Daily Archives: 12 April, 2021

Shakespeare Re-shaped – Opera Up Close

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The second of a pair of coffee concerts from Opera Up Close –at a time when live audiences are not permitted – this 30 minute programme explores the links between Shakespeare and opera. It also offers a few entertaining, sometimes moving thoughts about spring, new life and hope for the future.

We start with tenor Joseph Doody and soprano Claire Wild as Nannetta and Fenton duetting a Falstaff extract from their own homes with Kelvin Lim on piano also in his own home.

This is followed by Claire Wild, smilingly cross legged on her sofa bringing oodles of youthful excitement to Gounod’s take on Juliet – the change of key and mood for the middle section sensitively negotiated before an exuberant accelerando as Gounod brings her back to the original melody.

Another fine performance is actor Lara Steward perched on a window sill doing Juliet’s “Gallop apace” speech in British Sign Language. It is eloquent, passionate, sparkily bright-eyed and is quite a treat to see BSL silently allowed to speak for itself rather than being an added-on accompaniment to conventionally spoken dialogue.

Other high spots include Joseph Doody searching for Sylvia with Schubert and, back to Falstaff, the rich-voiced baritone Rodney Earl Clarke being outrageous by 21st century standards as Ford. “Only a fool wastes his time with a woman” and “How will I make her suffer?” he sings – his top notes finding all the clarity and resonance of a massive bell.

What an inspired idea, then to follow that with Isabella’s horrified commentary on male domination in Measure for Measure. Kat Rose-Martin’s warm, Northern voice gets the revulsion and disbelief perfectly and somehow makes it seem totally topical. I liked her monologue poem too in which, as an actor, she bewails the compliance of so many women in Shakespeare. “Stop the swooning and start to sway” she advises them. It’s wryly witty but the points it makes are deadly serious.

It makes sense to finish with an upbeat  trio (Finzi’s It was a Lover and his Lass) and even though the syncing is slightly off here so that the three singers are not always quite together, it didn’t spoil my enjoyment of this thoughtful little concert.

Susan Elkin

Calming the Tempest – Opera Up Close

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One of a series of online coffee concerts from Opera Up Close, this 30 minute offering celebrates the poetry in music and the music in poetry – and does so with verve and originality.

The high spot for me is actor Althea Stevens reciting Sylvia Plath’s poem The Bee Meeting. She is poised, impassioned and totally compelling as she articulates the words defiantly past her disability. It is a moving account of the poem by any standards as is her later rendering of an Emily Dickinson poem.

Two singers offset the spoken work. Tenor Joseph Doody sings two Guy Woolfenden Shakespeare settings written for a 1987 Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Tempest. Mezzo Flora McIntosh sings settings of three songs by Nicholas O’Neill (who also accompanies on piano), each of them a setting of an Emily Dickinson poem.

The latter is a world premiere introduced by Fiona Shaw who explains that the three songs were commissioned by the mother of three siblings whose birthdays fall in March, April and May – a song cycle for spring, then. We see Flora McIntosh seated elegantly in a sitting room – presumably her own – as she sings these three songs. Given the rich formality of her voice it seems slightly incongruous to see her in a domestic setting, as if she were about to offer you tea, but the songs are warm and tender.
This mini concert – very loosely predicated on The Tempest – begins with Rosabella Gregory’s atmospheric piece about the storminess of the witches in Macbeth with lots of arrestingly jagged rhythm. Also included is actor Jade Anouska reading her own poem The Brave Vessel, which is a response to The Tempest.
The curation of this short concert is interesting – lots of links but nothing contrived. It is yet another tribute to pandemic ingenuity.

https://www.operaupclose.com/at-home/coffee-break-concerts

Susan Elkin

Opera North Ring Cycle – on YouTube

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Peter Mumford built up Opera North’s Ring Cycle over four years – one opera a year – and I was fortunate enough to review the live performances at the Birmingham Symphony Hall for Musical Opinion. However I never encountered the cycle complete in one week – until now.

Over the Easter holiday we watched the cycle on YouTube and in many ways it is even more impressive than hearing it live.

This is far more than just a semi-staging. The cast are dressed appropriately for their characters and are at the very front of the stage. The full orchestra under Richard Farnes is banked up behind them, and above them are three large screens onto which are projected ambient vistas to reflect the action – fire, water, storm clouds etc – and a running story line, rather than a set of surtitles, which encourage the audience to listen rather than try to follow word for word.

This was the experience in the concert hall. For me, the TV/film experience was even better. The screen was frequently split into six sections. The top, smaller, three covered the conductor in the centre and the orchestra either side. The lower three were for the singers of whom there are rarely more than three protagonists at a time. Where necessary the screen images were bled behind the singers to create added atmosphere, frequently extremely effective – the fire in the immolation scene gradually engulfs Brunnhilde before the Rhine washes over her and Valhalla burns. It is rarely as effective in the theatre.

Then we come to the singers. Wagner took most of his life completing the cycle and managed to write Tristan and Meistersinger between the second and third acts of Siegfried. As a consequence characters develop and where an opera house mounting the cycle will understandably prefer to keep one singer one part, the slow build-up over four years enabled ON to match voices to parts with much more subtlety. One simple example; Wotan changes considerably across the first three operas. Michael Druiett’s young, pushy Rheingold god is clearly headstrong and careless of longer term outcomes, whereas Robert Hayward’s Walkure god is far more troubled and introspective, making his act two scenes with Brunnhilde very moving. Béla Perencz is a gnarled, worldly-wise Wanderer in Siegfried and one who is all too ready to see the end as inevitable and actually welcome.

Of the smaller parts Jeni Bern is a charmingly agile Woodbird, Claudia Huckle a very youthful Erda and Mats Almgren as black a Hagen as one could ask for.

Yet it is the Siegfried and Brunnhilde that were really outstanding. We had met Kelly Cae Hogan as the Walkure Brunnhilde where she certainly made her mark but she really came into her own in Gotterdammerung, radiant in act one, fierce as hell in act two and simply overwhelming in the immolation scene. Alongside her Mati Turi is as totally convincing a Siegfried as one could wish for, with his changes in emotion keenly felt at all times and the voice as heroic as one might wish for. This is a Ring to be proud of – any chance of a DVD!