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Flashbacks

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I’ve been banished from the living room and so the home theatre by the lemur practicing for a dance recital.  As a result I’m listening, on my iPod, to Solti’s recording of The Ring, which I was introduced to nearly four decades ago.  Listening to Das Rheingold again today after a long lay off I’m struck by how utterly brilliant it is.  Gustav Neidlinger’s Alberich is a marvel.  He’s singing lyrically not snarling or barking and it sounds quite lovely.  Solti’s command of rhythm is astonishing.  One could dance to this!  And has John Culshaw’s sound engineering ever been bettered?

Still wonderful as it is it’s having much the same effect as Proust’s madeleine.  I first heard this recording (on vinyl of course) courtesy of the man who taught me Applied Maths for ‘A’ level .  He was a rather sad old chap but he introduced me to Wagner, Quad electrostatic speakers and gin.  He’s long dead of course.  So it goes.

Which way do you dress?

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Last night I attended the dress rehearsal of the Canadian Opera Company’s upcoming double bill of Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi courtesy of Peter McGillivray who sings Marco in the latter. I’ve never been to s dress rehearsal before and I don’t think it’s kosher to “review” a production based on one so I’m going to concentrate on the “dress rehearsal experience” and just a few notes about the show. Continue reading →

Some help from my American friends?

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I believe in new opera. I think it’s vital to the survival of the genre and I like quite a lot of it. Most of what I like has come from European or British composers or John Adams. I love Reimann’s Lear and Birtwistle’s The Minotaur and Sariaaho’s L’Amour de Loin.  I’m equally impressed by Nixon in China and, maybe to a lesser extent, Doctor Atomic.  All of these, it seems to me, lie within the range of idiom of contemporary symphonic or chamber music.  I’ve had much less luck finding contemporary American opera, Adams aside, that I enjoy or even find interesting.  I loathed A Streetcar Named Desire and five minutes of Adamo’s Little Women had me reaching for the barf bucket.  It’s a combination of cloying sentimentality and music that sounds like South Pacific minus the good tunes.  It’s certainly not the sort of music one could imagine hearing at a symphony concert. Am I missing something?  What should I try to see if I want to see intelligent, musically interesting contemporary American opera?

Opera 101 – Tosca

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Opera 101(I) at the Duke of Westminster last night was more interesting than I expected. Besides the usual host, Brent Bambury, we had the director of the current production Paul Curran, Mark Delavan, who is singing Scarpia, and Julie Makerov, one of two Toscas. Delavan and Makerov were engaging and funny if not specially revelatory though both revealed a taste for country music which is a bit disturbing. Most of the interest came from Curran. He’s an intense little Scot who tells it how he sees it. He grew up in the less salubrious parts of Glasgow (I’m reliably informed that there are salubrious bits!) and the first opera he saw was Wozzeck which he describes as the story of his life. I was struck by his emphasis on the role of the music in his directorial process. He described himself as a “musician first” and talked at some length about his role in making sure that the singers can sing to their best ability. He’s also no literalist. I asked him whether the very specific time and place setting of Tosca was constraining or liberating and he went on a bit of a rant which I loved! He listed off the historical inaccuracies with the Tosca libretto with encyclopaedic accuracy peppered with expressions like “complete bullshit” basically ending up at “so I feel I can do pretty much what I like with it”. He’s also not one for the pretties. He told a story about being criticized because Tosca’s dress in Act 2 was inelegant. His response “It’s a rape scene (F word not far away here we feel). I don’t think she’s asking ‘does my bum look big in this?'”. I liked his take on “Vissi d’arte” as a Jewish aria too. He’s alluding to it’s sense of a contractual relationship with God as opposed to Tosca’s over Catholicism (he’s from a very Catholic family). All in all good value.

We had a brief chat afterwards about Britten, ‘difficult’ operas and stuff. I want to see his Peter Grimes but, unfortunately, Santa Fe isn’t exactly next door.

In a couple or three hours it will back to COC for me for the third time in 24 hours. This time for the 2012/13 season announcement.

fn1. Opera 101 is a pub based series of fairly informal talks by members of the creative team for various COC productions.

Just for fun 4/n

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So, gentle readers, what do you think this image relates to?

ETA: Callum Blackmore correctly identified this as being from We come to the River by Hans Werner Henze. It’s a scan of one page of the Royal Opera House programme for 20th July 1976 when I, as a somewhat bemused 18 year old, saw David Atherton conduct a cast of thousands in that rather remarkable work.

Curious about young artists programmes

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A lot of opera companies have young artists programmes. They seem to vary a lot and so I’m curious to know more about them and what opera goers think about them. I’m no expert but I do have quite a lot of exposure to my local YAP; the Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio. I know a couple of the singers. I’ve seen many of them perform both in COC sponsored ventures and otherwise. I’ve seen many graduates of the programme perform too and I’ve been enormously impressed. One of the things about the Ensemble Studio that I really like is that it provides lots of performance opportunities. I don’t really understand how one can grow in a performing art without performing. I’m not sure though that this emphasis on performance is universal with YAPs. The Met programme for instance seems to offer few performance opportunities (please disabuse if I am wrong!). Here in Toronto our young performers get frequent opportunities in the free lunchtime concert series at the Four Seasons Centre, they do an annual schools tour with works geared for kids, they do a special performance with full orchestra on the Four Seasons centre Stage of one of the COC productions that year and they, crucially, take on many of the lesser, and sometimes not so lesser, roles in the COC’s productions. For example in the two productions mounted so far this season three members of the Ensemble Studio sang in Robert Carsen’s production of Iphigenia in Tauris alongside Susan Graham, Russell Braun and Joseph Kaiser and the roles of Marullo, Countess Ceprano and two other roles in Rigoletto were sung by ES members not to mention that the Gilda in four performances was also an ES member. How does it work in your local company?

Signal boost

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The witty and brainy Zerbinetta over at Likely Impossibilities has an excellent piece up on why directing opera is different from directing theatre. I can only think of one good counterexample to her theory, which is Dario Fo’s Amsterdam Barber of Seville. I don’t think the odd Nobel prize winner invalidates her main argument.