Summer is icumen to an end

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opera5It may still be 90%+ humidity and hot as hell in Toronto but the signs of things to come are piling up.  I have a stack of tickets for fall events at various venues and the smaller opera groups are starting to announce their seasons.

The latest news is from Opera 5 who are launching the year with a Hollywood Glam Gala at Atelier Rosemarie Umetsu.  It’s a fundraiser with an “Opera in Hollywood” theme.  Performers will include Teiya Kasahara (probably not with the butch lesbian routine), Elizabeth MacDonald, Graham Thompson, and the increasingly visible Geoffrey Sirett among others.  Toronto photographer, Emily Ding will be on hand for Hollywood glam photos with food and alcohol provided by Fionn MacCool’s, notorious hangout of the COC Chorus.

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My darling goat

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Meyerbeer’s Dinorah ou le Pardon de Ploërmel must be a very strong candidate for the silliest opera ever written.  It concerns a young girl, Dinorah, who is deserted on her wedding day by her fiancé Hoël who disappears in search of a cursed treasure.  She goes mad.  There’s sheep and goat ballet, a lullabye to a goat accompanied on the bagpipes, more sheep and goat ballet and a scene where Dinorah sings a very difficult aria to her own shadow.  There’s a “ghastly” enchanted glen scene at the end of which Dinorah, pursuing her pet goat, falls into a river; apparently fatally.  Rather than resolve this we then get another half hour of pastoral with a hunter and a reaper and assorted shepherdesses and, inevitably, dancing sheep and goats before Hoël shows up having rescued Dinorah. He persuades her that the last twelve months have all been a bad dream and they get married accompanied by much pious singing.

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Spreading the goodness

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220px-Sir_Thomas_AllenWhen I learned that Sir Thomas Allen was going to be singing at the COC I decided that I really ought to try and get something organised for/by Durham alumni/ae in Toronto.  Step 1 is now complete.  There will be a party of 11 (so far!) at the opening night of Cosi to see Sir Tom’s Don Alfonso.  We’ll see what else we can manage… For me, this will be the second time I have seen him live; the first being in 1975!  Got a great price on the tickets too.

Armide at Versailles

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Lully’s Armide is pretty much the archetypal tragédie en musique.  It features an allegorical prologue praising Louis XIV’s multiple virtues, delivered as a dialogue by La Gloire and La Sagesse followed by five acts based on the Armida/Rinaldo story from Tasso.  There are also, of course, lots of ballet interludes.  As such, it isn’t all that easy to stage for a modern audience.  Robert Carsen and William Christie’s approach for their 2008 Paris production is to frame the story in the context of Versailles.

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The god-damn son of a bitch is dead

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“The god-damn son of a bitch is dead”.  So says one of John A. Macdonald’s henchmen on checking his watch to see that the scheduled time of Louis Riel’s execution has passed; at least in Harry Somers’ 1969 operatic version of the story.  Louis Riel, on the face of it is a historic narrative about the leader of the 1869 and 1885 Métis opposition to the expansion of the Dominion of Canada.  But it’s deeper than that.   It’s a complex work dealing with fundamental questions of identity and belonging and of the relation between people and state.  Written during a weird combination of the orgy of cultural nationalism that greeted the centenary of Confederation and Canada’s most turbulent political violence it transcends the Canadianness of its story and clear parallels could be found in many countries, including Canada, today.  This is really about “culture wars” in all their complexity and horror.

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Adventure story

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Robert Carsen doesn’t seem disposed to treat Handel too reverentially.  Although there is some of the trademark Carsen cool minimalism in his 2011 Glyndebourne production of Rinaldo (not to mention symmetrically arranged furniture) there’s also a degree of humour, as there is in his Zürich Semele.  I find it very effective and, judging by the audience reaction, so did the people who saw it at Glyndebourne.

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Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein König

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In many ways Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots is a typical mid 19th century French grand opéra.  It takes a sweeping, epic story; in this case the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and grafts onto it the elements the paying public demanded; spectacle, ballet, showpiece arias etc.  The result is unwieldy and, when applied to such grim subject matter, almost grotesque.  The 1991 Deutsche Oper production by John Dew (performed in German as Die Hugenotten) takes these disparate elements and works with them; mixing laugh out loud and extremely grim to create a piece of music theatre that is truly disturbing.

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Summer in the city

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toronto-summer-ferryThis year’s Toronto Summer Music Festival reported a 28% increase in attendance over the previous year with the under 35 segment up 11%.  Obviously this is a good thing but I’m also interested because it tends to reinforce my view that the assumption that there’s no market for classical music in the summer months is based on a very outdated view of behaviour.  Most of us don’t decamp to the cottage for the summer.  The  model of the non-working wife taking the children to the cottage for the summer where father joins them on the weekend is right up there with the idea that schools should close for the summer because the kids are needed on the farm.

I think there’s a real opportunity for a summer opera venture in Toronto.  Maybe it’s where we could slot in our (missing) equivalent of Chicago Opera Theatre that does more obscure and/or edgier stuff than the big kids at the COC?  One can hope, I guess.

Allons enfants de la Patrie

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There can’t be many French Revolutionary propaganda comedies but Cherubini’s Koukourgi is one of them.  Written in the crisis year of 1792 and intended for the Théatre Feydeau it never actually made it onto the stage and remained unperformed until it was staged by the Stadttheater Klagenfurt in 2010.  By then the dialogues, the overture and the finale had been lost but music director Peter Marschik found a couple of bits from other Cherubini operas to fill the musical gaps and director Josef E. Köpplinger supplied rather arch German dialogue to link the musical numbers (sung in French).

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Two years!

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janeforblogSo I’ve been here for two years now. This will be the 534th post. Readership has grown from 267 hits in September 2011 to between 4000 and 7000 per month in 2013 (there’s more traffic outside of the summer months).  It’s been a blast.

Thanks to everyone who has helped along the way including all the great people at Canadian Opera Company, Against the Grain Theatre and Opera Five among others.  And special thanks to fellow opera bloggers The Earworm, Regie or not Regie, Opera Obsession, Definitely the Opera and Third Floor Republic and to many, many others for helping create a real sense of community.