hence the two-tenors rivalry). Battle goes badly for the rebels, but Elena seeks to save her father and her true love, and in the end … Well, I won’t give it all away.

Director Jacopo Spirei and designer Madeleine Boyd have staged the opera in a way that conveys general impressions – ragged clothes for the Highland warriors, shiny techno-style costumes for the King and his forces; a interior/exterior set to provide the lakeside locale for the first act and a geometric, power-lit coldness for the King’s palace in the second … showing there’s a clash of cultures as well as of loyalties, a nice gloss on the storyline. The use of a tiny model boat to represent what the script says is Elena’s offer to her visitor of a trip across the lake got a bit of a titter from the audience – but what else can you do on a stage like Buxton’s?

What you need for this opera to work is two tenors with first-class Italian-style top registers: tick – Buxton has Nico Darmanin and John Irvin. You also need a really good bass-baritone and a virtuosic wide-ranging mezzo (for the trouser role of Elena’s warrior true love: tick – Buxton has David Ireland and Catherine Carby. And above all you need an utterly wonderful soprano as Elena: Buxton has Máire Flavin, and her rondó finale at the end brings the whole thing to a triumphant close, as it did on the first night in 1819 and needs to every time.

So the casting is top-class. So is the chorus, all 22 of them plus some minor role singers, too. Buxton has nobly managed so often in the past with a small-scale body, but at last it’s great to hear a full-throated crowd of them in the bright Opera House acoustic.

And the musical direction, by festival artistic director Adrian Kelly, is full of energy and impact. The Northern Chamber Orchestra plays with precision and panache, and the whole thing rattles by with both brilliance of coloratura technique and glorious tone production from all the principals.

(Giulio Cilona conducts on 12, 15 and 17 July).

Antonio e Cleopatra

Ricciardo and Hasse

Buxton International Festival

Buxton Pavilion Theatre

13, 16, 20, 22 July 2022, 1 hour 25 minutes

 

This is Buxton International Festival’s second fully home-grown opera production for 2022. Antonio e Cleopatra is a “serenata” – a baroque mini-opera employing a tiny orchestra and a smaller cast … the title tells it all, as there are just two of them.

It was written in 1725 by Johann Hasse, a German who, like Handel, had his first successes in Italy, and created for production in Naples – then part of the Holy Roman Empire of the Habsburgs.

As the state museum in Vienna will proudly tell you, the Habsburg imperial crown, inherited from Charlemagne, has symbols that show supposed continuity from the Caesars, and this piece makes the point by having Cleo and Mark Antony finally console their unhappy lot (after the battle of Actium) by looking to a future world ruled by Kaiser Charles VI and his missus, Kaiserin Elisabeth. Very loyalist, if a tad historically unlikely.

So how to present a two-acter in which the lovers (both written for high voices) spend the whole time telling each other how they feel, and nothing actually happens? This is baroque opera, and the convention is that each aria (always in da capo repeat-the-beginning-after-a-middle-section form) represents one emotion only – despair, anger, renewed love, determination, regret, resignation, heroic fatalism, etc. The succession gives the singers opportunities to show what they can do in each mood, and that’s the drama.

Director Evangeline Cullingworth (with the help of designer Grace Venning) seems to find parallels in the agonies of a penniless (or even homeless) young couple of the present day. We’re in a near-bare bedroom, and they have nothing but the clothes they stand up in and one big suitcase of a few remaining treasured things. These turn out to include bits of Roman armour, a pair of angel wings, some wigs, theatrical costumes, imitation pistols and hair brushes. Perhaps they have been acting in some dead-end theatre, as finally they dress up in full Carry On Cleo mode for the suicide pact that ends the piece?

The props, of course, give them something to do as they emote their way through Hasse’s arias (plus a couple of duets, one to close each act), with all those repeats. The vocal music is extremely taxing, though, and the quality of the two singers – Thalie Knights, as Antonio, and Ellie Neate, as Cleopatra – is what the audience has come to hear. They are top-class young artists, well able to embellish their repeats tastefully, and in Ellie Neate’s case making the most of her frequent bursts of high-powered top notes (originally written for Farinelli). The first-act closing duet, “Un solo sospiro”, verges on the Handelian in its variety of emotive resource and showed the two both at their best.

Musical direction from the harpsichord is by Satoko Doi-Luck, with a tireless in-period string quintet beside her.

