Thomas Adès and Friends. Milton Court 5 November 2013

Britten: Suite for Violin and Piano Op. 6

Adès: Lieux retrouvés, Catch, Court Studies

Stravinsky: Suite from The Soldier’s Tale

Thomas Adès (pn), Anthony Marwood (vn), Matthew Hunt (cl), Louise Hopkins (vc)

Thomas Adès is the ideal artist for Milton Court, and Milton Court the ideal venue for Thomas Adès. In the few weeks the new hall has been open it has been put through its paces by all manner of ensembles, from large choirs to string quartets. The acoustic is good, but it has its own identity, which hasn’t always suited the performers, at least not until they’ve gotten used to its ways. The sound is very immediate, giving instrumental colours an almost tactile quality. It is resonant without being especially warm. Everything comes across with real clarity, and even at the quietest dynamics, the sound is always arresting.

Much the same could be said of Adès, both as composer and pianist. His music is filled with dark, translucent colours, rarely abrasive but always imposing. Whatever dynamic or tempo he employs, he always ensures a clarity of texture that gives his music a sense of openness and honesty. And at the piano, too, he is always projecting textures and colours, propelled by a skittish energy, but giving every element within the texture its due exposure. So the Milton Court acoustic plays to his strengths. The sound here may not be enveloping and comfortable, like at the Wigmore, but Adès has no interest in comfort. He specialises in music with an edge, textures with focus that communicate directly to the listener, and this hall is clearly in sympathy with his intentions.

The programme opened with Britten’s early Suite for Violin and Piano, Op. 6. By the standards of mature Britten, this is radical music, filled with Bartók-inspired acerbic textures. But coming from Adès and Anthony Marwood it sounded even more extreme. Marwood played most of the work with a bright, penetrating tone, qualities again emphasised by the hall. Adès followed suit, giving the piano part a buzzing, electric quality, jittery and impulsive, but also filled out with well-weighted and fully-sustained sonorities. Almost everything that followed was from recent times, yet this 1934 work, in Adès and Marwood’s hands, came across as the most modern on the programme.

Gerald Barry doesn’t give a lot away with the title of his clarinet and piano work Low, nor with his seven word programme note “It is sometimes high and sometimes low”, but the piece is fairly self-explanatory. The clarinet and piano are equal partners in the duet, and for the most part the piano plays a single line, often in rhythmic unison and at an equal dynamic with the clarinet. The rhythms are fast and irregular, and get faster as the work goes on. In fact, it turns into a feat of endurance towards the end for clarinettist Matthew Hunt, and although the strain showed in the last minute or two, he made it safely to the end.

Lieux retrouvés is a major work for cello and piano, in which Adès explores a range of involved textures and ideas over the course of four substantial movements. Adès’ writing for the cello is as idiomatic and imaginative as his writing for the piano, and a range of extended techniques are employed, but never merely for effect. The piano part owes much to Ligeti’s Etudes, like them it often relies on flowing but metrically ambiguous textures. Cellist Louise Hopkins struggled with much of this music, understandably given its obvious difficulty, and her intonation was unsteady throughout. Fortunately her work in the second half of the concert was far better.

A Soldier’s Tale was on the abrasive side: needlessly difficult listening. The performance was very much led by Marwood, his violin counter-rhythms dominating even the more regular piano part, although Adès was able to fit it in beneath without too much trouble. But there was little sense of ensemble here, and the three players seemed in opposition, each trying to spit out their rhythms more brutally and abrasively than the others. All of Stravinsky’s clever rhythms came through, but few of his clever harmonies.

Catch is the nearest Adès’ music gets to comedy I suspect. It is written for piano trio with itinerant clarinet. The clarinettist is offstage at the start and spends the whole work mobile, coming and going, playing backstage and in the hall. But Adès isn’t playing this for laughs. The focus of attention is always the three stationary players, and their music seems both dictated the clarinet’s obbligato line and the player’s position relative to the ensemble. Adès’ textures are as clear and beguiling as ever, although his motivations for once are obscure in the extreme.

To end, the Court Studies freely adapted from Adès’ opera The Tempest. Any notions of levity, however slight, were immediately quashed by this very serious music. The programme note tells us that the music comes from scenes of dialogue and argument, but for the most part this work seems homophonic and unified in its textures and outlook. What great music it is! No tricks here, and no gimmicks, just well-conceived and well-realised musical ideas, expertly paced and, as ever with Adès, expertly voiced among the four instruments.

