Dido and Aeneas, Guildhall, 9 June 2025

Milton Court Theatre

Images: David Monteith Hodge
Dido (Karima El Demerdasch)

Dido – Karima El Demerdasch
Aeneas – Joshua Saunders
Belinda – Manon Ogwen Parry
Sorceress – Julia Merino
Attendant, Second Woman – Hannah McKay
Witches – Seohyun Go, Julia Solomon
Spirit – Gabriella Noble
Sailor – Tobias Campos Santiñaque

Director – Oliver Platt
Designs – Alisa Kalyanova
Movement – Caroline Lofthouse
Lighting – Eli Hunt

Video – Mabel Nash  

Chorus (chorus master: Henry Reavey) and Orchestra of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama James Henshaw (conductor)

This new Guildhall Dido and Aeneas, directed by Oliver Platt and designed by Alisa Kalyanova, was not the Dido of your expectations. I can be reasonably sure of that. Doors opened to reveal a club scene onstage, electronic music of a decidedly non-Stockhausen variety blasting through the small theatre. Dido eventually joined, dancing as if her life depended on it; perhaps, in retrospect, it did. Belinda too (if indeed these were there names). And then, suddenly everything changed. Purcell’s music was to be heard. In an unanticipated Dr Who-like shift – will the Queen of Carthage turn out to be the new Doctor heralded by Billie Piper? – we found ourselves in a very different world indeed. Its denizens took what they wanted from Dido’s handbag, re-clothed her, and left her generally shocked and bemused, apparently having no more idea what was going on than I did. 

Sailor (Tobias Campos Santiñaque) and Chorus

We now appeared to be in a rural English community, with straw figures, a maypole, and enforced country dancing, clothes suggestive more of the early twentieth century than Purcell’s time, let alone that of Dido and Aeneas. When Aeneas arrived, seemingly similarly abducted, he had no more idea what was going on. So far as I could discern, neither of them did throughout, brought together by the strange villagers, though again, neither did I. Punk-triffid witches did their thing. Aeneas eventually resolved to stay, Dido by then rejecting him, physically berating him, until he turned on her and seemed on the verge (at least) of sexual assault, until she stabbed him, after which she was led to the Maypole to be hanged. It was quite absorbing in its way and very well blocked and choreographed, but I really could not tell you what it was about or how it cohered. Was that the point? It may have been, given liberties taken – nothing wrong with that – for the missing music, but I suspect I was missing something. Was it perhaps all an unfortunate dream, arising from nightclub hallucination? I fear I shall simply have to admit defeat. 

Dido and Chorus

All in the cast, the excellent chorus included, threw themselves into this oddly compelling vision in wholehearted, committed fashion. Karima El Demerdasch’s Dido was first-rate, from wild abandon – difficult to imagine Janet Baker or Jessye Norman in this production – through fear and unease to final tragedy. Accomplished through the synthesis of words, music, and gesture that, put crudely, is operatic performance, this signalled not only great promise but great achievement. I am sure we shall see and hear more from her. Aeneas is, especially by comparison, a bit of a thankless role, but Joshua Saunders made a good deal of this bemused conception. Manon Ogwen Parry’s Belinda and Julia Merino’s Sorceress were both very well taken, as indeed were the other, smaller roles, Tobias Campos Santiñaque’s Sailor a winning ‘boozy’ moment in the spotlight. James Henshaw’s conducting complemented the punk-folk conception of the staging, more City Waites than Les Arts Florissants, let alone English Chamber Orchestra. It may not be how I hear it, but it is hardly how I see it either, and performance should always extend beyond ritual. There was, then, much to enjoy—and to puzzle over.

LSO Chamber Ensemble et al./Pascal - Boulez, 27 January 2025

Milton Court

Initiale
Messagesquisse
Dérive 1
Sonatine for flute and piano
Anthèmes 2 for violin and live electronics

Benjamin Marquise Gilmore (violin)

David Cohen (cello)

Gareth Davies (flute)

Joseph Horvat (piano)

Sound Intermedia

LSO Chamber Ensemble

Guildhall School Cellos

Maxime Pascal (conductor)

The Boulez centenary celebrations are underway. If London’s – and much of the rest of the world’s – response so far looks more muted than one might have hoped, something is better than nothing and there is all the more reason to cherish what we have. Following an afternoon symposium (oddly timed on a Monday, when most of us must work) the Barbican Centre offered an excellent chamber concert of five works, from LSO musicians and friends, directed where appropriate by Maxime Pascal.

What could have been better as an opening than the 1987 brass fanfare Initiale, which I had last heard at the opening of Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal thirty years later? Although Milton Court lacks a ready possibility – at least unless electronics are employed – for the Gabrieli-like spatial element deployed in Frank Gehry’s Berlin hall, the LSO players’ balcony elevation nonetheless signalled development of our concert expectations beyond Boulez’s ‘museum’ of the musical past. Metrical complexity, rubato implied through exactitude, was there from the off. More kaleidoscopic and varied in mood than your typical fanfare, its cascading, proliferating echoes of Répons helped establish aural expectations for what was to come.

