The virgin of sorrows weeping at the cross, described in a few plain words in the Bible, remains one of the most potent images in Christianity, invested with emotion by artists across centuries. Composers have found inspiration in the medieval text Stabat Mater; some 250 settings exist, more than two dozen from the past decade alone (all listed by stabatmater.info, which reasonably calls itself “the ultimate Stabat Mater website”). Among the best known is that by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, from 1736. At Stone Nest, the former church and one-time nightclub in Soho, London, the group Figure gave this version a staged reimagining, called Our Mother.
Conducted from the organ by its creative producer, Frederick Waxman, the vocal parts were distributed between five singers instead of the usual soprano and alto. New connecting music by Alex Mills, sympathetic to the original but distinctively his own, deftly played by the small string ensemble, expanded the evening to an hour-long show. The audience stood around a cross-shaped stage, which created a sense of witness.
From the pure-toned, 15-year-old Nadya Pickup to Emma Kirkby, long famous in baroque repertoire, now in her eighth decade, the singing had power, beauty, frailty. Catherine Carby, Rowan Pierce and Alexandra Achillea Pouta impressively represented the years between those extremes of ages, suggesting motherhood across time. Sophie Daneman’s direction had many touching ideas, as when the simple shaking of a silk scarf came to represent our own redemption. A movement director would have helped calm and sharpen all the busy action, but this is a detail.
Still at the start of her career, the South African soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha, 30, already has a keen following. She and the pianist Simon Lepper, with contributions from the violinist Anna Blackmur, attracted a sold-out audience to Monday lunchtime’s concert at Wigmore Hall, also broadcast live on Radio 3. Born in the Limpopo province and discovering her voice as a child singing in church, Rangwanasha first came to public attention when she won the song prize at the 2021 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World. She has been a participant in the Jette Parker programme at the Royal Opera House, and this year completes her stint as a Radio 3 New Generation artist. Ranging daringly from Wagner to The Sound of Music, the programme demonstrated this singer’s impressive musical imagination.
The opening song, Stehe Still! from Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, immediately held our attention. After Strauss’s Morgen and Mahler’s Rückert Lieder, repertoire in which Rangwanasha was idiomatic and expressive, she switched mood: two South African songs, including Abide With Me in the Sotho language, plus Bless This House (Wigmore Hall no doubt felt the love as she belted out – a technical term – the climactic final lines) and Amazing Grace. To much laughter, and fortunately little take-up – hers was the voice we wanted to hear – Rangwanasha asked her audience to join in with Climb Ev’ry Mountain, by Richard Rodgers. Cheers and encores followed.
Excellence, we learn from the recent “Let’s Create”, an independent report commissioned by Arts Council England (ACE) on opera and music theatre (see Catherine Bennett in last week’s Observer), inhabits a blighted plural category of human existence called “unhelpful hierarchies”. This is a pity, because Madama Butterfly at the Royal Opera House is, for want of a better word, excellent. The 10th revival of Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s 2002 classic production has a cast that wholeheartedly deserves that same description. The ROH orchestra, conductor Kevin John Edusei; the smooth, meaty-voiced Pinkerton of Joshua Guerrero; Lauri Vasar as feckless Sharpless – all are, no need to repeat the word. Above all, at the heart of this performance, Asmik Grigorian’s Butterfly, tender, steely, devastating, is in a hierarchy of her own. Let’s call her superb, which I take to mean excellent plus. See it live in cinemas on 26, repeated on 31 March.
Puccini, as you may have gathered, had a drubbing (by implication) at the hands of ACE, guilty of being popular and more than 100 years old. Since the report came out earlier this month, I have tried to relate its grey data to the living, breathing, pulsating art form called opera. The facts and percentages may be useful for industry “stakeholders”: this is its aim.
It makes no pretence of doing more than scratching the surface of what opera is, or how or why anyone goes in the first place. Or that audiences, who might not be rich but are willing to make sacrifices elsewhere, return to well-known masterpieces not for reasons of conservatism (no doubt true in some cases) but because the tunes, like the story of Hamlet or the colour of the Mona Lisa’s hair, are only the start of our understanding. Going in deeper takes a lifetime.
Star ratings (out of five)
Our Mother ★★★★
Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha/Simon Lepper ★★★★
Madama Butterfly ★★★★
Our Mother is at Stone Nest, London, until 23 March
Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha’s Wigmore Hall recital is on BBC Sounds/ on Radio 3 on Sunday 24 March, 1.30pm
Madama Butterfly is in rep at the Royal Opera House, London, until 18 July
