Mozartists/Page - Haydn, Applausus, 15 March 2018

Cadogan Hall

Haydn: Applausus, Hob. XXIVa:6 (UK public premiere)

Ellia Laugharne (soprano)

Elspeth Marrow (mezzo-soprano)

Thomas Elwin (tenor)

John Savournin (bass-baritone)

David Shipley (bass)

It is not every day one attends a Haydn premiere, even if only a UK public premiere. Haydn’s Applausus, written 250 years ago, for the fiftieth anniversary of a Cistercian Abbot’s vows, seems never to have been performed again until 1958, for a BBC studio recording under Harry Newstone, the soprano one Joan Sutherland. (She must have relished the coloratura!) Despite a few performances elsewhere in the meantime, and three recordings, it does not seem to have been performed in concert in this country until now.

Was it worth the wait? Unquestionably, although I fear that contemporary audiences, longing for superficially ‘exciting’ substitute film music, will not necessarily react kindly or even comprehendingly to a celebration of monastic virtues on a suitably monastic time-frame. There is no plot of which to speak; the work might almost be characterised as an allegory without an allegory. There can certainly be no questioning the quality of the music in this cantata. (Would it fare any better if we called it an oratorio, the two terms being more or less interchangeable? Hummel, after all, recorded The Seasons as an ‘oratorio’ in his 1806 catalogue of the Esterházy collection.) Conductor Ian Page offers sage advice, moreover due food for thought, when he writes, ‘If an aria is beautiful, why should it bother us if it lasts for more than ten minutes? If the same line of text is repeated a couple of dozen times, how do these repetitions affect us as we consider and contemplate the text? How should we best prepare ourselves for the experience of listening to a complete performance of the work?’ It would be interesting to know how it would fare in an abbet such as that at Zwettl, in Lower Austria, for which it was written. How would the acoustic and the visual experience of the architecture shape our experience? In the meantime, though, this concert hall experience gave a fine account. So too did Classical Opera’s splendid documentation, the concert programme a model of its kind, with an excellent note by Page, as well as an important reproduction of a letter by Haydn concerning the work.

By way of an introduction to the opening recitativo accompagnato, we heard, as seems often to have been the case in the work’s relatively few performances, the first two movements of Haydn’s Symphony no.38 in C major. Hand on heart, my preference remains for modern instruments in such music, but it is always good thing from time to time to revisit one’s preferences and prejudices, and I found much to jolt me from ‘modern’ complacency in the sound, especially from the wind instruments. The Mozartists, Classical Opera’s ‘period’ band, certainly sounded preferable to my ears to the current, peculiar fashion for mixing and matching modern and period instruments. Even the echoes of the second movement, marked by a certain intonational fragility, were well shaped enough to render that fragility more touching than anything else. And there was something to the sound, here and elsewhere, that brought the music close to the world of the eighteenth-century – and not just Haydn’s – Missa solemnis figuraliter, trumpets, drums, and all. The opening of that first recitative, moreover, seemed to speak of Handel, even if this were similarity rather than influence as such. (The period of Handel’s true influence on Haydn, nurtured by Gottfried van Swieten’s Vienna concerts of alte Musik, lay a good few years in the future.)

By the time we reached the first quartet, ‘Virtus inter ardua quaerit habitare,’ there was, moreover, little doubt concerning the quality of the soloists either. The coordination and blend of their often highly melismatic writing was second to none. Ellie Laugharne’s silver-toned soprano and Elspeth Marrow’s richer mezzo proved well matched and contrasted; Thomas Elwin’s fresh, truly Mozartian – for that matter, Haydnesque – tenor proved fully equal to the extraordinary challenges Haydn afforded him, especially later on in two highly ornate arias of truly ‘heavenly length’. John Savournin’s bass-baritone and David Shipley’s bass likewise offered a pleasing degree of comtrast, the former truly coming in to his own in the rage aria, ‘Si obtrudat ultimam,’ the latter ably handling the fascinating tonal plan of the first aria of all, ‘Non chymaeras somnitatis’. Harpsichordist Steven Devine and violinist Steven Devine offered fine solo work too. Throughout, one could only marvel at the care lavished by Haydn on this more or less unknown music, never to be heard again in his lifetime. Page’s tempi were judicious; this is not music to be hurried, let alone harried, nor was it in practice.

The closing chorus, here taken as quintet, is an ‘Amen’ in all but name – and words. It is a delightful one at that, and proved a true culmination, a point of arrival. ‘I hope,’ Haydn wrote in the aforementioned letter, ‘that this Applausus will please the poet, the worthy musicians, and honourable revered Auditorio, all of whom I greet with profound respect.’ It certainly pleased this member, honourable and revered or otherwise, of the Auditorio, who hopes against hope that he will not have to wait too long until the next audition.

