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Richard Bratby

~ Classical music writer, critic and consultant

Richard Bratby

Tag Archives: Handel

Review: Alcina (Longborough Festival Opera)

04 Thursday Aug 2016

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Birmingham Post, Handel, Longborough Opera, Reviews

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (you should really go out and buy the paper!) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at  Longborough  on Saturday 30 July.


Longborough Opera House

Cotswold Bayreuth

In this Shakespeare anniversary year, what a pity that Handel never wrote any Shakespeare-inspired operas! Perhaps, in staging Alcina, Longborough was trying to make up for that. After all: a tale of lovers trapped on a mysterious island ruled by a powerful magician, haunted by a sense of transformation and loss? Mix in a bit of baroque gender-swapping and Alcina isn’t so very far from The Tempest.

Certainly, it would explain why director Jenny Miller had the musicians of the orchestra spilling up onto the stage, barefoot and antler-clad like the sorcereress Alcina’s victims (she likes to transform discarded lovers into wildlife). And why at moments of crisis the characters stepped in amongst the players, seeming to direct their pleas to the spirit of the music itself: the real enchantment here being Handel’s “sounds and sweet airs”. Faye Bradley’s abstract sets certainly created an air of an alternative reality: occult-looking ox skulls hung on poles, a glowing orange disc represented Alcina’s island, and a blue moon glowered down. Dan Saggars’s lighting was simple but effective in tracing the slow fading of the illusion.

And under Miller’s direction, this was a reality peopled with lively, believable individuals: no mean feat when you’re dealing with humans transformed into lions and boys playing girls while girls pretend to be boys. A youthful but highly experienced cast went at it with total conviction. Lucy Hall, as the Ariel-like Morgana, was exuberantly, sensuously physical, while Anna Harvey made a poised and noble Bradamante. At the start, she changed into her vaguely Edwardian men’s garb on stage – typical of Miller’s imaginative approach to clarifying a far from simple plot.

And typical, too, was the fact that if Julia Sitkovetsky, as Alcina, didn’t have the most lustrous voice on stage – that belonged to her love-slave Ruggiero, sung with glowing expression by Hanna-Liisa Kirchin – the piercing fragility of her top register made her both otherworldly and strangely touching as she lamented her lost love and fading powers. Kirchin has a compelling stage presence, and made a wonderful counterpart to Rosie Lomas’s bell-like purity as the boy Oberto.

With earthy, unfussy playing from the period-instrument orchestra under Jeremy Silver (plus a delightfully inventive continuo group), it all came together. No stand-and-deliver baroque tedium here: this Alcina creates a living, breathing fantasy world – and casts a spell to which it’s a pleasure to surrender.

And relax…

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

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Birmingham Post, Bliss, Elgar, Handel, Hereford, Longborough Opera, The Arts Desk, Three Choirs Festival

Wagner, Verdi and Mozart at Longborough.

Wagner, Verdi and Mozart at Longborough.

Well, not exactly; I’m working on a range of projects this month including programme notes for the Wigmore Hall, a feature on Mahler for the LPO, new orchestral biographies for the CBSO, and laying plans for an exciting new project for Amati Magazine (watch this space).

But things do generally get quieter on the concert scene in August, unless you’re in London or Edinburgh, and after a frantically busy 10 days, my last two long-range review missions will be my last for a couple of weeks, at any rate.

Longborough: dinner is served.

Longborough: dinner is served.

First was Longborough’s final show of the season: Handel’s Xerxes. It takes a lot to make me enjoy a Handel opera but this was…well, read my Birmingham Post review and see for yourself. Taken as a whole, I think it may even have been the most completely successful Longborough production (on all fronts) of the three I’ve seen this year. Longborough is like a little corner of operatic Eden: I’m going to miss that place (and not just for the people-watching and the picnics!)

Longborough - last night of the season.

Longborough – last night of the season.

And then on Monday, to Hereford, for the 300th Three Choirs Festival and a performance of Arthur Bliss’s choral symphony / war requiem Morning Heroes. A rarity like this makes a 180 mile round trip worth while; especially when the work is itself so noble, and the performance so committed. My review for The Arts Desk is here.