Milton Court is clearly going to be a great asset for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and its uses are going to stretch far beyond just student recitals. The theme of tonight’s event was prestige, the school showing off both its former students (all four were ex-GSMD) and its fabulous new facilities. In the cut-throat world of London music colleges, where getting an upper hand on your rivals can have significant benefits, this approach is understandable, and I was certainly impressed. The event was the first in an “Alumni Recital Series”, with appearances to follow from Anne Sofie von Otter, Tasmin Little and Toby Spence. Star performers indeed, and in this exciting new performing space, all are sure to shine.

This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is availible to listen on demand until 12 Novemeber 2013 at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03g30q0 

BBC Singers debut Milton Court

Milton Court is open for business, and it’s a beauty. The Guildhall School of Music and Drama, presumably with the help of some wealthy friends, has set up London’s newest concert venue, and given the paucity of adequate performance spaces in the capital, that has to be big news. The hall is situated on the first floor of a new tower block adjacent to the Barbican, and where its neighbour is the epitome of dour brutalism, everything here is corporate elegance; lots of concrete and glass, but all in pastel shades. The hall itself is a shoebox, mostly lined with wood panelling, but with some bare concrete surfaces too. The obvious comparison is with Kings Place, with which it shares many features. This hall is bigger though, wider overall and with a significantly larger stage. Also, it’s not quite as shoeboxy, and has a pronounced bulge in the middle, tapering slightly front and back. The hall has been open for a few weeks now, and various ensembles have been putting the space through its paces. Yesterday it was the turn of the BBC Singers to make their debut, with a season opener of Copland, Whitacre and Reich.

So how does the hall sound? I took a straw poll after the performance: a performer told me it was too dry, while a sound engineer told me it was too resonant, predicable responses both. The sound is certainly immediate in here, and the performers are given a real sense of presence. The incessant projection of detail could well get taxing on the ear in more angular music, although that was never a danger with the rounded tones of the BBC Singers. Despite its relatively large size, the acoustic has clearly been designed with chamber music in mind. At lower dynamics there is a real sense of intimacy, and there’s never any danger of missing salient details. But that precision is accompanied by an attractive warmth. Sound-wise, that’s the big difference between Milton Court and Kings Place, the latter has a drier and less elaborate profile; the sound here may not be as true, but it has more character.

When the music gets loud, though, a problem emerges. The detail disappears and the higher frequencies start to predominate, making for shrill sounding tuttis. That’s not necessarily a problem for chamber music, but a choir like this, who can really project, need to take care.  The concert began with Copland’s In the Beginning, and the louder sections of this pushed the space to its limits. The Copland was followed by some Whitacre, up to his usual tricks, which all sounded fine here, and really capitalised on the distinctive warmth of the space. After the interval, the Singers were joined by Endymion (significantly expanded to include Ensemble Bash) for a performance of Steve Reich’s seminal The Desert Music in the composer’s arrangement for chamber forces. As well as orchestral instruments, the piece also calls for electronic keyboards and amplification of the voices, making it a very different proposition for such a resonant space. Some baffles have been installed around the upper gallery to dull the sound, and they work well. They’re not very elegant though, resembling giant grey rollerblinds. Kings Place certainly maintains its lead in this respect, with elegant automatic curtains across its huge blind arcades. Considering the difficulties Reich poses the players and singers, the performance was a good one. The strings sometimes struggled though, and it was just as well that the percussion parts were played by specialists in this repertoire: the marimbas alone held the music together.

Milton Court is clearly going to be a real asset to London’s musical life, but it’s not the panacea many of us had hoped for. However many players will fit on the stage, the acoustic dictates that this will remain a chamber venue. That’s not what London needs; we’ve already got the Wigmore and Kings Place, and good as the sound is here, it is trumped by both of those. Symphony orchestras remain saddled with the opaque sound of the Festival Hall and dull sound of the Barbican (and don’t get me started on the Proms). On the other hand, Milton Court has a distinctive aural identity, more immediate than the Wigmore but rounder than Kings Place. The BBC Singers, and everybody else who performs here, will need some time to work out exactly how best to exploit this. I can imagine piano recitals sounding great, and the space is likely prove to be an excellent recording venue for small ensembles. But record labels, string quartets, broadcasters and everybody else are just going have to take their place in the queue. After all, this is the Guildhall’s venue, and term has just started, so chances are they’re going to want it back.

