UoT Opera’s annual Student Composer Collective production was presented on Sunday afternoon at CanStage Berkeley Street.  This year Michael Patrick Albano’s libretto took three stories from antiquity and presented each twice; essentially in the original and then with a modern twist.  The three stories were Antigone, Medea and Helen and five composers were involved in creating the music.  Sandra Horst conducted with a seven piece ensemble on stage to one side.

Generally I tend to enjoy Michael Patrick’s librettos more when they have a comic element but that’s pretty hard to do with Antigone or Medea.  Helen, of course, is a different matter.  Nonetheless I thought this show was well constructed and coherent.

Antigone in Antiquity featured music by David Archibald and told the story of Antigone’s burial of her brother in a fairly straightforward manner with  a Greek looking chorus backing up Camille Labonté as Antigone and Brooke Zarubin as Ismene.  The score is basically Late Romantic and quite colourful though with some cruelly high notes for Antigone.  Camille coped pretty well with those and, overall, gave rather a touching performance.

Antigone in Our Time was more ambiguous.  A woman (Delaney Dam) searches a battlefield for her, presumably dead, brother.  She’s interrupted in her quest by her mother  (Taline Yeremian) and the ghost of her dead fiancé (Josh Gibson) while the chorus questions her motives.  The music, by Pari Bahrami is much more abrasive and quite chorus heavy.  Overall, this vignette was more overtly dramatic than its predecessor.  It was here too that I started to notice the striking projections (Gabriel Cropley) that covered the whole back wall.

The Vengeance of Medea again told the story of Medea killing Glauce, Creon and her sons in a pretty straightforward way backed by a busy, somewhat minimalist, score by Willian Quan Cheng.  Zyyion Stephens gave a powerful performance as the sorceress with a solid showing from bass Onur Hilaloğlu as Creon and a cameo by Mena Lukic as Jason.

Medea in Suburbia was perhaps the most interesting and experimental piece.  Here, Medea (Sloane Ryan) is a woman awaiting trial for killing her children and she’s meeting with her young, inexperienced lawyer (Taline Yeremian) while Josh Gibson stands by as the prison guard.  The music, by James Lowrie, is much more challenging.  He takes risks with the vocal line; breaking up words and inserting percussive repetitions of words and syllables against a spiky instrumental score.  My big criticism of contemporary opera, at least in North America, is that too often it does nothing interesting with the vocal writing so full marks for a pretty successful attempt to be different and praise too for Sloane and Taline for a very effective and dramatic presentation of some tough music.

The Helen story was presented with classical story being told in cheeky surtitles and projections to a more conventional score by James Lowrie before we got into a take based on the antics at a soup delivery company in 1955.  Manny Menelaus (Enquan Yu) decides to stage a beauty contest involving three office girls (Katerina Victoria Monaco, Emma Lavigne, Claire Jun) to impress his visiting boss Bob Paris (Christian Matta).  His wife Helen (Katie Kirkpatrick) decides to gatecrash the contest and while the girls have been dressed frumpily but fussily by Manny, Helen is the height of 1950s elegance.  It’s lust at first sight and Bob and Helen elope to Yellowknife.  Classic Albano really.  Nicely sung and well acted to an appropriately light hearted score by Kelly Du and spectacular projections.

These shows are unique.  AFAIK no other university opera programme showcases the compositions of current students in this way and it’s always fun.

Photo credit: Gene Wu