… that at the end of Saariaho’s L’Amour du Loin the entire stage explodes killing cast, orchestra and the first ten rows of the audience.
It’s a little known fact…
2
University Avenue at night
Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre is an utterly gorgeous theatre. You can find lovely photographs of it all over the place including as the background to this blog. The front of house area is all glass fronted and looks over University Avenue; one of downtown Toronto’s busiest, and noisiest, streets. There are three hospital ERs within five minutes walk of the FSC so you can work out the siren potential. Add to that the subway runs under the building and you get some idea of the brilliant engineering required to isolate it acoustically. Any way, that’s just a preamble to saying that at night, and perhaps especially on a dreary winter evening like last Tuesday, one can see some striking vistas. I was in the house to see Saariaho’s L’Amour du Loin for a second time and I was up in Ring 3. In the interval I was struck by the view across the atrium to the street. I only had my iPod for photography purposes so it’s not a great shot but I rather like it.
Russell Braun and friends
The free concert series that the COC puts on in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre at the Four Seasons Centre often has interesting programs and frequently the performances are very good indeed. It’s also pretty good value for money. It’s not often though that the line up is as starry as today’s gig. Baritone Russell Braun was joined by his L’Amour du Loin costars Erin Wall (soprano) and Krisztina Szabó (mezzo) plus Ensemble Studio tenor Chris Enns. On the piano were COC Music Director Johannes Debus and Carolyn Maule.
They kicked off with Brahms’ Liebeslieder-Walzer. They were performed with verve and skill and quite a bit of humour but I’m afraid it was still Brahms. In my book Brahms should be loved from afar. I much preferred the selections from Schumann’s Spanische Liebeslieder which followed. I particularly liked Russell’s rendering of Flutenreicher Ebro which showed great feeling for the words and real skill in articulating different moods through voice colour. Krisztina also gave us a ravishing version of Hoch, hoch sind die Berger.
The revelation for me though was John Greer’s settings of Canadian folk songs; All Around the Circle. Looking at the words I thought this was going to be really hokey but in fact both the vocal arrangements and piano accompaniments are really pretty sophisticated and right up there with better known English and Australian folk song settings for voice and piano. The quartet gave them all they had. Lots of attack, good ensemble work and tons of humour. (One needs humour with a line like “She’ll be waiting for me there with the hambone of a bear”!). Terrific piano playing here too from Johannes and Carolyn. It was fun! (And great value for money)
Pelléas et Mélisande in the Valleys
The Gramophone Classical Music Guide 2010 describes the DVD of the 1992 Welsh National Opera performance of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande thusly:
This is, in every respect, a model of what a DVD ought to be, a perfect realisation in picture and sound of Debussy’s sole and inspired opera.
Followed by a good deal more in the same vein. This, regrettably, tells us more about the Gramophone Guide than about this DVD(1). Actually it’s not bad at all by 1992 standards but “a perfect realisation” it isn’t.
Peter Stein’s production is semi-abstract and monotone. The tone is “dark”. There’s some interesting lighting but visually it’s pretty nondescript. The director’s focus is clearly on the actors and their interactions and in a work like Pelléas et Mélisande that makes sense. There is some very good acting, especially from Alison Hagley as Mélisande. The tower scene is brought off rather well with perhaps the most extravagant hair extension in the history of opera. This also features in a disturbingly violent Act 4 Scene 2. Act 4 also sees a brief appearance by a live sheep, no doubt in deference to local sensibilities. I’m not entirely convinced that Stein gets enough complexity from his cast to really raise the psychology beyond the cardboard cut out level. Donald Maxwell’s rather crude and coarse Golaud doesn’t really make a case for his descent into jealousy, madness and murderous rage based on not much at all really. He’s not helped by the rather colourless Pelléas of Neill Archer. On the other hand Alson Hagley conveys the fragility and mystery of her character exceptionally well. (I also wondered whether a visual reference to Gerald of Wales’ Melusine was being made in the tower scene but maybe that’s over-theorising). She’s very much in the same frantic and febrile mould here as Natalie Dessay on the Theater an der Wien recording. Kenneth Cox gives a strongly characterised Arkel with particularly good chemistry with Hagley. Stein uses a boy treble, Samuel Burkey, in the role of Yniold. It works dramatically but I don’t much care for it musically.
In general the singing is very good. All the principals have adequate French at least, though they can’t quite match Vienna’s line up of Francophone star talent. Pierre Boulez conducts. He gets a very detailed, transparent reading from the WNO orchestra while occasionally pushing out a genuinely Wagnerian dramatic climax. No complaints here.
