Back in the dark days of December 2020 Tapestry Opera and New Music Concerts collaborated on a filmed version of Ana Sokolović’s Love Songs featuring soprano Xin Wang.  Thursday night, a quite different version opened at the Nancy and Ed Jackman Performance Centre.  It also features Xin Wang and is directed by Michael Mori but this time saxophone has been swapped out for a tap dancer Rumi Jeraj which fits with the body percussion elements of the score.

It’s a fascinating piece.  Lyrics about love and loss in English, French, Serbian, Irish and Latin are interspersed with repetitions of “I love you” in over one hundred languages.  Mostly it’s quite quiet and understated but sometimes it leaps into, often anguished, cries.  For example right at the end the last line of Catullus’ elegy for his brother; “atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale” is repeated multiple times almost in a scream.  It’s all sung a cappella and is a real tour de force by Xin Wang.

The staging is really beautiful.  It’s atmospherically lit (Emerson Kafarowski) in sort of greens and blues.  The set is just a dirt strewn area with a scrim behind it.  Xin Wang acts out a sort of ritual mainly involving candles as she reflects on her lost love.  We hear Rumi Jeraj; tap dancing of course, long before we see him and when we first do t’s as if “through a glass darkly” with clever use of light on the scrim.  It’s well into the piece before he makes a fully visible entrance and acts out a sort of childhood tableau with Xin Wang that involves a really weird version of O Mistress Mine and a lot of rhythmic clapping.

It’s a genre defying piece with a disturbing, unsettling beauty.  Michael Mori’s staging and excellent performances from Xin Wang and Rumi Jeraj enhance those qualities to make a truly memorable hour of music and theatre.

There are three more performances; Friday at 7pm, Saturday at 4pm and Sunday at 2pm.

Photo credit: Dahlia Katz