Yearly Archives: 2018

What’s on in April

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marcyApril is a busy month for fully staged opera.  Canadian Opera opens two productions and there are shows from Opera Atelier, Against the Grain and Essential Opera.  First up is the COC’s revival of Robert Lepage’s production of Stravinsky’s The Nightingale and Other Short Fables.  This opens on April 13th and runs to May 13th.  In 2009 it sold out so this time there are nine performances.  Also at the COC there’s Donizetti’s Anna Bolena completing the Tudor trilogy.  It opens on April 28th with nine performances closing May 26th.

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Belladonna

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belladonnaFAWN Chamber Creative presented a new piece last night at Kensington Hall.  It was called Belladonna and was billed as a “queer, techno opera” to a libretto by Gareth Mattey who apparently specialises in this genre.  “”Queer, techno pastoral” might have been nearer the mark.  Basically, sheep tending person of uncertain gender/orientation meets another such.  A supernatural being of some sort intervenes.  There are hallucinogenic berries (“tripping hither, tripping thither?”).  “Exploration” ensues.  I was unclear on whether or not it had a happy ending.  I’m not sure it matters.

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Paint Me a Song

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Last night, at Walter Hall, the Canadian Art Song Project presented their latest commission; Miss Carr in Seven Scenes by Jeffrey Ryan.  The overall standard of the CASP commissions since Lawrence Wiliford and Steven Philcox launched the endeavour has been very high.  The Ryan piece maintains that.

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You’re welcome, Rossini

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Today’s Mazzoleni Songmasters concert featured Lucia Cesaroni and Alysson McHardy with Rachel Andrist at the piano and Iain Scott narrating in a program that wasn’t, as expected, all Rossini.  Rather it was music written by and for six of the women in Rossini’s life in a program inspired by Patricia Morehead.  So what we got was plenty of Rossini, some Bellini, some Clara Schumann and music composed by the ladies themselves.  I’m moderately familiar with the music of Pauline Viardot (younger sister of  Maria Malibran) but I had never heard anything composed by Malibran, Isabella Colbran,  Pauline Sabatier, Giuditta Pasta or Adelina Patti.  As it turns out all were perfectly competent song composers and it was good to hear some rather rare material.

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Cavalli’s Elena

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Cavalli is a rather neglected composer. Something like thirty of his operas exist but few are ever performed and only one, La Calisto, appears at all frequently. It’s hard to see why. He was Monteverdi’s pupil and a worthy successor whose work was decidedly popular in his lifetime. It’s even harder to see why a work like Elena could have been ignored for 350 years before being revived at the Aix en Provence Festival in 2013. It’s really got the same things going for it as Il coronazione di Poppea. There’s sex, homoeroticism, mythology, cross dressing, a weird (Shakespearean?) mix of the serious and the comic and some really lovely music. The only downside I can see is a rather convoluted plot and the fact that one of the leading roles was written for a high castrato.

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Of Thee I Sing

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There are some pretty silly opera plots.  Donizetti’s Emilia di Liverpool comes to mind but the Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing probably tops even the thundering torrents of the Mersey as it descends from the Cheshire Alps for silliness.  Basically one John P. Wintergreen is a candidate for POTUS.  His campaign gimmick is that he will marry whoever wins a beauty contest, held naturally enough, in Noo Joysy.  Unfortunately(?) he falls in love with the homelier corn muffin maven Mary Turner and marries her instead.  He duly gets elected but diplomatic complications with the French follow when it is revealed that the pageant winner; Diana Devereaux of Louisiana is the “illegitimate daughter of the illegitimate son of the illegitimate nephew of Napoleon”.  Impeachment proceedings follow but, of course, there’s a happy ending.  Along the way almost every US institution and region gets gently pilloried and the jokes are even funnier because what might have seemed risque in 1930 seems “business as usual” now, as when three White House interns sing about how the Presidential Mansion is the safest place in America for a young girl…

Cairns cast Chorus Act 1

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Glenn Gould School’s Die Fledermaus

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Die Fledermaus offers a lot scope for reinterpretation.  Like so many works involving spoken dialogue there is a tradition of reworking that dialogue to work in contemporary humour and geographic relevance to the point where there is no canonical version though there’s probably a set of general expectations.  Joel Ivany’s production for the Glenn Gould School, which opened last night at Koerner Hall, goes further than most to create a “play within a play” dynamic riffing to some extent on the difficulty of staging an opera in a concert hall.  He also makes the decision to use English dialogue but have the sung text in the original German (except for the finale).

GGS Opera 2018 Die Fledermaus #1; Lisa Sakulensky Photography

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