London Coliseum, 30 October 2018

This is the second revival of David Alden’s production and in many ways the strongest and most telling to date. Much hinges on the vulnerability of Sarah Tynan’s splendid Lucia. Her tiny frame, encased in a voluminous crinoline and tight lacing, is constantly at the mercy of the misogynistic society which surrounds her. That she sings the part with great sensitivity as well as having a voice which easily fills the theatre is near miraculous given the constant physical threat to her very presence. David Alden’s stark reading of the text is now more pertinent than when it was first staged and our awareness of sexual harassment and passive-aggressive behaviour ever more obvious.

While her brother Enrico, sung with great and overt passion by Lester Lynch, is unable to contain his incestuous desires, it is Clive Bayley’s Raimondo who is even more objectionable as a canting prelate, whose diction is all too clear. Michael Colvin’s oleaginous Arturo is a vile individual and there is little sense of remorse either side of the footlights when Lucia kills him. Even her lover, Edgardo – Eleazar Rodriguez, in better voice than in last season’s Rossini – is a nasty piece of work and it is difficult to see him through her eyes. The only other female on stage, Alisa, wonderfully created by Sarah Pring, can do nothing to assist Lucia as she is too obviously at the lower end of the pecking order.

The chorus are strictly divided, the men having authority within their own sphere while the women are below them – a point beautifully identified at the end of the marriage scene where the women are seated with their men standing behind them, keeping them firmly in their place.

Stuart Stratford creates a romantic warmth from his orchestra which is totally in keeping with the visual and dramatic dichotomy proceeding on stage. The clash of styles heightens our understanding of the dysfunction taking place.

It is good to see this production again and hopefully it will not be for the last time.

The theme this year was The Grand Tour and one which enabled us to sample songs with a wide variety of languages and styles. To help us on our way there were morning talks on a range of less familiar European languages as well as introductions to composers who are internationally known but not necessarily for their lieder settings.

Monday 15^th October concentrated on Polish lieder and at lunchtime Jan Petryka, tenor, and Sholto Kynoch, piano, gave us songs by Chopin, Laks, Szymanowski, Paderewski and Moniuszko. As the Holywell Music Room was undergoing some renovation during the daytime, most midday concerts were moved to the Sheldonian Theatre, with seating placed very close to the performers to improve the intimacy of the occasion. The Chopin settings were instantly recognisable even if the text of Little Prisoner proved to be somewhat unnerving. Tenor Jan Petryka is Polish and so had no problem with these songs but the central set were in English with Szymanowski‘s setting of James Joyce’s Seven Songs. The unusual placement was challenging but also very effective in highlighting the care which the composer brings to his understanding of the text and that of the singer in communicating it.

The late afternoon concert brought us back to Holywell Music Room for The Pale of Settlement- songs from the Polish-Jewish community while under Russian rule.  Alison Rose, soprano, shared the platform with Gareth Brynmor John, baritone, opening  with a beautiful unaccompanied lullaby Schlof mayn kind, and later a heavily oriental melody in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Hebrew Love Song.

Gareth Brynmor John gave us an heroic Saul’s Lied from Mussorgsky with strong hints of Boris Godunov, and the tongue-in-cheek How the czar lives. They ended with a poignant traditional setting of Yoshke is leaving. Throughout they were sensitively accompanied by Florent Mourier.

The evening concert brought an unusual combination to the Holywell Music Room with Sholto Kynoch, piano, Louise Alder, soprano and Stef van Herten, horn. If the effect was somewhat disconcerting this was more the difficulty of balancing the horn against the piano and voice. The opening solo horn piece – Gounod’s Larghetto – worked well but too often the horn player was simply not able to make the impact less than strident. Thankfully in a full programme there were many felicities. Debussy’s Ariettes oubliees have a languorous beauty which Louis Alder made the most of, as she did in the Wagnerian overtones of the five Strauss songs. At the end we were given a little lightness with Verdi’s Chimney Sweep and Donizetti’s L’Amor Funesto where the coloratura sounded anything but sad.

On Tuesday morning Dr James Partridge gave us a brief introduction to the Czech language, trying to persuade us that it is actually far less complex than it seems, and this was followed by a lecture from Caroline Palmer on the inveterate traveller and art enthusiast, Maria Graham who combed the galleries of Europe with her second husband Augustus Wall Callcott. The time she spent in what is now the Czech Republic was instructive and useful to our understanding of the music we were to hear across the rest of the day.

That the language problem can affect more than the singers getting their heads around unfamiliar songs became all too apparent at the lunchtime concert given by Harriet Burns, soprano, and Caitlin Hulcup, mezzo-soprano, with Christopher Glynn at the piano. No difficulty it seemed for the singers but those responsible for the programme had come to grief over the translations and the complexity of variations. As a result some of the songs were not listed at all and others had the wrong text to the right title. It made for a very interesting session, for whereas some songs were instantly comprehensible – Dvorak’s gently pleasing duet And I will sail away from you and Smetana’s lovely Evening Songs – others for which we had nothing were incomprehensible regardless of how well sung. Given that one of the major points of a Lieder recital is the sensitivity of the singer to the text this was all rather unfortunate. That the two singers did so well under the circumstances and their voices more than overcame the problem is a real tribute to them both and to Christopher Glynn whose accompaniment was thrown into unusually high relief.

