Rapture, ecstasy, ardour, and a few cheeky fumbles in the bushes – Louise Alder and James Baillieu’s Wigmore recital promised “Chants d’amour” and delivered amply, giving us love in all its bewildering, technicolour variety.
Twelfth Night, Epiphany, call it what you will, is one reminder that there's continuity after the turn of the year. Another was Sakari Oramo's final Sibelius-plus concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra - a predictable triumph given that the previous four were all highlights of 2017, capping, at least for me, the "Rattle Returns" experience.
Remastered they may be, but the 20 live operas recorded here between 1949 and 1964 vary soundwise from clean at best to atrocious, with all the caprices of stage noise and audience participation seemingly acceptable at the time (so often there's the shouting prompter who seems duty bound to cue everything – even interjecting a loud libiamo! in the silence before the voices kick in for La traviata's Brindisi).
After Sakari Oramo's dazzling Sibelius rattlebag with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on the centenary day of Finnish independence, things weren't looking so good for Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia at half time last Thursday (★★★). Then along came the Four Lemminkäinen Legends, an early Sibelius masterpiece teeming with invention and strangeness, long a Salonen speciality.
Singing students from the Guildhall School should have been issued with a three-line whip to fill the inexplicably half-empty Milton Court concert hall for last night's charmer. After all, every musician, and not just sopranos, should know that this is how it ought to be done. True, an effervescent personality like Lucy Crowe's can't be simulated. But every other respect of her stunningly sung and varied Mozart can be aspired to: the relaxed, natural stance (and in this instance, knowing how to play a recalcitrant shoe heel for comedy), knowing what to do with the hands, how to execute coloratura as spine-tingling expression, not mere display, how to spin long lines and to colour the music according to the situation, with the right dramatic looks and widening of the eyes to match.
True, this was culinary Mozart of the sort to make E F Benson's Lucia and Georgie affectedly exhale, two-thirds of it composed in his teens, but as with Donizetti and Bellini, when you have supreme stylists in charge, it all commands attention. There are no better period-instrument players around than Harry Bicket's band, and though the dry acoustics didn't help them out in the way that the Wigmore Hall would in the frothiest of Mozart's early Divertimenti, the D major K136 with the already-vintage humour of its six-note finale kickoff, the pleasures came thick and fast. Mozart's inner string lines were full of life and interplay, runs clean and bright.
The orchestral counterpart in the concert's second half, the A major Violin Concerto K219 with its rollicking "Turkish" rondo episode, brought another pleasure of collaboration. The English Concert's leader, Nadja Zwiener (pictured left), may not be a born soloist with the kind of panache that Isabelle Faust brought to the even slighter G major Concerto at the Proms, and in her first entries she had a bit of an intonation problem as well as less than perfect ornamentation. But the Adagio shone with such a rare consonance between violinist and orchestra, the sort of thing that star players flying in for one rehearsal can't achieve, and by the finale, with aforementioned romp both clearly articulated, with none of the usual rushing, and laugh-out-loud exuberant, we were back to the level of what Crowe had already achieved with Bicket and co (the conductor-instrumentalist pictured below by Richard Haughton).
Our great soprano didn't make it easy for herself, plunging in with Aspasia's ferocious first aria in Mitridate re di Ponto. If Crowe had been singing this role rather than the less rewarding one of seconda donna Ismene at Covent Garden, that musically rather ordinary evening might have come up to the mark of this one dazzling performance. More brilliant still was "Ah se il crudel periglio" from Lucio Silla, with its unbelievably well-executed runs in the recap.
The necessary breather in between was the lovely "Ruhe sanft" from Zaide, Crowe touching and perfect of legato phrasing in dialogue with Katharina Spreckelsen's cool oboe obbligato. The maturity of Mozart begins to shine through here in the extra beauties he finds in the instrumental coda, and by the time of the "Et incarnatus est" from the great but unfinished C minor Mass, we are in vintage territory with not only that effortlessness of vocal writing but also the woodwind ensemble, enriching what becomes a kind of quartet-cadenza of melting beauty.
Crowe also made the heart flip in the simpler, solo cadenza at the heart of "Exsultate, jubilate". Each time I've heard her sing it, not a note or a phrase has been out of place, and this was on the same level as last year's glorious performance with David Bates and La Nuova Musica. The bonus proved simply sublime, making the eyes prick as the earlier numbers could not: as Bicket pointed out, Mozart by the end of his life knew how to say with 40 bars what had earlier taken him 200, and with Crowe bringing extra fullness of tone to what is usually just a pretty arietta, Servilia's "S'altro che lagrime" from La Clemenza di Tito, we all too few in the audience came out knowing we'd heard the best that singing in concert has to offer.