Stein also directed for TV/DVD. It’s pretty conventional 1992 TV direction. There are lots of close ups but generally there’s no sense that one is missing anything. Although recorded live, there is no applause and no sign of an audience. During the orchestral interludes we get film of the orchestral score which is an interesting treatment but tends even more to make this like a film rather than a theatre performance.
The picture is average DVD 16:9 and the sound options are PCM stereo, Dolby 5.1 and DTS 5.1. The surround tracks were created from an original stereo source using DG’s AMSI II technology. The DTS track is very decent but not quite up to best modern standards. Extras include a trailer, a picture gallery and some DG promo material. Subtitles are French, English, German, Spanish and Chinese. There’s a trilingual booklet with track listings, synopsis and a short, not very useful essay.
This is a good (though far from perfect!) effort. It’s definitely worth a look though I personally prefer the more recent Vienna recording.
fn1. I’ve long been skeptical about reviewers who claim that the best recording of a well known work is one made by Fritz Busch in his garden shed in 1935.
Ponderings on the Subject of Love
Julie Makerov and Anne Larlee in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre
For the Valentine’s Day lunchtime concert at the Four Seasons Centre American dramatic soprano Julie Makerov chose a series of art songs by English and American composers on various aspects of love. I was familiar with the English works by Quilter and Britten, though more used to hear them sung by male singers, and not at all familiar with the American works by Berger, Barber and Heggie. It made for an interesting mix.
A dramatic soprano wouldn’t normally be my first choice for a song recital but Ms. Makerov is very skilled. She scaled her voice back nicely and had her vibrato well under control. She also had excellent diction and a good feel for the text. She didn’t have the most interesting range of tone colour I’ve ever heard but it was a most musical and enjoyable performance. She performed the whole set from memory which is nice. The highlights for me included a couple of Quilter settings; Weep You No More Sad Fountains and The Faithless Shepherdess, and a really moving account of Britten’s setting of O, Waly, Waly. I also really liked the three songs by Berger; In Time of Silver Rain, Heart and Carolina Cabin. In case we thought the whole thing too serious she encored with an appropriately over the top rendering of Heggie’s Alas, Alack.
Anne Larlee, on piano, once again showed what a fine accompanist she is and there was a very good cameo for cellist Paul Widner in Heggie’s What My Lips Have Kissed.
It was well worth braving the driving sleet of a truly dreich Toronto day.
On accents in opera
Generally speaking , as far as I can tell, opera is sung as far as possible without a particular class or regional accent. Each language has a well understood sung form that isn’t exactly like RP speech but is clearly close to it. I know that there are a few Italian works where a comprimario role takes a Sicilian accent and Baron Ochs in Rosenkavalier is supposed to be comically rural but these are minor exceptions for effect. Why then the tendency for modern works in English to require exaggerated accents? And why is it so uneven? Nobody expects the characters in Peter Grimes or Albert Herring to sing with Suffolk accents but apparently Anna Nicole requires singers to do a really bad fake Texas accent and A Streetcar Named Desire seems to be thought to require a similar treatment.
Does the same thing happen with modern operas in other languages and does anybody have any explanation for why it’s suddenly crept into the English language repertoire? The only explanation I can offer for Anna Nicole is that it’s part of a whole cultural appropriation/condescension thing that is going on in that work that I find quite intolerable.
They shoot horses don’t they?
Just back from the HD broadcast of the Met’s Götterdãmmerung.
Musically, I was really quite impressed. I thought Luisi’s take on the score was original, valid and enjoyable. His tempi were generally quite quick and there was a taut, sinewy quality to the strings that really brought out the shape of the music. No romantic wallowing here! I really liked the Gibichungs; Wendy Bryn Harmer as Gutrune, Iain Paterson’s Gunther and, especially, Hans-Peter König’s Hagen. All were well sung and characterful. Jay Hunter Morris as Siegfried and Deb Voigt as Brünnhilde were really exciting in the Act 1 love duet and Deb nailed the Immolation scene, almost managing to overcome the staging. So much for the music, what about the production?
Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour du Loin at Canadian Opera
Last night we saw Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour du Loin at the Four Seasons Centre. It was really, really good. It’s a very unusual piece. There’s not a lot of action in the libretto, despite, or perhaps because of, which Daniele Finzi Pasca devised a most spectacular production (more below). It’s an opera about ideas; love, duty, honour, death, faith, God. The characters spend far more time debating what to do and why than doing it. The plot is very simple. Jaufré Rudel, prince of Blaye, tired of a life of meaningless pleasure, yearns for real love. The Pilgrim tells him of an ideal woman, a countess in Tripoli. devotes Jaufré devotes his life to writing love songs to his “Love from Afar”. The Pilgrim tells Clémence of Jaufré and she falls under his spell. Jaufré decides he must cross the sea and meet Clémence but in doing so falls mortally ill. They meet and throw caution to the winds but Jaufré dies. Clémence decides to take the veil but her attitude to God is ambiguous at best. To who is her finally ecstatically beautiful prayer directed; the deity or her “Love from Afar”? It’s not the easiest piece to engage with. It has something in common with other meditative operas like Dialogues of the Carmélites and Pelléas et Mélisande and it’s rewarding in the same sort of way.
