Digital Programmes
Academy of Ancient Music: Haydn's Creation
Start time: 7.30pm
Approximate running time: 120 mins including a 20 minute interval
Please note all timings are approximate and subject to change.
This performance is subject to government guidelines
Richard Bratby speaks to the Nina Dunn Studio team about the aspects of Haydn’s choral work that inspired tonight’s visuals.
In June 1792, Joseph Haydn encountered one of the scientific wonders of the age. He recorded the occasion in his personal notebook:
On 15th June I went from Windsor to Doctor Herschel, where I saw the great telescope. It is 40 feet long and 5 feet in diameter. The machinery is very big, but so ingenious that a single man can put it in motion with the greatest ease.
When Haydn had arrived in England, 18 months earlier, he’d started noting down his reactions to everything from Royal Navy warships to Cockney slang. William Herschel’s telescope (actually, it seems likely that Haydn was welcomed and shown around by Herschel’s sister and fellow-astronomer Caroline) clearly made an impression upon him. Not, perhaps, one that struck as close to his personal interests as the massive Handel Commemoration Festival at Westminster Abbey in May 1791, at which an orchestra and chorus of over 1000 performed Israel in Egypt and Messiah to a huge and receptive audience. But it was an experience that clearly excited the imagination of a composer with a lively and receptive mind.
It’s wholly appropriate, then, to present The Creation in a performance that incorporates the latest in digital visuals. ‘We’ve thought a lot about nature’s process of creation: where things start, and how an artwork evolves’ says Nina Dunn. ‘When Haydn was working, he would have looked at layering of the orchestra, how the voices come in and out, and the richness and detail of what he was creating. So we've sought out the richness of the technology available to us: 3D scan technology, reactive visuals, and also footage and hand-drawn work. It’s like an orchestra of techniques that come together, and allow us to respond. But our orchestra is a little bit different from the 1790s!’.
It seems clear that Haydn’s overwhelming impulse in The Creation was to communicate – and to do so as vividly and directly as possible. Before leaving England for the last time in 1795, he acquired an English libretto, of unknown authorship, for an oratorio based on Milton's Paradise Lost. Modest about his grasp of English, he enlisted the Viennese polymath Baron Gottfried van Swieten who ‘resolved to clothe the poem in German garb’. Van Swieten’s translation is the text that Haydn set as Die Schöpfung – and which Haydn, aware of his huge English-speaking fanbase, had translated back into English as The Creation. Completed in the autumn of 1797, Die Schöpfung / The Creation became the first work in musical history to be published bilingually, though the actual premiere took place on 30th April 1798, at the Palais Schwarzenberg in Vienna. The reaction was ecstatic.
The subject could hardly have suited Haydn better. There’s something simultaneously touching and sublime about his musical portrayals of the weather; the sun and moon; the tiger, the whale and (of course) the earthworm. The tonally-ambiguous prelude, the ‘Representation of Chaos’, is a radical masterpiece in its own right. But Haydn planned it as part of a greater design. Chaos is defeated by a dazzling affirmation of tonality – a mighty burst of C major as God creates light. And throughout The Creation, passages of relaxation (the radiant soprano aria ‘With Verdure Clad’, the rosy dawn that opens Part Three) and playful humour are balanced by music of visionary grandeur, and choruses of a scale and impact unheard since Handel.
Dunn and her colleagues have also taken their cues from the sheer beauty of nature, as represented (often before it’s described in the libretto) in Haydn’s music. ‘Each of the graphics is based on the essence of what's described in the music: the essence of chaos, the essence of water, the essence of beasts - the lion's roar, for example’ she says. ‘So, that's one layer. And then on a more tangible layer, we’re interrogating plant detail, feathers; the physical details that we, as human beings, often step over. There's a great beauty in fish scales’. But what of the religious – or if you prefer, the philosophical – element of a work by a devout Roman Catholic: a vision that frames the universe (at least, until Uriel’s brief final warning) in wholly optimistic terms?
