Author Archives: operaramblings

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About operaramblings

Toronto based lover of opera, art song, related music and all forms of theatre.

The discounting has started

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boheme upsellWith two nights to go to the start of the COC’s season the discounting has started already.  The deal is buy tickets for any two other operas and get free tickets for La Bohème.  The deal is good for performances on October 16, 25, 27, 29 and 30 and appears to apply for all but the cheapest and most expensive seats.  The website isn’t exactly splashing the news around.  You will only see the offer if you try to buy tickets for La Bohème or if you just happen to be poking around to see how well things are selling.

Two Cultures – alive and well

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As part of yesterday’s Koerner Hall concert yesterday there was a panel discussion between the President of the RCM, the Artistic Director of the ARC Ensemble and the Director of Koerner Hall.  Unsurprisingly the President at one point made a pitch about the value of the arts in education and deprecated the cuts that have been made in that area by various governments.  Fair enough.  That’s his job and, anyway, I agree with him.  What did raise my hackles was his contrasting the “creative” arts with “drilling” (his word) in maths and science.

As some of my readers may know, mathematics was once my field and it, and theoretical physics, remain important interests.  Now it’s quite possible, likely even, that someone running a conservatory never got far enough in mathematics to experience just how deeply creative it can be but there’s no excuse for not knowing it can be.  Some of the most subtle and beautiful ideas can only be understood mathematically.  And here’s the irony.  It’s just like music.  You have to do a hell of a lot of grunt work to get to the point where you can do beautiful mathematics just as even the best musicians still have to practice and play scales. This is probably true of anything where deep skill is involved.  That apparently effortless blind back of the hand pass of Richie McCaw’s comes from hours on the training field as much as from brilliance.

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ARC Ensemble

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c-t“Culture Days” is a weekend long festival in Toronto where various arts organisations put on free events.  This year it included a concert in Koerner Hall by the ARC Ensemble with guests Baritone Peter Barrett and cellist Se-Doo Park.  The main draw for me was Respighi’s Il tramonto; a setting for baritone and string quartet of an Italian translation of Shelley’s The Sunset.  This was indeed very well executed but was far from the most interesting part of the afternoon.

It was actually the final piece that was the revelation; Castelnuevo-Tedesco’s Piano Quintet No. 1.  It’s a really fun piece in high romantic style with tons of melodic ideas and lots of colour.  It was given a truly virtuoso performance by Erika Raum, Benjamin Bowman, Steven Dann, Se-Doo Park and Dianne Werner.  I think I’ll be looking for more examples of Castelnuevo-Terdesco’s work.

Sex and violets

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Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur isn’t performed very often and, when it is, it’s usually because some great diva of the day wants to do it.  That’s the case with the 2010 Covent Garden production which was created by David McVicar for Angela Gheorghiu.  Actually I am a bit surprised it’s not done more often.  It’s not a great masterpiece but it’s no worse than a great many commonly done pieces and, if the plot is a bit implausible, it’s not as offensive as half of Puccini’s output.  I would have thought it would have great appeal to that opera middle ground to which I don’t belong.

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Here we go again

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Yesterday saw the first of this season’s free concerts in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre.  As has become the norm it featured the singers of the COC’s Ensemble Studio.  This year it was dedicated to the memory of the late Lotfi Mansouri and included a couple of short tributes to him.

Six of the Ensemble’s singers are new this year, as is the sole pianist, so these were mostly singers I haven’t heard a lot of.  I’ve also observed how much members of the Ensemble Studio develop in the programme and last year we had a solid group of third years with a few new entrants.  The balance has shifted to the other extreme and so no surprise that yesterday we heard more potential than polish.

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Front (l – r): Clarence Frazer, Sasha Djihanian, Danielle MacMillan, Michael Shannon
Middle (l – r): Gordon Bintner, Aviva Fortunata, Claire de Sévigné, Cameron McPhail
Back (l – r): Andrew Haji, Charlotte Burrage, Owen McCausland
Photographer: Karen Reeves

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Ben Heppner at Toronto Reference Library

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heppnerLast night’s event in the Star Talks series at the Toronto Reference Library involved Richard Ouzounian interviewing Ben Heppner who is in town to sing the title role in Peter Grimes.  It was a very genial interview; no tough questions about elitism or whether opera was dying.  Rather it was very much the tale of the kid from Dawson Creek who beats Renee Fleming and Susan Graham in the Met auditions and becomes a superstar.  It was curiously like Desert Island Discs without the music.