Next page: watch Lucy Crowe sing 'Exsultate, jubilate' at the 2016 Proms
No sunshine without shadows was one possible theme rippling through this diva sandwich of a Prom. Even Richard Strauss's chaste nymph Daphne, achieving longed-for metamorphosis as a tree, finds darkness among the roots; and though Renée "The Beautiful Voice" Fleming has a heliotropic tendency in her refulgent upper register, her mezzo-ish colours are strong, too.
There are certain roles where you’re lucky to catch one perfect incarnation in a lifetime. I thought I'd never see a soprano as Natasha in Prokofiev's War and Peace equal to Yelena Prokina, Valery Gergiev’s choice for Graham Vick’s 1991 production.
The Florence Foster Jenkins industry reaches newly giddy heights with Stephen Frears's film of the same name, which cleverly casts a great talent - who else but Meryl Streep? - as the cheerfully self-deluded American soprano. The subject already of separate Broadway and West End plays (both in 2005) and a French film (Marguerite) that has only just been released, Jenkins's extraordinary story here stands apart by virtue of that rare leading lady who can make a character's misguided belief in her gifts seem a form of bliss.
Was it a blessing of sorts that Jenkins's head was somewhere in the clouds? Perhaps, or so the film suggests from its first glimpse of Streep dressed as an angel and kept airborne during a 1944 entertainment at New York's Verdi Club that happens to have been founded by this self-same philanthropist.
A culture doyenne with a particular avidity for potato salad - bathtubs of the stuff, in fact - Jenkins dreams of bringing her coloratura soprano to the tony confines of Carnegie Hall. That goal finds a ready enabler in her ever-droll common-law husband St Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant, pictured with Streep above), who makes up in support and kindness toward his beloved "bunny" what he may fail to provide sexually. On that front, Bayfield has a mistress (Rebecca Ferguson), about whom Jenkins remains seemingly as oblivious as she is when it comes to recognising her limited talent.
Determined yet dithery, her sweetness amended by a gently perceptible sorrow at her syphilitic past (Jenkins contracted the disease at 18), our heroine completes a triptych of sorts for Frears of singular women from entirely divergent backgrounds that includes Helen Mirren's Oscar-winning turn in The Queen and Judi Dench's Oscar-nominated Philomena.
If Streep gets a nomination for this, as surely she will, that will mark her 20th Oscar nod, and there's something lovely about seeing so consummate a talent play this blithely self-absorbed squawker - the enjoyment amplified for those who caught Streep's two most recent films, Into the Woods and Ricki and the Flash, in both of which she demonstrated her well-known singing skills.
And while a more churlish view of the material might glory in Jenkins's comeuppance, Frears and screenwriter Nicholas Martin remind us that here was a performer who sold out faster than Sinatra and who could make fans out of even the frostiest observer. The Tony-winning Broadway actress Nina Arianda illustrates as much with her scene-stealing bit as a ditzy Brooklynite who shifts from jeers to cheers, while a quorum of drunken soldiers in attendance at Jenkins's eventual Carnegie Hall appearance might as well be us in their about-face from sceptical disinterest to fervent ovation. (Frears isn't above employing some familiar showbiz clichés.)
Amid inevitable and deserved praise for Streep, one must pay very real tribute to Grant, who seems to have found a humanity not evidenced from him in years. While an endearing Simon Helberg gets ready laughs as the pianist Cosme McMoon, who regards his newfound employer with a mixture of admiration and alarm, Grant tempers his sometimes curdled urbanity with a depth of feeling that meets Streep head on.
Can it be that, faced with a first-rate scene partner, Grant decided to up his game? "No one can say I didn't sing," Jenkins tells a teary Bayfield near the end. Nor can anyone say in Florence Foster Jenkins that Hugh Grant didn't act.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Florence Foster Jenkins
Not many people write conspicuously brilliant tweets, but Elizabeth Watts is someone who does. Working on the most demanding aria on her stunning new CD of operatic numbers and cantatas by the lesser-known of the two Scarlattis, father Alessandro rather than son Domenico, she tweeted: “Good news – I can sing 88 notes without a breath. Bad news – Scarlatti wrote 89.”
Antonio Pappano, artistic director and chief conductor of the Royal Opera House, is a polymath, for he is also a brilliant and persuasive narrator of the history of music. Here he embarked on a four part history of the operatic voice, starting at the very top – or how to reach those high Cs, the Everest for the soprano.