‘We discussed it a lot at the beginning” says Dunn. “We asked whether we should have a warning in there. The Creation is a celebration - that is clear from the music and the libretto. But for us, there's quite an undertone of danger, in terms of the risk that nature faces from our actions. Sometimes the best approach is to remind an audience of the beauty of nature, rather than reading the riot act. We need hope; we need to be reminded of that beauty. But, at the end, we hope to highlight to the audience – literally by lighting them - that it's over to them, for better or for worse.’
© Richard Bratby, AAM Hogwood Fellow 2020–21
Start time: 7.30pm
Approximate running time: 120 mins including a 20 minute interval
Please note all timings are approximate and subject to change.
This performance is subject to government guidelines
Programme and performers
Programme
Joseph Haydn The Creation
Performers
Academy of Ancient Music
Laurence Cummings conductor
Nina Dunn video and projection designer
Mary Bevan Gabriel
Stuart Jackson Uriel
Matthew Brook Raphael
Rachel Redmond Eve
Ashley Riches Adam
Matt Brown video designer for Nina Dunn Studio
Laura Salmi visual dramaturgy for video
Adam Lansberry NOTCH artist
Luigi Sardi video programmer
Harrison Cooke production video engineer
Matt Somerville video engineer
Universal Pixels video equipment supplier
Artist biographies
The Academy of Ancient Music is an orchestra with a worldwide reputation for excellence in baroque and classical music. Using historically-informed techniques, period-specific instruments and original sources, we bring music vividly to life in committed, vibrant performances.
Established nearly 50 years ago to make the first British recordings of orchestral works using original instruments, AAM has released more than 300 albums to date, collecting countless accolades including Classic BRIT, Gramophone and Edison awards. We now record on our own-label AAM Records, and are proud to be the most listened-to period-instrument orchestra online, with over one million monthly listeners on Spotify.
Beyond the concert hall, AAM is committed to nurturing the audiences, artists and arts managers of the future through our innovative education initiative AAMplify. Working in collaboration with tertiary institutions across the UK, we engage the next generation of period-instrumentalists with side-by-side sessions, masterclasses and other opportunities designed to bridge the gap from the conservatoire to the profession, safeguarding the future of historical performance.
AAM is Associate Ensemble at the Barbican Centre, London and the Teatro San Cassiano, Venice; Orchestra-in-Residence at the University of Cambridge, Milton Abbey International Summer Music Festival and The Apex, Bury St Edmunds; and Research Partner to the University of Oxford. The 2021–22 season sees Laurence Cummings join the orchestra as Music Director.
Laurence Cummings is one of Britain's most exciting and versatile exponents of historical performance both as a conductor and a harpsichord player. He is Music Director of Academy of Ancient Music from September 2021 and also holds the posts of Musical Director of the London Handel Festival and Music Director of Orquestra Barroca Casa da Música in Porto. He was Artistic Director of the International Handel Festival Göttingen for 10 years until 2021. A noted authority on Handel, the Guardian has written of him 'he now ranks as one of the composer’s best advocates in the world'.
On the concert platform, he is regularly invited to conduct both period and modern instrument orchestras worldwide and highlights have included concerts with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, The English Concert, Handel and Haydn Society Boston, Zurich Chamber Orchestra, St Paul Chamber Orchestra, Basel Chamber Orchestra, Washington National Symphony Orchestra, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, and in the UK with the Hallé Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
Frequently praised for his stylish and compelling performances in the opera house, his career has taken him across Europe where he has conducted productions at Opernhaus Zurich, English National Opera, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Gothenburg Opera, Théâtre du Châtelet, Theater an der Wien, Opera North, Garsington Opera and at the Linbury Theatre Covent Garden. His numerous recordings include discs for Sony Classical, Harmonia Mundi and BIS.
