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House music: Tim Ashley's watching and listening highlights

I’ve been enjoying the Ryedale festival this week, which has moved online, streaming one concert a day from beautiful North Yorkshire venues on its new RyeStream platform. There are lovely things here. Soprano Rowan Pierce, singing by candlelight with pianist Christopher Glynn at All Saints’ Church in Helmsley, gives us a lockdown programme that opens with Purcell’s O Solitude and closes with the quiet optimism of Strauss’s Morgen! Isata Kanneh-Mason places Beethoven alongside Barber and Gershwin in a compelling recital from the same venue, while there’s a concert by the South African cellist-singer-composer Abel Selaocoe that juxtaposes African songs with riffs on Bach, astonishingly performed and utterly mesmerising.

In the Castle Howard chapel, meanwhile, baroque violinist Rachel Podger enthusiastically introduces and plays Biber, Vilsmayr and Bach. The castle’s long gallery is the venue for a superb recital by Matthew Hunt and Tim Horton, which flanks Jörg Widmann’s witty solo clarinet Fantasie with works for clarinet and piano by Schumann – the Fantasiestücke, ravishingly played – and John Ireland. The festival is available free on demand or by donation until 16 August.

I’ve also been catching up on podcasts. Opera North has just launched Thinking With Opera with the University of Leeds, with a challenging discussion between Opera North’s Dominic Grey and Professor Griselda Pollock. The focus falls largely on Puccini’s Madama Butterfly as a male narrative of female sexuality, though Pollock and Grey also range widely and easily over ideas of sacrifice in classical drama and the disturbing attitudes to women that lurk beneath the surface of Gauguin’s paintings.

Australian theatre and opera director Barrie Kosky, who appears on Opera Holland Park’s podcast.
Australian theatre and opera director Barrie Kosky, who appears on Opera Holland Park’s podcast, in Paris last year. Photograph: Eric Feferberg/AFP via Getty Images

Opera Holland Park, meanwhile, has been running its series From the Producer’s Office for some time. The latest instalment finds presenter James Clutton, its director of opera, in conversation with Stephen Langridge, Glyndebourne’s new artistic director, about having to cancel seasons due to coronavirus, and bringing live music back with physically distanced, open-air performances. Recent episodes include Clutton’s terrific interview with director Barrie Kosky, also intendant at Berlin’s Komische Oper, in which Kosky, with great wit and frankness, regales us with tales of his life and career. It’s among the most entertaining things I’ve heard for some time.

This week’s archive Proms, meanwhile, include a Royal Concergtebouw concert with Riccardo Chailly from 1990, shortly after his appointment as the orchestra’s chief conductor. Beethoven’s First Symphony dominates the first half, but the main work is Prokofiev’s disquieting Third, reworking music from The Fiery Angel, his opera about demonic possession, unperformed in his lifetime. You might not share Chailly’s view that it’s one of the great 20th-century symphonies, but there’s no question about the power with which he conducts it, unearthing dark veins of lyricism beneath its surface.

My picks for the week ahead

From 28 July, OperaVision is streaming Wahnfried, by the Israeli-American composer Avner Dorman. Written for the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe in 2017, it dramatises the internecine goings-on in the Wagner family in the 1920s, and their involvement with the rise of nazism. It all sounds bizarrely fascinating, to put it mildly.

And from 2 to 9 August, Glyndebourne Open House is streaming John Cox’s great 1975 staging of Rake’s Progress by Stravinsky, famously designed by David Hockney, and filmed during its 2010 revival. The fine cast features Topi Lehtipuu as Tom, Miah Persson as Anne, and Matthew Rose as Tom’s demonic nemesis, Nick Shadow.