Author Archives: operaramblings

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About operaramblings

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

Good news

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Canadian Opera Company General Director Alexander Neef has signed a new contract to stay with the company through 2021. This is very good news indeed. Neef has shown a canny ability to programme imaginatively varied programmes while keeping the house full, mostly through carefully balancing the number of performances between the more adventurous repertoire and one or two “bums on seats” shows per season. Aided by the company having moved to the technically and acoustically excellent Four Seasons Centre he has also done a great job of making the COC a company that the best singers, conductors and directors want to come to(*). That’s a problem none of his predecessors managed to crack. It’s no idle boast now when COC describes itself as “home to the best”. I feel confident that we can now look forward to another eight years of varied, high quality opera at COC.

* Confirmed to me by Larry Brownlee but to be honest the line up in the last couple of years and going forward speaks for itself. Brownlee, Graham, Archibald, Radvanovsky, Pieczonka, Braun, Schade. Hereros-Casada, Sir Andrew Davis. Carsens, the Aldens, Sellars, Malfitano, Albery. Such a change from ten years ago!

In which I fail to ‘get’ dubbed opera films

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I’ve reviewed a fair few films of operas on this blog. They have all been of a kind where a director rehearses a cast they record the opera in the studio and then film a lip synched version either on set or on location. There are also films where the opera is recorded in the studio thenan entirely different cast mimes the opera on location. Petyer Weigl’s 1988 film of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin comes into this category.  It started life as a perfectly normal studio recording and then Weigl filmed it on location, presumably in Russia, and in the process cut nearly a quarter of the music.  The approach doean’t work for me.  However good the film actors are, they look like film actors miming someone else and in so doing much of the interpersonal drama is lost.  The result is that it’s like listening to the CDs with eye candy.  Continue reading →

Alfano’s Cyrano with Domingo and Radvanovsky

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It’s hard to think of a play that would make a better basis for an opera libretto than Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.  Henri Cain’s adaptation is rather good; somewhat simplifying and tightening up the plot in a similar manner to that later taken by Britten and Pears with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s a shame Franco Alfano’s music doesn’t really rise to the same heights.  It has its moments, especially later in the opera, but much of the time it’s dull and impressionistic; more like a film soundtrack than an opera score.  I guess the lesson is that one just can’t do verismo while trying to avoid vulgarity and excessive melodrama.  It also has to be said that much of the time the music seems to be fighting the natural rhythm of the words rather than supporting it.  What the music does have is Alfano’s trademark torturing of his singers, especially the principal four roles of Cyrano, Roxane, Christian and De Guiche.

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Cartoonish barbiere

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So following on from Jean-Pierre Ponelle’s last film we now turn to one of his earliest, a 1972 version of Rossini’s Il barbieri di Siviglia.  It’s based on his production for La Scala but is, as usual with Ponelle, studio recorded and shot in the studio with lip synching.  It’s not an especially interesting production but it does have a starry cast including Hermann Prey in the title role.  Continue reading →

Artificial and cruel Così

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In 1988 Jean-Pierre Ponnelle made the last of his lip synched opera films; Mozart’s Così fan tutte.  It carries Ponnelle’s trademark “artificiality” even further than in other of his films that I have seen.  The sets, the costumes, the acting and the camera work never let us forget that this is a work of the, in the director’s words, “greatest artificiality”.  It also becomes increasingly clear as the piece progresses that Ponnelle has a very clear idea of what “the opera is about”.  Continue reading →

Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo at the Liceu

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Director Gilbert Deflo was inspired by the Hall of Mirrors in the ducal palace in Mantua, scene of the first performance of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, to try and create something similar for the much larger Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona.  The result is an almost extreme HIP approach.  Sets, costumes, acting and singing style are all what we have come to expect from HIP performances of baroque works.  In this case even the conductor and orchestra wear period dress which is quite effective as conductor Jordi Savali looks remarkably like Monteverdi.  For reasons I don’t understand though the lighting plot is one that could never have been realised with baroque forces.  To further advance the “hall of mirrors” idea Deflo makes quite a lot of use of mirrors on stage reflecting the house back on itself which doesn’t really come off on video but I imagine, based on my experience with the COC’s staging of Semele, that it could work well if one was in the right part of the theatre.  There’s also a fair amount of characters entering via the auditorium including a dramatic entrance for Savali as the brass and percussion play the opening toccata from stage boxes.

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The Frosch report

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Casting for the upcoming COC production of Die Fledermaus, to be directed by Christopher Alden, was announced back in February with one notable exception. There has been no word on who will take the speaking role of the drunken gaoler Frosch in Act 3.  This part is usually played as a buffoon by a second rate comedian(1) so Toronto mayor Rob Ford would seem an obvious choice.  Unfortunately it’s a speaking part so that rules him out.  Now, apparently, we can expect a ‘crisis of capitalism’ Fledermaus but I’m not sure that leaves me any the wiser.

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Ponelle’s Cenerentola

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There’s been a fair amount of discussion of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s film version of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito over at The Earworm so I thought it would be a good time to dig out his La Scala production of Rossini’s La Cenerentola.  They have a lot in common; an obsession with statuary and heavy focus on verticality that makes the picture often seem taller than it is wide are just two.  The Rossini, despite being filmed at La Scala is very filmic.  It’s much more like a movie than a video recording of a staged performance.  Continue reading →

Historically informed performance à l’outrance

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The works of the French baroque are a rather specialized taste.  Some people love them, some not so much.  There are also strong views on performance style.  Some people favour an essentially modern treatment as in Robert Carsen’s Paris Garnier production of Rameau’s Les Boréades.  Others are fans of the fantasy baroque approach taken by the likes of Opera Atelier.  I’ve seen good examples of both approaches.  What I haven’t seen before is a rigorous attempt to recreate a 17th century staging complete with period appropriate scenery and stage effects.  In 2008 such an attempt was made at the Théâtre de l’Opéra Comique in Paris.  The work involved was the first true opera in French; Lully’s Cadmus et Hermione.  The results are very interesting.

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Tcherniakov’s Gambler

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So I finally found a way of getting the Kultur release of the 2008 Staatsoper unter den Linden production of Prokofiev’s The Gambler to work, with subtitles and all, though I had to go to my back up DVD player.  As you will read below this is a very interesting and worthwhile DVD but whatever you do, don’t buy the Kultur release which is technically wonky and features sub-standard Dolby 2.0 sound.  For heaven’s sake who is doing Dolby 2.0 on an opera DVD in 2008!  The same recording is available on regionless DVD and Blu-ray from C-Major and in that release it features PCM 5.1 and LPCM stereo choices.  There may even be some useful documentation which, as ever with Kultur, is minimal.  There are also more subtitle choices on the C-Major version.

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