Nina Dunn Studio is a multi-disciplinary video design studio founded and led by award winning independent Video & Projection Designer Nina Dunn. Nina works with a core team of creatives such as Matthew Brown and Laura Salmi, whose objective is to bridge scenic narrative and lighting disciplines using the infinitely flexible medium of integrated live video for theatre, concerts and live immersive events.
The visual design for The Creation is being led by studio associate artist and video designer, Matthew Brown. He has worked with the studio for nearly a decade.
Recent studio projects include The Messiah (Academy of St Martin In The Fields); Extinct (Theatre Royal Stratford East); City of Angels (West End); 9 to 5 The Musical (West End / UK Tour); Cinderella (Imagine Theatre); A Museum in Baghdad, Venice Preserved, Miss Littlewood, The Seven Acts of Mercy, Volpone (RSC); Plenty, Copenhagen, Fiddler on the Roof (Chichester Festival Theatre), Cbeebies Hansel and Gretel (BBC); No Man’s Land (Tour/West End); Alice’s Adventures Underground (London / China); Der Freischütz, Macbeth (Wiener Staatsoper); Spring Gala (Royal Opera House); The Damned United (West Yorkshire Playhouse / Tour); The Hook, Alone In Berlin (Royal & Derngate); Phantom of the Opera (Cameron Mackintosh, UK/US/Australia Tour); The Flying Dutchman (ENO); La Traviata, Hippolyte et Aricie (Glyndebourne); Emperor and Galilean (National Theatre), The Rocky Horror Show (European Tour).
Praised by Opera for her “dramatic wit and vocal control” in stand-out performances on opera and concert platforms, Mary Bevan enjoys huge success in baroque, classical, and contemporary repertoire, and appears regularly with leading orchestras and ensembles around the world. She is a winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artist award and UK Critics’ Circle Award for Exceptional Young Talent in music and was awarded a MBE in the Queen’s birthday honours list in 2019.
In the 2021/22 season, Bevan performs Belinda and First Witch Dido & Aeneas with the Early Opera Company at St John’s Smith Square, a European tour of Handel Messiah with Kammerorchester Basel, Handel Theresienmesse with the Handel and Haydn Society and Bach B Minor Mass with the Philhamonia Baroque Orchestra. Further highlights include recitals at Wigmore Hall, Lammermuir Festival and Osafestivalen alongside returns to Oxford Lieder, the Bolshoi Theatre and Carnegie Hall.
Recent highlights for Bevan include her house debut at the Bolshoi Theatre as Dalinda Ariodante, her role debut as Marzelline Fidelio at the Royal Danish Opera, and the title role in the premiere of Turnage Coraline for the Royal Opera House. Notable performances on the concert stage include Bliss Rout with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the world premiere of Sir James MacMillan Christmas Oratorio at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.
Stuart Jackson was a choral scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, before completing his training at the Royal Academy of Music in 2013 where he studied with Ryland Davies. He won second prizes at both the Wigmore Hall International Song Competition and the Hugo Wolf Competition in Stuttgart. He was also a Samling scholar. Recent highlights in the concert hall include his debut with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen in their 1808 Beethoven project; Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins; Haydn’s The Creation with the Royal Northern Sinfonia under Paul McCreesh; Beethoven’s Symphony No 9 with the Hallé under Sir Mark Elder; and concerts and a recording of Handel’s Brockes Passion with Arcangelo under Jonathan Cohen. In opera he has sung the roles of High Priest/ Abner/Amalekite/Doeg in Handel’s Saul at the Châtelêt, Paris; made his role and house debut as Jupiter (Semele) for the Komische Oper Berlin; and made his debut as Prologue/Quint (The Turn of the Screw) for Opéra National de Lorraine. Recent and forthcoming highlights include BBC Proms Bach Matthew Passion (singing the Evangelist) with Arcangelo, his debut with the Royal Danish Opera in Mitridate (title role) and recitals for Oxford Lieder and Temple Music, as well as performances with Britten Sinfonia and the English Concert.
