Latest news with #Handel
The Citizen
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Citizen
Linda van Coppenhagen said classical music's power is real
'This kind of singing is my rebellion against artificial intelligence,' she said. Real music and vocals do not need autotune or a million processors to make them sound palatable. It is dynamite from the gut, and there is only one place where you really get that kind of effect. Classical music. Operatic arias. Singers who belt it all out with nothing between them and the audience but air and instinct. That is music in its natural state. The way Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven meant it. When the voice was not decoration but an instrument. Soprano Linda van Coppenhagen has been an instrument of song in Europe for over a decade. There's no tech and gadgetry or engineered smoke and mirrors. Just powerful lungs, absolute control, physical endurance and emotion. She returned home in July for two shows in Joburg, including a Theatre on the Square appearance on Friday, 25 July. Her new album is titled Heimwee, which means 'homesickness' The album was recorded over several years and saw its genesis during lockdown in Germany, during the time of the pandemic. 'We were stuck inside. The world was strange. All I wanted was light, warmth, and something that reminded me of home,' Van Coppenhagen said. 'That is what this music became.' The album features both German and Afrikaans classical art songs. All performed and produced without technical wizardry. Real music. 'This kind of singing is my rebellion against artificial intelligence,' she said. 'There is no autotune. No hiding. If my voice glitches, it stays. If I miss a note, it stays. It is all part of the truth.' Classic music rules, ok? Van Coppenhagen grew up in Johannesburg, studied in Pretoria and Cape Town, and left to pursue her stage dreams in 2010 after winning the Musiqanto Classical Singing Competition. Since then, she has built a highly successful career in Germany, where opera is part of daily life. She couldn't pursue her career at home because the market and concomitant opportunities do not make for a sustainable career. This, despite her absolute love for her country of birth, which will always be home to her. Also Read: 'Roger Waters: The Wall' is an epic watch of powerful music It is the feeling of the music that keeps inspiring her. It's the storytelling, the universal themes still relevant after centuries, and the power of the sound. She shared how music was different hundreds of years ago, and even the pitch was somewhat different to what we know today. Baroque composers like Handel and Bach wrote their music to be performed at a lower pitch. What we now consider normal tuning is set at 443 hertz. But in their day, it was closer to 415 hertz. The difference may seem small, but she says it changes everything. 'It is warmer. Softer. When I sing Handel at 443, it feels rushed and unsettled. At 415, it settles in the body differently. The brain responds. The music feels like it belongs.' She compared it to playing Tetris. 'When the tuning is right, it all locks into place. The music becomes something real and whole. Something your body recognises.' No mics needed And it's all done without a PA system, a front-of-house desk and engineers. Instead, your whole body becomes an instrument, and the ability to project vocals into every corner of a theatre or arena is the challenge. It takes power, a lot of training and manual precision, she said. But also, vulnerability. 'You are naked up there. There is no reverb to carry you. You must carry yourself,' she said. 'But when the audience hears it the way it was meant to be heard, something changes. It becomes a connection, not just a performance.' Soul music still exists It's something that's gotten a bit lost in some modern music, but Van Coppenhagen said that music with soul still exists, across genres. Yet it is becoming harder to find. 'There was a time when pop stars were real musicians. Michael Jackson. Queen. They wrote their own songs. They played their instruments. What you saw on stage was what you heard,' she said. 'Now we are drowning in effects. Everything is polished and packaged, but the emotion is missing.' This is also why she said that perhaps classical music and the power of arias, for example, may make a comeback, especially because of the emotional punch it packs. 'Like books. Like vinyl. Maybe classical music is due for a comeback as people seek out more authenticity,' she said. Tickets for the Joburg shows at Theatre on the Square on 25 July are R100. The show starts at 1pm. Now Read: Coldplay's 'Moon Music': A new vibe, same heartbeat
Evening Standard
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
Pretty Yende on the raw power of music: ‘opera is literally soul food'
And if there's anybody who can connect the crowd to the music, it's Yende. Now 40, she is currently starring in the title role of Handel's Semele at the Royal Opera House, which isn't for the faint of heart: Oliver Mears' production is a very dark interpretation of an opera that already includes kidnapping and forced marriage. 'It's a heavy tale,' Yende explains. 'Although it can seem very light, with all the nice music that Handel wrote, the actual story of my character is quite intense. What is amazing about the production is that visually you get the sense of that.'