Dialogues des Carmelites GSMD

Dialogues des Carmélites: Students of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Clive Timms (conductor), Silk Street Theatre, GSMD, London, 3.3.11

Marquis de la Force: Koji Terada

Le Chevalier: Charlie Mellor

Blanche: Anna Patalong

Thierry and Deuxième Commissaire: Matthew Wright

Madame de Croissy: Cátia Moreso

Mère Marie de l'Incarnation: Sylvie Bedouelle

Monsieur Javelinot and Le geôlier: Matthew Staff

Madame Lidoine: Sky Ingram

L'Aumônier: Alberto Sousa

Soeur Mathilde: Roisín Walsh

Premier Commissaire: Alexandros Tsilogiannis

Mère Jeanne: Sioned Gwen Davis

Conductor: Clive Timms

Director: Stephen Barlow

Designer: David Farley

Lighting Designer: Declan Randall

Video Designer: Chris Jackson

The final scene of this production of the Carmélites is astonishing. I'll confess that I've only just come out of the performance, but the effect is overwhelming. It is very easy to mess up the execution scene, especially in a low budget production like this, and to assume that the music will do all the work. Well, there is none of that here, they gauge it just right. Without giving too much of the ending away, the guillotine is actually on the stage, which to my mind brings valuable immediacy to the conclusion (I'm in favour of the plastic baby in Jenůfa too) and the sisters are picked off one by one with spotlight beams.

That final scene is the saving grace of this production, and the other staging decisions add up to about an equal number of hits and misses. The work lends itself to student performance; dramatically it punches above its weight, and Poulenc prided himself on the singability of all the roles. Most of the scenes are set in a convent, and there is no point in trying to sex that up too much when you're on a tight budget.

The stage design here centres on a small, square piece of raked staging that can rotate to change the audience's perspective on the action. That works well enough, but it is framed by large baffles in the shape of shards of glass around a broken window (broken, of course by the revolutionaries). These move in an out as the action demands. Perhaps the idea is to create a sense of claustrophobia as they encroach. But they wobble and are quite noisy when they move. Worst of all, they make the convent look like the batcave, an impression the nuns' habits do little to dispel.

All of the major roles are taken by postgraduate students, and all are equal to the task, although only a few excel. The first act poses two casting problems for a young company; the Marquis (Blanche's father) and Madame de Croissy, the old prioress. Both Koji Terada and Cátia Moreso do their best to seem convincing in these senior roles, but both lack credibility. They both also struggle with some of the lower notes and with the occasional long phrases.

This isn't really an opera to stage if you have a strong male cast, so either the Guildhall is doing better for female singers these days or they've got a production of something like Billy Budd lined up for next season. Of the gentlemen, only Charlie Mellor as Le Chevalier (Blanche's brother) seemed underused. He has a fine tenor voice and a real stage presence. The character is quite wet really, but Mellor is able to create the necessary empathy make the part matter.

The nuns all have distinctive voices, which is just as well, as Poulenc does very little musically to distinguish them. Sylvie Bedouelle as Mère Marie has a decisive and focussed tone, not a pretty sound as such, but ideal for the part. Sophie Junker is destined for great things. She sings the role of Soeur Constance beautifully, with compassion and immediacy. I wonder, though, if she would be better off on the recital stage. Her musicality does not fit so easily with the dramatic pretence and I often wished she could just stand and sing to us.

But the star of the show is undoubtedly Anna Patalong as Blanche. She has an astonishingly mature and sophisticated voice. It has richness and timbral complexity that puts all of her colleagues in the shade. She was as close to note perfect as any opera house could require. And she can really act. Remember the name.

Clive Timms conducted with the firm hand that this sort of performance requires, but maintained a sense of chanson flexibility throughout. The playing from the orchestra was a mixed affair. There were some serious ensemble problems in the first act, but most of the orchestra settled into it by the second. The only exception was the brass, who had a very bad night. Surely a major London music college can field a brass section that's better than this. Poulenc keeps them busy, true enough, but that's no excuse for the many splits and the unrepentant sins against intonation that not even the mother superior herself could find it in her heart to absolve.

But on the whole this was a great evening of opera. For those who tire of going to the same old venues to hear the same old singers, I'd heartily recommend a visit to the odd music college production to find out what the stars of tomorrow are up to. Not everything you will meet will be up to the highest standards the London stage has to offer, but some of these singers are clearly destined for great things. And if ever you see an opera billing that includes the name Anna Patalong, make sure you get a ticket.

Gavin Dixon