Appreciation by David Fisher

The 76th season of the Leicester Music Society got off to a great start with Michael Lessiter’s audio-visual talk on Famous Operatic Trials. With his experience of the operatic stage Michael was an ideal singer to explain the trials in detail and he used his profound knowledge to put these across in eight well-chosen extracts by English, German and Italian composers.

Michael illuminated the dramatic and memorably musical extracts with precision and clarity. He pointed out those elements of the music which enabled us to understand how the often intense drama was underpinned by the vocal and orchestral techniques allied to the specific instrumentation of the composers.

Michael started with Gilbert and Sullivan’s short but perfectly crafted Trial by Jury before upping the emotional stakes with Britten’s Peter Grimes and Billy Budd. The poignant power of these particular operas cannot be overestimated, and the other extracts he chose—mainly Italian by Verdi, Puccini and Giordano with a Teutonic touch of Wagner (see the track list below)—were also excellently illustrated with stirring recordings of famous singers and interesting photographs: some contemporary with the operas, and others relevant to specific productions. These helped to enhance our understanding of each plot, which characters were involved, and where they appeared in the opera.

We could not have been better served in that Michael has trodden opera stages in those works himself, which gave us the feeling of being there. His personal recollections certainly brought everything to life.