Elgar in Hereford.

Elgar in Hereford.

Out in the Cathedral close, Sir Edward Elgar had been suitably garlanded for the Festival week – he looked rather overwhelmed by the sudden attention, I thought.

003

It was good to catch up briefly with colleagues Chris Morley  and Clare Stevens (the Festival’s phenomenal one-woman Press & PR team) at the Cathedral. But these long-range reviews can be lonely affairs, so I’d taken Bliss’s memoirs As I Remember along with me for the trip. And as well as giving me an extra level of insight into the strange, dignified but deeply emotional neglected masterpiece that is Morning Heroes itself, this meant that I had the company of Sir Arthur himself over lunch in Ludlow and my late-night pizza in Hereford before the drive north. Did you know he’d received fan-mail from Webern, was a friend of James Joyce, bashed through the sketches of the Symphony in 3 Movements with Stravinsky, and played tennis with Schoenberg? Well, now you do.

Countertenors and tubas at Lichfield Cathedral

16 Tuesday Dec 2014

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Birmingham Post, Handel, Lichfield, Lichfield Cathedral, Lichfield Cathedral Chorus, Messiah, Staffordshire Band

Selwyn tomb

This picture comes from the tomb of the 19th century Bishop Selwyn of Lichfield. It’s in the Lady Chapel at Lichfield Cathedral, and this tiled rendering of a pit on the nearby Staffordshire coalfield is the backdrop to a fabulous Victorian confection of stone Gothic tracery, brass lettering and a gleaming, life-sized marble effigy of the great Bishop himself. No-one saw anything odd about putting this image in a mock-Medieval tomb in a real Medieval cathedral. The scene – so recognisable to members of the Bishop’s flock – was part of the flesh and blood of his life and ministry; being truthful, it couldn’t be incongruous. (At the other end of the tomb, similar painted tiles show a Maori war-canoe and tree-ferns – Selwyn spent much of his career in New Zealand).

It came to mind because on Saturday night, Birmingham Post business (and to be honest, a fair bit of personal pleasure) took me to a performance of Part One of Handel’s Messiah by the Lichfield Cathedral Chorus, accompanied by the Staffordshire Brass Band. My review of the performance is here; but even before the night, I was surprised by the way musical friends reacted to the very notion of a brass band accompanying Handel. “Christ, no!” exclaimed one. “This is all wrong” declared another. At which I could only think: how could something wrong, sound so right?

Wasn’t Handel’s music once the staple of amateur ensembles across the UK, performed with enthusiasm by groups of all sizes and skills? Isn’t that still the case – and isn’t that a good thing? Aren’t we glad that performers and listeners feel able to co-opt a great work of art into their own musical lives and traditions? And talking of traditions, haven’t we all now accepted that the brass band movement in this country is our very own, original, “Sistema” – a grass-roots, community-based musical movement capable of producing virtuoso players of international calibre, and an inspiration to composers from Holst to Robert Simpson?

The performance was sincere, the playing bright, precise and wonderfully fresh; I’m ashamed to say that I heard harmonies in the overture that I’d never noticed before. But then, I’ve been a gigging cellist. I know how under-rehearsed scratch string ensembles feel about the annual Messiah with their local choral soc. This was very different.

I’m not saying that I’d always trade a smart, sensitive period-instrument orchestra for a brass band or even a Beecham-esque full symphony orchestra; just that no one performance style or tradition can ever have the final word on a work as limitless as Messiah. Also that it’s not every day you get to hear a really cracking countertenor singing against tenor horns and cornet. Plus, those tubas sounded like they were having the time of their lives. It felt right; it felt real; and I think that’s a feeling that Bishop Selwyn – not to say Handel himself – would have understood.

