I thought this was too cute. Against the Grain Theatre’s promo video for the upcoming Figaro’s Wedding.
Click here for more information and tickets.
Susanna and Figaro get engaged
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Author Archives: operaramblings
More Iphigénie
The second half of the Amsterdam double bill that opened with Iphigénie en Aulide is, of course, Iphigénie en Tauride. In this piece the more usual version of the Aulis story, where Diana substitutes a stag for Iphigenia on the altar and whisks the girl off to be her priestess among the savage Scythians of Tauris, is assumed. So the piece opens with Iphigenia and six other Mycenean priestesses (how they got to Tauris is a mystery) in Diana’s temple at Tauris where their job is to sacrifice any strangers who show up. Almost at once the capture of two Greeks is announced. They turn out to Iphigenia’s brother Orestes and his sidekick Pylades and the the next 90 minutes turns on Iphigenia failing to sacrifice either of them.
Breaking news
This just in:
Calgary Opera Announces New Resident Conductor
Calgary, AB… Following an extensive search, Calgary Opera announces the appointment of Christopher Mokrzewski as Resident Conductor.
“Calgary Opera had the opportunity to have Christopher Mokrzewski as repetiteur for a six-week period in October and November,” says General Director and CEO Bob McPhee. “During that time it was very evident that he was the ideal candidate and would bring the appropriate skill set to our company.”
This appointment builds on the success of the previous Resident Conductor, Gordon Gerrard. After three years with the company, Mr. Gerrard won the Enbridge Emerging Artist Award and is now a regular mainstage conductor in Calgary and throughout North America. Most recently he was appointed Assistant Conductor to the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.
Mokrzewski is thrilled by the opportunity to further his skills in collaboration with Calgary Opera. Currently a resident of Toronto, he is the Music Director of Against the Grain Theatre and a regular music staff member at the Canadian Opera Company.
“I am very excited to be joining Calgary Opera,” says Mokrzewski. “To collaborate with such a distinguished and forward-thinking Canadian company is a privilege and a remarkable opportunity. I also look forward to working with its Emerging Artists Development Program, which contains extraordinary young talent and has a strong presence in the Calgary community.”
Calgary Opera would like to thank Canada Council for the Arts for their support of the Resident Conductor program.
I really wanted to highlight this because Topher is an amazing artist and I’m sure this is the first step in a very exciting conducting career. He and Joel Ivany (watch out for that name too) have made Against the Grain Theatre the most exciting thing in Toronto opera since the Four Seasons Centre opened. I hope we’ll still see plenty of Topher in Toronto. Calgary couldn’t have made a better choice.
Iphigénie at last
Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide is finally available on Blu-ray and DVD. It was staged and recorded as a double bill with Iphigénie en Tauride at De Nederlandse Opera in September 2011 in productions by Pierre Audi. It’s excellent in just about every respect. The cast is to die for, the production is interesting and so is the staging in the rather challenging space of The Amsterdam Music Theatre, which also poses problems for the video director. Backed up, on Blu-ray, by a 1080i picture and DTS-HD-MA sound it’s a pretty compelling package.
Don’t lose your head
Just spotted new discount deals on the COC website. For the three spring productions; David Alden’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Robert Carsen’s Dialogues des Carmélites and Atom Egoyan’s Salome, they are offering 25% off if you buy two of the three and 33% off for all three. You get to pick your dates and tickets are available in all sections except the cheapest and most expensive. The 33% deal brings prices down to around season subscription rates. There are also $22 and $35 tickets available for both the under 30s who attend COC performances.
On a per dead nun basis you won’t find cheaper anywhere!
Gentle Death, I embrace you
It’s 1990 and Dame Joan Sutherland is retiring. Australian Opera decide to stage Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots as a farewell gala. In some ways it’s an odd choice as the Sutherland character, Marguerite de Valois, only appears in two of the five acts of an opera that’s rather long despite cuts. Still, as a vehicle for an ageing coloratura it’s not a bad choice. The production is by Lotfi Mansouri so there is nothing to get in the way of the plot and, by the same token, nothing much to think about. It’s also, equally characteristically, quite dark in places. Everything then rests on the performances. Continue reading
How did we get here?
Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker’s A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years, published in 2010, is an interesting and, occasionally, perplexing read. It looks at developments largely from a musicological perspective only rarely straying into political context and even morer rarely dealing with sociological factors surrounding opera although there is an interesting short section on French grand opéra that deals with the extent to which French opera of various kinds was subsidised and how the odd social habits of the audience shaped the works themselves.
Doubly fiendish
Today’s Guardian Prize crosssword is a must for any opera fan who likes first class cryptics.
Hell is oneself
Last night I attended Soup Can Theatre’s double bill of Barber’s A Hand of Bridge followed by Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit; an English translation by Stuart Gilbert, of his 1944 play Huis Clos. The latter is a piece I’ve seen before and read in both English and French and I would never have imagined it could be presented as it was last night. It’s a play about three people who find themselves in a room in Hell together. They will be there for eternity, an eternal triangle I suppose, for they have been especially selected to get on each others’ nerves by continually reminding each character of that aspect of their former lives that they find least admirable. I have always seen it as an incredibly bleak play as befits one that premiered in Paris in the last months of the German occupation. I would never have imagined it as a comedy; albeit a dark one, but that’s what director Sarah Thorpe gave us. Continue reading
Dodgy theology night at the opera
I seem to be in the middle of a run of operas full of dodgy theology. First it was the Met’s Parsifal where Wagner à la Girard dished up a puzzling mixture of misogyny, sacred wounds, centuries long curses, bastardization of the Eucharist and weird holy weapons. There’s a really good conversation about this over at Likely Impossibilities. Today I was at Opera in Concert’s semi-staged production of Massenet’s Thaïs. (My review of this should be in the summer edition of Opera Canada). So today was more misogyny, hairshirts, lots of penance and the idea that the road to sainthood is to be a tart until one’s looks start to go and then torture oneself to death in an appropriately aesthetic manner. Also, showing empathy for anyone not exactly like oneself leads to doubts, expulsion and damnation. Coming up soon, Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, in which salvation is achieved by rejecting anything to do with the Enlightenment and being guillotined. There’s a Salome in there too somewhere though I’m not sure there’s anything that could be called coherent theology at all in that.
Blessed are the cheesemakers… Really.
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