Music takes centre stage
There are musical delights from the very outset, conductor Jérémie Rhorer’s period band Le Circle de l’harmonie colouring the overture with raw pizzazz, and a final crescendo that translates into dizzy expectation.
Rhorer’s swift and seamless direction underpins the strong points of this cast. Michele Angelini’s performance as Count Almaviva combines vocal gymnastics with easeful portrayal of the conniving aristocrat. Just occasionally, his pitch drops off centre.
Catherine Trottmann plays Rosina with red-hot physical energy and a strong, enrapturing top voice. As Bartolo, Peter Kálmán looks and sounds every inch the villain, a stentorian voice that would shake the rafters.
Robert Gleadow’s Basilio is an engaging mix of lugubrious stupidity and wily survivability, and as Berta, Julie Pastraud, ensures her one big number makes characterful impact. Which leaves Figaro, and a portrayal by Guillaume Andrieux that sparkles with nimble wit, artful stagecraft and athletic voice. There IS more to Rossini’s opera than the score. But the virile energy of this performance mostly compensates for what is missing.
Today and tomorrow, 7:15pm
JIM GILCHRIST Usher Hall JJJJ
The NYCOS has supported many international stars at the festival, but this was their first concert in their own right. They began with Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Five Mystical Songs featuring baritone Andrew Mctaggart. He clearly articulated George Herbert’s devotional poems against the backdrop of Michael Bawtree’s gorgeous organ accompaniment. However, we had to wait until the final antiphon to hear the NYCOS in all their glory. Apart from a few passages of hummed accompaniment, the choir weren’t singing for the best part of 15 minutes.
When they got the stage to themselves, their superb a cappella set knocked our socks off. Artistic director Christopher Bell demands, and gets, the best out of these amazing young voices. They showed off their full-bodied textures in Five Spirituals from Tippett’s A Child of our Time and articulate dynamic attack in Musgrave’s delightfully subversive On the Underground Set 2.
These 120 young singers beautifully captured the depths of emotion in
Eric Whitacre’s cantata When David Heard, which describes King David’s grief at the news of Absalom’s death. The way the choir upped the volume and intensity of ‘My son, my son’ was sensational.
Bartók and Zemlinsky, with a spot of tragic, minorkey Haydn to kick things off, made for quite a dense, demanding morning offering at the Queen’s Hall. And in retrospect, Bartók and Zemlinsky’s second quartets might have been simply too similar in style to go side by side.
But the young players of the Dover Quartet, formed in Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute just a decade ago and here making their International Festival debut, were entirely at ease in this unremittingly intense, emotionally exhausting music. Their performances blazed with fierce commitment, vividly characterised and strongly projected but never overwrought.
They brought a glorious sense of lyricism to Bartók’s churning opening movement, and its Arabinspired scherzo was furiously fast, and crackled with sardonic wit. Their account of Zemlinsky’s massive, single-movement Second Quartet was wonderfully persuasive too: they discovered a natural sense of organic growth between its sharply defined sections, with remarkably unflagging energy and sustained intensity throughout the work’s helterskelter 45 minutes.
Only their opening Haydn – the serious-minded Quartet in F minor, Op. 20 No. 5 – struggled to convince. With its copious rubato and forthright vibrato, not to mention its fulsome, luxuriant tone, it sounded a lot like – well, Brahms. Nonetheless, this was a deft, compelling traversal of two 20th-century masterpieces – albeit ones that at times sounded disconcertingly alike.