Opera in Concert

Drawing together music, drama, set and costume design and lighting (as well as all the corresponding egos!), opera is the most time-consuming art form to write, the most expensive to stage and the most complex to rehearse. Why do people do it? Because, when it works, each element enhances and deepens the other, leading to an experience that is way more than the sum of its parts. ‘All the world’s a stage,’ Shakespeare tells us, and we witness the gamut of human qualities and emotions in opera too: love and lust, pride and humility, damnation and redemption, loyalty and deception – birth, marriage, death – even murder. As the great operatic soprano Maria Callas said, ‘An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I’ve left the opera house.’

Invented in Florence in around 1597, opera is the most enduring of all Western classical music forms. Early subjects were drawn from Greek and Roman mythology (including Monteverdi’s Orfeo, based on the story of Orpheus travelling to the Underworld to save his lost wife Eurydice). In the 18th century, ‘opera buffo’ (comic opera) was introduced to complement ‘opera seria’, which concentrated on heroic or tragic subjects.

Singing has always been at the heart of opera, the music and words working together to heighten the expressive effect. It’s no surprise that sopranos and tenors, who tend to take the lead roles, attracted star status. Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, Richard Strauss and Wagner created some of the best-known operas up to the 20th century. Figures such as Judith Weir, Kaija Saariaho, Harrison Birtwistle, Thomas Adès and Nico Muhly have reinvented the form for the 21st.

Hearing an opera in concert allows us – and the performers – to focus on the key component of this multilayered art form: the music. The cast can concentrate on the singing, rather than on hitting their marks or on trying not to overheat in heavy costumes; while the orchestra takes a front-facing position on stage, rather than sitting in the theatre pit below ground. In this genre, which demands that composers take extra pains to etch the emotion and psychological impact directly into the music, stripping away the physical action and stage machinery allows us dig deeper into our own imagination and enter into the theatre of the mind.

By Edward Bhesania