Author Archives: operaramblings

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About operaramblings

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

In which the futility of speculation is revealed

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A month or so ago I speculated on what might be in the 2013/14 Canadian Opera Company season.  Today I attended the official launch.  I got two out of seven right.  Yes, I officially suck as a seer (a seersucker?).  Oddly, the two I got right were ones I’d worked out for myself and the two I’d based on hot tips turned out to be wrong.  So it goes.

Stuart Skelton as Grimes at Opera Australia - Photo: Branco Gaica

Stuart Skelton as Grimes at Opera Australia – Photo: Branco Gaica

So what’s new and exciting?  The biggest excitement for me is Peter Grimes.  Ben Heppner will sing Grimes which is great though part of me really wants Stuart Skelton.  Alan Held will sing Balstrode, which is also terrific casting, and Ileana Montalbetti will sing Ellen.  I think casting Ileana is a wonderful decision and I really look forward to seeing her in a major role.  The production is by Neil Armfield and has been seen previously in Houston and at Opera Australia.  Continue reading →

Honest Injun?

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I confess to having mixed, nay conflicted, feelings about the 2003 Palais Garnier recording of Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes.  On the one hand there is some really good music, idiomatically played and sung by musicians utterly at home in this repertoire, there’s some brilliant dance; both the choreography and the execution, and there is spectacle on a grand scale.  On the other hand there’s a nagging sense of cultural appropriation and, perhaps worse, a feeling that the whole thing may just be a giant piss take.  Actually in some ways it’s all of the above and if one can get into the spirit of the thing it sort of works.

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More Tudor queens

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confrontationToday’s MetHD broadcast of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda was a bit of a mixed bag.  There were some really good performances.  Joyce DiDonato in particular gave what may well have been a truly great performance and I would have loved to have seen it live.  David McVicar’s production was much better than his Anna Bolena; visually interesting and with some strong dramatic ideas.  However the good was pretty seriously undermined by another really awful piece of video directing by Gary Halvorson.  I guessed it was him after about ten minutes. The incessant use of the nose cam and the incredibly irritating low level tracking shots were a dead give away.  It was a big disappointment since the last two shows I saw, La Clemenza di Tito and Les Troyens, were filmed by Barbara Willis-Sweete and had given me some faint hope that the Met was capable of self analysis and improvement in this area.  Hope that was, alas, sadly dashed today.

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Wonky androids

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I’m a pretty Regie friendly guy but I confess to being quite bemused by the 2006 Salzburg production of Mozart’s Ascanio in Alba.  Some of the production concept I totally get.  Removing the unaccompanied recits and replacing them with two actors speaking a summary (in German) makes all kinds of sense.  It reduces a sprawling pastorale with minimal plot to something half the length while keeping all the good music.  The wonky android chorus, the hero apparently with severe motor neuron disease and Aceste shunting Silvia about in a wheelbarrow I had more problems with.  The Gumbie chorus seemed particularly odd and the costumes, well see for yourself.

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Upcoming events

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sellarsThere a couple or three things coming up in Toronto that might be of interest to readers.

On Sunday 27th January at 2pm Russell Braun and Rihab Chaieb are giving a recital of German songs in the Glenn Gould Studio.  Tickets are $60 but only $25 for under 25s.

The following evening Peter Sellars is giving a talk on his production of Tristan und Isolde at the Toronto Reference Library.  This one is free but ticketed.  Tickets are available from the TPL website.

And in free RBA noon concert news, on 24th January Sasha Djihanian and Cameron McPhail with pianists Timothy Cheung and Jenna Douglas are offering up Debussy’s Ariettes oubliées and Schumann’s Dichterliebe.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

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simone_sI guess being young, talented, hard working and a lovely person all help.  A leg up from Marilyn Horne does no harm either.  All of which is by way of saying that Simone Osborne makes her Carnegie Hall debut on Saturday in the Marilyn Hall Song Celebration.  Simone has already made a big impression in Toronto (Pamina, Gilda and Lauretta at COC) and across Canada as well as in Japan while taking time out to charm sharks in the Indian Ocean and Lotfi Mansouri (no relation) in Zurich.  There are some other singers too, including one Piotr Beczala, so New Yorkers might want to check this one out.

Toi, toi, toi and stuff.

Look! No swan

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1.kingSurprisingly perhaps I started out liking this 1986 recording of Lohengrin from the Metropolitan Opera quite a lot.  It’s a very traditional, literal and 70s/80s dark production but the orchestra and chorus are great, the P-regie seems pretty well thought out and the singing in the opening scenes is great.  Unfortunately it really rather goes downhill once Elsa, Lohengrin and Ortrud make their appearances.

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The silliest opera ever?

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Even by the standards of bel canto comedies Donizetti’s Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali is insubstantial fluff.  It’s basically a farce about a no hope opera troupe failing miserably to rehearse an opera in the face of prima donnaish Prima Donna, her overprotective husband, a flaky German tenor and the overbearing mother of the Seconda Donna (played by a man, natch).  Half of the jokes turn on cast members singing badly and the rest on standard opera clichés.  None of them are particularly funny.  The music is a bit non descript too.  The best bits are when the Prima Donna and the tenor inexplicably decide to sing Rossini and Mozart in the middle of a rehearsal.

1.PD_tenor Continue reading →

Brotherly love

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Rameau’s Castor et Pollux is a tragédie lyrique in five acts.  It’s a mythology based libretto which, ultimately, celebrates the fraternal love of the twins who rise to immortality while rather callously discarding the female human love interest.  Pierre Audi’s 2008 production for De Nederlandse Opera nods both to the baroque and to the mythological by staging the work in a rather abstract Sci-Fi sort of way but with moving sets and Fx that suggest, rather than reproduce, the stagecraft of the baroque.

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First of the year

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Cameron McPhail - Photo by Chris Hutchson- Jan 8 2013Yesterday saw the first free lunchtime concert of 2013 at the Four Seasons Centre.  Five singers from the COC’s Ensemble Studio gave us a programme of works by Mozart and Salieri, mostly comparative rarities.  I enjoy hearing the singers of the Ensemble Studio because it’s not just a chance to hear some good singing but also to see how voices are developing and make some guesses about whether one is seeing a future star.

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