La bohème, Opera Holland Park, 11 June 2016

Holland Park Theatre

Mimì – Anna Patalong

Rodolfo – Shaun Dixon
Marcello – Andrew Finden
Musetta – Elin Pritchard
Schaunard – Frederick Long
Colline – John Savournin
Benoît – David Woloszko
Alcindoro – James Harrison
Parpignol – Michael Bradley
Customs Sergeant – Alistair Sutherland

Stephen Barlow (director)

Andrew D Edwards (set designs
Howard Hudson (lighting)

Opera Holland Park Children’s Chorus and Chorus (chorus masters: Scott Price and Richard Harker)

City of London Sinfonia
Matthew Waldron (conductor)

 

Ever since a friend was reported as having said he’would like something in return for modern-dress Shakespeare (how quaint that term seems now, as if anyone would bat an eyelid!), namely an Elizabethan-dress staging of Look Back in Anger, I have been curious about the possibilities of ‘down-dating’, as I suppose we might call it. Rarely, if ever, do we see it, though. Stephen Barlow’s new production of La bohème does just that, however, relocating the action to that very same period. Indeed, I notice that the RSC’s Props Department is credited in the programme for ‘their co-operation and contribution’. Andrew D Edwards’s designs look gorgeous: both sets, making excellent use of the Holland Park stage and environment, and costumes.

 

What are we to make of such a move? Not having asked Barlow and that, perhaps, not being entirely the point in any case, I shall, without implying ‘intention’, say a little about what I made of it, or thought one might make of it. One could, I suppose, say that it does not matter, say what ‘we’ often say about the time and period, that in some respects, at least, it is the least interesting aspect of a production. That, I think, would be a half-truth, but a half-truth nevertheless. I doubt many of us would be complaining if an opera set in Tudor England were convincingly updated to nineteenth-century France, and certainly not to the present day, although we might well ask why, and with what success. Why there and then, in that case? For me, the immediate resonance was with Shakespeare’s London. Rodolfo, our poet, perhaps something of ‘Will’ about him: perhaps more Shakespeare in Love than Shakespeare ‘himself’, but how much do we know of the latter anyway? A leather doublet becomes him, as does distraction from his quill. Given not only the poetical but metatheatrical concerns of the work, I wondered whether, following the first or even the second act, we should discover that it had all, or partly, been a play within a play, or some such device, but no – with the possible exception of the decidedly, deliberately artificial device of casting snow upon the scene in the third act. Perhaps that is the point, or at least could be made to be the point: we are all metatheatrical now, we all create our own metatheatre, even when something is apparently played ‘straight’. That, I think, is undeniable, although I suspect the particular relocation is, at any rate, not entirely arbitrary. Shakespeare’s London, or our creation of it, speaks to an English audience as strongly as pretty much any other possibility.

 

Perhaps the justification is that: we know it, or think we know it, and thus we find it easier to explore. I have no problem in principle with exchanging Montmartre and a Southwark tavern. It was all rather fun, and genuinely surprising. Other productions might delve deeper – although, frankly, very few do. Not everything can be directed by Stefan Herheim, whose Oslo staging is in a class of its own. This works well, on its own terms. The enigmatic programme quotation from Two Gentleman of Verona – which I only saw afterwards – might speak for itself, then, so long as we do not start silly gushing about alleged ‘timelessness’. Nothing is timeless; nor is it helpful or interesting to consider it so. ‘Oh, how this spring of love resembleth/The uncertain glory of an April day/Which now shows all beauty of the Sun/And by and by a cloud takes all away.’ We are free, then, to consider correspondences and connections insofar as we wish.

Having a young cast of such considerable theatrical ability helps. Rarely has the sexual attraction between Mimì and Rodolfo seemed so evident. Anna Patalong offers a beautifully sung, clearly heartfelt performance. It would take a sterner heart than mine not to root for her. Shaun Dixon sometimes sang out a little too much for my taste, but the acoustic can be a tricky one. There was certainly no doubting his commitment, nor his idiomatic command. Andrew Finden’s Marcello was intelligent, thoughtful, impetuous: the quicksilver quality of his exchanges with Elin Pricthard’s gloriously charismatic Musetta, every inch the self-conscious stage queen, yet most genuine in concern and charity at the close, would have been worth the price of admission alone. Frederick Long and John Savournin made at least as much of Schaunard and Colline as any artists I can recall. The sense of student camaraderie can rarely, if ever, have been so strong; nor can the dangers of that play-acting which ultimately fails our tragic heroine. David Woloszko’s Falstaff-like Benoît was not only an obvious comic turn, but very well sung too, as indeed were all of the ‘smaller’ roles’.

The OHP Chorus and Children’s Chorus were, quite simply, outstanding. Barlow’s work with them had clearly been thoroughly internalised. They knew what they were supposed to do, and did it, without ever seeming over-rehearsed. Vocally, one could hear every word, and in a coherent musical whole too. Matthew Waldron’s conducting doubtless helped greatly in that respect. There was never the slightest danger of sentimentalisation, in a sharp-edged account, which kept the excellent City of London Sinfonia on its toes throughout. I was surprised how little, if at all, I missed a larger body of strings; in a fine performance, one’s ears (almost always) adjust. It was not all so driven, though; where the music needed, wanted to dance, it could do so happily, not least during Musetta’s second-act ‘show’. There would be no harm in relaxing a little as the run progresses; by the same token, however, there is nothing to complain about, and a great deal to savour, here. OHP’s Puccini Midas touch works its magic once again.