RNCM Opera Gala

RNCM Opera Gala

RNCM Theatre, 22 January 2013

It is the Opera Olympics, no less.

The evening promised world-class arias by world-class composers and it yielded world-class performances of the same by RNCM alumni and students and the Orchestra of Opera North.  Each performance – and there were 17 all told – was a highlight.

Just as with Opera North’s staging of Wagner’s ring cycle, the orchestra were up out of the pit, the choir behind them, the singers taking their place front of stage.  A smart set-up and it worked well here.

Pure indulgence, this concert, just like eating cherries: pleasure that does you good.

Maxim Rysanov and Ashley Wass

Maxim Rysanov and Ashley Wass

Manchester Chamber Concerts Society

RNCM Concert Hall, 19 November 2012

Maxim Rysanov. Photo by Pavel Kozhevnikov and Irina Podushko.

Great viola players are rare, Maxim Rysanov is unique.

He plays a broader range of repertoire, from Bach to Bibik one might say, and has done most in recent years to revitalise the viola, that wondrously fabulist instrument.

The concert in fact began with Bach, a work arranged for solo viola by Simon Rowland-Jones, and ended with Richard Dubugnon’s Incantatio.  There were works by Faure, Debussy, Ravel and Bohuslav Martinu along the way.

Ashley Wass’s piano played a part in all but the Bach, and what made the concert flow, really, was the evident rapport between the two players.  You might characterise Wass’s piano style as being a bit like his suit: bright and businesslike, yet with the occasional delicate feature.

They were called back for, I think, two encores.  A very fine concert indeed.

For details of future Manchester Chamber Concerts Society concerts, kindly click here.

Uri Caine: Beethoven 1 Improvised

Uri Caine: Beethoven 1 Improvised

RNCM Concert Hall, 22 November 2012

Uri Caine. Photo by Bill Douthart.

We saw a master craftsman at work and a fine pianist at play.

Uri Caine’s concert closed day one of Ludwig Van, the RNCM’s Beethoven festival.  The idea is to devote one day every month or so over the coming year to the great composer, playing all his symphonies in the process.

In a talk beforehand, Caine had talked amongst other things about improvisation as practice.  Not just as a way of creating, but as a way also of exploring and understanding a piece of music, taking it apart and putting it back together, seeing how it all works.

He began with pieces by Mozart and Mahler, and then launched into an improvised version of Beethoven’s first symphony.  His playing was exhilarating.

In the Locked Room & Ghost Patrol

In the Locked Room & Ghost Patrol

Music Theatre Wales & Scottish Opera

RNCM Theatre, 7 November 2012

NICHOLAS SHARRATT as Sam (left) and JAMES MORAN-CAMPBELL as Alasdair in GHOST PATROL. Credit: © CLIVE BARDA / ArenaPAL.

A double bill of contemporary opera: that is what you get with this lot.

The first offering, In the Locked Room, was based on a story by Thomas Hardy, and it was an intriguing, mysterious affair.  Perhaps it could best be described as a preternatural love story.  Huw Watkins’ music was eerily effective.

To many, Louise Welsh will be a familiar name.  She is a fine novelist, author of The Cutting Room amongst others, and was the librettist for Ghost Patrol, our second opera of the night.  This might have been – and in parts, perhaps, it skirted with being – a love triangle too, but as it turned out it touched mainly on the far-reaching effects of war.  Their night patrol had undergone an awful ordeal, some foul accident that’s oh so slowly revealed, but when Sam and Alasdair, the two ex-comrades who’re apparently fairly well adjusted, meet again in Civvy Street, all the buried memories come rushing to the surface.

There is again plenty of fine music, this time from Stuart MacRae.  A Scots ballad is hidden in the opera, one of those visions in marble, and the score for the fight sequences is exciting and very effective.  He can do a lot of different things and can do them very well, can Mr. MacRae.  Raymond Short choreographed the fight sequences and it struck me that they’re rarely seen at all in opera, and never as well as this.  I wondered why, then the answer struck me.  Opera singers aren’t generally as – how should one put it? – as mobile as Nicholas Sharratt and James McOran-Campbell are here.

All in all, this was an excellent night at the opera.

Carminho

Carminho

RNCM Theatre, 14 November 2012

Photo by Isabel Pinto.

She is a wonderful talent, this young woman, her voice fine and fierce, as indomitable (you feel) as her heart.

Her own Fado songs were here, alongside some Fado classics and some sung poems, including one by the great Fernando Pessoa (or rather from one of his heteronyms, Maria José to be precise).  Each song or sung poem she made her own.  It was a perilous, emotionally fraught adventure which you took with her as you listened.  And as long as the guitars played their gorgeous music, you were immersed in her joyously anguished struggle.

Singers aren’t always soulful warriors but Carminho is, she’s out there on the stage, in the field, fighting the good fight.  Long may she emerge victorious.

Carminho is singing in Leeds tonight, then she goes over to France.  Full tour dates can be found here.

Noah Stewart

Noah Stewart

The Lowry, 31 May 2012

The celebrated tenor sang a range of songs: operatic arias, show tunes, traditional spirituals.

Just him and a pianist and an occasional partner: on the show tunes he dueted with Kathryn Rudge, an alumnus of the RNCM.

