OSJ/Lubbock - Handel: Messiah, 10 December 2015

St John’s, Smith Square

Nardus Williams (soprano)

Eleanor Edmonds (mezzo-soprano)
Chris Turner (tenor)
Morgan Pearse (bass)

OSJ Voices (chorus master: Jeremy Jackman)

Orchestra of St John’s

John Lubbock (conductor)

 

I have heard a good deal of moaning about Messiah performances this year: more, I have to say, from performers than from audiences. Perhaps it does become a little tedious for some; there are certainly alternatives (or why not supplementary works?) well worth exploring. Yet, for whatever this is worth, there generally seems to be an audience for a performance, of whatever ilk. Moreover, whilst I should love the opportunity to hear other Handel oratorios in non-‘period’ performances, they are few and far between. For those of us who admire Handel and prefer his music to be treated as music rather than pseudo-archaeology, we are not exactly spoilt for choice during the rest of the year.

 

There was, for me at least, a little too much that betrayed ‘period’ influence here, more with respect to the orchestra than anything else. It was not so much that the instruments were compelled to play in evidence-free ‘period style’, or what passes for that, as that the strings of the tiny orchestra (3.2.2.2.1) rarely played out as it might have done, a familiar tale for those of us wearily accustomed to enduring so-called ‘historically-informed performances’ on modern instruments. The perversity of having modern instruments and yet being afraid to use them is something I shall never understand, save of course for fear of the fury Adorno so memorably outlined in his essay on Bach, warning, alas, largely unheeded of the ‘sectarian’ nature of Historismus. One could hardly avoid the suspicion, he argued, that the sole concern of Bach’s ‘devotees’ (Liebhaber) was to ensure that ‘no inauthentic dynamics, no modifications of tempo, no excessively large choirs and orchestra’ should be employed. Palpable was the potential fury, ‘lest any more humane impulse’ should become audible. As he pointed out earlier in his essay, the (presumed) ‘absolute’ sound of the eighteenth century – not at all, I might add, an eighteenth-century concept but rather a distorted product of nineteenth-century conceptions of ‘absolute music’ – was already in the early 1950s being falsely elevated to an exclusivist end in itself. Many do not even notice any more, if indeed they ever did.

 

And so, whilst there were moments in which the orchestra roused itself to play thrillingly, it often sounded subdued, in spite of generally sensible – and varied – tempi being adopted by John Lubbock. (One exception, was a bizarrely fast ‘Surely He hath borne our griefs’, quite at odds with the words – and music.) The trumpet playing (Nick Thompson and Simon Gabriel), however, was excellent, as was Howard Moody’s organ continuo: rather too hyperactive for my taste – ‘All they that see Him laugh Him to scorn’ a case in point – but in some respects, making up for the timidity of the string playing. A few more desks and a little more courage in the fight against ‘authenticity’ would have been welcome, even in so forgiving an acoustic as that of St John’s, Smith Square.

 

Four young singers all had something creditable to offer. There was a great deal of ornamentation to be heard, very much the fashion nowadays; I have nothing against it in principle, but wonder whether we might hear more of the ‘original’ prior to its ornamentation. Nardus Williams’s clear, bright soprano was not always so full-toned as one might have hoped for, but I suspect that it will develop further in that direction. Her singing was in any case disarmingly sincere, as indeed was that of all of the soloists. Eleanor Edmonds was at her best in ‘He was despised’; there, one might almost have taken her relative darkness of tone for that of a contralto. I liked also the real defiance, which I am tempted to call ‘operatic’, in the final ‘like a refiner’s fire’ of ‘But who may abide the day of his coming’. Chris Turner also adopted a dramatic mode of performance as tenor: mostly welcome, save for a too-frequent ‘sob’ in the voice, which veered towards sentimentality. To my ears, Morgan Pearse was the pick of the bunch. His had all the drama of any of the other performances, but with a more varied palette and a deeper understanding – and communication – of the words and their implications. I had no quibbles at all with his truly excellent performance. A decent sized chorus proved both agile and (relatively) weighty, equally adept in homophonic and contrapuntal music. If, on occasion, I thought Lubbock had OSJ Voices sing too fast and/or too blithely, that was not the fault of the chorus itself, clearly well-trained by Jeremy Jackman.