Matthew Brook has appeared as a soloist throughout Europe, Australia, North and South America and the Far East. He studied at the Royal College of Music, and has worked with many of the world’s greatest conductors including Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Richard Hickox, Sir Charles Mackerras, Harry Christophers, Christophe Rousset and Sir Mark Elder, and orchestras and ensembles including the Philharmonia, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, St Petersburg Philharmonic, the Freiburger Barockorchester, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the English Baroque Soloists, the City of London Sinfonia, Collegium Vocale Gent, the Gabrieli Consort, Les Talens Lyriques, The Sixteen, and Orchestra Nationale de Lille.
This season, Matthew sings his recital programme with Iain Burnside titled View from the Villa at the Lammermuir Festival, Handel’s Messiah with Music of the Baroque in Chicago, and also on tour in Europe with the Academy of Ancient Music, the role of Pilate in Bach’s St John Passion with Les Violons du Roy in Quebec, and the role of Lodovico in Otello for Grange Park Opera.
Rachel Redmond began her career with the Jardin des Voix under William Christie with whom she performed Iris (Atys) at the Opera Comique, and Irene, Léontine and Flore (Les Fêtes Venitiennes) at the Opera Comique, the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse and Brooklyn Academy of Music. Other roles include Susanna (The Marriage of Figaro) (English Touring Opera) and Second Woman (Dido and Aeneas) (Aix-en-Provence Festival).
Engagements this Season include Dalinda Ariodante at the Göttingen International Handel Festival, her début with Helsinki Baroque Orchestra singing Clorinda Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and Belinda Dido and Aeneas, Samson and St John Passion with The English Concert, St John Passion and L’allegro, il penseroso ed il moderato with Les Arts Florissants, The Fairy Queen (staged) with Atelier Lyrique de Tourcoign, Carl Heinrich Graun’s oratorio Der Tod Jesu with Netherlands Bach Society/NTR Radio, Dixit Dominus with Il Gardellino and Flemish Radio Choir, Juditha Trimphans with Norwegian Baroque Orchestra and St Matthew Passion and Acis and Galatea with Dunedin Consort.
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She is also a regular soloist with Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, Ensemble Caravanserail, Jordi Savall and the Centre Internacional de Música Antiga, Ensemble Correspondences, Cappella Mediterranea, and Collegio Ghislieri.
Her Concert repertoire includes works by Bach, Beethoven, Bernstein, Boismortier, Brahms, Charpentier, Galuppi, Graupner, Handel, Karl Jenkins, Jomelli, Monteverdi, Orff, Pergolesi, Purcell and Vivaldi.
Bass-Baritone Ashley Riches studied at King’s College, Cambridge and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and was later a Jette Parker Young Artist at The Royal Opera House and a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist.
On the operatic stage he has sung Figaro and Count Almaviva (Le Nozze di Figaro), Don Giovanni (Don Giovanni), Escamillo (Carmen), Schaunard (La Boheme) and the Pirate King (The Pirates of Penzance) at houses including The Royal Opera House, English National Opera, Glyndebourne, Garsington, the Grange Festival and Opera Holland Park.
Highlights on the concert platform include Berlioz’s Lélio with Sir John Eliot Gardiner in Carnegie Hall, New York, Bernstein’s Wonderful Town with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Simon Rattle, a European tour of Giulio Cesare and Agrippina with Les Talens Lyriques with Christophe Rousset and Creon Oedipus Rex with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
In recital, he has collaborated with pianists including Graham Johnson, Iain Burnside, Julius Drake, Joseph Middleton, Anna Tilbrook, James Baillieu, Simon Lepper, Gary Matthewman and Sholto Kynoch.
Ashley has a fast-growing discography including the BBC Music Magazine 2020 Recording of the Year, Purcell’s King Arthur with Gabrieli and Wonderful Town with the LSO and Sir Simon Rattle. Last season he released his debut solo-disc for Chandos, Musical Zoo.
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