Gounod’s Faust is very French, stuffed with a specifically Catholic religiosity and has all the elements, welcome or not, of 19th century French opera; it’s long, it has ballet, there are interpolated drinking songs etc. Alaina Viau and Markus Kopp’s adaptation Dissociative Me, presented by LooseTEA Music Theatre, is none of these things (OK there’s an interpolated drinking song, Stan Rogers even, but at least it happens in a bar) and it’s all the better for that.
Giancarlo del Monaco’s production of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann recorded in Bilbao in 2006 isn’t nearly as weird as the interviews on the first disk might lead one to expect. It has its moments but in many ways is more “by the book” than the Laurent Pelly production I looked at last week. The interviews talk of a “Sartrian” Hoffmann and a Freudian approach to Antonia. Ok so Hoffmann is portrayed as a hunchback and he’s fairly damaged but he’s basically your standard drunk poet fixated on a woman or women he can’t have. I can’t actually see this dude nailing his hand to a nightclub table with a knife or drowning his cat to prove a point.
UoT Opera has announced a five show line up for 2015/16. Casting, ticket information etc to follow as and when available.
Two listings in in the last 24 hours. COC is staging a couple of “family friendly” events. On Saturday, November 14th, they are presenting Dean Burry’s The Bremen Town Musicians (11am) and interactive opera Operation Superpower (1.30pm). Starring the young artists of the COC Ensemble Studio, both operas are written specifically for young people aged 3 to 12. Each opera is 45 minutes in length, followed by a 15-minute Q&A with the cast and crew. Both performances take place at the Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Opera Centre at 227 Front St. E., Toronto, Ontario. There’s the opportunity to take part in “hands-on activities” related to the operas an hour before each show. Tickets to each opera are $15 for adults, and $10 for children. More info at coc.ca. Continue reading
Laurent Pelly’s 2013 production of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann at the Liceu is one of those productions that’s a bit hard to take in at first go. Part of it is the performing edition used (Michael Kay and Jean-Christophe Keck) which seems to have added a lot of dialogue compared to any version I’ve seen before and includes Hoffmann killing Giulietta in Act 3. This produces a constant sense of “where they heck are we in the piece”. It doesn’t help that the DVD package contains no explanatory material at all. There are no interviews on the disks and the documentation is sub-basic.
Today is Operaramblings fourth blogiversary. In that time I’ve produced 1,089 posts which have been viewed a total of 270,084 times. Maria Ewing continues to prove oddly popular. The Salome DVD review has been read 3,622 times. Traffic seems to have stabilised. Having grown from 47,759 hits in 2012 to 93,209 hits last year I think it’s gone as far as it is going to; 7,000-8,000 hits/month.
So there you go. Thanks to everyone who has, and continues, to make it fun.
This just in from frequent Operaramblings commenter and COC Adult Education Programs Manager Gianmarco Segato. The COC is launching Opera Insights, a series of free adult education events linked to the productions of the 2015/16 season. It’s a pretty broad range of programming ranging from scholarly discussions on reconstructing the score of Maometto II and the history of the ball gown to Traviata singalongs and Carmen themed dance lessons. Participants include composers Barbara Monk-Feldman and Norbert Palej, conductors Johannes Debus, Harry Bicket and Sandra Horst and singers like Christine Goerke plus, inevitably, lots of academics (we love them really we do). Looks like a lot of fun. The events are all free but are ticketed. Full details can be found here.
The Canadian Opera Company has just announced the 2015/16 season line up for the free lunchtime concert series in Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre. Now under the curatorship of Claire Morley there’s the usual incredible array of chamber music, dance, piano, jazz and world music as as well as, of course, the vocal series.
Verdi loved Shakespeare and tried to reflect the psychological depth of his characters in the operas he based on the bard. You really wouldn’t know that watching the 2008 Salzburg Festival production of Otello. There’s a lot to like in both production and performance but the emotionally monochromatic performance of the title role by Aleksandrs Antonenko, who can do every mood from fairly grumpy to furious, and the moustache twirling Jago of Carlos Álvarez rather reduce the piece to pathologically jealous nutter with anger management problem kills wife.
The last major concert of this year’s Toronto Summer Music Festival was a recital by Finnish soprano Karita Mattila and pianist Bryan Wagorn. Talk about ending on a high note. This was an exceptional performance by a mature artist at the height of her powers. In her mid-fifties, she is starting to transition to older roles. For example she will sing Kostelnička, rather than the title role, in her next Jenůfa. She has really acquired an ability to darken her voice which she used to great effect, especially in the set of Sallinen songs she sang after the interval but she hasn’t lost the vocal qualities that made her a star.
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