Further performances will be given on 19^th (Dorchester Abbey), 20^th (SJE Arts, Oxford), and 21^st December (Kings Place). Those on 20^th and 21^st are advertised as using Lubbock’s ‘new reorchestration for flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoon, cello, bass, trumpets, timpani, and organ’. That sounds intriguing: definitely worth a hearing, I suspect. Cuts were made – there is, in any case, no definitive ‘version’ – but nothing too grievous.

Dido and Aeneas and other works by Purcell, OSJ/Lubbock, 15 September 2015

St John’s, Smith Square

 

Chacony in G minor 

Arias and duets:

Music for a while; Sweeter than roses; My dearest, my fairest; If music be the food of love; Bonduca’s song; Sound the trumpet; Evening hymn; Hark the echoing air

Penelope Appleyard, Hannah Davey, Anna Shackleton (sopranos)                   

Ellie Edmonds (mezzo-soprano)

Johnny Herford (baritone)

John Heley (cello)

Howard Moody (organ) 

 

Dido and Aeneas

Dido – Francesca Saracino

Aeneas – Johnny Herford

Belinda – Hannah Davey

Sorceress – Charlotte Tetley

First Witch – Anna Shackleton

Second Witch – Ellie Edmonds

Second Woman – Penelope Appleyard

Spirit – Rachel Crisp

Sailor – Mitesh Khatri

 

OSJ Ashmolean Voices

Orchestra of St John’s

John Lubbock (conductor)

 

A delightful concert of music from the English Orpheus, the composer whom I unhesitatingly consider the greatest between Monteverdi and Bach. Indeed, I know of no greater piece of instrumental music before Bach than Purcell’s Chacony in G minor. Its searing dissonances and overwhelming marriage of formal dynamism and musico-dramatic development all spoke here with unexaggerated yet unquestionable power. Four players, one to a part, showed that larger forces are no absolute requirement. The excellent acoustic of St John’s, Smith Square, certainly assisted. (What a relief to be spared the Royal Albert Hall!) Inner parts, in particular, resounded with richness, but always directed richness. Shading was beautiful – and yes, goal-oriented too.

 

Following that splendid ‘overture’, we heard five young singers in arias and duets from various Purcellian sources. Johnny Herford’s Music for a while benefited, as did the other numbers, from organ continuo playing (Howard Moody) that was imaginative without exhibitionism. Herford’s vocal decoration was likewise; his rendition of ‘drop, drop, drop, …’ did everything it should. In Sweeter than roses and Bonduca’s song, Penelope Appleyard displayed a winning match of the plaintive and expertly-negotiated coloratura. Sound the trumpet, in which Appleyard was joined by Hannah Davey, had a swift, finely balanced performance, whilst Anna Shackleton displayed a ‘whiter’ voice in Evening hymn. Ellie Edmonds’s richer mezzo lacked nothing in flexibility in If music be the food of love.

 

Dido and Aeneas: well, if it is not the finest opera between Poppea and Idomeneo, then I should clearly resign my job forthwith. This ‘Tristan und Isolde in a pintpot’ (Raymond Leppard) rarely, if ever, ceases to amaze; it certainly did not here. Its inexorable musico-dramatic tragedy, its vocal and harmonic mastery, and not least a fine performance worked their magic once again. John Lubbock’s tempi were well suited to the work and each other; his orchestra, again one to a part, belied in richness and commitment such apparent ‘restriction’. The choir sang well, its off-stage echoes a particular highlight, but the closing chorus proved equally impressive. The simplest of stagings permitted Purcell’s drama to ‘speak for itself’.

