With events running over two weeks and not a single day starting later than lunchtime it is impossible for even a hardened lieder-lover to really do justice to the Oxford Lieder Festival. I spent two whole days this year and managed to take in eight concerts which were clearly focused on the main theme of the festival – Singing Words, poets and their songs.

Lunch with Faure and Schubert

The two lunchtime recitals on Wednesday and Thursday 28-29 October, focussed on songs by Faure and Schubert. The first was given by baritone Nicholas Mogg, who won this year’s Oxford Lieder Young Artist Platform and it was easy to see why, as not only is the voice remarkably well focused but his presence is alive and he communicates warmly,  introducing the songs with relaxed confidence. He brought a profound yearning to Faure’s Vaisseaux, nous vous aurons aimes en pure perte and a sensitive integrity to Schubert’s An die Musik. I look forward to hearing him again soon. He was very ably accompanied by Jams Coleman who showed a keen ear for the dynamics of the recital, coming into his own with the more dominant writing for Faure’s Serenade.

The following day brought us two singers from the National Opera Studio, Katherine Crompton and Hann-Liisa Kirchin. Soprano Katherine Crompton had asked our indulgence as she had been suffering from a throat infection but this did not seem to inhibit the charming rendition of Faure’s Mai or the sentimental Noel.  Mezzo-soprano Hann-Liisa Kirchin impressed with the more powerfully emotional pieces, filling out Faure’s Au bod de l’eau with operatic enthusiasm and bringing real power to Au cimetiere. By contrast there was an unnerving simplicity to Faure’s Les trois soeurs aveugles.

Settings of Thomas Hardy

A new venture this year has been the inclusion of a number of free recitals, given in Exeter College Chapel. These focused on a single composition within a limited time-frame to given those who might be hesitant of hearing a complete song recital a taste of what is in store. In the event they proved to be the best events I attended across the two days, starting with a magnificent performance of Britten’s Winter Words from tenor Nick Pritchard accompanied by festival director Sholto Kynoch. If there is was ever a need to demonstrate the close relationship between words and music these surely do it. Nick Pritchard brought great clarity to the text, within quite a difficult acoustic, and his body language enhanced the impact of his voice. In The little old table he found an emotional intensity which is not immediately obvious in the text and was deeply moving in the gentle sensitivity of The Choirmaster’s Burial. If there is pessimism here, as so often in Hardy, it is lifted by the universality the score brings to the text, none more so than the final Before Life and After. This was a splendid occasion and if anybody was hearing lieder for the first time this could not surely have been a better start.

That afternoon baritone Benedict Nelson brought us Gerald Finzi’s settings Earth and Air and Rain. Deeply romantic in style, the verse concentrates on a range of Hardy’s rural voices, from the folksy Rollicum-rorum to the reflective In a churchyard. Though there was no obvious problem with his voice, the text did not carry well and it was, retrospectively, obvious just how clear Nick Pritchard had been earlier in the day. This did not matter too much as we had the text before us but may matter more if Benedict Nelson wants to be comprehensible without us having our heads buried in the programme.

These two concerts really did reflect the sensitivity of the composer to the text, something which we would come back to later in the day.

Strauss & Chopin

Festivals can often find a place for an oddity and Richard Strauss’ Kramerspiegel is certainly that. Roger Vignoles gave us an extended introduction to the work as it has a fine back-story. In the days when copyright was a far more difficult process, composers often found themselves obliged to hand over works to publishers with whom they no longer wished to work. Strauss found a way round this by writing a song cycle which attacked publishers, hoping that his own would refuse to publish and thus get him out of his obligation. Readers will need to look up the history for themselves, but it will be worth doing so for the fun of it alone. Suffice it to say that there is great play on the names of publishers, most of whom fortunately have names which are also animals or objects eg Bock – Goat. Strauss has great fun with these, as did we listening to them from Elizabeth Watts, whose sense of humour shone through as well as the voluptuous voice she brings on all occasions. Roger Vignoles delighted in highlighting the musical allusions (much here toying with Rosenkavalier etc) and providing sterling and vigorous support throughout.

Late on Wednesday evening Imogen Cooper gave us a little respite from the voice with an all Chopin recital in the Ante-Chapel of New College. Of a finely crafted programme the Fantasie Op49 was exceptionally beautiful, and the final G minor Ballade left us wanting more even though it was close to midnight.

Wildflowers and A Shropshire Lad

The two main evening recitals, though they brought the largest audiences, were both problematic. Anna Stephany’s concert on Wednesday evening seemed unbalanced and bity. While her singing was not at fault the long narrative of Haydn’s Ariann a Naxos was surprisingly unmoving though the nobility of Schubert’s Lied eines schiffers an die Dioskuren somewhat made up for this.

