Needing something suitable to celebrate Britten’s 100th birthday I decided to go and see the National Ballet’s new show Innovation which premiered last night and included a piece set to the Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes. A Pergolesi Stabat Mater with Emma Kirkby and Daniel Taylor was a considerable additional attraction. I’m not a dance expert so take any comments on that subject that follow as the impressions of a complete non-expert.
Deborah Warner’s entry point to Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is the, almost certainly apocryphal, story about it premiering in a girls’ boarding school. At various points in the action we get a chorus of schoolgirls in modernish uniforms commenting silently on the action. They are on stage during the overture, are seen in dance class during some of the dance music and queue up for the Sailor’s autograph. It’s quite touching and adds to the pathos of the basic, simple, tragic story. Warner also adds a prologue (the original is lost). In Warner’s version Fiona Shaw declaims, and acts out, poems by Ovid/Ted Hughes, TS Eliot and WB Yeats. These additions aside the piece is presented fairly straightforwardly in a sort of “stage 18th century” aesthetic. The witch scenes are quite well handled with Hilary Summers as a quite statuesque sorceress backed up by fairly diminutive (and, for witches, quite cute) Céline Ricci and Ana Quintans. Their first appearance is quite restrained but they go to town quite effectively in their second appearance.
The Metropolitan Opera looms pretty large in the consciousness of any North American opera goer though, I suspect, is not as big a deal as its management thinks elsewhere. I was very curious then to experience it for myself. I see most of my opera in the comparatively intimate Four Seasons Centre (2100 seats) or even smaller spaces. I’m almost used to getting kicked as a character writhes at my feet in a small space production. I’ve been in larger houses too; neither the Coliseum nor Covent Garden are small. That said, the first impression of the auditorium and stage at the Met is just how big it is. We sat in the front row of the Balcony and the combined Balcony and Family Circlre stretched away behind us, apparently the size of a rugby field (probably a Welsh one given the slope). I had not realized that the Family Circle is not really an additional “ring” but a backwards continuation of the Balcony.
We caught Richard Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Met on Wednesday night. Expectations were high. It’s Strauss, and rare Strauss at that. It was our first time at the Met. The on-line opera world was abuzz with Christine Goerke’s performance as the Dyer’s Wife. By and large we weren’t disappointed.
Sunday night I attended a performance of Mozart’s Requiem Mass and the Ave Verum Corpus at Grace Church on the Hill. It was a charity event in memory of Rachel Krehm’s younger sister Elizabeth. All the cast and so on details are here.
I was/am in no fit state to write any kind of analytical review. There has been far too much death in my life recently and the music and the packed church was pretty much what I needed to process some of my own demons but not to tease out the nuances of the music or the performance. Enough! It was all in aid of St. Michael’s ICU and it must have raised a ton of money judging by the number of people there. I’m really grateful to Rachel for organizing this and for the invite.
The lemur and I flew to New York yesterday. We are going to see Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Met tomorrow. Anyway, following the train ride from Newark to Penn station and then the subway to our hotel, this was the first thing we saw after regaining the upper airs. Appropriate or what.
David McVicar chooses to set his production of Die Meistersinger, staged at Glyndebourne in 2011, in the 1820s or thereabouts. It’s an interesting choice as it puts German nationalism in a specifically cultural rather than political context and also rather clearly makes the point that “foreign rule” = “French rule”. That said, he really doesn’t develop any implications from that and what we get is a production typical of recent McVicar efforts. There’s spectacle aplenty and very good character development but he doesn’t seem to have any Big Ideas; for which, no doubt, many people will be grateful. The only place he seems to go a bit overboard is in laying on some fairly heavy German style humour. People who think that slapping waitresses on the bottom is the height of comedic sophistication will probably appreciate it.
It’s hard to fault any aspect of the new recording of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte recorded earlier this year at the Baden-Baden festival. The soloists are consistently good, and in some cases very good indeed, Simon Rattle is in the pit with the Berlin Philharmonic and Robert Carsen’s production is beautiful to look at and thought provoking without being pointlessly provocative. Add to that first rate video direction and superb Blu-ray sound and picture quality and one has a disk that looks competitive even in the very crowded market for Zauberflöte recordings.
Joel Ivany
Korngold’s Silent Serenade is, to put it mildly, odd. The plot could have been taken from Dario Fo and the only possible excuse for the schmaltzy music is that Korngold initiated many of the saccharine clichés he relies on. Last night the students of the Glenn Gould School under the direction of Joel Ivany and the musical leadership of Pieter Tiefenbach bravely tried to rescue it from well deserved obscurity.
The plot concerns a dressmaker who is accused of breaking into the bedroom of, and trying to abduct, one of his clients; an actress who happens to be engaged to the Prime Minister. In Naples this is a hanging offence. Meanwhile someone has made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the unpopular Prime Minister with a bomb. The king is dying and, we learn from his confessor, wishes to make a great act of mercy before he finally snuffs it. He wishes to pardon the bomber. Unfortunately the police don’t have a suspect. The solution is obvious. The dressmaker must confess to both crimes so that he can be pardoned and hanged for neither. Unfortunately the king dies before signing the pardon and so the dressmaker must hang. Following this so far? Fortunately for him the unpopular Prime Minister is killed in a popular uprising and he is installed in his stead much to the annoyance of the anarchist who did plant the bomb. They agree that the dressmaker will return to his salon and the actress, who has now fallen in love with him and is, conveniently, no longer engaged. There’s also a subplot concerning a newspaper reporter and an aspiring actress.
Topher Mokrzewski does it again. This time it’s an operatic spoof on our appalling, indeed surreal, mayor. Aaron Dimoff sang the role of Rob Ford. Alex Beley and Tyler Fitzgerald are the Ford Nation Chorus. All the singers are part of Calgary Opera Emerging Artist Development program.
Hat tip too to Brent Bambury and the CBC.
operaramblings 