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‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ at English National Opera

The final work in ENO’s 2022/23 season, a staging of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, made for a poignant, beautiful and moving close to a season beset with anxiety about the future of ENO in is current home, the London Coliseum, after Arts Council England (ACE) slashed its funding and demanded that the opera find a new home outside London. This is all part of the government’s so-called “levelling up” policy, but for many of us who care about such things, it – and other acts of desecration by ACE – feels like an attack on culture and also on excellence.

These points were more than touched upon in an emotional pre-performance speech by Stuart Murphy, outgoing CEO of ENO, who warned Nicholas Serota, Michael Gove and others that “history is watching you”. Murphy’s speech garnered enthusiastic support, with a few shouts of “Tories out!” from the balcony.

What followed was a performance which demonstrated exactly why we should value ENO and what it does – and what makes it distinctive from London’s other great opera house.

Of course Symphony of Sorrowful Songs is not an opera. It’s an orchestral work in three movements by Henryk Gorecki (1933-2010), a composer hitherto almost unkown outside his native Poland until this work hit the classical charts in the early 1990s in a recording featuring soprano Dawn Upshaw with the London Sinfonietta. The album remained in the charts for weeeks and weeks, and is one of the biggest selling contemporary classical pieces of all time.

The music is minimalist in style, approachable but also highly affecting, with an insistent pulse throughout which could suggest a human heartbeat. The only voice is that of a soprano, in the ENO production Nicole Chevalier, who in three meditative movements offers a triptych of motherhood – the first a lament of the Virgin Mary, the second a message written on the wall of a Gestapo prison cell, and the third a mother searching for her lost son. The production was presented in Polish with Englisha and Polish subtitles.

The work lends itself to a theatrical presentation and is rich in religious imagery, in particular the Pietà and figures at the base of the cross from the Crucifixion, both of which were referenced in the opening movement. A simple set with two apertures of light overhead created the sense of a cavernous stone tomb. At the back, a figure lay on a suspended slab while a woman dragged a cloth from a grave. Gathering it up in her arms, the cloth became at once a cradled child and a shroud. Throughout the performance, extraordinary lighting and video effects projected tears or waves, and the fuzzy images from an ante-natal ultrasound scan, which served to enhance and reinforce the message of the music and the words.

In the second scene, in a Gestapo prison cell, we see that the stone walls are in fact a series of closely-meshed ropes through which mysterious, masked figures emerge and depart. In the final scene, the tangled ropes suggests the mess and fog of war as the mother searches for her lost son. The resonances with the war in Ukraine were very obvious here and this made for a very moving episode in a work freighted with a visceral sense of poignancy and loss.

Nicole Chevalier’s translucent yet rich soprano brought power and tenderness to Gorecki’s long-spun lines, while conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya and the ENO orchestra gave an unsentimental but not less committed and absorbing reading of the score which appreciate the narrative arc of the individual movements and the work as a whole. The overall effect was compelling, deeply moving and yet ultimately uplifting: the closing moments of the final movement, the mother spreads her wings and ascends towards heaven, in an image redolent of the art of William Blake.

An ambitious, imaginative and haunting production from ENO, which demonstrates exactly why we must treasure and support this organisation.

Symphony of Sorrowful Songs continues until 6 May

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The De Kooning Ensemble, Weymouth Lunchtime Chamber Concerts, Wednesday 27th October 2021

Fresh from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, this young piano quartet presented a sumptuously programme, with two dramatic and unashamedly romantic works by Frank Bridge and Josef Suk bookending a highly contrasting contemporary piece  by young Iranian-American composer Darius Paymai. Pianist Will Bracken stepped in for the Ensemble’s usual pianist Lewis Bell.

Opening with Bridge’s Phantasy Piano Quartet in f-sharp minor, a single-movement work composed in 1910, which embraces sonata form with its exposition and reprise separated by andante and scherzo sections, The De Kooning Ensemble matched this work’s fluency, variety and lucidity with a lively, committed and imaginatively-nuanced performance.

After the passionate flourishes of Bridge’s Phantasy, Darius Paymai’s Piano Quartet offered a complete contrast in both mood and textures. A work comprising only a handful of notes, its dynamic range often barely above piano, it owed something to the music of Arvo Pärt in its haunting simplicity. It was performed with immense control and sensitivity, and provided an absorbing, meditative interlude in the middle of the concert.

The De Kooning Ensemble are recipients of the Ivan Sutton Prize for Chamber Music  and their performance of Josef Suk’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in A minor revealed exactly why they were awarded first prize. Throughout we were treated to very tight, perfectly coordinated ensemble playing but also an opportunity to enjoy each individual instrument. From the elegant lyricism of Jessica Meakin’s violin to the warm sonority of Freya Hicks on viola, the mellow cantabile of the cello (Evie Coplan) to the sweetness of the piano (Will Bracken) in the second movement, this was a performance brimming with character and command.

Watch the livestream video from St Mary’s Church, Weymouth

Meet the Artist interview with The De Kooning Ensemble

Weymouth Lunchtime Chamber Concerts series continues on 17th November with a performance of music by Malcolm Arnold and Ludwig van Beethoven by Peter Fisher (violin) and Margaret Fingerhut (piano). Details here

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An aura of concentrated stillness descends over the London Coliseum as the opening measures of Philip Glass’s opera Satygraha are sung, simply and eloquently, by tenor Toby Spence. He is M.K. Gandhi: dressed in a formal dark suit, he is a young lawyer in South Africa, not yet the stoic nonviolent activist, the “Mahatma”, in his distinctive white dhoti.

Satyagraha, a sanskrit word meaning “truth force”, is a meditation on the early life of Gandhi when, as a lawyer working in South Africa in the early years of the twentieth century, he encountered racial discrimination: his response was the development of non-violent protest as a political tool. This central narrative feels appropriately topical in our troubled times of suspicion towards migrants, refugees, people of colour and those of different faiths, and this gives Satyagraha a relevance and immediacy which makes it all the more compelling.The attendant presences through the three acts of Tolstoy, the Bengali poet Tagore, and Martin Luther King respectively remind us of the wider influences and connections of Gandhi’s story and his philosophy.

Phelim McDermott’s gorgeously theatrical production, first staged at ENO in 2007 (when it broke box office records for modern opera), is a feast for eyes and ears, and the combination of a visually arresting set, enhanced by puppetry, film and projections, and Glass’s haunting, mesmeric soundscape make this quite unlike traditional operas. In fact, someone on Twitter compared it to Parsifal and while I have never seen Parsifal, I can appreciate the comparison: the length, the scale, the absorbing narrative and the sense of a whole art work – the Wagnerian Gesamtwerk.  And in mixing the sacred text of the Bhagavad Gita with the real life incidents of  Gandhi’s formative experiences in South Africa, the opera also has the feel of a grand oratorio.

If you saw ENO’s Akhnaten, also directed by Phelim McDermott, many of the tropes will be familiar: the slow motion and long ritualistic set-pieces, the visual and poetic allegories. These all inform and enhance the narrative – and you need it because the libretto is in Sanskrit and there are no surtitles! (But thankfully comprehensive programme notes, which made for interesting reading on my homeward train journey afterwards.)

The ENO chorus is on superb form, as always, and the orchestra was masterfully and sensitively directed by Karen Kamensek, a Glass specialist, who brought colour and vibrancy to Glass’s spooling repetitions and piquant harmonic shifts.

The entire experience was profound, moving and very beautiful.

Performances continue at ENO until February 27 — details here.