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.