The second half opened with the world premiere of Rhian Samuel’s Wildflower Songbook , settings of poems by Anne Stevenson. Throughout the three songs the vocal setting is more lyrical than the accompaniment so there is a continuous underlying tension between text and music. This often works well, particularly when there is a sudden coming together emotionally as at the shell-frail colour of harebells, but at other times can make for more uncomfortable listening. On a first hearing, the whimsical charm of Digitalis impresses and it would be good to hear the cycle again to get a better feel of its merits.

Of the rest of the programme, the Sibelius songs had the power of simplicity, and Michael Head’s Foxgloves and Sweet Chance were particularly beautiful. Sholto Kynoch was the accompanist demonstrating yet again great versatility and sensitivity whatever he is called upon to play.

The final event I attended also proved to be the most contentious. On paper, performing Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, interpolating settings of the poems as the evening proceeds, should be a simple matter. In the event it was something of a dog’s dinner. While individual items impressed the whole simply did not hang together. It was also deeply hampered by the introduction of regular auto-biographical details which gave an un-necessary slant to the text which we were experiencing. If we add to this the wide range of settings, the whole was, in essence, a mess. C W Orr’s Wagnerian approach, many of his settings soundly distinctly sub-Tristan, sat uncomfortably beside John Ireland and Vaughan-Williams. Not that the voices helped. The three male singers, all in evening dress, seemed intent on presenting the songs like Edwardian ballads rather than the potential simplicity, even naivety which the texts imply. Graham Johnson had pointed out at the start that Housman’s verse is almost entirely monosyllabic and there is a reason for this which goes to the heart of the work. The further one gets away from the simplicity the less effective the texts become. I am very glad to have encountered this performance as I had often thought I would like to mount the cycle using the songs. There is no problem with the poems, there is no problem with the settings by their individual composers, but putting them all together is, in retrospect, a mistake, from which I hope we all can learn.

After so much that had been outstanding over the 48hours I was in Oxford, it seems a pity to end on a sour note. I’m just glad that the Festival draws our attention to so many fine young singers and to works which we might otherwise never hear.

Next year’s Oxford Lieder Festival runs from 14 – 29 October and will bring us the complete songs of Robert Schumann. As a warm up, there will be a Spring Weekend of Song, 4-6 March 2016 which will include the auditions for the Young Artist Platform. 

As David Pountney notes in his introduction to this new season, Madness is possibly more endemic to opera than any other emotion. The three works which make up the autumn season focus on very different forms of madness but are none the less more closely connected than recent seasons, some of which have seemed somewhat fanciful in their linkage.

Handel’s Orlando, which I caught at the Bristol Hippodrome on 21 October, centres on the madness of the hero when confronted with the polarity of love and duty. Harry Fehr’s production moves the action to somewhere during World War II and a military hospital. Though this may seem too far from the mythical medieval realm of the original story it works remarkably well. Orlando, a fighter pilot, is seen dealing with the demons that war brings and the ensuing mental breakdown. The anonymity of a hospital, the almost surreal calm and staff going about their duties, ignoring the passion raging before them, makes sense both of the narrative and the intensely personal music which Handel provides. Arias are inner monologues rather than narrative devices and we have many glorious moments of intense beauty and – frequently – pain.

The production also highlights the importance of Dorinda, radiantly sung by Fflur Wyn. A staff nurse, she has little importance in the hierarchy but her sensitivity sees to the heart of the situation even when she herself loses by it. Her Nightingale aria at the start of act two was exquisite. But there were no weaknesses in the cast with Lawrence Zazzo a noble hero, Rebecca Evans ever so slightly snobbish as Angelica, but one whose pain we feel, and Robin Blaze a finely understated Medoro. The premise of the hospital is held together by the figure of Zoroastro, in this case the senior consultant, who guides his staff to allow nature to take its course. The only low voice in the cast he added a genuine gravity to the excesses of emotion around him.

There is no pit in the Birmingham Hippodrome which helps baroque works, though the orchestra under Rinaldo Alessandrini seemed larger than is needed to be. Not that this provided any lack of balance with its carefully moulded musical lines and the plethora of ornamentation coming from the stage.

