If you feel helpless in the face of world events and battered by 24-hour news, you are in good company: America’s greatest living composer, John Adams, feels the same. His latest work, Frenzy, given its world premiere by its dedicatees Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra last week, is Adams’s pulsating reflection on our frenetic times, a leap away from his Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986), yet packed with the same excitement and energy. He says: “For me, ‘frenzy’ sums up the feeling, at times overwhelming, of contemplating the modern world around us, especially as it is imagined in our daily doses of digital news and information.”
To achieve the required level of agitation in his 18-minute “short symphony”, he discards minimalism to explore the development of a single motif, one that worries and frets its way into many different guises, sometimes finding relief, but always with a hint of dread running underneath. Celeste, vibraphone, harp and piano send lightning flashes of unease across a sometimes darkly eerie orchestral landscape, and woodwind chatter menacingly until an insistent drum beat drives the strings and brass into a despairing, panicky finish. This could become a theme tune for our age.
It formed the centrepiece of a star-spangled, all-American programme, bookended by resolutely perky overtures by Gershwin and featuring his irresistible piano concerto, with the formidable Kirill Gerstein as soloist, all his mercurial jazz credentials on display. A five-star evening.
Frenzy is not a word you would associate with Tom Rakewell, the doomed protagonist in The Rake’s Progress, Stravinsky’s 1951 neoclassical opera. Lazy, unsatisfied with his lot and driven by material desires, he is wide open to manipulation on his road to ruin. Stravinsky sought inspiration from across the musical spectrum for his chewy score, drawing chiefly on the model of Mozart’s operas and introducing a harpsichord to accompany the recitatives, something not used for 200 years.
English Touring Opera (pairing this work with Puccini’s Manon Lescaut in their spring tour) make a neat feature of this by placing harpsichord and player Satoko Doi-Luck on stage, an extra character among the pagan mummers, dressed in designer April Dalton’s straw and animal mask costumes, who dance round a brightly coloured maypole. These are Tom’s bucolic neighbours, whom he quickly abandons for the promise of fortune and the temptations of London, much to the dismay of his sweetheart, Anne Trulove.
Polly Graham’s production makes full use of the company’s accomplished ensemble singers, though sometimes to the detriment of the narrative. They make up a constant parade of country folk, crooks, swindlers, whores and frantic auction-bidders, overcomplicating what is in essence a simple if devastating tale. Musically, things are on firmer ground, with incisive conducting from Jack Sheen and some fine singing, chiefly from baritone Jerome Knox, a suave, plausible Nick Shadow, who lures Tom to his doom. Soprano Nazan Fikret is deeply affecting as fragile yet resolute Anne. Frederick Jones, as Tom, became unwell on opening night, so his understudy, the elegant tenor Brenton Spiteri, sang the final two acts from the wings.
Tim Albery’s 2009 production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman returns for its third revival at Covent Garden, expansively conducted by Henrik Nánási. Michael Levine’s designs startle under David Finn’s dramatic lighting; the chorus, alert and virile, is in tremendous form, but some of the principals are too vocally subdued for this high drama.
The Dutchman, condemned to sail the seven seas for eternity unless he can find redemption in a faithful bride, has been a signature role for Bryn Terfel since the inception of this production. There is a hollowness in the voice today, but that serves him well in his portrayal of the exhausted, mythical wanderer. Swedish soprano Elisabet Strid, making her Royal Opera debut as Senta, the Dutchman’s putative bride, sings with creamy intensity but is sometimes overwhelmed by the riptide of Wagner’s surging orchestra, a fate also suffered by her hapless suitor Erik, tenor Toby Spence.
Riding high above the waves, though, are American-Finnish tenor Miles Mykkanen, making an impressive ROH debut as the Steersman, Danish bass Stephen Milling as Senta’s father, Daland, Ukrainian mezzo Kseniia Nikolaieva as Senta’s nurse Mary, and the hard-working orchestra, flooding our ears with Wagnerian brilliance.
As lockdown took hold in 2020, pianist Tom Poster and violinist Elena Urioste planned to play a new piece every day online “just for a while”. In the event, they performed for 88 days, as #UriPosteJukebox went viral. In response to fans’ requests, Poster made dozens of arrangements of jazz standards, pop songs and film scores, which they dotted in between more conventional violin and piano repertoire.
The couple’s enterprise won them a Royal Philharmonic Society award and they now take their joyful jukebox on the road, turning up earlier this month at the imaginative Classical Vauxhall festival and bringing the house down with classy arrangements of Gershwin, Lili Boulanger, Nat King Cole and even favourite Disney themes. The audience pushed the buttons on their imaginary jukebox by voting for which arrangement they wanted to hear; a fun way to build a programme.
But here’s the thing: each was played with the same meticulous care the duo brought to the pieces that opened the evening. Urioste and Poster found an astounding level of delicacy in Mendelssohn’s solemnly beautiful Sonata in F major, and then revealed a wide-ranging, restless yet hugely rewarding sonata by Mel Bonis (1858-1937), a French female composer who chose a deliberately nongender-specific nom de plume.
Star ratings (out of five)
London Symphony Orchestra/Rattle ★★★★★
The Rake’s Progress ★★★
The Flying Dutchman ★★★
Elena Urioste and Tom Poster ★★★★
The LSO’s all-American concert will be broadcast on Radio 3 on 28 March, 7.30pm/BBC Sounds
The Rake’s Progress is touring until 28 May
The Flying Dutchman is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 16 March
