Music
More than a yard of tickets to the Proms!
Arias and drinks on the lawn of the Walled Garden in aid of Chiswick House and Gardens.
My photograph shows the two singers, Milly Forrest and Lauren Joyanne Morris, as shining colour in the darkness and that’s how this evening felt: at last bringing the colour of live singing back to us still in the gloom of Covid.
There was great musical energy from the artistes and a pretty good setting. Even with the public health restrictions, it was so much better than anything online or recorded or broadcast where you don't get the shared experience of going to the concert venue or the communal response to the music: online is just not so human. But there’s still a long way to go. Meanwhile, we can hope the proceeds help to give encouragement to these local young artistes who have trained at London’s Royal College of Music, as well as some finance to the venue, Chiswick House.
Milly Forrest and Lauren Joyanne Morris’s programme was varied including opera arias and songs by Handel, Dvorak, Bizet and Humperdinck. Tom Lehrer’s satirical Poisoning Pigeons in the Park finally got an audience reaction beyond polite applause. Spacing the audience out, as currently required, does inhibit audience bonding and the audience’s rapport with the performers.
Read more: Opera in the Walled Garden: Chiswick House Festival
Radio 3 Outside Broadcast trucks at the Proms, 2018
No opportunity this year to queue outside the Albert Hall, to stand in the hall promenader to promenader, sweaty shoulder to sweaty shoulder, within spitting distance of the brass and avoiding eye contact with the string players. Ah, those summers of not so long ago. But we have instead a tasty season of BBC recordings from this iconic but acoustically challenging venue.
In presenting these my comments, we have to be aware of the various difficult circumstances of live concert sound balancing. Limitations of crewing, rig and rehearsal time, compatibility with television and so on. That our friends at Radio 3 manage so much is to be celebrated not nit-picked. Nonetheless, in scheduling a season from the archive (for reasons we well understand), it’s also an invitation to compare the styles of stereo sound we have enjoyed, especially as they are rebroadcast this year in glorious HD sound, in quick succession and within the same presentation format. Good to hear at least some of the original presentation, voices no longer on our radios.
But just to comment on the stereo sound. I’m listening on full-range speakers in my basement room which has extensive acoustic treatment and very low ambient noise, comparable to a sound studio control room.
Live opera restarts with Mozart’s chilling D minor chord from the Berwaldhallen, Stockholm, as their socially distanced production of Don Giovanni breaks the silence from the opera houses since March.
Symbolism pervades even more than usual in a Mozart opera. Don Giovanni, the promiscuous but lovable rake would be a super-spreader in Covid-19 parlance, there’s the masked ball of Act 1 and the banquet in Act 2, which arrives in take-away boxes.
The Brighton Philharmonic return with their New Year Viennese Gala. Varied as ever and not restricted to the music of the Strauss family of the 1860s and 1870s, Brighton’s own orchestra draws a near sell-out audience to Brighton Dome on New Year’s Eve. Conductor Stephen Bell mounted the podium with a hop, skip and a jump and bounced along in the programme.
The Brighton Philharmonic is growing in strength and confidence, it’s obviously not an international orchestra though a number of the individual players work at that level for their day job. A sparking Die Fledemaus overture opened the concert with glorious woodwind. Ailish Tynan, soprano, was in good voice for the first of several vocal pieces. The woodwind continued to delight, as did the precise xylophonist. Franz Lehár’s Gold and Silver Waltz rounded off the first part of the programme, the strings giving a credible swirl to the sumptuous main waltz tune even in the relatively austere architecture of the Brighton Dome.
Parkour, acrobatics, plyometrics, clownery and some very modern on-stage attitude combined in Super Sunday by Race Horse Company of Finland. Six athletic artistes and their crew won over a mixed Christmas audience with their Contemporary Circus skills and dark wit in this full-length performance at Brighton Dome. Many of the tricks which looked so simple were probably the most difficult to carry off because of the critical timing co-ordination and delicate balance. We saw the human catapults, the life-size teddy bear rocketed to the roof and the acrobatics on teeterboards and trampolines. Their iconic hamster wheel routine, which ended the show, was a triumph from another dimension, the performers working acrobatics within the moving reference and balance of the revolving wheels.
Read more: Super Sunday - Race Horse Company at Brighton Dome
