Ebbs/St Paul's Sinfonia/Morley - Beethoven, Doolittle, and Mendelssohn, 18 September 2020

Stanley Halls

Beethoven: Overture: ‘Coriolan’, op.62
Emily Doolittle: A Short, Slow Life
Beethoven: Ah! perfido, op.65
Mendelssohn: Symphony no.4 in A major, ‘Italian’, op.90

Carleen Ebbs (soprano)

St Paul’s Sinfonia

Andrew Morley (conductor)

Attending a concert in London has at present something of the Prohibition era to it. Music-making is not quite prohibited, of course, yet not so far off, even without an audience. (Football, being a matter of crucial national importance, is of course another matter.) And so it was that I found myself taking three trains to South Norwood to hear this St Paul’s Sinfonia concert in the Edwardian Stanley Halls, part of a select yet enthusiastic audience, augmented several times over at home, I trust, by a Front Rooms Concert audience, helping raise money for Help Musicians.


There remains something very special about the privilege of hearing Beethoven’s music this year. To feel the Coriolan Overture course through one’s veins in as immediate and reverberant an acoustic as this was more than worth the journey in itself. Andrew Morley, elsewhere an energetic and engaging compère, led the musicians in a cultivated, urgent performance, in which one could feel as well as see and hear bows fly from strings. Rhythmic insistence played its part in bringing Beethoven’s heroism to life: much needed, given what desperate news lay outside the hall. The final, decisive turn to C minor spoke of true, noble tragedy, not the deadlier banality around us. How this music matters: it is part of what makes us human.


Soprano Carleen Ebbs joined the orchestra, now slimmed down to ensemble size, for Emily Doolittle’s Elizabeth Bishop setting, A Short, Slow Life. Again, one could hardly fail to make connections with, to draw conclusions from our current plight; again, our experience was certainly not to be reduced to that. It opened sharp, precise, yet certainly not without warmth, whether in work or performance. A fine ear for instrumental combinations was revealed on the composer’s part, likewise by players and conductor for the balance necessary to reveal them in performance. Apparently simple figures—scalic passages, for instance—sounded fresh, even far from simple, somehow reinvented before our ears. Procedures were clear, while remaining means to an end rather than an end in themselves. Indeed, the variety of musical writing within a relatively short frame was striking, not least since it unquestionably formed part of a greater whole. Grateful vocal writing, whether in musical response to scansion or in beguiling melismata, sometimes as part of the ensemble, sometimes set in relief, found a compelling interpreter in Ebbs.


So too did Beethoven, in his 1796 concert aria, Ah! perfido, the first of two German visits to Italy. Vigour, nobility, and tenderness showed Beethoven coming as close as ever he could to the Mozart of Così fan tutte, reminding one above all why, though admiring its music greatly, poor Beethoven and his very different morality could never comprehend Mozart’s bracing modernity here. Like Wagner, only more so, Mozart proceeds beyond good and evil; Beethoven’s conception of the good is an entirely different matter. Good is good, though, especially in a performance in which the orchestra truly speaks. Cellos and basses did excellent work in the accompagnato; the soloist sent shivers down the spine in the hochdramatisch final section.


Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony completed the programme. Morley’s evident affection for and understanding of the work shone through. (How could anyone not love this music?) Bright and vivid A major in the first movement benefited from insistence of counterpoint and dance rhythm. The second movement processional proved nicely poised between invitation and something more forbidding: to join the pilgrims or not? Mendelssohn is not, after all, Berlioz. An amiable minuet gave way to a touching trio, Mendelssohn’s writing for horns duly relished. It was the finale for me that received the most compelling performance, a veritable whirlwind of saltarello that yet found space for detail. Far from coincidentally, the frame through which local colour could be glimpsed and felt was decisively Beethovenian.