Daily Maverick
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
In the Walkman revolution we lost shared listening in an ever-narrowing world
I catch up to things late, always have done. I went, by way of example, from my transistor radio and those finickity cassettes that needed cumbersome cassette recorders to the smartphone with its ability to play music. I skipped over that breakthrough era of the Walkman and evaded the time of the Discman and the portable CD player. I even missed out on MP3 players. I still shake my head: what was I thinking? Why did I never acquaint myself with the latest technology and get myself a device that would have allowed me to hear music inside my head through those spindly, non-earpod but serviceable headphones? Probably the most important thing about the Walkman was that it revolutionised how we listened to music, changing the consumption of music – and all things auditory, such as audiobooks and podcasts. How? By giving us the chance to have a private listening experience, laying down the pathway for individual listening choice. It was a heady breakaway from the 'before' listening times, and took away the constant carping and complaining about whose turn it was. My teen years were hell, an endless negotiation around the inexplicable (to a truculent pre-adult) concept of sharing. I grew up in a family of six, all with particular musical tastes, all needing airtime. My mother liked classical music with religious themes: hymns, Gregorian chants, Handel's Easter music; the Ave Marias (the Bach and Schubert versions). 'Cross yourself music,' my brothers called it, mostly because my God-fearing mother often made the sign of the cross when she heard a particularly stirring liturgical piece. My father liked Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole, Buddy Holly, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald… played loudly (which annoyed my mother) so he could hear it while he cooked. There was only one turntable built into a cabinet with an open rack that held the long-playing records, or vinyl as they were known, and a radio with a fabric or mesh-fronted speaker and a large knob for a tuning dial. This was in a pride-of-place position in the lounge. Remember, there was no television set, so it was where we sat to listen to whatever was being played – record or radio. Antonette, my six-years-younger baby sister, listened to David Frost narrating fairy tales, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella. She'd happily sing along with the complaining Hamelin rats, resentful about being unloved, bitter about their treatment from humans. Anton came home from boarding school, superior in his new knowledge of the hip music scene, bringing with him the music of Jethro Tull, Shawn Phillips, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath… all the colours, my mother used to say. My musical choices included Elton John, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Phil Collins, Billy Joel, Rod Stewart, Queen, Fleetwood Mac, the Bee Gees… And, embarrassing to the Naidoos, a deep love of country music: Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, John Denver. My brother Shaun, learning how to play the piano in those years, listened to everything – it is necessary, he'd say, to hear it all. Necessary, it seems, for the brilliant composer he would become before his untimely death at 49. Everyone had to have a turn. We had to listen to each other's choices – we had no choice. It was communal listening. My hero, John Denver, wrote a song about his grandma's feather bed that could 'hold eight kids and four hound dogs, And a piggy we stole from the shed' on which they 'didn't get much sleep but had a lot of fun'. It was a bit like that in the Naidoo family master bedroom. After dinner, when our teeth were brushed, our faces scrubbed and pyjamas donned, we – along with Timmy, the dog – climbed into my parents' bed to listen to the radio on my dad's bedside table. As the Lost Orchid from a print of Tretchikoff's famous weeping painting looked down on us, we feasted on programmes like Squad Cars, in which the police prowled the empty streets at night, waiting in fast cars and on foot…; The Creaking Door; Test the Team; Inspector Carr Investigates; No Place to Hide with Mark Saxon and Sergei Gromulko; The Mind of Tracy Dark. Family time, a sharing time. Happy squabbling time. And then came the Walkman and everything changed. We no longer had to share. We could plug in our music and listen to whatever we chose. It was always our turn. Over the past 50 years, individual choice has replaced things communal. On a visit to my family in Los Angeles I got sick enough to spend the day in bed. To make sure we still had family time, my sister-in-law, Ann, and nephew, Joe, piled onto my bed. Only each of us had our laptops, each our Airpods, each watched a television series (me), documentary (Ann) or music video (Joe) of our own