The Fall 2015 Opera Canada is out. No performance reviews by me in this one but I do have a profile of countertenor Daniel Cabena and reviews of three CDs; Adrianne Pieczonka singing Wagner and Strauss, Bud Roach singing Italian renaissance songs accompanying himself on guitar and a rerelease of Peter Maxwell Davies’ Resurrection. Lots of good stuff by other people too of course!
So further to my rant the other day about the ROH and ENO approach to their cinema broadcasts in Canada and the Met’s lock up with Cineplex Odious…
Suppose one were responsible for marketing the Royal Opera or ENO’s product in Canada what would you do? Personally I wouldn’t worry about signing up loads of suburban and small town fleapits. I’d go for the where the opera audience is in the downtown areas of the cities that have opera companies and maybe university towns. I’d also go for the upscale theatres with decent sound and bars with decent beer and that sort of thing. In Toronto that would be the TIFF Lightbox and Bloor Hot Docs. Elsewhere I don’t know but I’d like to push the idea with the ROH marketing folks so any ideas on the “right” cinemas in Montreal or Vancouver or even Hamilton would be most welcome.
So this week instead of hobnobbing with the rich and famous over wine and canapés in tony North Toronto I was slumming it with the kool kids on Queen West. Specifically I was at a fund raiser to help send Amanda Smith to intern with Robert Lepage (and maybe bring her back again).
Acadian soprano Suzie LeBlanc is crowd sourcing the marketing and tour of her new album La Veillée de Noël based on an old French songbook found in the now defunct Collège St-Joseph in Memramcook, New Brunswick. She’s looking for ten grand to finance the project. Details are here.
So, I stopped by the Tanenbaum Garden around noon today to get some shots of the Pelléas et Mélisande set. Obviously it looks a bit different with the sun high in the sky than in the evening but I think you’ll get the idea.
More under the cut.
I really had intended to write up the COC’s new production of Handel’s Hercules tonight. But the best laid plans etc were subverted by the lovely Sasha Djihanian dragging me off to the after party. There will be a proper review in the morning but, if you are smart (and don’t already have tickets) you won’t wait and will go buy some before they sell out.
To tide you over here’s Hercules himself (aka Eric Owens) flanked by Sasha and Rihab Chaieb.
It’s hardly news to regular readers that I watch a lot of opera recordings on DVD and Blu-ray. Until recently though I rarely watched streaming video off the internet as I’m not very keen about sitting in front of a computer for hours. I do enough of that at work! However, it was time to replace our aging TV with something more modern so I used it as an excuse to do some other upgrades (as well as decommissioning the VHS and cassette tape players which haven’t been used for at least 5 years). Basically i hooked up Apple TV to the new TV and the home theatre sound system allowing me to stream anything from the lemur’s Macbook Air and be able to watch it on a large screen TV with 6.1 channel surround sound. A lot of the stuff out there is a bit naff qualitywise but there are some gems. Courtesy of another opera blogger who doesn’t want his bootleg publicising activities publicised I was able to view an extremely high quality feed of the Bregenz 2013 Die Zauberflõte which looked and sounded fantastic. I’m now really looking forward to live streams from Glyndebourne and the Bayerische Staatsoper.
Back in October I posted about The Lady in Number 6; a documentary about pianist and holocaust survivor Alice Herz-Sommer. Some of you may have seen the news that she recently left us at the amazing age of 110. The film has now been nominated for an Oscar in the Documentary Short Subject category. You can see the trailer on my original post.
ETA March 3rd 2014: The Lady in Number 6 won the Documentary Short Subject Oscar last night.
Lucy over at Opera Obsession has started a very interesting discussion based on a series of German language interviews with opera directors that appeared in book form as Warum Oper? Gespräche mit Opernregisseuren (Why Opera? Conversations with Opera Directors). Some extracts were translated into English and published in The Opera Quarterly Vol 27 so should be available to anyone with JSTOR access.
What’s interesting about the interviews (or at least what I could read in the English extracts) is how far they go beyond the never ending, and ultimately sterile, debate about traditional versus $descriptor_for_non_traditional productions. All the directors take it as read that if one is going to restage a limited list of canonical operas over and over again then they must be reinterpreted. Anything less is something less than art. They differ in the degree to which the original product should be “respected”. Most believe that any production must be closely rooted in the score though the most radical (for example Sebastian Baumgartner) argue that the canon should be treated more as a collective mine from which fragments can be extracted and recombined. I’m pretty sure I would not go that far but after reading some of the other contributions I find myself reevaluating how I think about rearrangement and interpolation at least. It’s certainly a stimulating read and I wish it were easier to have this kind of serious engagement with the interpretive and creative process in North America.
It appears that Warner Classics are slowly releasing some of their back catalogue of video recordings on Blu-ray. These appear to be recordings that were previously available in North America on rather low quality Kultur releases. And by low quality I mean that many of them had serious sound problems as well as annoyances like hard coded English subtitles. These are mostly older recordings; typically 4:3 format picture drawn from TV broadcasts so there is only so much remastering can do for them but, if the Sellars Theodora is anything to go by, they are a huge improvement. Several Glyndebourne classics have appeared including the Anja Silja Makroupolos Case and the Haitink Marriage of Figaro. Pricing is a bit variable but there are some real bargains to be had.