Messagesquisse was given by David Cohen and six cellists from the Guildhall School (Gabriel Francis-Deqhani, Kosta Popovic, Nathaniel Horton, James Conway, Theo Bently Curtin, and Seth Collin), conducted by Pascal with properly Boulezian precision and commitment. I was again intrigued and delighted by the tricks music could play on my perception—or perhaps the other way round. Initially, I could have sworn one cello was not playing, only to see and then hear that it was, at a pitch I had mistakenly thought another was: a smaller-scale sense, perhaps, of that sense of spatial magic squares that would so inform a later masterwork such as sur Incises (via, perhaps, common inspiration ultimately in Les Noces). Brimming with melody, impassioned of mood, harmonically compelling: it was everything Boulez is, and everything his detractors would say his music is not. Dynamic contrasts and all manner of other post-Beethovenian dialectics abounded in ‘organised delirium’. Contagious proliferation of a single line suggested at times a very French inheritance in the music of the clavecinistes. At times, I even thought of Nono. And what performances these were, reminding any who might need it of the crucial role of performance in Boulez’s music.

The shifting transformations of Dérive 1 proved an similar yet different delight, music spiralling before our ears in a mesmerising tour of aural pleasure. The temptation was to ask for more, which of course we should eventually have in its successor, Dérive 2. This music, though, spoke for itself, no mere precursor but a masterwork of proliferation in its own right.

The Sonatine for flute and piano received an outstanding and confounding performance from Gareth Davies and Joseph Havlet. No one would dispute the work’s allure, yet the array of elements in its first movement that might – just might – have to them something of the more neoclassical Schoenberg (and Debussy) seemed more than ever to rejoice in the necessity of internal and eternal explosion and destruction. It might not sound quite ‘like’ the Second Piano Sonata, but the Sonatine’s progress suggested ever closer kinship, emotionally and intellectually. Here, it felt, was instantiated a post-Notations world of infinite possibility.

Last up was Benjamin Maruise Gilmore with Ian Dearden and Jonathan Green of Sound Intermedia in Anthèmes 2. Its world of violin and electronics sounded, like much else, both old and new: not so very different from Messagesquisse or other works with solo and double/shadow, and yet… Echoes expected and unexpected beguiled and surprised as music from plainchant to Messiaen and beyond ricocheted around us. Indeed, an unsuspected harmonic sweetness suggested what remain less acknowledged lessons learned from Boulez’s teacher. As waves of sound lapped upon our consciousnesses, it was Debussy’s La Mer, endlessly transformed, that next suggested itself as fons et origo; that and, of course, the composer’s own endless imagination. The museum lives and develops; so do music and performance history of Boulez, one of its newer recruits.

Total Immersion – Music for the End of Time, 23 January 2022

Barbican Hall, Milton Court Concert Hall

The Music of Terezín, dir. Simon Broughton

‘The Theresienstadt Orchestra’
Hans Krása: Overture for Small Orchestra
Pavel Haas: Study for String Orchestra
Erwin Schulhoff: Symphony no.5

BBC Symphony Orchestra
Alpesh Chauhan (conductor)

‘Songs in Time of Distress’
Viktor Ullmann: Two Hebrew Pieces for choir; Songs of Comfort for low voice and string trio
Gideon Klein: String Trio; Folk Songs for male chorus
Silvie Bodorova: Terezín Ghetto Requiem for baritone and strong quartet: ‘Lacrimosa’
Pavel Haas: String Quartet no.2: ‘Wild Night’
Dieter Gogg, arr. Iain Farrington: Als ob; Theresienstadt, der schönste Stadt der Welt
František Domažlický: Song without words for string quartet
Ullmann: Yiddish Songs for choir; Der Kaiser von Atlantis: ‘Komm Tod, du unser werter Gast’ (arr. Farrington)

Simon Wallfisch (baritone)
Guildhall School Musicians
BBC Singers

Nicholas Chalmers (conductor)

Ullmann: Der Kaiser von Atlantis, dir. Kenneth Richardson
Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du temps

Kaiser Overall – Thomas Johannes Mayer
Loudspeaker – Derrick Ballard
Soldier – Oliver Johnston
Harlekin – Robert Murray
Bubikopf – Soraya Mafi
Death – Henry Waddington
Drummer Girl – Hanna Hipp

BBC Symphony Orchestra
Josep Pons (conductor)
Guildhall School Musicians

 

Images: BBC/Mark Allan

Holocaust Memorial Day falls on 27 January, thus poignantly entwined—forever?—with the birthday of Mozart. Much could and doubtless should be said about that dialectical relationship, but let us leave that for another time, perhaps when I am once again able to travel to Salzburg and its Mozartwoche is once again able to take place. The BBC/Barbican annual Total Immersion day or weekend—this year a day—was, however, able to do so, offering much food for thought and contemplation. This year, we approached a commemoration that calls into question, many would say irrevocably denies, the possibility of historical ‘normalisation’, by way of music (mostly) from Nazi prison camps, above all the ghetto of Theresienstadt/Terezín. Simon Broughton’s 1993 documentary film offered an excellent introduction: informative, evocative, and, through its interviews with and performances from survivors, touching too. It is difficult to imagine the BBC making such a film now, but thank goodness it did then. 