choosing. In the end, nobody shared what they'd been watching or listening to, I think because we each had such specific personal taste that nobody thought our choice would interest the others. It struck me that because it's always our turn, the algorithm can track us and give us more and more of what it thinks we like or want to see or listen to. And so our world gets narrower and narrower, as do the chances of getting to know arcane religious tracts or becoming familiar with the songs of Bing Crosby or being able to sing along with the rats of Hamelin. You are left with a repertoire of only what you like. As I said, I come late to things and seem to catch on and catch up only when the trend is deeply entrenched. Embarrassingly, I have just discovered podcasts and am listening to a host of views and opinions with which I agree, to which I nod along. A case in point is The Rest Is Politics, hosted by former journalist-turned-strategist and spokesperson for Tony Blair and New Labour Alastair Campbell and British academic, broadcaster, writer and former diplomat and politician Rory Stewart. In a determined attempt to confuse the algorithm, I have resorted to forcing myself to listen to the extremely right-wing views of Donald Trump-supporting Joe Rogan, whose ravings are liberally interspersed with racist epithets. It's a grim business and I find myself vacillating between rage and despair at some of the things people (such as Kash Patel, Trump's director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation) say. But I genuinely believe that the only way to form opinions is to have the views of all sides. DM This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
Spectator
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
A contradictory staging, but the music floods the ear with splendour: Semele at the Royal opera reviewed
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there – and opera directors really, really wish they didn't. The problem is particularly acute if, like the Royal Opera's Oliver Mears, you believe in staging Handel's concert works as if they were operas. Broadly speaking, Handel's oratorios affirm the moral and political consensus of Hanoverian England – Protestantism, marriage, loyalty to Church and Crown. All deeply uncool now, of course, so when Mears staged Jephtha in 2023 he duly inverted its central premise. The good guys became the bad guys. Unfortunately, Handel missed that production meeting and the result was as incoherent as it was dour. Semele is a slightly different case. Handel is trying something altogether friskier – disarmingly so, at times. Even here, though, there's an unambiguous moral: 'Nature to each allots his proper sphere.' Can't be having that, so Mears spins this lively parable of vanity, lust and fatal hubris into a grim tale of sexual exploitation. For Handel and his librettist William Congreve, Semele's gleeful delusions of divinity and Juno's murderous hatred are aspects of a femininity so toxic that it's practically radioactive (there's a reason why Handel gives Jupiter the most tender music in the whole show). All irrelevant, apparently, as long as Mears can somehow wrestle Handel's jubilant conclusion onto the territory where the 21st century feels most comfortable, namely cynicism with a side-order of mental illness. Still, the old Saxon weaves a powerful magic. There are stretches where even Mears forgets the box-ticking and starts to have fun, despite the drab, dimly-lit designs (the Olympian gods live in the foyer of a run-down 1930s civic hall). Pretty Yende (Semele) and Niamh O'Sullivan (her sister Ino) are both spirited performers, and Yende's voice was appealingly bright, even if her coloratura sounded rather untethered. Mears scored a lot of laughs in their reunion scene, where Ino arrives for a girly sleepover, laden down with designer shopping. Alice Coote, meanwhile, was an irresistible Juno, played (very effectively) as a cartoon battleaxe, with a voice that swung from dark, gurgling snarls to a truly fearsome brilliance as she plots her revenge. Together with her PA Iris (a delightfully sparky Marianna Hovanisyan), she disrupts Somnus's eternal sleep, and Brindley Sherratt was a sepulchral sounding sleep-god: slumped in his underpants in a grimy bathtub as Juno sweeps briskly in, opening curtains and turning on the shower. On this, at least, I'm with Mears. Morning people really are the worst. But you want to know if you should see this Semele, or whether it'll just irritate you, and that's tricky. There's no getting away from the contradictions of Mears's staging, and the final scenes are particularly gratuitous. Yende's a genuine star, but she sounded less than stellar when I heard her. As Jupiter, on the other hand, Ben Bliss recovered from a slightly colourless start to give a performance of 'Where'er You Walk' that was so eloquent – so charged with quiet sensuality – that it cast its radiance over the