 

Francesca Saracino had, in the first act, occasional instances of hesitancy, especially in the falling off of phrases, but she acted well – a highly expressive face a boon here – and grew in tragic stature. If she did not overwhelm the cast as some great Didos of the past have done, that was no loss; indeed, it permitted greater depth of characterisation. Hannah Davey’s Belinda had a couple of unfortunate fallings out of sync with the orchestra, but recovered well and continued to display the virtues we had heard before the interval. Aeneas is a tricky role, perhaps not entirely unlike Don Ottavio: how does one present a strong characterisation of a culpably weak character? One can, of course, but verbal and musical subtlety should come to the fore, as they did with Johnny Herford. Charlotte Tetley’s Sorceress was quite mesmerising, her stage presence splendidly allied to vocal resources. Special mention should go to Mitesh Khatri’s spirited, engagingly flirtatious Sailor. I hope – and am sure – that we shall hear more from many of these singers. And how wonderful, even if for one night only, to have Purcell rescued from the clutches of ‘authenticity’!

 

OSJ/Lubbock - Handel, Messiah, 22 December 2011

Hall One, Kings Place

Hannah Davey (soprano)
Roderick Morris (counter-tenor)
John Pierce (tenor)
David Pike (baritone)

OSJ Voices (chorus master: Jeremy Jackman)
Orchestra of St John’s
John Lubbock (conductor)

This was a delight: very much a tonic to December blues. Time was when Hall One of Kings Place would have been considered risibly small for a performance of the Messiah – though time was when anywhere smaller than the Royal Albert Hall or even the Crystal Palace would have been. Monster Victorian performances from the likes of Sir Michael Costa are long gone, though we should do well to recall not only the popular enthusiasm they engendered but also their musical influence: Haydn, in London, heard a performance, which, if not Victorian, employed forces inconceivable today. It set him on the road to writing The Creation.

Back to Kings Place. This was a chamber performance, at least in terms of the orchestra, strings fewer than I have ever previously encountered: 3, 2, 2, 2, 1. That presents a few problems, not so much in terms of volume – even my knowledge of acoustics informs me that thirty first violins are not ten times as loud as three – but blend and tonal quality. (Indeed, one to a part, true chamber music, will lose the rough edges.) So there were occasions, especially when playing softly, when ensemble could prove a little rough. They should not, however, be exaggerated in importance, and should be balanced against considerable cultivation at other times. Vibrato was not eschewed, even if there were passages, more so in the First Part than later on, when more would have been welcome. Leader Richard Milone’s solo work was especially finely turned. And if there were occasions when John Lubbock indulged the contemporary fashion for abrupt endings to phrases – believe me, I have heard much, much worse – much of his characterisation of individual numbers proved both apt and refreshing. For instance, I do not recall hearing ‘He trusted in God that He would deliver Him’ performed with such anger, malice even: the great turba choruses of Bach’s St John Passion came to mind. Given that the words are those of the vicious mob, they who ‘laugh Him to scorn’, such a performance made excellent sense, imparting a greater narrative drive to a section of the oratorio that is not entirely without longueurs, whichever version is employed. (The present version did not, off the top of my head, correspond to any particular Handel performance, but worked well enough.)

Choral singing, from OSJ Voices, was excellent throughout. Forty-eight strong, according to the programme, this was by contemporary standards a fair-sized chorus, but it lacked little in agility, responding with alacrity to Lubbock’s keenness in numbers such as ‘And the glory of the Lord’. Weight was present where necessary too: indeed, the wholeheartedness to the closing choruses of the second and third parts was quite moving. (Almost everyone stood for the ‘Hallelujah’ Chorus. Two notable refuseniks were those who had chattered and disrupted with sweet-wrappers throughout. I shall remember their faces…) This, then, was a choral performance that would put many professional choirs to shame, for which considerable credit must also be ascribed to chorus master, Jeremy Jackman.