Noah Stewart nattered engagingly between performances as well, proving himself to be a regular guy, a fine fellow.  It was all about the voice, and what an extraordinarily expressive instrument his turned out to be.  This delightful concert could have gone on forever: Stewart was called back for two, no it was definitely three encores, before he was finally allowed to depart.  When silence at last descended it was sweet sorrow indeed.

A beautiful blessing, that’s what the concert felt like.

Calefax @ the RNCM

Calefax

RNCM Concert Hall, 22 March 2012

 

Calefax. Photo by Oliver Boekhoorn

 

This was quite an eye-opener all around – or whatever the aural equivalent might be – as well as being a pleasurable concert in itself.

They’re a reed quintet, Calefax are, and they seem on this showing to specialise in arrangements of music originally written for strings, perhaps piano especially.

The highlight of the concert, amongst works by Debussy, Michelangelo Rossi and Shostakovich (and a Nina Simone song ‘For All We Know’ played as an encore), was the performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

At first you smile with something like indulgence, especially as you hear the bassoon (Alban Wesly) and the basset horn (Jelte Althuis) take the reins, playing music originally written for the harpsichord.  But this smile soon becomes one of delight, almost childish delight, blossoming quickly into unbridled enthusiasm and admiration.  The other instruments represented were saxophone, clarinet and oboe and the way they worked in combination and unison with the richer tones of the other two was simply wonderful. 

What about ear-enhancer as an aural equivalent of eye-opener?

Anyway, this concert made for an enjoyable, an educational and even an edifying experience.  It was wonderful, quite wonderful.

Calefax have a website, which includes tour dates and everything, here.

Portrait of War

Portrait of War

Manchester Camerata

RNCM Concert Hall, 10 March 2012

Manchester Camerata with Music Director, Gábor Takács-Nagy. Photo credit: Jonathan Keenan

The second half of this fine concert was wholly given over to Richard Strauss’s epic Metamorphosen, a requiem to the ravages wrought by the Second World War.

Surely change does not necessarily imply destruction, diminishment and elfin despair.  But for this composer, in this work, it is inevitably so.  And as you listen, Strauss makes you believe it too, such is the force of his vision.

Before Metamorphosen there were three other works, each related yet unlike.  Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin was a kind of happy remembrance, a celebration of friends fallen in war.  The composer is clear that they will live on, in memory and in the music, in lives they’ve touched, not least his own.  There was a new work, Look Me in the Eyes by Aaron Parker, and that too – like the Ravel – turned on an emphatic connection.  Empathy: the impossibility of being simply one person.

Quite my favourite work of the evening was Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.21, which was a thing of wonder, a composition of complex colours.  Man, can Kathryn Stott play the piano: a timely reminder that she’s playing again on Monday 19 March.  This concert, too, will be performed again in a few days, in Leeds this coming Saturday.

Look out also for Manchester Camerata’s forthcoming concert, Portrait Of Faith, at Manchester Cathedral on 4 April (details here).

Louise Hopkins and Piers Lane @ the RNCM

Louise Hopkins and Piers Lane

Manchester Chamber Concerts Society

RNCM Concert Hall, 27 February 2012

Louise Hopkins

Piers Lane. Photo credit: Clive Barda

Kindred as cello and piano are, they’re not too similar in sound.

One can quite imagine them as two currents in a river, the solid strings of the piano all surface force and propulsive power, the cello’s lambent tones the more intense.  However, here sometimes these roles were reversed.

This was a wonderful concert, Louise Hopkins (cello) and Piers Lane (piano) allowing all their class to come to the fore.

Of the five works performed, pride of place must go to the last, Rachmaninov’s Sonata in G minor.  The two musicians did full justice to the profound emotion present – like jewels on a mountaintop – in this intense work.  Dvorak’s Romantic Piece No. 4, though of short duration, was dazzling and altogether sublime.  It gladdened one’s heart.  There was as well the recondite musical complexity of works by Beethoven (his Sonata No 4 in C major) and Janacek (the Pohadka) and the bleak, desperate outcry of Sibelius’ Malinconia.

A concert offering something to everyone for whom music has become a vital necessity.

And Mr. Lane wore some seriously snazzy socks.  Check it: an array of black and white cheques.

This was one of a series of concerts organised by the Manchester Chamber Concerts Society.  For details of future concerts, click here.

RNCM Big Band with Colin Towns

RNCM Big Band with Colin Towns

RNCM Theatre, 14 December 2011

This was a variable concert, in truth: at one extreme excellent, while at the other absolutely brilliant.

The first part was devoted to Big Band arrangements of some eight Cole Porter songs, including ‘What Is this Thing Called Love?’ and ‘I Get a Kick out of You’, while the second part was taken up with nine Beatles and John Lennon numbers.

Of these, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was sumptuous but even so it was surpassed by ‘A Day in the Life’, which was a thing of magnificence and wonder.  How a Big Band was able to capture all of the Beatles’ and George Martin’s jiggery-pokery on this song, and then some, I confess I don’t know.  But they did it, and in spades.

Colin Towns praised the talents of these young musicians more than once, and quite rightly too.  Their talent was on show for all to admire, not least during the several solos throughout the concert.

RNCM Big Band will be performing next with Steve Berry, details of that concert can be found here.