There were a couple of interesting stories.  The best concerned Heppner and Richard Jones’ production of Lohengrin (available on DVD/Blu-ray with Jonas Kaufmann in the title role).  It’s the one where Lohengrin and Elsa build a house then Lohengrin burns it down.  Well it turns out the the three year old Ben Heppner managed to burn the family home down and during the dress of Lohengrin had a pretty strong repressed memory reaction at the point where he had to set the cradle alight.  It says a lot for his professionalism that the first night went off without incident.

I did get to ask him for his views on different kinds of tenor singing the role of Grimes.  After all it was created for one of the most ethereal operatic tenors ever but ids frequently sung today by full on heldentors.  He said he didn’t think the voice was as important as how fully the singer inhabited the character and singled out Philip Langridge in that regard.  I have to agree with him.  I love Langridge’s Grimes.  It’s a real pity the video recording of it is so awful.

Peter Grimes runs for seven performances at the COC starting October 5th.

Bosom stirring

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Chabrier’s one act opera Une Éducation Manquée has possibly the most implausible plot in all of opera.  It concerns a young aristocratic French couple on their wedding night.  The whole plot turns on them having no idea what they are supposed to do.  Not only are they French but they rejoice in the names of Gontran de Boismassif and Hélène de la Cerisaie.  Titter ye not!  Fortunately it only takes them 47 minutes to figure things out because a Wagner work on this theme would be quite intolerable.  I’m not sure why anybody would bother with this piece of fluff but it made it onto DVD in a performance recorded in Compiègne in 1994.  It’s probably the most amusing thing out of there since someone faked up a video of Hitler dancing in front of a train carriage.  Which isn’t saying a lot.

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Albert Herring

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Britten’s Albert Herring is mysteriously under represented in the DVD catalogue.  The work is performed quite often being relatively inexpensive to mount and suitable for smaller venues but the many productions haven’t led to many recordings.  I have only been able to find one and that dates back to 1985 when it was recorded at Glyndebourne.  That’s appropriate enough as that’s the house the piece premiered in in 1947.  At least it’s a  fair and effective representation of the work.  Peter Hall’s production takes few liberties with the libretto and is a rather literal and effective, if necessarily somewhat caricatured,  representation of life in a Suffolk village.  The sets and costumes are evocative; especially the hall of Lady Billows’ house which really evokes a 17th century Great Hall and, as the view through the window tells us, is set in or close to the village, not in an isolated park.  There’s quite a lot of that kind of attention to detail in this production.

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You think this is funny, Beauty?

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The DVD version of Michael Sturminger’s Giacomo Variations was recorded at the Ronacker Theater in Vienna in 2011.  With the exception of Florian Boesch in the baritone role it’s the same line up as the performance in Toronto that I reviewed earlier this year.  Watching the DVD didn’t change my views about the piece or the performances materially.  It still feels a bit undercooked and schematic.  I did like the quote on the DVD box about Malkovich’s singing from the Kürier “closer to Tom Waits than to Fritz Wunderlich”.  I wish I’d said that.

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Tapestry Briefs

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tapestry_quartetTapestry Briefs is the product of the Composer-Librettist Workshop run annually by Tapestry.  Four composers and four librettists come up with sixteen ideas for a new opera and work up a scene from each.  Last night twelve scenes from the most recent workshop were presented in a fully staged format with piano accompaniment in Ernest Balmer Studio and adjacent Distillery spaces.  The quartet of singers for the evening was made up of some of Toronto’s top singer/actors; Carla Huhtanen, Krisztina Szabó, Keith Klassen and Peter McGillivray.  Piano accompaniment was from Gregory Oh and Jennifer Tung.

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