After his formative operatic experiences in Hamburg and Italy, Handel arrived in London well able to cope with its uncertain musico-theatrical climate. Radio 3's Handel opera cycle broadcasts on Thursday & Friday of this week were , of 1711. It was an instant success, despite the mocking critique of in the Spectator, who laughed at the castrato Nicolini doing battle with a mangy 'lion' and at the infamous release of sparrows in the theatre. (Actually, Addison also recognised Nicolini's acting skills, and suggested many actors in the spoken theatre could learn the art of graceful gesture from him.)
Partly because it was Handel's first London opera, Rinaldo was performed more often during the composer's life than any other of his operas. In particular, it was frequently revived in the five seasons after its première, as the fortunes of London's operatic venture went up and down. It also contains fabulous music, as we can hear in this recording. Here takes Nicolini's role, that of Rinaldo himself. plays Goffredo, a male role that also went to a woman in the original production. Although this practice was relatively unusual in Italy, it became common in London, where there were usually more female singers of the appropriate calibre available than there were .
As you will have heard for yourselves, it was a terrific cast; if you missed it, there's always the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ iPlayer. The cast included Catherine Bott, whose Early Music Show this Saturday (1pm) will be looking at the life of , who was one of Handel's particular patrons after the 1710s operatic enterprise finally collapsed.
I think the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Philharmonic did justice to yesterday. The Philharmonic tell me they used 35 players including two natural horns. To my mind the star was the bass player Ronan Dunne, who included a neat little cadenza in the second repeat of the trio.
The did not die but was only sleeping! The six viols of with the mezzo-soprano continue their celebration of Purcell at the Wigmore Hall this weekend with a programme mixing 17th century items with those of later centuries. Purcell is represented by the songs O Solitude and Music For a While, the Fantazia Upon One Note and another four-part fantazia. While these are matched with fantasias and fantasies by and , the rest of the programme includes arrangements of works written when the viol consort was supposedly dead - Schubert, Debussy, Shostakovich, Wolf and Warlock for instance. Sonnets and fantasies by and world premieres of works by and confirm the viol's late 20th century resurrection.
I met last week. He seemed to be glowing from the previous night's concert, reviewed here. 'You must be elated,' I say, 'it was an excellent concert.' 'If the audience thinks so, I am happy,' he says, hinting that from his perfectionist viewpoint there were rough edges. Principally he is worried about the programme's length with two St Cecilia Odes by and and a Haydn mass. He records it this week in , the home of . He apologised to the audience at the concert and hoped we would not take the second interval as an opportunity to depart.
I say I am particularly interested in Purcell and ask him what a) he and b) the French think of the composer. He says, 'The French admire Purcell as a great composer of the . They know the dances, the music from the masques and the opera . But they are not aware of his church music as the British are.' In other words, the French get to know his physical, sensuous, greasepainted side rather than his intoxicating, spiritual, cassocked music. He points out that the French came to the baroque through the English, first and his Deller School in the South of France, later with the and English Baroque Soloists
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Stand by for that rare creature - a live studio broadcast in the middle of Classical Collection. People like me will be delighted to hear the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Philharmonic having a go at , conducted by , on Wednesday at 11 am. The orchestra normally fields around 60-70 players. Any guesses on the number that will be involved for this performance? Will they use a harpsichord?
Sing in a choir? Love Mendelssohn? Put the weekend of 8-10 May into your diary. As part of the big Radio 3 Mendelssohn weekend, the station is inviting everyone to join in a massed national singsong of 'O for the Wings of a Dove' with or without its parent piece, Hear My Prayer - a musical equivalent, if you like, of making a human chain across the country in tribute to dear old Felix.
When your choir joins in, you will have the chance to be broadcast on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio 3, and you'll be offered posters to download to advertise your performance. If you upload your performance to your choir's website, Radio 3 will provide links to these, and you can send photos of the event in for an online gallery at the Composers 2009 site.
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Listening to this morning's Composer of the Week (while fixing my daughter's new fridge!) it struck me how much Donald Macleod's style reminds me of and his . There's the same informed, easy conversational style, and sense of spending time in the company of a good friend. Long may it continue.
'Reiner_Torheit' suggests, with regard to the modern staging of oratorio, that 'Handel knew perfectly well in which genre he was writing - and he was very careful about this.'
While I wouldn't dispute Handel's awareness of generic issues or his care with his compositions, I think we should be careful applying our conceptions of genre retrospectively: the Italian oratorio of the 17th and 18th centuries was performed by the same forces as used for opera (i.e., opera singers, though often not women), often in front of theatrical backdrops, and it used the chorus as little as opera did.
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'Why did Handel make the move from opera to oratorio?', 'kleines_c' and others wonder. This is one of the big questions in Handel's career: doctoral dissertations and books have been written on it, so a blog entry is only going to scratch the surface...