The early evening at the Holywell Music Room was given over to the Albion Quartet who commenced with Josef Suk’s Meditation on the Old Czech Chorale St Wenceslas Op35a. The opening is certainly introspective but quickly builds in both intensity and fire. After this they were joined by Christopher Glynn for Dvorak’s Piano Quintet No2 in A major Op81. The work seemed to suite the young players admirably as its constant changes of mood, dynamic and pace challenged them to ever riskier tempi and lightning interchanges. If the final movement has an unexpected moment of reflection towards the end it is only after a sparkling flight at breakneck speed with all the colour and verve a quintet can muster.

This was, of course, only a tiny fraction of what was on offer this October and the festival ran for fifteen days with numerous events each day, many sold out well in advance. Next year’s theme is Tales of Beyond – Magic, Myths and Mortals.

Middle Temple Hall, City of London

Middle Temple Hall – in all its Elizabethan glory with carving and stained glass – is a stunningly beautiful concert venue. It was, apparently the venue in which Twelfth Night was premiered (earliest known performance, anyway) in 1602 so it’s rather delightful that the tradition continues.

This concert opened with a world premiere of Windows by Misha Mullov-Abbado. I’m not sure how fair it is to point out that he’s the son of Viktoria Mullova and Claudio Abbado but he is, obviously and literally, a born musician. This work in three unrelated movements (written originally as standalones) is unexpectedly tonal and lyrical as well as, at times, jazzy and lilting. The first movement is almost lush in places with some fine, very exposed string work. I also admired the quality of the trombone playing over lots of well controlled vamping in the middle syncopated movement.

And then it was Schubert’s Eighth Symphony. Outcry Ensemble claims to approach modern music with the passion and rigour you’d expect to experience when hearing mainstream repertoire and to apply the explorative-analytical approach normally required for contemporary music when they play standard repertoire. And in this work you could hear exactly that from the dramatic dynamics to the well pointed general pauses which made it feel very crisp and fresh. In the andante Henshaw balanced the sonority with the alternating lightness, and the percussive pizzicato came through with notable precision. Yes, there was an occasional wrong note but that’s the joy of live performance.

The acoustic of Middle Temple Hall is perfect for Schubert. It worked much less well for the Brahms Violin Concerto. In the opening and closing movements the orchestra was often too loud so that accomplished soloist Oscar Perks seemed almost competing aurally and losing. Henshaw really should have been aware of this and damped his orchestra down. The gentler passages and the whole of the middle movement worked well though and it was a real treat to hear Perks play his own cadenza which explored the themes of the first movement with imaginative virtuosity.

Susan Elkin

Mote Hall, Maidstone,13 October 2018

The opening concert in MSO’s 108^th season really belonged to young cellist, Maxim Calver. Aged only 18, he was a finalist in this year’s BBC Young Musician of the Year and he stood in at short notice for the booked soloist.

Unusually he began, at conductor Brian Wright’s request, with a solo piece – a variation, from a work by Lutoslawski commissioned by Rostopovitch and pretty dramatic it was too. He played this ambitious piece, complete with glissandi and quarter tones with intense insouciance.

Then, in place of Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto, it was on to a strikingly mature performance of Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme with the legato variations leaned on for maximum romance and the faster ones delivered with crisp witty aplomb. His use of harmonics is spectacular too.

And as if that weren’t enough he then treated us to a richly nuanced encore – the very familiar but evergreen Sarabande from Bach’s First Cello Suite. Thus, this engaging, poised young man who smiles though the music when his rapier eyes aren’t staring into the distance, whizzed through the music of three centuries in less than an hour.

The concert began with Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem which is getting a number of outings this year to mark the centenary of the 1918 Armistice. It’s a tricky work. You don’t often see MSO front desk players visibly counting but they carried it off. The Dies Irae movement with the relentless rhythms ably underpinned by weighty percussion  (seven in the section) was especially impressive and there was some lovely work from harpists, Milo Harper and Alex Tindall.

Pictures at an Exhibition, of course, as we now usually hear it owes as much to Ravel’s orchestration as it does to Mussorgsky’s original piano suite. In this intelligent performance Brian Wright allowed every soloist and solo section  – some excellent playing here – to ensure that we noticed their contribution but without ever letting the piece feel bitty. It sailed along with warmth, fireworks and lots of colour. At the end Wright stood tuba player, Andy Bridges up first and quite right too. His solo was splendid as was Mike Austin’s work on alto saxophone. And The Great Gate of Kiev, the final section, with those evocative tubular bells and cymbal clashes must have sent every member of the audience away with melody ringing in their heads.

Yes, the season is off to a fine start. Roll on 1^st December.

Susan Elkin