Daily Archives: 18 February, 2018

Valentine’s Opera Breakfast

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St Mary in the Castle, Sunday 18th February 2018

Following the continuing success of the Jazz Breakfasts at St Mary in the Castle, it seemed reasonable to launch an Opera Breakfast linked to St Valentine’s Day. However, the underlying theme of the entertainment was much more subtle than a string of extracts might imply.

Marcio da Silva and Sophie Pullen drew together arias and duets from a number of Mozart operas to illustrate the joys and pitfalls of sexual relationships, giving the first half over to the predatory male and the impact of what today we familiarly call sexual harassment, while the second half praised the married state.

Don Giovanni opened the morning with his serenade to Don Elvira’s maid – though in this case Marcio sang directly to ladies seated close to him as he wandered from table to table. This was followed by the whole of the opening scene from Le Nozze di Figaro. If Figaro is naïve in his acceptance of the Count’s room his vicious anger in Se vuol ballare hinted that the French Revolution was only too close. Sophie Pullen gave a moving account of Deh vieni non tardar showing her constancy even in the face of the Count’s attempted seduction. Happily Suzanne knows only too well how to deal with him – though not so Zerlina who seems to give in all too easily to Don Giovanni at the end of La ci darem la mano. In between Sophie Pullen had given us a full-blooded rendering of Come scoglio from Cosi fan tutte, where Fiordiligi proves her strength in the face of male onslaught. While Sophie Pullen had given us a fine range of female protagonists, Marcio da Silva had gone from debauched rake to revolutionary and back again.

The second half was all drawn from Die Zauberflote concentrating on the relationship between Papagano and Papagana, with just enough time to take in Bei mannern, with Sophie Pullen morphing easily into Pamina, where she stayed for a very moving rendition of Ach ich fuhl’s.

Throughout, Simone Tavoni had accompanied from the piano, adding in the bells and whistles in the second half, as easily as he brought the dramatic intensity to the heightened emotions of so many of the arias in the first.

The morning was a thank you for the volunteers who work so tirelessly for the venue and particularly those who have supported the work of Hastings Philharmonic. Let us hope it will be the first of a new line of breakfasts!

 

 

 

Czech Philharmonic Orchestra

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Anvil Arts, Basingstoke, 16 February 2018

Dvorak is to the Czech Philharmonic what, say, Strauss is to the Vienna Philharmonic. It’s in the blood and in this exuberant concert you could hear all that Bohemian ancestry pounding in every bar. And they want to keep it that way, which is why almost every player in the orchestra is Czech. The result is a phenomenal corporate “instrument” which conductor Tomas Netopil, an energetic but businesslike conductor, plays, and plays with, to remarkable effect. By the time we got to the final encore – Brahms Hungarian Dance 5 – he was ready to have fun jokily exaggerating the tempo changes with electrifying precision and I certainly wasn’t the only person who left the auditorium beaming with delight.

One of the reasons for the distinctive sound is the unusual layout. Tomas Netopil has violas on the right opposite the first violins with cellos and second violins on the inside. Double basses, meanwhile are majestically lined up along the back behind the horns and woodwind on a tier which puts their feet on a level with violinists’ heads. It means that you can often hear both viola and bass parts with unusual clarity and alters the balance of the whole.

The programme was a Dvorak sandwich. We began with the Symphonic Variations in which Dvorak imaginatively explores the fugal form at one point moving from second violins, thence to violas, first violins and cellos in that order. It’s quite a showpiece and doesn’t get as many outings (in the UK at least) as perhaps it should. It’s a very vibrantly orchestrated work which allowed the orchestra to show what all its sections can do.

In the middle we left Dvorak’s homeland and headed to Russia for a splendid performance of Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto – a work which is very much more on the public radar these days than it used to be because brilliant young players (Guy Johnston, Sheku Kanneh-Mason et al) keep winning major competitions with it. On this occasion Alisa Wielerstein, serious and romantic looking in a statement scarlet dress, played it excitingly with lots of tension. Accompanied by a slightly scaled down orchestra, she took the first movement at a terrific tempo and found a mysterious, plangent but appealingly resolute sound in the moderato movement. When she finished someone in the audience gasped “oh!” in amazement. It was involuntary, I think, but a very valid testament to Weilerstein’s verve and technique.

And so to the sunny New World Symphony in which the unconventional orchestra layout heightened awareness of the apposition phrasing between lower strings and other sections. And Tomas Nepotil managed to make the largo sound as fresh as if the audience had never heard it before. It was played with warm, affectionate delicacy, especially at the recapitulation of the challengingly familiar first subject.  I loved the effect of the bass pizzicato when you can see and hear every player clearly and the rousing scherzo accomplished all its time signature and key changes so neatly that one was left sighing in admiration at the tightness of that glorious Czech sound. And as for the finale, the speed was so cracking in places that it made my amateur violinist fingers ache even to think about it. But it came off with aplomb.

It’s a long journey home from Basingstoke to where I live in South London and this leisurely concert – with its 7.45 start, two encores and lots of applause – didn’t finish until after 10.00pm. I have rarely been so glad that I made the effort.

Susan Elkin