 

Viva la Diva

Donizetti after Sografi, English version by Kit Hesketh-Harvey

Salzburg State Theatre in association with Buxton International Festival

Buxton Opera House

10, 14, 19, 21 and 23 July 2022, 2 hours 55 minutes

 

It’s good to see that Buxton International Festival can laugh at itself. Here we have an adaptation of material originally written to be a comic opera about opera, by Donizetti, turned into a tale of the auditions, rehearsals and final chaotic performance of a piece by the “High Peak Festival” – guess what that might be.

There’s the aspiring hopeful from the Royal Northern College of Music, the heavyweight star soprano with equally nasty minder from eastern Europe, the mezzo who flounces out to be replaced by the grande dame of the local musical scene, the tiny Italian tenor with a sore throat, the dodgy impresario who can’t quite find the cash to pay everyone on time, and the hapless director trying to hold it all together.

So far, so good, as ideas. In practice, Viva la Diva turns out to run 40 minutes longer than they estimated when the festival programme was printed, and it’s not quite as funny as it thinks it is. Maybe that’s to do with the inevitable in-jokes of opera singers sending themselves and their colleagues up, maybe it’s because Kit Hesketh-Harvey’s English words to fit around Donizetti’s tunes, full of internal rhymes and cleverness, still aren’t as tight as a script for a comic opera should be (he also gets extended mileage out of imagined absurd surtitle translations of an Italian libretto – OK first time but not worth doing over and over). Maybe the extra length is to do with preparations for the second act, which is technically quite ambitious, but if you’re going to do an exercise in The Opera That Goes Wrong (as this does), you have to be sure we know which bits are gags and which are not.

There was a feeling of improv creeping in, as if the presence of a male in drag (George Humphreys, stealing the show as supposed contralto Lady Agatha Wigan) turns everything to panto in British theatreland.

Many of the rest of the cast are capable of strutting their stuff as genuine bel canto singers, and I suppose they needed to have the opportunity to prove it, but the progress of the plot is slowed by rather too much Donizetti in the process. So full marks to everyone for singing really well at times and acting funny at others, to conductor Iwan Davies and repetiteur Katie Wong for both being and portraying their roles, to the Northern Chamber Orchestra for both their excellent playing and for pretending to go on strike, and to director Stephen Medcalf and the technical team for everything that went wrong properly.

Review of Opera North's Parsifal at the Bridgewater Hall

 

Richard Farness conducting the Orchestra of Opera North in Parsifal

The first of Opera North’s concert hall presentations of Parsifal was a magnificent musical experience, but, to anyone who saw the fully staged version in Leeds, it also showed how much the resources of a real theatre were absent.

Of course you never miss what you didn’t know about. The soloists – and, particularly, those with lesser roles now honoured with red chairs of their own front-of-stage – were all keenly able to convey character and emotion through simple gestures and intelligent positioning alone, and the story was easier to follow in some ways by using one’s own imagination than when interpreting a director’s spin presented as graphically as this had been.

“Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them …” said Shakespeare’s prologue to Henry V, and it was that sort of exercise. Think, when Parsifal says he’s holding a spear, that he really is, and so on.

What’s more, the Bridgewater Hall acoustic added a dimension of clarity and thrill to the sound of singers and orchestra that few theatres could emulate. Wagner designed the whole work to be a kind of quasi-religious experience, and the hall’s near-cathedral-like resonance helped give that feeling.

But perhaps the leading Flowermaidens, seated in black dresses, could not manage to be alluring quite as much as the writer-composer might have liked, and the full chorus, powerful in numbers and voice as they always are, looked the same in serried ranks, whether personifying chaste knights, temptresses or the angelic host.

As in some other Opera North concert-hall versions of operas, without even electronic projected settings (and they used only the minimum stage lights, not the full available rig) the music was the point, and the whole point. Richard Farnes, seen this time in a centre-stage spotlight, was visibly the Wagner conductor par excellence, guiding every note and nuance, pacing the whole huge structure with both dramatic excitement and meditative depth, and the orchestra played wonderfully for him. They, and he, know that it often matters to hold the decibels down a little bit so that voices can be heard without strain, but when they (especially their warm and wonderful brass) really opened up, the result was spine-tingling. And the chorus, too, made glorious sound.

