Today’s MetHD broadcast was Shostakovich’s absurdist opera The Nose based on a short story by Gogol. It’s about a bureaucrat whose nose falls off. The nose then gallivants around town impersonating a state councillor while the bureaucrat tries desperately to get it back. It’s a lovely Shostakovich score but honestly the one joke wears a bit thin when played out over two hours without an interval. Where’s a Soviet censor when one needs one?
Christopher Gillett and I have a fair bit in common. We are both English and much the same age. We are both on second marriages to performers; the failure of our first marriages being at least partly related to the vagaries of travelling for work. We are also both tenors. There the similarities end. Mr. Gillett sings for a living which I, to the great relief of the music loving public, do not. He also does not like cats. This makes me a bit suspicious but whatever.
Next Sunday the Amici Ensemble have an interesting looking concert of works all transcribed for forces not originally intended by the composer. It’s called, appropriately enough, Transfigured Transcribed. The highlight for me is Verklärte Nacht transcribed for piano trio but there’s also some Berg, some Brahms and some Bartok. The concert is at 3pm at Mazzoleni Hall. More details and tickets.
This weekend also sees the opening of Opera Atelier’s Abduction from the Seraglio and Opera 5’s Poe themed show Requiescat in Pace. If that wasn’t enough, this afternoon the MetHD broadcast is Shostakovich’s The Nose in William Kentridge’s well reviewed production. It’s surely the highlight of this season’s line up and the only one I will be bothering with.
Berndt Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten was something of a sleeper hit at the 2012 Salzburg festival and is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. It’s a peculiar work. It’s very episodic and requires massive forces. There are 16 singing and 10 non-singing roles, a 100 piece orchestra, a jazz band and more. At Salzburg the scale was magnified by staging it in the Felsenreitschule, using the full 40m width and enormous height of the stage. I’ve included some full stage shots in the screen caps to give an idea of how huge this all is. They can be expanded to full size Blu-ray caps (roughly three times the size of the image in the review).
Yesterday’s free concert in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre featured three members of the Ensemble Studio singing 20th century English language songs. The concert opened and closed with Vaughan Williams. Baritone Clarence Frazer gave us five songs from Songs of Travel (texts by Robert Louis Stevenson) and Cameron McPhail sang three songs from The House of Life (texts by Dante Gabriel Rossetti). These are some of my favourites and I must have almost worn out my CD of Thomas Allen singing them (On the Idle Hill of Summer on Virgin Classics). So, I don’t know whether that made me more or less critical but I thoroughly enjoyed both performances. Clarence sang strongly, straightforwardly and with very fine diction while Cam was more overtly emotional. Both approaches worked.
Clarence Frazer
Earworms are funny things. What causes a particular passage of music to stick in one’s mind almost obsessively? I’m thinking about this now because I’ve seen two operas twice in the last couple of weeks and one is filling my waking moments with highly detailed flashbacks. It’s not just tunes. I’m hearing the orchestration and the inflexion of the words. And it’s not the odd tune here and there. It’s great long passages and many of them. The other, although I would recognise most every phrase on hearing it, is not doing that at all. Here’s the odd thing. The one that’s leaving no impression at all is number three world wide in terms of number of performances(1) and is, of course, Puccini’s La Bohème. The one I can’t get out of my head is far down the list at number 88 and it’s Britten’s Peter Grimes (and note that it’s the Britten centenary).
Know I have to ponder whether there is any connection between this and the fact that while all the cheap seats for Peter Grimes seem to sell out, the boxes on fat cat row are half empty.
For my second look at La Bohème at the COC I caught the first night of what is, effectively, the third cast. This is actually the first cast but with Eric Margiore replacing Dmitri Pittas as the third Rodolfo of the run. So, how did it compare to Wednesday night’s effort?
Joyce El-Khoury as Musetta – Photo:Michael Cooper
The COC’s Ensemble Studio competition; effectively the final auditions for potential new members of the program, gets a makeover this season. Previously it was held in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre with each member performing two arias with piano accompaniment. Now it becomes a gala event styled Centre Stage and held on the main stage of the Four Seasons Centre with accompaniment from the COC orchestra. There’s also a cocktail reception and black tie dinner.
I understand that the format will be that each singer performs an aria of their choice for the judges behind closed doors and a second, of the judges’ choice, for the gala audience. In any event, it’s on November 26th with doors open at 5.30pm. Tickets for the reception and competition are $100 and for the dinner $1500. More details here.
La Bohème has been running at the COC for a couple of weeks now but last night was the first performance for the second cast. There are some new faces; Michael Fabiano comes in as Rodolfo with Simone Osborne as Musetta, Tom Corbeil as Colline and Cameron McPhail as Schaunard. There are also some change ups. Joyce El-Khoury swaps Musetta for Mimi and Phillip Addis swaps Schaunard for Marcello. I’ll be back Friday to see the opening night cast with the exception of Eric Margiore coming in as Rodolfo.
Yesterday’s lunch time concert featured bass Robert Pomakov accompanied by members of the Gryphom Trio. The programme kicked off with two songs by Glinka with Bob accompanied by Roman Borys on cello and Jamie Parker on piano. The first piece was called Lullaby but it’s hard to imagine anyone sleeping through Bob’s powerful rendering. The second piece, Doubt, showcased some lovely playing by Borys.
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