Two of the three composers featured in the first of three concerts also featured in that film. Hans Krása and Pavel Haas were joined by Erwin Schulhoff, who met his end at another of the camps, Wülzburg in Bavaria. It was unclear why the concert was named ‘The Theresienstadt Orchestra’, since Schulhoff’s Fifth Symphony was not performed there, nor indeed anywhere else until 1965; but never mind. The BBC Symphony Orchestra under Alpesh Chauhan gave sharp, committed performances of all three works, though the spiritual sense of a memorial seemed strangely absent. Krása’s Overture for Small Orchestra, the ensemble essentially a matter of what was available to him, was light, at times sardonic, almost a Central European response to French neoclassicism, with an especially virtuosic piano part. It was nothing adventurous, yet well crafted and performed, with a nice twist for its sign-off. Where Krása had offered an ensemble of many soloists, Haas gave us massed strings in a more substantial piece whose fugal writing and more general counterpoint brought us closer to contemporary Hindemith than to Haas’s teacher, Janáček. Lively cross rhythms perhaps suggested otherwise. During its relatively short span, it packed in a considerable amount of material and invention. There was moving fragility and resolve to its ultimate contrapuntal restoration. 

Schulhoff’s symphony opened with great promise, its first movement ominous, full of foreboding, as if the walls of his incarceration-to-come were already closing in. The tread of a march in slow motion, deliberate in both senses, seemed as though it might go on forever—then suddenly stopped, which I assumed to be the point. A slow movement somewhere between Franz Schmidt and Prokofiev, with some of the former’s post-Bruckner tendencies, and some of the latter’s harmonies, nonetheless looked at times to a different, darker, and perhaps more cinematic world. If it perhaps went on a bit long, many of us are used to forgiving that failing in other music. A furious and frenetic scherzo, its repeated frustration apparently imbued with definite, even fatal meaning, seemed still more intent on bearing witness to its time, courting comparisons with a contemporary piece such as Martinů’s Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano, and Timpani. This was a tremendous performance, driven in a good way, and above all brutal, in what came across as a forceful if not overtly complex work. Alas, its finale hovered on the edge of incompetence (as composition, rather than performance). Its opening intrigued, suggesting grim nobility to a chorale that might ultimately triumph or, knowingly going through the post-Mahlerian motions, not. It never quite hung together, though, more damagingly extending for what seemed an unmerited eternity. I could not help but wonder whether it would be better given as a three-movement work, omitting the finale entirely. 

The second concert, for which we crossed over the road to Milton Court, was perhaps the most successful of all. The brainchild of baritone Simon Wallfisch, who not only briefly sang but devised the programme and read from letters and diaries more properly to remember those who lost their lives, it offered not only a touching memorial but also a valuable conspectus of artistic production, performed by the BBC Singers, young instrumentalists from the Guildhall, and Nicholas Chalmers. What might not seem the most intrinsically interesting of choral music was transformed by our knowledge of its educative role at Theresienstadt, where education was prohibited but keeping children busy was not, singing falling into that category. And what one could learn by singing, as one of the readings reminded us. Here the determination to bear Jewish witness was one of the many things experienced, for instance through by Two Hebrew Pieces and Yiddish Songs by Viktor Ullmann. Gideon Klein’s String Trio, concise and almost shocking in its mastery, received a fine, comprehending performance, every bit as involving in more ‘purely’ musical terms as it was in remembrance. Cabaret was present too. An arrangement of the closing chorale from Ullmann’s Kaiser von Atlantis looked forward to the evening. But this finely planned selection was so much more than the sum of its parts. It is to be hoped that Wallfisch has opportunity to give it elsewhere.

And so, to the evening, where we saw a resourceful concert staging of Ullmann’s celebrated opera. It was haunted not only by the opening pageant of characters walking on stage, Death laying down a suitcase (of course), others picking up props from it, but later by a shocking interpolation of sound from without the camp: a sound of actual war, and then of crowds hailing Hitler (for whom, read the Emperor). But it was the early parody of Mahler, the ‘Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde’, life both overflowing and fundamentally tragic, that hit home most strongly for me, fruitfully, fatally overshadowing what was to come. A fine cast, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and Josep Pons, captured our attention and never let it wander. This is not Brecht-Weill; nor should it attempt to be. It breathed a sadder, more unmediated, yet undoubtedly sincere air: not a work one wishes to encounter often, but which one definitely should from time to time. Quite what Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time was doing in this company, I do not know. Musicians from the Guildhall gave an impressive performance, especially so during its passages—movements—of slow ecstasy. A prison camp, whilst no fun, was not, however, a concentration camp. Messiaen’s compositional mastery seemed to accentuate the divide further, giving an unfortunate impression of climax upon the day’s towering (acknowledged) musical masterpiece. Audience whooping at the close only made matters worse. It was a pity, but we had heard—and learned—much of very different value before.