Oberon, New Sussex Opera, 25 November 2014

Cadogan Hall

 

 

Oberon – Adam Tunnicliffe

Puck – Siân Griffiths

Sir Huon – Adrian Dwyer

Sherasmin – Damian Thantrey

Reiza – Sally Silver

Fatima – Carolyn Dobbin

Five Fairies – Nisha McIntyer-Burnei, Beatrice Monaco, Michael Diamini, Rachel Farago, Rachel Shouksmith

 

 

Harry Fehr (director)

Charlie Lucas (lighting)

Victoria Newlyn (choreography)

 

 

St Paul’s Sinfonia

New Sussex Opera Chorus

Nicholas Jenkins (conductor)

 

What on earth to do with Oberon, Weber’s last opera, written – are you listening, the Royal Opera? – for Covent Garden? Many consider it to contain his greatest music. I am not sure I should go so far; or, perhaps better, the genre with which Weber was lumbered, made it simply impossible for the music to tell as it should. If we think that Purcell had it bad with the dreadful mess of ‘semi-opera’, at least he had Dryden, although, as Sir Donald Tovey put it, ‘Our first and greatest man of genius in dramatic music was … condemned to inaugurate a tradition whereby English opera consisted of music that merely added a series of lyric and spectacular digressions to a play which, if good at all, would be better without the digressions.’ Weber, alas, had James Robinson Planché, whose libretto for Oberon for Tovey ‘represents an advance on [semi-opera] … inasmuch as the play would not be better without the digressions,’ thus leading up to what, regrettably, remains an unforgettable and largely unarguable claim: Weber ‘poured his last and finest music into this pig-trough.’ A sequel to A Midsummer Night’s Dream might seem ill-advised at the best of times; this, however, was certainly not the best of times.

 

 

And so, it was a brave and highly laudable decision for New Sussex Opera to stage Oberon. Nothing, I am afraid, can begin to redeem the libretto, whose lack of dramaturgical coherence is truly a thing of wonder. (One is almost left wishing that England had truly been a Land ohne Musik at the time.) Considering a roughly comparable – and far from un-problematical – work, Schubert’s Fierrabras, does not help; but then nothing can, save perhaps for the deconstructionist reimagining production of one’s dreams. Neuenfels or Herheim perhaps? That, of course, is not what we have, or could have have, here. Harry Fehr has limited resources and for the most part elects to play things straight, save, perhaps for some dubious – or dubiously executed? – choreography. Dress is more or less ‘modern’ but not really in the service of any particular ‘concept’. Chairs are perhaps over-used; waving them around to depict a storm seemed on the verge of exhausting some members of the chorus. A few sheets might have done the job better. But Fehr’s is clearly a thankless task and the contours of the drama, such as it is, register clearly enough.

It was a great pity that the orchestra could not have been augmented. (Might not some amateur string players have been found?) A string section of 4.2.2.2.1, even in a smallish hall, is bound, with the best will in the world, to sound undernourished at times for Weber’s score. That said, the players of St Paul’s Sinfonia for the most part responded admirably to Nicholas Jenkins’s sensitive, keenly dramatic traversal. Flexible and cultivated, with plenty of direction: his was a reading worthy both of Weber and of the gamble the company had made in mounting the enterprise. I should be keen to hear more of the conductor in such and indeed other repertoire.

The chorus had some shakier moments but for the most part acquitted itself well, summoning up a good, full sound for the close. Soloists did their best to bring to life the ‘characters’. Adrian Dwyer showed no sign of tiring from the difficult demands of the tenor hero, Sir Huon, offering creditable nobility of tone throughout. Sally Silver coped very well indeed with the loss of a monitor at the beginning of the second act, leaving her unable to see the conductor at all during ‘Ocean! Thou mighty monster!’ If her intonation was not always perfect, slips did not unduly distract, and she again invested the role with a dignity it perhaps does not entirely deserve. Carolyn Dobbin proved a lively Fatima, drawing one in as much as one could reasonably expect. Adam Tunnicliffe’s Oberon sounded destined – and I hope it will be – for a larger hall or theatre. Most importantly, then, we had a good opportunity to experience this opera ‘live’, for which thanks and congratulations should go to New Sussex Opera.