The principals, as I’ve said in another place, are about as near to a dream line-up as you could get, and every one of them was on form for this performance. Brindley Sherratt sustained his rich tone throughout the marathon but also managed to grow older for the final act by stance and demeanour alone; Derek Welton made Klingsor a really vicious-looking but wonderful-sounding baddie; Robert Hayward was noble and affecting as Amfortas, and Katarina Karnéus conveyed remarkable depths of psychology while singing superbly. Both she and Toby Spence (who filled the space with some ringing top notes) seem to have abandoned the beatific grins of the Leeds first night and found a subtler way of portraying blessedness: that’s good.

Review of Concerto Budapest with Angela Hewitt

                                

Angela Hewitt (cr Fotograf Ole Christiansen)

Touring international orchestras are back, thanks to the mighty IMG, and the Bridgewater Hall mustered a small but very enthusiastic audience to welcome Concerto Budapest (formerly the Hungarian Symphony Orchestra) and its chief conductor and artistic director, András Keller, along with Angela Hewitt, the peerless pianist who is always a draw in her own right.

The programme offered to Manchester (slightly different from other venues so far on the tour) had two pieces full of folksong and dance and two mainstream classical ones.

Top of the menu was Kodály’s Dances of Galánta – played for the first time on the tour but no doubt bread-and-butter to these musicians back home. Their string tone is rightly something to be proud of, and the eight celli made a superb start to the piece (the following string playing wasn’t as clean and precise as the Bridgewater Hall acoustic really needs, but it takes a little time to adjust to it – there’s an awful lot of side-to-side resonance in this hall). The music has something of the sound of traditional ‘gypsy’ bands in it, and by the fast bit near the end there were grins all round – they were enjoying doing it.

Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody no. 1, played after the interval, had much of the same feel to it (and gave the percussionists of the orchestra something to do: their two harps and a most self-effacing pianissimo triangle made their delicate contribution).

But before that there was Angela Hewitt. You could hardly get more mainstream than Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 23 in A major (K488), and she plays it with good old-fashioned well-pedalled smoothness and grace. The orchestra, too, was suavity personified, and its principal bassoon had his best vibrato to show off, along with the principal oboe’s most expressive style, in the second and final movements.

Angela Hewitt’s playing is beautifully proportioned and finely calculated. Mozart’s (his own) first movement cadenza brought a flash of drama to the narrative … and I loved the way (being a director-from-the-keyboard herself on other occasions) she conducted the players back into action herself at the recapitulation. She played the gloriously elegiac central Adagio una corda but with some surprise emphases to stimulate the imagination.

To remind us of her expertise in interpreting baroque keyboard music for the modern piano, she returned with an encore in the shape of a Scarlatti sonata.

Last there was Beethoven’s Fifth. Strings were slightly reduced for this (they had been cut right down for Mozart), but there were modern timpani. There was plenty of energetic articulation in the opening movement, and intriguing crescendos on held notes from the wind players. The speeds of the remainder were mainly brisk, though sometimes variable in a nicely Romantic way, and the horns and trumpets (three of the latter, with shared duties on the top line, to keep their sound brightly dominating everything else) made a powerful contribution.

Review of Northern Chamber Orchestra with leader Nicholas Ward and soloist Craig Ogden

 

Nicholas Ward (left) and Craig Ogden

The highspot of the weekend Manchester Guitar Festival at Chetham’s School of Music was a concert on Sunday afternoon by the Northern Chamber Orchestra in the Stoller Hall, featuring Craig Ogden as soloist in both Malcolm Arnold’s Guitar Concerto and Peter Sculthorpe’s Nourlangie.

But the concert – a repeat of one given in Macclesfield Heritage Centre the night before – was important for another reason: it was the final performance by the NCO with Nicholas Ward as leader and artistic director. Nick has been in the leader’s chair since 1984, and I’ve followed the fortunes of this remarkable ensemble, player-led both organizationally and musically, throughout that time. His departure is a wrench.

Nick’s whimsical and sometimes far-ranging spoken introductions to the music played in their concerts have long been a welcome part of their special atmosphere: you know that this is real chamber music, played by friends among friends. His inspiring musical contribution, literally leading by example, has also been something to savour, making the sound of the NCO one that can vary from subtlest intimacy to extraordinarily big effects. There was one right at the start, as for this performance he had a strings strength of 17, augmented to 27 by musicians from Chetham’s School for the opening Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, by Vaughan Williams – one of three wonderful examples of string writing on the programme. Designed for a cathedral acoustic, the varied textures and sense of the past brought to new life were equally entrancing in the bright, reflective Stoller Hall, and this was no routine performance but full of passion.