Aminta e Fillide and Venus and Adonis, Guildhall, 5 June 2019

Milton Court Theatre

Images: Clive Barda
Cupid (centre, Collin Shea) and chorus

Aminta – Harriet Burns

Fillide – Carmen Artaza

Venus – Sîan Dicker

Adonis – Andrew Hamilton

Cupid – Collin Shay

Shepherdess – Katherine McIndoe

Shepherd – Damian Arnold

Victoria Newlyn (director)

Madeleine Boyd (designs)

Andrew May (lighting)
Karl Dixon (video)

Chorus and Orchestra of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Chad Kelly (conductor)

The stature of John Blow becomes clearer, it seems, with every encounter. Alas, paucity of encounters remains the problem for many of us. This was the first live performance of Venus and Adonis I had heard, let alone seen; I am delighted to report that it did not disappoint. Indeed, it brought vividly to life what so many of us know intellectually: that if Purcell’s genius will likely always remain the loftiest summit of English Restoration music, it stands far from alone; and that, moreover, Dido and Aeneas owes a great deal to the example of what is rightly considered the first English opera. When one hears Blow’s anthems, many characteristics one has hitherto considered quintessentially Purcellian are revealed to be part of a common musical language; the same is true here, and for dramaturgy as well as musical language.

Adonis (Andrew Hamilton)

Any passable performance of Dido – ‘Tristan und Isolde in a pintpot’, Raymond Leppard once called it – will fly by; so did this more than passable performance of Venus and Adonis. Conductor Chad Kelly seemed very much in his element, continuo and orchestral playing warm, flexible, charged with dramatic meaning and atmosphere. The singers did too. Sîan Dicker sang and acted a splendidly voluptuous Venus: sexier than Dido, yet moving towards similar grief. If the latter were ultimately more generalised, that shows the final distinction between Blow’s opera and Purcell’s and is no reflection upon a fine performance indeed. Andrew Hamilton’s Adonis, perhaps not unlike Aeneas, was similarly imbued with allure: less complex, in his own way more vulnerable – he, after all, meet death – and a blanker sheet for projection in an under-acknowledged reversal of gender norms. Collin Shay’s Cupid fascinated. Presumably in conjunction with director, Victoria Newlyn, Shay presented a god of love by turns sullen, awkward – childish, one might say – who sprang to animated life when finally heeding the call to use his bow. Damian Arnold’s finely sung and acted Shepherd had one wishing there were more for him to do, the chorus from which he sprang exemplary in delivery of notes, words, stage action and that alchemy we call opera. Newlyn’s production presented Venus as an artist(e), her final words delivered movingly almost as a nightclub torch song. Video projections of the random world of Internet dating – iCupid, should we call it? – and a telling contrast between such urban modernity and the decidedly down-at-heel American hunting community from which poor Adonis had been plucked brought to contemporary life dramatic conflicts that have haunted our civilisation however far back we may care to trace.

Cupid, Aminta (Carmen Artaza),
Fillide (Harriet Burns)

I was less sure about her staging of Handel’s Italian cantata, Aminta e Fillide, and ultimately less sure whether staging it had been a good idea at all. This is not a dramatic piece and was never intended to be. Concert performance without stage hyperactivity would surely have served it better. One can try, of course, and I should be delighted to be prove wrong. Frenetic scene changes taking us from airport lounges to early video games were doubtless fun for those taking part, extras included, but seemed only to confirm that less would have been decidedly more. Cupid's linking presence felt forced; still more so did the desultory appearance of Botticelli's Birth of Venus at beginning and end.Here, Kelly seemed more constrained by what has become ‘period’ convention, vibrato-less strings sometimes grating, the music in general more regimented. However, Harriet Burns and Carmen Artaza offered some dazzling singing, especially later on, coloratura and range of colour alike showing what should really lie at the heart of this pastoral. 

Esfahani - Rasmussen, Berio, Srnka, Cage, and Abbasi, 17 January 2019

Milton Court Concert Hall

Sunleif Rasmussen: Quadroforone no.1 (2018, world premiere)

Berio: Rounds (1965)

Miroslav Srnka: Triggering (2018)

Cage: HPSCHD (1967-9): 'Solo VII'

Anahita Abbasi: Intertwined Distances (2018, UK premiere)

Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord)

Electronic Music Department of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (electronic realisation)

Images: Mark Allan/Barbican

Now this is what I call a harpsichord recital programme. We have all the time in the world to hear more Bach, Rameau, Byrd, et al., and shall very happily do so. But what could be more important than to establish and, just as important, to strengthen the instrument’s standing as an instrument of the present? This, moreover, was what I should call a harpsichord recital performance too. In such a situation, one can all too readily take virtuosity and musicianship for granted, concentrating, as is only natural, on the music ‘itself’. It may be unnatural, but it is also unfair, for nothing does new music a greater service, alas, than well-meaning yet incompetent performance. Such were the circumstances in which Pierre Boulez founded the Domaine musical. Let us steer clear of the cul-de-sac of ‘discipleship’ and say that Boulez has many successors. Mahan Esfahani certainly took his place among them in this Milton Court recital.