Not surprisingly, there are several answers, to do with patronage and money, cultural and national politics, and musical style. It seems that the audience for opera became fickle in the 1730s - they wanted opera, and they didn't, which meant that Handel's financial situation was frequently precarious.
Often, it seems, the aristocracy wanted to dictate the terms, and Handel was increasingly unhappy with that. He had seen the appetite for sung works in English - not just with (1728), but also with English opera experiments in the early 1730s. He also saw how well audiences liked the performance of his oratorio, , put on in a tavern(!) by the Master of the Children of the in 1732. A subsequent unauthorised production forced Handel to mount his own, expanded version of the work, and so his English oratorio career was born. For the rest of the 1730s, however, Handel persisted with opera, eventually intermixing it with oratorio, which he could perform during the run-up to Easter. So, he was evidently still attracted to the theatrical aspects of opera - although his oratorios were often highly dramatic, they weren't staged as such (in large part, because of religious objections).
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On Sunday 18 January, conducted his own band, , in Purcell's Ode to St Cecilia of 1692. One felt the year had truly begun with the immaculate blazing trumpets, neat fugues and sighing slow sections of the opening Symphony. The chorus were in robust welcoming form and not shy of expressing the British patriotism of 's words. The period instrument orchestra is young, talented and enthusiastic. Brasses are narrow-bore, the strings gut-strung. The violins have no chin-rests, the cellos no spikes, one of them resting on a pink cushion instead of its owners' legs.
The soloists stood behind the orchestra, an unwelcome modern convention born in the recording studio which diminishes the stars both in stature and volume. They have to oversing the instruments and if they make eye contact with anyone it is with the conductor, not the audience. In the old days, he followed them, not they him.
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I had the pleasure of giving the pre-concert talk last Sunday night at the Barbican. Featuring under , three of our anniversary composers - Purcell, Handel, and Haydn - were joined under the banner of , music's patron saint.
As listeners can hear in Wednesday's Performance on 3 at 7pm, all of the artists were in good form in both Handel and Purcell's Odes. For me, the best moment came in the Handel, when soprano and principal cellist gave a wonderful account of 'What passion cannot Music raise or quell'. I've circled the broadcast in my diary for Wednesday evening listening, and am looking forward to it. Lucy, incidentally, will be performing songs by Dvorak, Schumann and Strauss at the Wigmore Hall on .
The concert also included the Kyrie and Gloria of Haydn's St Cecilia Mass. This will be broadcast on Radio 3 on Saturday 24th January at 7.45pm. Most definitely recommended!.
Purcell's dazzling duet Sound the Trumpet is on the bill at the Wigmore Hall (020 7935 2141) this Saturday (24th January) in a concert given by soprano and mezzo with pianist . Other Purcell songs include Lost is my quiet for ever and the self-deprecating What can we poor females do?. The concert also features duets by Mendelssohn, Brahms, Gounod, Chausson and Rossini. My money's on the latter's as an encore.
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Did Handel love the English language, or did he have real trouble with it? Many of our juicy Handel anecdotes transcribe Handel's spoken English with a German accent worthy an episode of '. But Handel was evidently an excellent linguist (as so many composers had to be in those days): he fit into Italian society remarkably quickly when there, and likewise in England, ingratiating himself with court.
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At first encounter, the at London's is rather stern and forbidding. Then you notice the beautiful wood grain and knots in the concrete, imprinted by the frames into which the liquid rock was poured during construction. Amazing invention, . All you do is add water, and lo, a multi-storey tower-block or a 200-seat auditorium.
Purcell's concert hall is like Purcell's music. People steeped in contemporary culture find the heavy, stultifying, overdone, but there is a fine detail, a lightness and a brilliance of conception which one discovers in this music on closer listening.
First one admires the lines and the subtle overlapping by which the sensuous melody never cadences with the bass. Next one loves the running counterpoint with each part both independent and co-operative in a consort of three, four or five .
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In CD Review's Building a Library on Saturday, critic Richard Wigmore recommends Colin Davis and the Concertgebouw Orchestra's 1977 recording of Haydn's last symphony, on the Philips Duo label as the most satisfying performance available. If you follow the link you can listen again if you missed it. The performance can be heard complete on R3 on Monday's Classical Collection at 11.30 am. The 'London' gets performed a lot. My nearest favourites in that great series of 12 works are No 99 and No 103 (The Drumroll). Anyone have any other suggestions?
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There have been some interesting observations after the broadcast of Almira. 'Dr Schoen' draws a comparison to Bach, and Anne_B to Rameau and Telemann. I guess the early works of any composer are going to have a lot of echoes of others - their teachers or their peers. When we hear J.S. Bach or Telemann in Handel, though, what we're really hearing are the influences that formed all of them.