Percy Grainger’s setting of the Londonderry Air (Irish Tune from County Derry, as he called it), with a horn added to the texture, was equally beguiling. Then we heard a special piece for the occasion: the NCO’s own composer-player James Manson’s Bânjöeš Yètí, based on a Moldovan folk tune but completely in the English pastoral tradition in nature, with lovely roles for solo clarinet, horn and flute – and, of course, a violin solo.

And so to the guitar pieces. The Arnold concerto should be heard much more often: it’s got sweet and wistful tunes in each of its three movements, of the sort he crafted so well, and the central one of the three is both long and rather mysterious, partly like a score for a Hitchcock thriller (as it’s been described), with portamento slides on the violins and the menace of thudding bass notes – but also by turns energetic and finally haunting.

Craig Ogden’s mastery of his instrument needs no endorsement from me: his playing is always crystal-clear, super-sensitive and beautiful to listen to. And so it was again in Sculthorpe’s piece, which brings on an array of percussion (thunder sheet, gong and cymbals included) to present its ingeniously developed themes.

Finally it was strings alone again, for Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro. For me it’s one of the most glorious things ever created, and the sound of Nick Ward and the NCO playing it, molto sostenuto and molto espressivo (as it says towards the end) is the way I shall remember the enriching time that his leadership of this orchestra has given us.

Review of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet with Gábor Takács-Nagy and Manchester Camerata at the Stoller Hall, Manchester

 

Mozart’s late piano concertos are among his greatest and subtlest creations, and consequently both immensely rewarding and, by the same token, very challenging.

The ongoing recording project by Manchester Camerata under its music director, Gábor Takács-Nagy, with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet as soloist, brought a fascinating concert at Chetham’s on Friday night. Word had clearly got around: there was hardly a spare seat to be found.

Takács-Nagy and the orchestra, led by Caroline Pether, got things off to a fizzing start with the Marriage of Figaro overture – contemporary with the C minor concerto, K491 and no. 24, which was to follow it. It was meant to be a fresh take on a familiar piece, said the maestro, and so it proved. With 20 strings in total, the balance was bound to favour clarity in the wind lines, and they emerged prominently, even from a big round sound underpinned by modern timpani.

Big sound was a characteristic of Bavouzet’s approach to the concerto, too, with plenty of pedal used on the Schimmel instrument to underscore the music’s tragi-Romantic qualities. He knows how to be self-effacing, too, and let the woodwind soloists have their fair share of the limelight, but the piano has necessarily to claim much of it. He had a grand and dramatic first movement cadenza to offer (by Hummel), which contributed to the solemn and weighty effect.

The slow movement of K491 is a puzzle: such a simple, seemingly childish, opening tune surely requires some decoration, but how much? Bavouzet began very modestly, indeed making it seem a mere formality, and though the ingenuity increased (and there was more in the finale), I wasn’t quite convinced it was being used to heighten the emotional impact of the music (as classical embellishment really should). The finale itself presents its problems, and conductor and soloist must have decided it needed some drama to finish, with a touch on the accelerator when the minor key signature returned.

The second half of the concert began with a real curiosity: an overture for a play by Goethe (Erwin und Elmire) written by Princess Anna Amalia von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, a contemporary of Mozart. Made-up name, I thought when I first saw it (we are near April Fools’ Day, after all), but apparently she did exist. Was it a bit cynical to dig up her efforts under the ABO Trust’s programme to promote historical women composers? The fact that her composition, a pleasant exercise in Empfindsamkeit, survived probably only illustrates another inequality (of aristocrats versus mere professional musicians) in her day. But at least – unlike Mozart – she believed in the employment prospects of second flutes.

The other piano concerto was no. 25 in C major, K503. It had all the virtues of the previous Bavouzet/Takács-Nagy major key concerto interpretations – lightness of spirit, conversational interplay between soloist and orchestra, well crafted contrasts and, in this case, a bit of a tempo change in the first movement to energise proceedings. The big cadenza (by the young American virtuoso Kenneth Broberg) was a real turn, involving a near-quotation of La Marseillaise which encouraged many a chuckle among its listeners.

In the lovely Andante slow movement Bavouzet soon began to charm with some melodic embellishment, very tasteful again. The finale was full of brilliance and romped home with a dizzying sprint of an Allegretto.