Sunleif Rasmussen’s Quadroforone no.1, a Barbican commission, received its world premiere. It is intended to be the first – as the numbering may have implied – in a series of four pieces that will set a live instrument against recorded, transformed sounds of itself. Ironically, or perhaps not, my first impression, prior to hearing any electronic transformation, was the unadulterated sound of Esfahani’s instrument: very much a modern instrument, in a grand line we might trace back at least to Wanda Landowska. What struck me throughout the twenty minutes or so of the performance was above all a sense of material turning around, not just in the spatial realisation, although that must have played a part, and of never quite repeating: a spiral, then, at least to this confirmed, even obsessive Hegelian. Electronics conveyed a sense, almost old-fashioned, of a round: interesting, and perhaps noteworthy, that that rather than ‘canon’ was the word that first came to mind. Confrontation and integration alike between solo instrument and electronic at times suggested a reinvention before our ears of a Baroque concerto. Then came a slower section, apparently, according to the programme, entitled ‘Nocturne’, in which a duet between hands, between manuals, co-existed, indeed interacted, with duetting between soloist and electronics. There was a sense of unwinding: again circular, spiralling, but downwards. Gathering pace once again, upwards (even when not in pitch), the music arrived at a final section, seemingly going nowhere but going nowhere interestingly. Harmonies and hierarchies of hearing continued to reproduce themselves, albeit with ever greater difficulty, until – nothing.

Luciano Berio’s classic Rounds followed, our early music for the evening. Square notes and round notes, turning the page around, upside down too: it emerged in contrast very much as a successor to, and/or precursor of, Rasmussen’s piece. The delicacy of playing and writing, silence included, registration changes telling, offered a keen sense of the ludic. But if procedures were audible – rightly, helpfully audible – they were never the music ‘itself’, any more than in Berg. Wit of work and performance alike proved fleeting in the best sense.

Miroslav Srnka’s Triggering appears to be relatively scant in its notation. (I am judging simply from Esfahani’s typically engaging, informative spoken introduction, since I have seen the scores for none of these pieces, save the Berio – and that many years ago.) About 85 per cent, we were told, of the instruction to the performer is in pitch classes alone: time or better times, central to the composer’s conception, may in his words, be ‘political, social, private, metaphorical, sporting, humorous, existential, climatic’. In this piece, he attempts ‘to construct all these different times – the instants and the betweentimes – until the mechanism of playing dissolves and the times change in nature.’ That ‘instant’ lies between the pressing of the key and the plectrum plucking the string: very much, then harpsichord music. Electronics come later – in the guise of e-bows attached to the strings of a second harpsichord – but even in the first of the eight short movements or sections, ‘Digital Wounds’, the digital binary being one of either plucking or not plucking, the low pitches speak in a fashion that does not sound entirely un-electronic; or so, at least it sounded in performance and listening. Esfahani’s extraordinary virtuosity, first over two manuals, and even over two harpsichords, was very much part of the theatre, but this was a theatre of musical drama, no ‘happening’. Major scales in ‘Major Rain’ again played with our notions of what was predictable: a connection, surely, with Rasmussen’s piece. We more or less ‘knew’ what would happen, but never quite: how extended would it be? In which direction would the ‘rain’ fall? What would the note values be? In sum, this seemed a highly visual work, in an almost programmatic sense, albeit for a digital, video age. Electronics came to evoke the unearthly, ‘historical’ world of the glass armonica, until work and performance alike subsided into silence – and, as the lights went down, darkness too.

John Cage’s ‘Solo VII’ from the installation, HPSCHD, is still more scantily notated – or rather not notated at all. His instruction is simply: ‘Practice and/or perform any composition(s) by Mozart. Amplitude and registration free.’ Esfahani chose the D minor Fantasia, KV 397/385g, and via an I Ching website, divined the parameters for questions he had previously defined. At which bar to start practising? Bar 57. At which point after the electronics had started, should he start practising (in multiples of ten seconds)? 110 seconds in. At what point should he stop practising? 2 minutes. And at which point after that, should he start to perform (in, if I recall correctly, multiples of thirty seconds)? 90 seconds. All the while, the electronic realisation by the Guildhall School’s Electronic Music Department, with its own questions and divinations, albeit founded upon the original, if you like ‘period’ electronics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, ran its course: an absolute, set duration. There was wit, for instance when Esfahani pencilled something in (a fingering?) whilst practising, but it was also deadly serious: as surely Cage must be. It never came across as a joke, as whimsy. I was led to reflect on ways of listening, of being able to listen, of not listening too. A wonderfully free performance of the Mozart Fantasia unfolded, insofar as one could hear, far freer in tempo than I should ever have dared imagine, let alone convincingly despatched. Was that the point? The very question seemed beside the point; so too, perhaps, did any point.

Finally, we came to the United Kingdom premiere of Anahita Abbasi’s Intertwined Distances, a commission from Esfahani himself. Here, the quadrophonic electronics are taken from an improvisation (if I remember correctly!) Esfahani gave as part of a recital in San Diego. The composer plays with conceptions of distance, writing: ‘According to Merriam-Webster, distance is a separation in time, an extent of advance from a beginning; and in mathematics it refers to the degree or amount of separation between two points, lines, surfaces, or objects.’ How do they intertwine, then? How did they intertwine in time? Figures sounded generative and (almost) repetitive, sometimes simultaneously, yet (again) never quite predictably. A quasi-Ligetian swarm arose as the work gathered pace– probably more my seeking for ways to describe than an ultimately meaningful comparison – out of which electronic sounds emerged, whatever the truth of the material’s actual origins. Distance and dialogue, dialogue in distance: such seemed to be the crux of performance and listening as activity. There was, without doubt, an extraordinarily inventive musical imagination at work, but it was never merely invention: it was a sonic and instrumental drama that seemed somehow to summarise, to extend, and quite properly to question many of the tendencies we had heard so far. This was, then, a programme and performance of harpsichord music for the here and now.

