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

Samuel Boden as Acis and Anna Dennis as Galatea 

in the Early Opera Company's Acis & Galatea at 

Buxton International Festival. Credit Genevieve Girling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further performances are on 18 and 20 July.

 

Review of Pauline Viardot's Cendrillon at Buxton International Festival

Nikki Martin as Cendrillon at Buxton International 

Festival. Credit Genevieve Girling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further performances are on 16 and 24 July.

 

Review of Dido's Ghost at Buxton International Festival

Isabelle Peters as Anna in Dido's Ghost 

at Buxton International Festival, Buxton 

Opera House. Credit Genevieve Girling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

David Webb, Eleanor Dennis and Graeme Broadbent

 in The Dancing Master at Buxton International Festival. 

Credit Genevieve Girling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

Rachel Nicholls as Leonore in Opera North’s production

of Beethoven’s Fidelio. Credit Richard H Smith 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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