As for dance in Handel's operas, he was ever the man of the theatre: if an opportunity came his way to include dance in his operas, why not do so? The collaborations with the famous French dancer, , in the 1730s were particularly significant. Actually, later in the eighteenth century, as skirts gradually went up, the dancing between the acts became so popular, it was said to be more of an attraction than the opera itself!
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Three concerts catch the eye this coming week. On Tuesday 13 January in Turner Sims Hall Southampton (023 8059 5151/www.turnersims.co.uk) the viol consort Fretwork with soprano Clare Wilkinson celebrate Purcell's 350th performing the Fantazias, the Evening Hymn and Dido's Lament. They then take the same programme and soprano to the USA for a three-date tour in Los Angeles, Houston and San Antonio.
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Donald MacLeod invited the Chairman of the Purcell Society, Bruce Wood, to be his resident expert on Composer of the Week last week. Both pronounced his name with a stress on the first syllable, as in Persil. The current head of Jazz at Trinity School of Music, Simon Purcell, always stresses the second syllable of his name. He does not know whether his family is related to Henry Purcell's. He tells me there are a lot of Purcells in Ireland, however, and they invariably pronounce the name as he does.
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I very much enjoyed Purcell's Yorkshire Feast Song on Thursday's Composer of the Week, especially the sensuous ground bass number 'So when the grand glittering Queen'. Now I want to hear nothing but ground basses. The Yorkists seemed to be taking the credit for the Glorious, Bloodless Revolution which brought the replacement Protestant monarch, austerity, modesty, a preference for organs rather than strings in church and the Bank of England which has just announced its lowest lending rate since Purcell.
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My Composer of the Year was last week's Composer of the Week. On Monday, presenter Donald MacLeod played Purcell's My Beloved Spake in a 1981 recording by Christ Church Cathedral Choir, Oxford under Simon Preston. The soloists, he said, were anonymous. Not any more! They were alto Matthew Bright, bass Michael Morton, and tenor Neil Mackenzie (a current ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Singer) or Mark Tucker.
On Tuesday, Donald opened the show with Purcell's catch, Once, Twice ,Thrice which contains the repeated line 'so kiss my arse'. Disappointingly, the top part was constrained to substitute the original text for 'arm', so as not to offend delicate ears, while the lower lines were allowed to sing the original. Personally, I was more offended by the censorship...
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Before Christmas, 'Reiner Torheit' asked which operas were being included in the '40-plus' Radio 3 schedule. First, I should explain that, while Handel wrote 42 operas himself, a few are lost (only one of his four Hamburg operas survives - that's Almira). Then there are also the pasticci - assembled from his own works or the works of other composers (this was a common practice at the time). As I understand it, Radio 3 are making up the complement of operas by including some works that weren't strictly counted as operas in Handel's day - e.g. Semele - as well as doing one pasticcio. More will be revealed as the schedule unfolds!
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Why did Handel write so many operas? Was he intrinsically drawn to the theatre? These were two of the questions I knew I would have to answer last Thursday, for the interview that preceded the first of Radio 3's 'complete Handel operas' series (the work broadcast was Almira). I was delighted to be asked to kick off the series, but did wonder how I could possibly answer some of the questions in the few minutes we had available. The two above are particular posers, in quite different ways.
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It's not every day that a story like this one lands in your lap and makes you choke on your cappuccino.
Mendelssohn cracked up? He not only fell in love with 'Swedish Nightingale' Jenny Lind, but wanted her to elope with him to America? And he - the happiest of composers, the proudest of husbands and fathers, the favourite of Queen Victoria, the sunniest of men - threatened suicide if she refused? And she refused...and he died. What?
Click on the link to and read my feature, which carries the full tale today.
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On Wednesday's Composer of the Week, Radio 3 presenter Donald MacLeod played most of Act III of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. This was the only item soprano and evening presenter Catherine Bott picked out when she previewed the 10pm repeat, which, as it was she who was singing Dido, might have seemed immodest had not hers been the one of the best versions of 'When I am Laid' ever recorded. It is tense, tragic and drenched with emotion and she can be justly proud of it.
The Mendelssohn Octet is ringing through the house today - at least, its third violin part, which my husband is busy practising for the London Philharmonic's chamber concert at the Wigmore Hall on 4 March. It involves a lot of "scrubbing" - the intense fizzing-in-the-middle that is part and parcel of high-octane Mendelssohn, his energy, his élan, his lust for life. The Octet does not contain one weak note or one uninspired bar. It's a work of sheer perfection, with irresistible charm as well as amazing originality. And its composer was only 16 years old.
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Haydn and Mozart are known to have played in a string quartet together, Rebecca. Do you know what they played, Denis, and who was listening? This is a concert I would definitely have liked to attend. Any thoughts, b?
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It's great to see there's a discussion thread running as well. Though blogs are, necessarily, personalised (otherwise you might as well just read a book on the composer, or Wikipedia entries!), I think the points that they throw up can generate discussion in all sorts of directions, including starting effectively independent threads on the messageboard.
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