Così fan tutte, Guildhall, 5 November 2018

Silk Street Theatre

Guglielmo (Benson Wilson), Ferrando (Filipe Manu), Don Alfonso (Christian Valle),
Fiordiligi (Alexandra Lowe), Despina (Zoe Drummond), Dorabella (Carmen Artaza)
Images: Clive Barda

Fiordiligi – Alexandra Lowe

Dorabella – Carmen Artaza

Despina – Zoe Drummond

Ferrando – Filipe Manu

Guglielmo – Benson Wilson

Don Alfonso – Christian Valle

Oliver Platt (director)

Neil Irish (designs)

Rory Beaton (lighting)
Caitlin Fretwell Walsh (movement)

Orchestra and Chorus of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Dominic Wheeler (conductor)

Despina and Ferrando

Precisely where and when Così fan tutte takes place should be a matter of sublime indifference – or at least of individual taste. It is ‘about’ many things, but eighteenth-century Naples – should that actually be the less exotic yet still ‘othered’ neāpolis of Wiener Neustadt? – is not among them. Not intrinsically, anyway. These things can happen anywhere, at any time; these emotions, these physical and metaphysical truths are for many of us as close to universal as makes no matter. Nevertheless, the idea of a southern port city as a venue for touristic licence may well prove an apt setting for what is at dramatic stake. It helped Mozart and Da Ponte tread the fine line between realism and artifice that is surely fundamental to this, (one of) the very greatest of all operas; it also did to outstanding effect in Opera Holland Park’s new production this summer.  

Guglielmo and Dorabella

In a different way, or at least in a different southern port setting, so too does it in the Guildhall’s new staging. I only realised after the event – indeed upon starting to write this paragraph – that the director had been one and the same: Oliver Platt, albeit with a different design team. Perhaps, then, there was something after all to my hitherto innocent thesis of a common theme, notwithstanding the move forward a couple of centuries to the 19-80s to Alfonso’s Bar. Close to an American (West Coast? San Diego?) naval base, with all the potential for conflict between transience and long-term ‘home life’ that might imply, mood was superficially very different, likewise the consequences for particular directorial choices. Rarely, if ever, for instance, have I seen quite so raucous an opening scene, as the licentious ways of the naval boys (and at least one girl), their partners, and their would-be partners got under way, our quartet of lovers to be schooled taken from their number. That sense of a social context, however – a meaningful social context rather than a mere setting, ‘pretty’ or otherwise – remained common to both productions.

Don Alfonso and Despina

So too, again in different ways according to the different requirements of this particular production and performance, were the spatial, eminently musical visualisations of Mozart’s extraordinary and extraordinarily telling musical symmetries and oppositions. Così fan tutte is a labyrinth and a laboratory like no other, as worthy a successor to the experimental Bach of the cantatas as a precursor – a successor too – to Tristan und Isolde. Indeed, though Don Giovanni was the Mozart opera Pierre Boulez said he had long wished to conduct, yet never did; it is surely Così he should ultimately have come to, not least in light of his revelatory late recording of the Gran Partita, KV 361/370a. Whatever the ‘incidental’ detail of tequila shots, of entertainment in sombreros, of Despina the notary as Judge Judy, the fundamentals – related, not necessarily identical – were present both in Holland Park and at the Guildhall. So too was the existential devastation, the clear-eyed, merciless refusal to transcend, of the close.

Despina

For that to be the case, of course, one needs musical drama too – indeed, musical drama above all. This one took a little while to get going: perhaps more a matter of opening night nerves than anything. The Silk Street Theatre acoustic did not help, I suspect, not least when married to a certain, rather surprising heaviness of hand – tending, in the Overture, even to the brutal – from Dominic Wheeler in the pit. Throughout the first act, some of his tempo choices were distinctly odd: not so much in themselves – as a listener, one should always be willing to adapt, to rethink in that respect – as in relation to one another. (Once again, doubtless idiosyncratically, I thought of Boulez and his admiration for Wagner’s Essay on Conducting, not least the claims for proportionality rather than ‘absolute’ tempo therein.) The second act worked much better, though, blessed by some gorgeous woodwind playing, even if the strings were a little too often thin of tone.

Dorabella

There was much both to enjoy and to admire in the singing – as there must be, if a performance and production are to have the slightest chance of working their dramatic effect. Carmen Artaza’s dignified, often exquisitely spun line, trickily married – that tightrope I mentioned above between realism and articificality – to sparky, well-defined personality proved a particular joy as Dorabella. So too did the patent sincerity of Filipe Manu’s Ferrando, his second-act aria truly moving, Benson Wilson’s Guglielmo a swaggering yet not insensitive contrast. Fiordiligi will always prove a great challenge: one to which Alexandra Lowe rose with considerable success in a performance finely differentiated from Artaza’s, her soprano coloratura meaningful as well as accurate. Christian Valle’s Don Alfonso ruled the roost as he must, Zoe Drummond’s excellent Despina intriguingly disillusioned at the close. Called upon to do far more in the way of acting and movement than would usually be the case, members of the chorus impressed too, individually and corporately. This, as the cliché has it, was considerably more than the sum of its parts. After all, if ever there were an opera to demonstrate both the truth and depth of what might first appear to be, and indeed what might actually, be buffo cliché, it is Così fan tutte.

