By all accounts, the world première of Elgar’s Sea Pictures at the October 1899 Norwich Festival made quite a splash. Elgar conducted, and the soloist was the 27-year-old contralto Clara Butt – dressed in a silky, sinuous number which drew gasps in those corseted late-Victorian days. Elgar thought she looked ‘like a mermaid’; the critics, of course (of course!) confined themselves to the music. They reported that Elgar and Butt were called back four times, and the second of the five songs – the delicate ‘In Haven’, to words by Elgar’s wife Caroline Alice – was singled out for particular praise
Interesting how tastes change. When Edward Gardner and the mezzo Beth Taylor performed Sea Pictures last month with the London Philharmonic, it was the third song, ‘Sabbath Morning at Sea’, that drew a spontaneous burst of applause. The poem is by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and perhaps its tone of religious exaltation (Elgar set it to music just months before beginning The Dream of Gerontius) spoke particularly deeply to the Royal Festival Hall audience in these restless times.
Or perhaps it was just that Taylor’s singing was so glorious. Taylor was a finalist in Cardiff Singer of the World in 2023 and she’s been picking up the sort of gigs (Handel to Wagner) all over Europe that suggest that she’s going places. At least one critic has already called her the successor to Janet Baker, though I’m not sure how helpful that is. Baker made a classic recording of Sea Pictures with John Barbirolli, back in the 1960s, and since hearing Taylor I’ve been listening, relistening and coming to the conclusion that while both singers have qualities that are vital in Elgar – including a deep nobility of sound – they’re each very much their own artist.
Though in Taylor’s case, that sound really is something special, with a lower register like Black Velvet. The drink, you understand, not the fabric: rich, luxurious and gloriously retro, but somehow fresh and reviving too. It’s a voice that you want to gulp down by the tankard, and with the opening ‘Sea Slumber Song’ Taylor lifted a concert that was already very fine into the category of an Occasion. Gardner excels at supporting singers, and the LPO brought out the layered silvers, greys and blues of Elgar’s accompaniment. The halo of muted violins with which Elgar surrounds the voice in the final verse of ‘In Haven’ was the sort of effect that actually gains in magic from being handled with
such precision.
With the opening Taylor lifted a concert that was already very fine into the category of an Occasion
Intoxicating stuff, in other words, and it feels churlish to suggest that the performance might have peaked too early. The vocal/orchestral balance didn’t seem quite so assured in the final song (‘The Swimmer’), though there was some exquisite detailing from the LPO string principals in ‘Where Corals Lie’. The fact remains that no one goes into an all-Elgar concert expecting Sea Pictures to be the highlight; still less to encounter the rapture that Taylor and Gardner created in those first three songs. And this came after a performance of In the South (brisk, smart, with piccolo and harp very much on parade) in which Gardner wafted soft mists around principal viola Benjamin Roskams’s moonlight serenade. Sospiri and the Enigma variations followed after the interval, and both gained immensely from Gardner’s way of supporting a melody and helping the singers in the orchestra (violins, cellos, clarinets) to do just that – to sing, even without words.
The Royal Academy of Music ended its autumn with a production of Carmen, directed by Harry Fehr and conducted with a vigorous blend of sensuality and sunlight by Christopher White. As usual, there were two casts, and on the first night the voices that leapt out were Zixin Tang – fearsomely self-possessed as Carmen – and Grace Hope-Gill as Micaela: bringing an intensity and brilliance that you don’t typically associate with this role. Konstantinos Akritides was a plausibly Gallic-sounding José and Caroline Blair (Frasquita) found a detailed, interesting personality in a part that’s usually little more than set-dressing.
Visually, it was the standard updating with 1980s costumes in front of a colour-washed screen on which we occasionally saw video footage of the characters. The smugglers stuffed cocaine inside toy bulls, which was droll. But with any college production, the overriding purpose is to prepare student performers for the profession, and this is exactly the sort of thing that they’ll encounter in regional European opera houses. If you’re after something a bit more traditional, the free online channel OperaVision is currently showing the 2023 Rouen production of Carmen, which used original prompt-books to recreate the set designs, costumes and movements from the opera’s première in 1875. It’s a marvel of scholarship, and the results are eye-opening in all kinds of ways: this is literally the staging that the composer intended. You’ll recall that it was a resounding flop.
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