Christopher Hogwood and Handel’s “Flavio”

26 Wednesday Nov 2014

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Academy of Ancient Music, Birmingham Town Hall, Christopher Hogwood, Handel, Metro

It’s still hard to credit that Christopher Hogwood is no longer with us – for anyone of my generation, he’d been at the front of the Historically Informed Performance movement for as long as we’d even known about it. I still recall, as a teenager, borrowing his L’Oiseau-Lyre box-set of Mozart symphonies with the Academy of Ancient Music from West Kirby library and being outraged at what I heard (there’s nothing more conservative than a 17-year old).

Years later, he directed concert performances of three major Handel operas with the AAM over three years in Birmingham – an experience that, with encouragement from Annette, would launch me on an ongoing exploration of a genre I still (if I’m honest) find problematic. Shortly after Flavio we booked our first trip to Drottningholm. Meanwhile, in April 2008, I’d interviewed Christopher Hogwood for Metro, and found a warmth, a charm and an enthusiasm strong enough to persuade any sceptic. Here’s the article:


Birmingham Town Hall has heard a lot of Handel. The Victorians couldn’t get enough of his oratorios, and Ex Cathedra’s recent performance of Messiah is just the latest in a line that stretches back to the Hall’s opening in 1834 – and beyond. Indeed, if the city fathers who designed the Hall had any particular vision in mind, it was surely a temple to the cult of old Georg Frideric. But still, it’s unlikely to have heard anything quite like this – as the Academy of Ancient Music, seven singers and the conductor, harpsichordist and Handel biographer Christopher Hogwood take the stage for a full concert performance of Handel’s sumptuous 1723 opera seria Flavio, Re De’ Longobardi.

“Handel was a great opera writer – the theatre was his first and greatest love” explains Hogwood. “The Academy of Ancient Music was looking for a project to span the three years prior to Handel’s anniversary in 2009, and I wanted to do something coherent – all my career, I’ve been working to try and bring some coherence to our picture of Handel. So we’re performing three Handel operas over the three years. Last year we did a very early Handel opera, Amadigi; next year we’re doing one of his very last, Arianna, and this year we’re doing one from his middle-period”.

But there’s rather more to the choice than that. To the majority of music lovers, who know Handel for Messiah, the Water Music and the ITV Champions League theme tune, it can come as a surprise to realise that he wrote over 40 operas. With a field this wide, Hogwood made his choice with a view to its impact.

“Flavio has a large cast, and quite an amusing subplot – there’s a surprising amount of light comedy, as well as all the usual high dynastic politics that you get in opera seria. It’s dramatic – one of the characters actually dies on stage, which is exceedingly rare in baroque opera. And there’s a running storyline about the difficulty of governing Britain. Handel’s London audiences would have enjoyed that, and I think ours will too”.

That’s important when you’re trying to revive a work that’s barely been staged in 285 years. The very fact of Flavio’s neglect is a reminder of an inconvenient truth about baroque opera seria. Its reputation for stilted classical plots, high-flown emotion and flashy but superficial singing has proved a hard one to shake – and for Hogwood, the popularity of Handel’s oratorios is partly to blame.

“This idea that the operas are statuesque and undramatic is a misconception created by opera companies who’ve tried to stage the oratorios as if they were operas. They don’t work – you just end up with a chorus of 50 on stage and nowhere to go. Handel’s oratorios are a completely different conception from his operas. He understood the theatre; his operatic music reflects that. And a lot of modern directors who do stage the operas don’t really trust Handel’s music, it seems to me. So they fill the stage with guns, helicopters and nudity. But it’s not TV opera – it has to have a certain studied formality. And it needs great singers”.

No problem on that front, with a cast that includes Iestyn Davies and Robin Blaze. “We haven’t got costumes and sets” says Hogwood “but we’ll certainly have action; people walking on and off, enough to show that these are characters in a drama. That spares us the hypodermic syringes and helicopters – which to me is an improvement. It’s less expensive too!”

And his advice to beat those other misconceptions? “Read the words! You have to know what they’re singing about – there are moment-by-moment changes of mood and emotion. And be ready to rise to some really big themes: themes of honesty, loyalty, power and love.” Big themes, powerful drama and great music…maybe it’s time,once again, to rediscover a Handel we’ve all forgotten.

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