Mamzer Bastard (world premiere), Royal Opera, 14 June 2018

Hackney Empire Theatre

Younger Yoel - Edward Hyde

Yoel – Collin Shay

Stranger – Steven Page

Esther – Gundula Hintz

Menashe – Robert Burt

David – Netanel Hershtik

Jay Scheib (director)

Madeleine Boyd (designs)

D.M. Wood (lighting)

Paulina Jurzec (video)

Yair Elazar Glotman (sound design)

Aurora Orchestra

Jessica Cottis (conductor)

Paulina Jurzec (cinematographer), Collin Shay (Yoel), Steven Page (Stranger)
Images: Stephen Cummiskey (C) ROH

Let me begin, like an undergraduate unsure what to say at the beginning of an essay: there were many reasons to admire the first performance of Na’ama Zisser’s opera, Mamzer Bastard, a co-commission from the Royal Opera and the Guildhall. Even though the journey is now a bit of a pain for me, it is always a joy to visit the Hackney Empire, infinitely preferable to the other of Frank Matcham’s London theatres that is sometimes used for opera. The quality is often very high, the location seemingly inciting visiting companies to their best; I am not sure I have ever seen a better Marriage of Figaro than that from the Royal Academy a couple of years ago. Not only bringing opera to Hackney but also taking it out of the West End is a very good thing; it genuinely seemed to have attracted a new, highly appreciative audience, half of which offered a standing ovation (something even Bernard Haitink receives less often in London than he does). The idea of an opera set in the Hasidic Jewish community was enticing too. I had no idea what to expect from any part of it, which always adds to the anticipation. Moreover, performances from all concerned were excellent, the Aurora Orchestra under Jessica Cottis perhaps the greatest stars of all. One had little doubt that one was hearing what one was supposed to hear. Gundula Hintz shone, too, as the mother, Esther: clearly both moved and capable of moving.

Esther (Gundula Hintz), Menashe (Robert Burt)

Then, alas, comes the matter of the opera itself: so tedious that I genuinely feared – hoped? – I might fall asleep. I suspect something could have been made of some of the material (if not necessarily the musical material), given a few years’ hard work, rethinking, and experience. Director Jay Scheib wrote in the programme of the libretto, by Samantha Newton and Rachel C. Zisser, having been ‘written in the form of a screenplay. Transitions took the form of jump cuts,’ and so on. Would that it had come across with any such focus or direction. It jumps around with much confusion: not dramatic confusion, more ‘let’s say a bit about the Holocaust here … let’s stop for a while and have a “meaningful” pause,’ etc., etc.

The lack of focus in the libretto is redolent more of an initial pub sketch of ideas for an opera than anything more thought out. It is not fragmentary; it is certainly not challenging; it is barely a drama. Sub- (very sub-)Katie Mitchell filming – sometimes with an awkward time-lag – did little to help, and perhaps a little to hinder. In Scheib’s words, ‘Cameras have afforded us access to a dynamic vocabulary normally reserved for the visual world of the cinema.’ Quite apart from the ignorance and arrogance of the claim – have you seen any German theatre recently, even ventured so far as the Royal Court? – little is revealed other than occasional, clichéd flashes of blinding light: appearing, aptly enough, long after lightning is supposed to have struck.


Much, though not all, of the music stands on the verge of embarrassing: swathes of vague electronic noise, sound effects, interspersed with cantorial and other trivial melodies, the marriage of word and text in the latter quickly heading for the divorce courts. (As for the former, it is good, perhaps, to learn that the Church of England holds no monopoly on banal liturgical music.) Attempts to define what is and is not opera are most likely bound to fail. That said, surely the idea that it should in some way or other be more than a play with music, that its music itself should be dramatic, seems a reasonable assumption. There are, at the close, a few signs of such a dawning realisation on Na’ama Zisser’s part. Some simple musical figures start to add up to something a little more than themselves, musically and dramatically. For me, however, it was all too late. As I said, a period of revision would have been in order; such progress might then have been read back into what had gone before, far too much of which came across as something akin to a school project: fine for those involved and their proud parents, but for the wider world? Would you want your sixteen-year-old essays on the meaning of life, the universe, and everything published and distributed?

‘Eine Oper ist ein absurdes Ding,’ Strauss’s Capriccio Count tells his sister. In many ways, yes, although not always. It nevertheless takes a great deal of effort and experience to be properly absurd. The artifice in both Capriccio and Ariadne auf Naxos tell a story, moreover, quite different from that which a superficial reading of their synopses might suggest. Mozart was different, Apollo et Hyacinthus a superior work to half of those in the benighted working ‘repertoire’ of many opera houses. Perhaps if one is not Mozart, one might wait at least a little longer before testing the operatic waters. It has worked – magnificently – for George Benjamin. And yes, this doubtless rests on a view of works, masterpieces, the rest, considered hopelessly outmoded by some. I am not, however, even claiming that a work should necessarily be forever. (Let us leave posterity for another time, as it were.) However, if a work is not for now, or at least not yet ready, then someone ought to have asked questions more searching than the self-congratulatory discussion published in the programme.

