The National Opera Studio, supported by our main opera companies, runs a Young Artists course each year for singers on the verge of professional careers. Creating concert programmes that give equal experience and exposure to all the participants, while also offering artistic coherence, is a tall order; but this opening evening, coordinated by the experienced director, Keith Warner, managed to square this circle with elegance.
The performance space down in Wandsworth Town is a simple black box, with, in this case, the audience seated in the round and a few minimal props in the form of benches, chairs and tables. Accompaniment is provided by a grand piano, played by a sequence of acccomplished apprentice repetiteurs, with Andrew Griffiths offering experienced guidance from the conductor’s chair.
The theme of the evening was ‘Shakespeare Revisited’, but this was a visitation through an unexpected and innovative set of pathways. While all the operatic extracts were settings of Shakespeare texts, the composers were far from the usual suspects. All the settings were by contemporary or overlooked composers without the accumulated varnish of performance tradition – thus leaving the way open for the Young Artists to find their own uninhibited way. And for the audience this was an excellent reminder of just how varied responses to Shakespeare continue to be within the world of opera. Between the musical items each performer in turn offered a Shakespeare soliloquy, acting on the valuable insight that pointing and delivering a section of verse is akin to preparing an operatic aria, presenting a valuable parallel training in word painting. While it would have been helpful to have all these items identified in the programme, this is an exercise and performance technique that really should be deployed more often.
In a short review it is hardly possible to do justice to a batting order with so many players of quality. However, there were many highlights and points to admire in vocal writing that is frequently very exposed and technically demanding. I was also much impressed at the high quality of the acting from all the performers whether in part or simply in silent chorus roles. Collective collaboration was very much to the fore as well as solo opportunities.
In the first half I was particularly taken by two scenes. It was good to hear Olivia Rose Tringham and Aleksander Kacjuk-Jagielnik perform the final duet from Samuel Barber’s Antony & Cleopatra, a work still sadly underperformed. This is sumptuous music, both lavishly romantic and self-indulgently decadent, to which their representations did full justice. The same two artists were also part of a completely contrasted enactment of the Player’s Scene from Humphrey Searle’s Hamlet. This setting had real dramatic bite and tension, despite the fact that we all know the plot, with wholly credible characterisations from Egor Sergeev and Luvo Maranti, as Hamlet and Lucianus.
In the second half I was immediately struck by the fine gradations of tone and exquistely floated high notes in Ana-Carmen Balestra’s rendition of Alison Bauld’s Portia Song, and the dynamic tensions Emyr Lloyd Jones and Balestra created in another scene from Hamlet, this time from the opera by Brett Dean, made all the more uncomfortable by the percussive effects generated offstage by members of the company. But perhaps the biggest surprise was a world premiere of a recently rediscovered ten-minute scene by Dorothy Howell, setting a section of The Winter’s Tale. This offered fresh moments of individual characterisation and infectious dance rhythms compellingly put across by the whole ensemble. Howell’s works deserve, to be better known and it is good to see the National Opera Studio playing their part in this process.
I look forward very much to reviewing the next outing of this highly talented cohort.
Director: Keith Warner
Conductor: Andrew Griffiths
Performers: Members of the Young Artists Programme
3 & 4 December 2024
2 hrs with interval
Photo Credit: Julian Guidera