Vocal soloists impressed too. If John Pierce’s recitatives sometimes passed uncomfortably into bluster, his arias were generally well phrased. David Pike’s rich tone did not preclude intelligent response to the words. I am not sure that anyone can redeem the dull ‘B’ section of ‘The trumpet shall sound’, but the principal material was especially pleasing, not least thanks to Paul Archibald’s excellent trumpet solo. Hannah Davey’s diction and phrasing often made one consider anew arias one might have thought one knew all too well. Perhaps the most welcome discovery of all was counter-tenor, Roderick Morris. Holding a prejudice here for a contralto, I was delighted to discover that I did not miss the female voice in the slightest. Morris’s voice brought a splendid sense of Baroque theatre to the occasion: despite his Oxford and Cambridge background, this was a supple, dramatic performance more in the mould of David Daniels than Alfred Deller (not that there is anything wrong with the latter). Ornamentation was tasteful and meaningful, less restrained than once would have been heard, but lending new life to Handel’s da capo arias, which can otherwise sometimes become a bit of a trial. There is plenty of life in Messiah yet.

For the greatest panache, utterly irresistible, save to those Beecham dubbed 'drowsy armchair purists':
 


For what remains to my mind the most recommendable 'straight' Messiah, full of life and supremely musical:
 


For Mozart's version:
 


An underrated digital account:
 

Orchestra of St John's/Lubbock - Handel, Bach, Alec Roth, and Haydn, 6 March 2010

Handel – Solomon: ‘Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’
Bach – Cantata no.51: Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen, BWV 51
Alec Roth – Departure of the Queen of Sheba
Haydn – Symphony no.44 in E minor, ‘Trauer’

Louise Wayman (soprano)
Orchestra of St John’s
John Lubbock (conductor)

There was much to enjoy in this, the third and final concert from the Orchestra of St John’s residency at Kings Place, which has sought to give a taste of the orchestra’s aversion to modish, ghettoising specialisation. ‘Specialists in nullity,’ was one of Boulez’s several dismissive remarks concerning the proponents of such an approach. For, as the OSJ’s founder and conductor, John Lubbock, comments:

More than forty years ago, when I set up this orchestra, many of my colleagues were doing very specialist things, like John Eliot Gardiner with his English Baroque Soloists and Christopher Hogwood with his Academy of Ancient Music, for example. We decided that we would go the other way, and play everything, from the late Baroque, to classical repertoire through twentieth-century works to the most contemporary music. So it’s that distinctive identity I wanted to communicate here: a good spread of all the different things we do, to show our versatility.

To that end, and what an increasingly rare blessing this is, the orchestra plays on modern instruments, albeit with chamber forces: perfectly appropriate for the venue, whose virtues Lubbock rightly extols:

I think Hall One is an absolute triumph – not only is it a beautiful hall acoustically and a pleasure for the audience to sit in, but it’s a pleasure to play in. The back stage facilities are second to none, and the technical and stage management team simply can’t do enough. We can get a thirty-seven piece orchestra on to the stage, that’s strings, thirteen [wood-]wind and brass, plus timps. That means we could do Beethoven symphonies. It’s ideal.

I am not sure that I harbour an overwhelming desire to hear Beethoven from such forces, but nevertheless the principle of a small hall requiring a smaller number of musicians holds – and for the most part worked well here. With strings scaled 4.3.2.2.1, there were only a few instances when the violins sounded undernourished. Moreover, there was none of that ghastly whining that passes for ‘Baroque style’ in fashionable quarters. Indeed, in the opening Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, an old ‘lollipop’ was made to taste, not through presenting an exhibitionistic attempt to be different or more likely ‘correct’, but by trusting Handel’s music to take care of itself, with a little assistance from Lubbock’s sensitive command. Dynamic contrasts and subtle shading played their part, as did a keen understanding of harmonic direction.

