Hair streaked with blue, face bubble-gum pink, eyes highlighted in yellow, Andy Warhol paid homage to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus with joyful freedom, creating a vivid dialogue between Italian Renaissance high art and American mass culture. His reworking loosely exemplifies a growing trend for musicians to try something similar: a Handel aria sung into a microphone, with pulsating keyboard accompaniment, turns into a yet more impassioned soul song. The same composer’s instrumental Concerto Grosso, Op 6 No 10 is reinvented as a vocal piece – with AI Handelbot-generated lyrics (Bfjjfid Ooooh eeeee aahhhh iiii ghdjjrr) for those who want to trill along.
Three events last week presented versions of this kind of baroque-update experiment. Two were at Stone Nest, the ex-Welsh chapel, ex-nightclub on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue: Arias Reimagined, part of the London Handel festival, with the independent record label nonclassical; and Rhythm of the Seasons, presented by the venue’s resident group, Figure, which included an interpretation of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on percussion.
In Arias Reimagined, the mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean, a singer of rich and fearless versatility, switched freely between arias from Handel’s Theodora and pop from the past 35 years, including Britney Spears and Cocteau Twins. The common thread was emotional intensity and the keyboard exuberance and invention of harpsichordist Xiaowen Shang.
A second set featured Akkordeon Baroque, a duo inspired by accordionists playing baroque counterpoint in Berlin’s U-Bahn stations. The radical singer-composer Loré Lixenberg and accordionist Lore Amenabar Larrañaga, who brings dignity and melancholy to every phrase she plays, worked aural spells with Handel, JS Bach and John Cage (sound by Isa Ferri).
The night ended in even more remote territory, with the multiple talents of Bianca Scout (music, movement, electronics, voice and more) and her small ensemble, performing short, spooky mini-dramas with titles such as “We are the lost ideas dancing back from death”. I admit to bafflement, but nothing new there.
To say Vivaldi’s Four Seasons played on percussion was straightforward in comparison would not be true. The dazzling soloist, James Larter, credited with making the arrangement with director Frederick Waxman, has stripped the score back to its bones, variously building it again with tuned percussion – vibraphone, marimba – and an array of drums, bongos, gongs, triangles, woodblocks, castanets, chopsticks and, as a ratchety addition, a güiro.
Vivaldi’s solos were redistributed between a five-strong string group, an almost ghostly harpsichord – Waxman used the lute stop, as well as, occasionally, his sleeve to dampen the sound – all crowned by the wild, leaping virtuosity of Larter himself. Every one of Vivaldi’s familiar imitations, from barking dog to birdsong to drunken dance, sounded different, newly exposed, each vertebra tapped and rattled yet lovingly authentic. Figure’s next event at Stone Nest is Lamentations on 10 April: Easter music by Couperin (Leçons de ténèbres) with readings by Radio 3’s Donald Macleod.
Also in Lenten mood, Vache Baroque’s Out of the Deep, at Smith Square Hall, combined penitential music by Wilbye, Purcell, JS Bach and Zelenka with readings, astutely delivered by actor Malcolm Sinclair, from Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, written during his imprisonment in Reading jail. This shapeshifting group of young musicians was founded during the pandemic. Their mission embraces children’s shows, opera, all kinds of outreach, working with some of the best rising star talents – here, countertenor Alexander Chance and tenor Guy Cutting – to achieve the highest standard of historically informed performance.
Brahms’s chorale prelude for organ, Herzlich tut mich verlangen, arranged for voices by Vache’s director, Jonathan Darbourne, was a reminder of music’s fluidity in honouring the past: back, in this case, to a secular song via a Lutheran hymn via JS Bach (and, eventually, forward to Paul Simon). The brief farewell, “In pace” by John Sheppard, ended an exceptional evening.
Easy to forget, Puccini also drew on a predominantly baroque form – that of Italian commedia dell’arte – for his last opera, Turandot. Archetype and myth are clothed in some of his most harmonically daring music, unfinished at the time of his death in 1924. The Royal Opera’s classic 1984 staging, by Andrei Șerban with designs by Sally Jacobs, has returned for its 16th revival (director Jack Furness), cranked back into life with apparent ease, strongly cast throughout, the spectacle ageless, magnificent as well as savage. Porcelain-white masks, crimson banners, suspended tableaux enthral, as does the choral and orchestral panoply so vital to this opera. There were scrappy moments, but Rafael Payare conducts this spirited revival with such impetuous enthusiasm no one should mind.
Character development is hardly the point. The Arabian-Italian story tells of a murderous princess and a self-regarding hero, each trying to outdo the other with their merciless riddles. Only the tragic former slave girl Liù (Anna Princeva) has much chance for nuance. The American-Canadian soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, an international Puccini star and a world-leading Turandot, has a gritty, reedy resonance and can soar above an orchestra at full tilt. As Calaf, the South Korean tenor SeokJong Baek tends towards the generic in terms of acting, but his sustained, gleaming top notes are matchless, exciting and only slightly longer than Puccini intended. And yes, his Nessun Dorma is as good as anyone’s, over in a few minutes but worth the wait. See Turandot live in cinemas on Tuesday, or repeated from next Sunday.
Star ratings (out of five)
Arias Reimagined ★★★★
Rhythm of the Seasons ★★★★
Out of the Deep ★★★★
Turandot ★★★★