The Long Christmas Dinner and A Dinner Engagement, Guildhall, 4 June 2018

Silk Street Theatre

Lucia – Alexandra Lowe

Mother Bayard, Ermengarde – Carmen Artaza

Roderick, Sam – Michael Vickers

Brandon – Bertie Watson

Charles – Frederick Jones

Geneviève – Emily Kyte

Leonora – Madison Nonoa

Nurse – Meriel Cunningham

Lucia II – Lucy Anderson

Roderick II – Eduard Mas Bacardit

Earl of Dunmow – Samuel Carl

Errand Boy – Filipe Manu

Mrs Kneebone – Emily Kyte

Countess of Dunmow – Lucy Andreson

Susan – Zoe Drummond

Prince Philippe – Eduard Mas Bacardit

Grand Duchess – Lucy McAuley

Ashley Dean (director)

Cordelia Chisholm (set designs)

Kevin Treacy (lighting)

Laura Jane Stanfield (costumes)

Victoria Newlyn (movement)

Orchestra of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London

Dominic Wheeler (conductor)

Stuck record time again: much of the best London opera comes from our conservatoires. That is not to belittle what I have heard at Covent Garden since returning to London; much has been of a very high standard. ENO: let us hope the benighted rule of Cressida Pollock has now been put behind it. Opera Holland Park continues to go from strength to strength, most recently with perhaps the finest all round Così fan tutte I have seen and heard for well over a decade. These things are not competitive, whatever capital might tell you. Moreover, our conservatoires tend to offer rather different, complementary fare. A particular strength of the Guildhall has been its repertoire choices – and so it continued to be here. If, in this double bill of two operas I had neither seen nor indeed heard, one proved far superior to the other, I was immensely grateful to be afforded the opportunity to acquaint myself with both, especially in such fine performances as these.

Hindemith and Thornton Wilder might not seem the most obvious of collaborators. The Long Christmas Dinner, however, works very well. Wilder, it seems, worked hard to convert his 1931 play into a libretto. (I say ‘it seems’, since I am relying on secondary literature; I shall certainly try to read the play before long.) The concision is striking, but so is its suitability for Hindemith in particular. That may, of course, also be a matter of Hindemith’s adaptability too. At any rate, what came across strongly, in work, performances, and indeed staging was the somewhat tedious repetition of Christmas in a bourgeois New England family, the Bayards, over ninety years – without in any sense proving tedious itself. The cyclical aspect may be seen in a revolving set, centred on the dinner table, to which characters in slight decline – far less dramatically so, and surely this is deliberate, than in Buddenbrooks – come and from which they go. Behaviour varies and repeats; one feels a certain sympathy, and yet a certain ennui, or rather feels their ennui. Hindemith’s forms mirror and/or incite this: softened Kammermusik, in a sense, the post-Bachian motor rhythms still present, albeit without noticeable aggression, drawing one in to action and atmosphere alike, in a harmonic language that is, doubtless unsurprisingly, closer to Die Harmonie der Welt. Time passes: their time and the world’s. Until, that is, Ermengarde, the final member of the family resident, learns that another branch – by now, with children Roderick III and Lucia III – are building another house, another story. Whilst reading the letter informing her, she dies. It is a very difficult task to bring off, to portray such people in such a situation whilst retaining one’s interest, but the company – and this seemed to me a true company achievement – did just that. For that reason, I shall single no one out in particular, other than to say Dominic Wheeler’s conducted framework proved just what the team required.

Hindemith’s opera was first performed in Mannheim, in 1961; its first performance in English came two years later, at the Juilliard, in 1963. Lennox Berkeley’s A Dinner Engagement had its premiere a few years earlier, in 1954, at Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall. It seems, frankly, to be very much an opera written for the insular, xenophobic world to which those trying to force us out of the EU would have us return. Not out of intent, I am sure, whether from Berkeley or his librettist Paul Dehn. But its fluent, pleasant, vaguely Gallic boutique musical style palls after a while, not least on account of the absence of any dramatic grit. A diplomat and his wife plan to marry off their daughter to the son of the Grand Duchess of Monteblanco. (Don’t ‘foreign’ places have funny names?) That son, Prince Philippe, thinks the daughter is a maid; they get on, and they decide to marry, the lack of a handsome dowry notwithstanding. His mother does not even object. If ‘heartwarming romantic comedies’ are your thing, even you might look for a little more in the way of a plot twist. The only ‘joke’ is that the ‘foreigners’ are – well, foreign, so speak or rather sing with ‘silly’ accents. Some food burns too. Performances were again very fine, Eduard Mas Bacardit and Zoe Drummond skilfully teasing out what level of lyrical excitement the score permitted as the two lovers. Once again, moreover, there was an excellent sense of company. But there are limits to what might be achieved, even with a resourceful kitchen set design, when the material is sub-Carry On – without the jokes.