It’s becoming a bit of a habit. The Royal Opera has released a video recording of the 2019 revival of Kaspar Holten’s 2014 production of Don Giovanni directed by Jack Furness and conducted by Helmut Haenchen. I’ve already reviewed both the DVD and the cinema broadcast of the 2014 production so saying much about the production would be superfluous. Suffice to say it’s one of the better Don Giovannis available on disk.
Amplified Opera are back with a line up of three “mini-gigs”. These are combined in a series of three double bills running March 17th to 20th inside Jeffrey Gibson’s installation I AM YOUR RELATIVE at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Sterling Road. Continue reading
There’s not exactly a flood of events in my calendar for march yet but there are a few. Running March 1st to 20th at Crow’s Theatre is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ satirical play Gloria about a Manhattan magazine staff seeking fame and glory as the internet turns the industry upside down. It’s not an opera but it’s directed by the very talented André Sills which is reason enough for me.
This is not intended as a a political blog though, art being what it is, it sometimes is. That said, these are not normal times and sometimes a political stand has to be taken. We stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine and condemn in the strongest terms the current aggression by the fascist regimes in Moscow and Minsk as well as their enablers and supporters in the United States and elsewhere.
Here’s a quick round up of recent webstreams. The main event is the concert streamed by the COC over the weekend featuring Jane Archibald with the COC Orchestra and Johannes Debus. There’s about forty five minutes of music and it’s predictably classy music making though it’s emotionally taxing to look at an empty Four Seasons centre again. The program includes Mozart. Handel, Strauss, Massenet, Gounod and Bernstein. Arguably it’s a bit predictable but both musical and technical values are high. It’s avaiable free until August 27th via registration at the COC website.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about whether or not it’s legit to change text, music or dramaturgy for problem operas like Madama Butterfly. I get pretty frustrated by this because it happens all the time in Europe, especially in the German speaking countries, a fact which seems to escape the notice of many involved in this debate. Usually it’s the dramaturgy that gets changed. Changes to the music are rare indeed and, traditional playing with operetta dialogue aside, the libretto usually doesn’t change. And, of course it’s not just “problem operas” that get the treatment. Today I’m going to write about a “concept” production of Weber’s Der Freischütz recorded at the Vienna State Opera in 2018.
There’s a certain logic in Christof Loy following up his 2019 production of Korngold’s Das Wunder der Heliane at the Deutsche Oper Berlin with Riccardo Zandonai’s 1914 piece Francesca da Rimini. Both pieces deal with overt, somewhat perverted, sexuality as the means of a woman achieving some sort of agency and both have lush, hyper-romantic scores. Loy claims his next project will be Shreker’s Der Schatzgräber for the same house so there’s apparently more to come.
Hans Abrahamsen’s let me tell you is a work for orchestra and soprano setting text arranged by Paul Griffith from Ophelia’s lines in Hamlet. It was written for and dedicated to Barbara Hannigan who recorded it in 2015 (I think) with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and Andris Nelsons.
It’s a piece in seven sections of varying moods expressing different aspects of Ophelia; both in the play and in the afterlife of the character in paintings etc. Generally the music sits on the fractured edge of tonality with a melodic line that owes something to folk music. Sometimes it’s extremely slow with a bassy, brooding air and other times it’s bright and busy.
So continuing my exploration of somewhat off the wall contemporary Icelandic music I come to Jóhann Jóhannson’s “oratorio” Drone Mass. The inspiration and textual base is the gnostic “Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians” discovered in 19435. These appear to be very obscure texts and Jóhannson really just uses syllable combinations from them to create a series of vocalises. These are then set for string quartet, eight member choir and electronics.
The musical style is minimalist in a way that’s a bit like Górecki or Pärt but with electronics. It’s quite hypnotic with some really tectonic bass supplied by the electronics in places. The vocal style varies from something like renaissance polyphony to something more rhythmically articulated. It’s the sort of music one easily gets sucked into. Across the 50 minutes or so of music there’s enough variation of style to keep things interesting.
I spent three hours earlier today listening to three panel discussions about the issues involved in presenting Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. The overall event was titled Grappling with Madama Butterfly Today: Representation, Reclamation, Re-imagination. They were three very different panels as we shall see. But first some context. The event was co-presented by Confluence Concerts, Amplified Opera, the Canadian Opera Company, the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto, and the Humanities Initiative at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. One of the “triggers” for the event was the planned revival of Madama Butterfly at the COC (now to be done as an “on-line” event of some description) though one might have listened to the discussions without actually realising that.
The first panel consisted of COC boss Perryn Leach with soprano Teiya Kasahara, soprano Jaclyn Grossman and Boston Lyric’s Jessica Johnson Brock. I expected it to tackle the problematic nature of Madama Butterfly head on, as indeed the other two panels did, but it didn’t. It got sidetracked into essentially blind alleys about whether the work should be performed at all and whether one should always cast Asians in Asian roles and such. I got the strong feeling that no-one involved wanted to touch the issue of why, in 2022, the COC had planned to present a thoroughly unreflective, indeed deeply racist and sexist, production of the work. And that in the context of a season of three problematic operas presented in equally unambitious productions. Indeed, so unambitious that Leech’s deputy has described Mozart’s The Magic Flute as a “whimsical comedy”. Brigid Brophy must be gyrating in her crypt. Why was the discussion so anodyne? I think it comes down to power dynamics. Perryn Leech advanced views that I think can be summed up as “as long as we present enough new work (preferably short stuff on small stages) and do a few token events like this one it’s OK to give the bougie donors their fix. Even if that fix is racist and misogynist. Nobody challenged this. After all, if you are a young woman trying to make her way in the deadly world of opera why would you call out the most powerful person in Canadian opera?
operaramblings 