whole evening. And best of all, Christian Curnyn conducted in huge, succulent swirls and flourishes; Handel playing that hits you in the stomach and floods the ear with splendour. If you've only ever heard Handel performed on period instruments, that might be worth the ticket price in its own right. Conversely, if you've only heard Mozart with a modern orchestra, the playing of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Riccardi Minasi in Glyndebourne's new Le nozze di Figaro might well sell you on the alternative. It's so silvery; so buoyant and warm. Mariame Clément is the director and she's done the unthinkable, setting the action in an aristocratic household near Seville in the 1780s. Julia Hansen's revolving pastel-coloured sets don't photograph well, but in the theatre, they allow for wonderfully ingenious and lucid storytelling, with the whole labyrinthine palace peopled by an army of bustling, watching (and occasionally singing) staff. Clément engages with the manners and values of the late 18th century, and directs the cast to behave like human beings. And voilà: everything falls gracefully into place. Who could have guessed? A good Figaro at Glyndebourne is one of opera's most life-enhancing experiences, and if I don't say much here it's because – with luck – this perceptive, funny and deeply humane staging will be around for years to come. For now, Michael Nagl is a bluff, generous Figaro, Johanna Wallroth a deliciously tart Susanna, and Louise Alder – always excellent – finds a new depth and pathos as the Countess. Adèle Charvet (Cherubino) was precisely as shy, cocky and impulsive as a real teenage boy and Huw Montague Rendall carried himself with aristocratic poise as a Count whose hauteur never – crucially – excluded the possibility of redemption. Should you see it? Put it this way: the audience was laughing even before they'd had their picnics.
San Francisco Chronicle
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale appoints new music director
For only the fourth time in more than four decades, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale is passing the baton to a new music director. Irish conductor Peter Whelan is poised to take the role for a three-year term starting next July for the 2026-27 season, which marks the company's 45th anniversary. He steps in for Richard Egarr, who resigned after four years in 2024 to pursue new opportunities. 'I'm just so excited to be starting this new adventure,' Whelan told the Chronicle. 'I think the most important thing nowadays is building a community around the arts and that community is already there in San Francisco.' Whelan has been highly regarded for the way in which he breathes new life into early music, bringing a vibrant perspective to the works. He made his first appearance with Philharmonia in March, conducting Handel's 'Alceste,' and debuted with the San Francisco Opera in 2022, helming Gluck's ' Orpheus and Eurydice.' The Chronicle's longtime classical music critic, Joshua Kosman, who retired last year, once praised Whelan as 'an artist of delicate but unmistakable mastery.' 'Peter brings a rare combination of historical insight and creative energy that resonates deeply with our mission,' said Emma Moon, Philharmonia's executive director and CEO. 'His work with us on 'Alceste' was both masterful and inspiring. We're excited to embark on this new chapter with him at the artistic helm.' Whelan studied at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and Trinity College Dublin, and has an extensive discography as a solo bassoonist in addition to his work as a conductor. In 2022, he won a Laurence Olivier Award for outstanding achievement in opera for a production of Vivaldi's 'Bajazet' with Irish National Opera. Whelan currently serves as artistic director of Irish Baroque Orchestra and founding artistic director of Ensemble Marsyas, both based in the U.K. He plans to initially remain there and travel to San Francisco for rehearsals, concerts and other engagements. He said that he hopes by bringing his expertise to Philharmonia that he'll be able to foster an environment of inclusivity and community. 'Live concerts and live music making is a place where you can confront biases, you can see how other people feel,' he noted. 'I think that that's such an important thing in the world today.' Before heading across the pond, however, Whelan is set to make his conducting debut at BBC Proms, an eight-week classical music festival, in August with a performance of Handel's 'Alexander's Feast' alongside the Irish Baroque Orchestra. The milestone performance will mark the ensemble's first Prom appearance and the second time in more than 100 years that an Irish orchestra has performed during the series. Correction: A previous version of this story misstated where Whelan will be living when he begins his new position. He will remain based in the U.K. and travel to San Francisco regularly for the job.