The following night was the first of three performances of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. It is obvious that this is excellent box-office for WNO as the house was packed and enthusiastic. I have always liked Sondheim though we seem to have had rather a lot of Sweeney’s recently. While this was efficiently staged and well sung throughout I found myself wondering if the work was not somewhat more limited in scope than I had been led to believe. I have yet to see a production which gives me any real alternative insight into the characters. James Brining’s direction highlights the idea of madness by setting the opening in Bedlam and coming back to this on a number of key moments during the work, but they are hinted at rather than used. Maybe the whole evening could have been set within Bedlam – like the Marat/Sade – which would give another nuance to the text but, no, we were on very familiar ground. The containers which make up the set mirror the anonymity of the killings and a world in which things, and people, can be moved around unnoticed, but this did not impinge itself on the action as such.

Janis Kelly is as good a Mrs Lovett as one could wish for with a keen sense of humour as well as a real moral ambivalence. Other characters are more two dimensional, though Aled Hall makes a sleazy and nasty minded Beadle. In the lead, David Arnsperger looks good and sings well as Sweeney but never really convinces us that he is a drive man – close to the madness which is supposed to lie at the heart of the season.

Apollo Theatre, Oxford, 3 November 2015

Madness is even more at the heart of Bellini’s I Puritani than either of the other two works in this season, for the heroine goes mad in each act. This becomes the lynch-pin for Annilese Miskimmon’s production as Elvira is never really sane across the whole evening. Setting the naturalistic story line in Ulster during the troubles makes sense of the civil war and gives an added bite to what might be romantically historical. We start in a bleak church hall where the Orange Order are assembling for a parade. As Elvira descends even further into hallucination we drift back to the seventeenth century and the hall physically collapses around her. This is very effective and manages at all times to make sense of the libretto, even the rather startling line in act three where she refers to waiting for Arturo for over three centuries.

Linda Richardson has now taken over as Elvira for the remainder of the tour. She sings strongly and the top of the voice is secure but her presence is rather two-dimensional and lacking the emotional dynamism the part needs given that everything hangs on her. Alessandro Luciano was a late replacement for an indisposed Barry Banks as Arturo. As with Linda Richardson he has no problem with the tessitura for the part, which is certainly demanding, but he did little to win our affection or convince us that he is in emotional and political turmoil. Only David Kempster’s sterling performance as Riccardo really gave us the sense of power that the work as a whole needs if it is to be lifted out of the canary cage.

Happily the best part of the evening came from the orchestra under Carlo Rizzi. It is always a pleasure to welcome him back to the pit (not that there is one in Oxford) and his sensitive, often deft handling of the score was a delight the whole evening. There was also some very fine solo playing, particularly from the first horn.

WNO returns in the spring with three – yes three – Figaro operas.

London Coliseum, Friday 16 October 2015

Benedict Andrews’ new production of La Boheme raises more questions than it solves. While the approach is updated and naturalistic, the settings consistently appear to be at odds with the narrative. Are these students actually impoverished or are they rich boys playing games? The waste of highly expensive paint in the final act is a case in point.

The vast studio of act one is shown in the final act to be a ground floor apartment next to a beautiful park in which is a children’s playground. How can impoverished students afford it? And why so many candles in the first act when there is more than enough light flooding the stage? These problems are exacerbated when Rudolfo and Mimi both shoot up while sharing their autobiographies. Are we to take O suave fanciulla as a drug induced delusion which then spills over into the rest of the evening?

While the sets for act one and four raise questions they are at least serviceable, and the simplicity of Johannes Schutz’ design for act three is highly effective. However, the Café Momus scene is a mess, lacking any sense of focus and ability to tell the story with clarity.

All of this would matter less if the musical side had been universally strong. The women could not be faulted. Rhian Lois is a feisty Musetta whose compassion shines through in the final act. Corinne Winters is more complex as Mimi. How far can we trust her girlish simplicity when she is clearly an addict from the start and remains so – Marcello checks her arm for marks at the start of act three? She sings with boldness and clarity, easily riding the orchestra and allowing her dying self to simply slip away. It is very effective.

The men never really reach this level. Duncan Rock’s Marcello comes closest and improves across the evening. Neither Ashley Riches’ Schaunard or Nicholas Masters’ Colline are given enough within this production to create any sense of individuality. Showing them all up was Simon Butteriss’ masterly doubling of Alcindoro and Benoit. Tiny parts, but etched into the memory by the clarity of characterisation.

Zach Borichevsky has shown in the past that he has the potential for Rudolfo but was not in good voice across the whole evening, straining at the top and unable to ride the orchestra in moments which really require it.

Xian Zhang has conducted La boheme before for ENO and her approach is solid if rather pedestrian for much of the time. The second act in particular lacked fire though there was some very sensitive playing in act three.

Any new production has the real challenge of being compared with the previous one. Jonathan Miller’s production, last seen only two years ago, may have been showing signs of age but actually worked far more successfully than this new one does. Maybe we will come to love this in time but the signs are not hopeful.

Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury,16 October 2015

It makes a real difference when Dvorak is in the hands of a Czech.   Jakub Hrusa really knows how to bring out all the delicious melodiousness of the seventh symphony. And it works especially well in those hallmark Dvorakian passages when lower strings are alternated with tuneful brass blasts, all very well played. The opening allegro pounded along with energy and the adagio presented an elegant contrast to both the movements which flank it. Then came a well-balanced finale. The symphony was a fitting end to a memorable concert.

We’d started with the overture to Prince Igor, a jolly piece – less familiar perhaps than the Polovtsian dances –  which may owe more to Glazunov than Borodin who was always pretty busy with his day job as a scientist. The result, whatever its provenance is cheerfully episodic and full of lights, darks and contrasts with plenty of dynamic range – played here with panache.

And so to the centrepiece of the concert: Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto played by a Daniil Trifonov, a young Russian, aged 26 who is making a huge name for himself – concerts with the world’s finest orchestras and a Deutsche Grammophon recording contract.  Geeky looking, bespectacled and hunched, he crouched over the piano like a stalking animal, his hands moving in fluid arcs. He was of course, totally on top of this (late) romantic pot boiler which he interpreted with liberal rubato. The opening crescendo was beautifully articulated and he maximised the melodic honey of the adagio. There was an energetic passion in the third movement which (just)  stopped short of becoming too mannered.  And the fat ralentando just before the end was suitably dramatic.

It may be invidious to single out performers in the concert which was as generally fine as this but I’m going to do it anyway. Principal flautist Samuel Cole has so much solo work in these three works that he probably played more bars than required by any flute concerto. And he did a magnificent job. Second, the sound of the Philharmonia’s lower strings is glorious and they too shone through in each of these three works. Principal cello, Karen Stephenson and principal bass, Dominic Worsley are to be warmly congratulated.

Susan Elkin

The Dome, Brighton, Sunday 11 October 2015

Most new seasons are launched with familiar works which will bring in a good audience to set the tone for the rest of the year. There was certainly a goodly sized audience at the Dome but the works – with exception of the concerto – were certainly not on most people’s list of the top 100.

Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini is a bombastic piece, full of angst and noise but suspiciously little content. The influence of Wagner is very clear in the louder passages – closer to the Flying Dutchman than the Ring Cycle- though there is little sense of control of the material or of any real narrative content. The central, more reflective, sections work best and sound more like Tchaikovsky but there is little that is memorable compared with Romeo & Juliet.

The transformation into Beethoven’s first piano concerto could hardly have been greater. Stephen Hough is a master of delicacy and detail, yet he also manages to bring wit and panache to his playing. Not since I heard these concerti with Alfred Brendel have I come across such an undemonstrative performer who yet brings every note stunningly to life. Everything is in the music and we are forced to listen more closely because of the total lack of visual affectation. It was masterly. I don’t normally like Steinway pianos for Beethoven but Stephen Hough manages to create the most delicate tone and rapid dynamic changes without any rough edges or compromise. The cadenza was unfamiliar to me and there was no note to indicate if this was improvised by Stephen Hough himself – it was certainly very apt and delightfully in keeping with the whole.

The other unknown quantity for this opening performance was the first symphony by Vasily Sergeyevich Kalinnikov – a name previously unknown to me but one which, on this hearing alone, should be far more widely known. The composer’s short and tragic life ended in 1897 just as his works were beginning to be recognised. This first symphony, written in 1895, was successfully presented in Moscow, Berlin, Paris and Vienna, and a piano reduction published.

It is essentially Russian but its enthusiasm and vivacity far exceeds any national constraints. There is no hint of Tchaikovsky; if anything it sounds closer to Dvorak and leans towards the later composer’s faults and merits. Kalinnikov tends to repeat his musical ideas at great length but has a real gift for orchestration and dynamic so that the mind never feels sated or bored by repetition. The second movement with its harp and string ostinati is very beautiful, flowing easily with a clear sense of structure and line. The lively brass writing and extrovert dance rhythms of the scherzo are captivating. I felt a little concern for the second percussion player who sits in splendid isolation until the final pages of the last movement when the triangle is needed – but it really is needed and adds that tiny touch of sparkle to the climax – yet another example of the composer’s absolutely secure understanding of tonal colour. I’m not sure whose idea it was to include the work in this opening concert – possibly Barry Wordsworth now fully returned from his antipodean travels – but it was thrillingly apt. Let us hope we hear more of Kalinnikov – he certainly deserves a reassessment.