Last week’s Classical Opera concert not only marked the opening of their 2015/16 London season, but also their eighteenth birthday. The evening featured soprano Sophie Bevan, whose close relationship with the company (she has performed with them every year since 2005) positioned her as the natural choice of soloist. The concert also previewed a forthcoming recording: in 2016, Classical Opera are working with Bevan to record works by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, including the three arias heard in this concert.

Part of the reason I always look forward to Classical Opera’s concerts is that I invariably leave having heard a piece of music I don’t know. Often, the piece in question is by an eighteenth-century composer who has been unjustly neglected, given the prominence of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven in the classical canon. In last week’s concert, though, all of the music featured was, to quote conductor and artistic director Ian Page, by ‘the three greatest masters of the Classical period’. Nevertheless, the three arias featured can rarely be heard live in concert.

These arias – all emotionally intense tales from distressed lovers – were interspersed with comparatively bright and easy orchestral works in C major, and the concert opened with an energetic performance of Mozart’s overture to La clemenza di Tito, K.621. The woodwind melodies were beautiful and, although I increasingly choose to attend period instrument performances, I am always struck by the timbral quality of the period woodwind instruments in particular.

Bevan’s first number was Mozart’s concert aria Ah, lo previdi!, K.272, composed in 1777 for soprano Josefa Dušek. Bevan’s performance was grippingly despairing, perhaps an appropriate tone not only because of the piece’s dramatic content, but also the circumstances of its composition. As Page outlines in the programme notes, Mozart sent the aria to his (unreciprocated) love interest, Aloysia Weber, a year after it was composed, with the following advice:

I advise you to watch the expression marks – to think carefully of the meaning and the force of the words – to put yourself in all seriousness into Andromeda’s situation and position! – and to imagine that you really are that very person.

(Letter of 30 July 1778)

The libretto is taken from Vittorio Cigna-Santi’s Andromeda, and tells the story of Andromeda, in love with Perseus but betrothed to marry Euristeo. In the first recitative, Andromeda mistakenly believes that Perseus has killed himself, and chastises Euristeo for failing to prevent it. The aria unleashes this fury towards Euristeo, the cause of her suffering, asking him to flee. A second recitative dwells upon her grief and unhappiness, and she imagines following Perseus on his journey to the afterlife.

Bevan maintained total immersion in her characters’ feelings in both the Haydn and Beethoven concert arias. In Haydn’s Scena di Berenice (set to text from Act 3, scene 7 of Metastasio’s Antigono), Bevan’s frenzied performance convincingly portrayed the torment felt by Berenice. Perceiving the gods’ satisfaction at her lover’s death, the aria expresses Berenice’s desire to accompany him to the underworld by crossing the river Lethe. It ends with Berenice’s impassioned and desperate plea to the gods to increase her suffering until some relief is provided with the end of her life.

The Beethoven aria, Ah! perfido, also set to a Metastasio libretto (Achille in Sciro), was also first performed by Josefa Dušek, the dedicatee of Mozart’s Ah, lo previdi!. This time, Bevan became a distraught, abandoned lover. The virtuosic capabilities and range of emotional depth to her voice were displayed in the transition from a recitative full of rage to an aria of anguished grief. Here, too, the rich lower tones of Bevan’s vocal range were exposed. Sadly, the orchestra were slightly too strong for some potentially magical pianissimo moments, where Bevan appeared to be almost whispering. Some beautiful clarinet solos that soared above the rest of the orchestra from Jane Booth made up for this slight disappointment, however.

We were given a brief reprieve from forlorn love with Haydn’s little known Overture to Windsor Castle. Originally this overture was composed for Haydn’s own opera, L’anima del filosofo, composed in 1791 during his first visit to London. This opera remained unperformed until 1951, while the overture itself became incorporated into Johann Peter Saloman’s opera Windsor Castle, premiered in 1795. The concert concluded with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op.21. In his programme notes, Page suggested that the audience resist listening to the symphony with hindsight, as an indication of greater things to come. This is a further symptom of how much the musical canon influences modern performances of music from the classical period. Indeed, another wonderful thing about Classical Opera is that they offer us the chance, and strongly encourage us, to imagine how early works by great composers were received and understood in their original context, without the ‘benefit’ of hindsight. At this concert, the task was helped greatly by the orchestra’s superb performance of Beethoven’s symphony, which was both fresh and exciting.

In all, this was another excellent evening of music making from Classical Opera, which bodes well for an exciting programme of events in 2016. Heading into the second year of their ambitious Mozart250 project, performances include a retrospective look at music from 1766, and a UK premiere of Niccolò Jommelli’s Il Vologeso.

Classical Opera’s performance of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven took place at Cadogan Hall on September 29th, 2015.