By request I’ve added a page to the site that covers strategies for saving money on tickets for the Canadian Opera Company. If anyone has similar content for other houses I’d really like to link to it so we have a more comprehensive index of cheap ticket advice. Please let me know.
Verdi’s Il Trovatore notoriously has an episodic and highly improbable plot. It’s also famously difficult to cast. Creating a compelling production and staffing it with capable singers therefore presents a formidable double challenge. The current Canadian Opera Company production gets it half right. The problem is Charles Roubaud’s much travelled production. There’s not an idea in it. It’s not surprising that the director’s programme notes run to three short paragraphs. Roubaud sets each scene in a sort of grey box of towering walls. Unfortunately each grey box is just different enough that that the curtain comes down at the end of each scene and the stage crew spend what seems like an interminable amount of time setting up the next grey box. We just aren’t used anymore to sitting quietly through interminable scene changes. We expect slicker stagecraft and in a modern opera house there’s really no excuse for this 19th century approach. Within in each grey box the grey clad cast come and go and in between mostly stand around. Blocking is perfunctory, acting superfluous and old fashioned “park and bark” the order of the day. It’s the sort of production that might have passed muster thirty years ago but really doesn’t cut it in 2012.
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Christopher Alden’s recent productions in Toronto; Rigoletto and Der Fliegender Holländer, were controversial, rather cerebral affairs that delighted his fans but tended to puzzle, and even infuriate, the more conservative critics and opera goers. His Die Fledermaus, which opened last night at the Four Seasons Centre, has something for everybody. There are two main threads uniting the three acts. The first is the piece as an allegory of Austrian bourgeois society from an insecure pre WW1 period through a period of unbridled hedonism in the 1920s to the beginnings of Fascism. The second is a much more explicit depiction of Falke as the ringmaster of the whole circus. He goes from manipulative Freudian psychiatrist in Act 1 to Orlofsky’s confidante in Act 2 to, bat costumed, sitting astride the giant watch that hangs above the stage; the only character aloof from the takeover of the drama by the sinisterly Fascistic Frosch. All this is strung together by prefiguring later elements in earlier scenes. In Act 1 the party goers from Act 2 invade the scene via the fractured wall of Rosalinde’s bedroom as Gabriel imagines the delights to come. A silent but frenetic Frosch appears on stage at various points in the first two acts although his identity isn’t apparent until the coup de theâtre that carries us into Act 3. Additionally Alden does not shy away from bat imagery, including it’s darker overtones. There are bat shadows on the backdrop during the overture, Falke first appears as a Dracula look alike, the ‘ballet’ are batgirls and we close out with Falke, again dressed as a bat, overseeing the denouement. There’s a lot going on and I shall be very happy to see this again and delve deeper (a recurrent theme with Alden productions). Continue reading
So says Rolando Villazón towards the end of the “Making of” documentary that accompanies Robert Dornhelm’s 2008 film of Puccini’s La Bohème. Fortunately for us Dornhelm, Villazón and the rest of those involved provide another piece of evidence that films of operas can indeed be made, and made very successfully. This one is a curious hybrid. It uses just about every technique that I’ve seen used in such a venture. The whole thing was originally recorded in the studio and most of the film is lip-synched using a mixture of the singers and actors who weren’t art of the singing cast but some of the arias were sung on set to a taped orchestral track. I’m not sure why and I couldn’t tell which was what. It all works pretty well anyway.
Female chorus member – Sketch: Constance Hoffman
There’s an event on in Toronto this weekend called “CultureDays”. The COC’s contribution last night was an open orchestra dress rehearsal of Christopher Alden’s new production of Die Fledermaus preceded by a talk in the Richard Bradshaw Auditorium by set designer Allen Moyer and costume designer Constance Hoffman moderated by the CBC’s Brent Bambury. The event was “first come, first served” and restricted to 500 tickets so we decided to be early. Doors opened at 1815 for a 1830 talk so the plan was to meet the lemur at the opera house at 1700, grab a bite to eat and then join the line-up. I got there early as I was through at work and preferred to sit in the sunshine at the Four Seasons Centre rather than at my desk so I got there around 1615. There was already a line up! By the time the lemur showed up just before 1700 there was quite a line up so we changed plan and the lemur went off to fetch burritos to eat in the line. Just as well as they ended up turning people away. Continue reading
As regular readers know posts on this blog frequently feature screen caps from the DVD or Blu-ray disk reviewed. In the process of garnering the screen shots I have found out one or two interesting things about the picture quality of the originating disk. Using vlc to play disks gives a window the size of the image in pixels. (I use vlc because for some reason screen caps from DVDPlayer come out blank.) Older opera DVDs have a picture that is nominally 720 pixels wide giving a 720×540 window for 4:3 pictures. In practice there are often black bars at the side of screen reducing this a little and sometimes older TV derived material isn’t even really up to even that quality so this really represents an upper bound on the amount of information available. More recent 16:9 DVDs tend to be a bit more information rich; 830×468 pixels seems quite common and some HD derived material checks in at around 850×480. It does mean though that very few operas will fit on a single DVD9 disk. Continue reading
Robert Carsen’s clean, refined production of Handel’s Semele originated in Aix, was recorded in Zürich and eventually made it’s way to Vienna and Chicago. In many ways it is classic Carsen. It’s elegant and uncluttered, is strong on the detailed Personenregie, has a consistent design concept but isn’t really pushing a concept driven agenda. It’s also quite funny without descending to priapic donkeys. Also there are lots of chairs.
(front row, l-r): Ambur Braid and Cameron McPhail; (second row, l-r): Jenna Douglas, Claire de Sévigné and Mireille Asselin; (third row, l-r): Neil Craighead, Owen McCausland and Sasha Djihanian; (fourth row, l-r): Rihab Chaieb and Timothy Cheung. Photo: Chris Hutcheson
So, as promised here are my thoughts on yesterday’s Ensemble Studio recital at the Four Seasons Centre. It’s always interesting to see the Ensemble Studio together; to see how returning members have developed since last heard and to hear the newcomers. This is what we got.
Soprano Claire de Sévigné gave us “Chacun le sait” from La fille du régiment. It’s a good piece for a young singer and shee sang it with spirit and enthusiasm and acted with gusto. Perfectly idiomatic French too of course. She has a lovely voice and is clearly one to watch.
Photo credit: Chris Hutcheson.
Today was the first concert of the season in the free concert series at the Four Seasons Centre featuring the very talented artists of the COC’s Ensemble Studio. I promise that there will be a proper review very soon but right now all I can offer is a treat for that section of my readership who have a thing for cross dressing mezzos. You know who you are!
The 2010 La Fura dels Baus Madrid production of Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is much the best version of the piece I’ve seen on DVD. The production starts and ends on a rubbish dump and the dump and its people, curiously reminiscent of the vegetarian terrorists in Delicatessen, are present pretty much all the time. It doesn’t pull any punches and tackles Brecht’s characteristically unsubtle parody of commodity capitalism straight on and without sentimentality or apology. Perhaps the most effective scene is the sort of “orgy by Frederick Taylor” that accompanies Second comes the loving match in Act 2 but there are lots of telling moments from the widow Begbick first appearing from a derelict fridge to the pyre of mattresses on which Jim is executed. Curiously perhaps the piece is given in Michael Feingold’s English translation but it’s a very good translation and little or nothing is lost.
operaramblings 