Bach may have been an exact contemporary of Handel, but his requirements are, in general, very different. Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen stands perhaps closer to Handel than many of Bach’s works, though even in this combination of rejoicing and vocal display, there is a great deal more at stake. Handel’s two oboes were replaced by Andrew Dunn’s trumpet: not so stunning as, say, Maurice André in such repertoire, but quietly impressive. And the orchestra retained something of its Handelian brightness of tone. Discreet organ continuo was provided by Christopher Bowers-Broadbent. Louise Wayman’s account of the soprano part grew in confidence. At first, she looked – and sounded – a little nervous, somewhat boyish in tone, but a greater level of engagement with the text was to be heard as the work progressed. Coloratura and ornamentation were generally well handled. Whilst verbal meaning was rarely stressed, there was a nicely imploring tone to ‘deine Kinder’ (the Lord’s children) in the aria, ‘Höchster, mache deine Güte,’ and greater use of vibrato in the ensuing chorale suggested the greater surety expressed in the text. Lubbock ensured that the recitative, ‘Wir beten zu dem Tempel an,’ sounded properly Bachian in tending more towards arioso. Indeed, the musical flow of the work was impressive throughout. If the final ‘Alleluia!’ were taken at a more sedate tempo than the blessed Elisabeth, there is much to be said for that. Admirable though Schwarzkopf may be here, there is a case for something a little more yielding.

The second half opened with Alec Roth’s Departure of the Queen of Sheba, written for the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in 1999, inspired by Ana Maria Pacheco’s painting, Queen of Sheba and King Solomon in the Garden of Earthly Delights. I am afraid I soon found myself wishing that the Queen would depart at least as quickly as she had arrived. That she took her time is doubtless in part owed to the programmatic concern, Solomon and his guest being loath to separate, but a little of this music would still have goned a considerable way. Beginning with a slowed down and otherwise somewhat varied version of Handel’s figuration, the lovers, offstage oboe representing the queen and English horn the king, soon commence their loquacious yet languorous dialogue. Unabashedly tonal, the mildness would not seem out of place in a television drama of a certain age or even a Merchant Ivory film: nothing to frighten away a Daily Mail reader, I should have thought. Vaughan Williams and Gershwin occasionally vied for attention, albeit with a little too much diluting to taste. There was nothing unpleasant; it was just blandly inconsequential. The performance, however, seemed to me excellent, not least from the soloists, Chris O’Neal and Alison Alty.

It was quite a relief, then, to turn to an invigorating performance of Haydn’s forty-forth symphony, the Trauer. Vigorous, urgent from the outset, Lubbock was clearly in his element, Haydn’s Sturm und Drang proving as tragic as and perhaps more single-minded than a great deal of Mozart. It is a rarer thing than one might expect to have someone so thoroughly understand Haydn’s language, not least in the demonstration that rhetoric and phrasing are anything but antithetical. The small number of strings made the first movement in particular glance back to the Baroque, especially if one thought of, say, Antal Doráti here, but the motival working out impressed upon one how, even at this stage, Haydn looks forward to Beethoven. The extraordinary ending to the exposition – repeated – in which the music subsides upwards, as it were, peers even further forward into the future. Die Jakobsleiter perhaps? And the intensity of the recapitulation’s chromaticism was fully, but never indulgently, expressed. Tragedy was again to the fore in the canonic minuet: intense, but never hard-driven. Just occasionally, the strings could sound a little thin, but they bloomed in the major mode of the trio, balm to the ears, and properly Haydnesque, in that there was little or none of the sadness, the smiling through tears, that Mozart would typically have brought to such a transformation. The Adagio was warmly affecting: poised without archness, the strings’ vibrato sensitively judged. Once again, I found myself thinking what a fine feeling Lubbock had for Haydn’s style, for the transformation in subjectivity that had taken place since the Baroque. The Presto finale brought fire and again did not confuse that with driving too hard. Its structure was as clear as its emotional import. Haydn proved – as if he had to! – that he is just as capable as Gluck at expressing the true nobility of tragedy. Why is everyone not queuing up to perform this magnificent music? One quibble: the conductor’s whistling throughout the symphony became a little distracting. This nevertheless remained an excellent performance.