The music really impressed me. It haunted my dreams last night. It is an extraordinary score. In the last couple of weeks I’ve heard quite a few smaller scale works by Saariaho but this was the first time I had heard what she could do with a full orchestra. Her tachnique here seems influenced bu European minimalists like Górecki but the end result is utterly individual. She create waves of sound, often with one section of te orchestra picking a phrase up from another. The effect is almost architectural as textures interplay to create a thing of real beauty. Often, despite the wealth of visuals i found myself wanting to close my eyes and just listen. The solo vocal writing is more straightforward than in some of her chamber works. Each character has a distinct musical signature. The Pilgrim for example has any number of the trills common to medieval vocal music (which I think of as moorish but that’s just my association). The choral writing combines elements of the orchestral and solo vocal styles. It’s all really quite compelling.
The performances were terrific. All three solo parts are long difficult sings and all three soloists were quite excellent. Russell Braun as Jaufré is on stage for four out of five acts. He was not as smoothly lyrical as he can be but his tougher, more muscular tone suited his line. Kristzina Szabó, as the Pilgrim, also has a lot to do. In many ways her acting must hold the piece together. This she said while sounding very idiomatic in the most ‘medieval’ sounding of the roles. Erin Wall almost stole the show at the end. Much of her part lies cruelly high and includes the sustained f and ff high notes that Saariaho likes to give sopranos. She coped admirably with those to close out the piece with a hauntingly beautiful rendering of the final, despairing prayer. The COC Orchestra and Chorus, were as ever, wonderful and conductor Johannes debus seemed to be right inside the music. Super stuff all round.
The production is very interesting. Gabriele Finzi pasca and his design team; Jean Rabasse – sets, Kevin Pollard – costumes and especially, Alexis Bowles – lighting and Roberto Vitalini – video, evoke the various settings of the piece extraordinarily vividly using cloth, light and video projections. The evocation of the sea in Act 4 is breathtaking and the ambiguous use of light shone into the auditorium at the beginning and end of the piece ask questions about the stage world and that f the audience. The story telling is embellished with shadow puppets, body doubles, acrobats and aerialists. It’s spectacular in the manner of a rather cerebral Cirque du Soleil performance. It might even be a little over the top to the point of distraction but there’s no denying the beauty of it.
I thought it was a terrific modern opera, beautifully performed and I’d go see this in preference to traditional warhorse productions any time but what I saw last night suggests I may still be a bit unusual in that regard. The house wasn’t full and seats which I’m pretty sure are subscription seats were empty. A significant number of people, young and old, left at the interval. This disturbs me on all sorts of levels. This is quite an accessible piece and it was presented in a production that emphasised that and despite that some people obviously didn’t get it. This worries me far more than people who get offended by blood or nudity in a new production of some over performed Puccini piece. There’s a catch 22 here. A new audience is put off by the idea of opera as a boring museum piece and a section of the traditional audience boycotts anything that isn’t stuffed and mounted. Anyway, if anyone at COC is listening my vote is for innovation, risk and life.
There are four more performances ending on February 22nd. Go see it!
All photos © All rights reserved by Canadian Opera
Rusalka in the nursery
David Pountney’s 1986 ENO production of Dvorak’s Rusalka is set in an Edwardian nursery. The action is all a dream or a figment of Rusalka’s imagination in which her grandfather, in a wheelchair, becomes the Water Gnome, her sisters water sprites, her governess the witch Jezibaba and so on. In Act 1 it works reasonably well. Clearly we are looking at a metaphor of Rusalka escaping the nursery for adult life with all the risks and discoveries that involves. It starts to get pretty strained in Act 2. There’s some not very subtle loss of virginity imagery but that’s about it. By Act 3 Pountney seems to have run out of ideas and the final denouement is played out pretty straightforwardly. Certainly there’s nothing in the ending to bring closure to the concept which seems like a cop out.
The performances, in English this being ENO, are mostly OK but not stellar. Elaine Hannan has a clear bright voice which suits the idea of Rusalka as a young girl but she doesn’t have the range of colour or dynamic range of, say, Renee Fleming. John Treleaven is rather good, if a bit stiff, as the Prince. You can definitely hear heldentenorish qualities in the voice. It’s a shame that, with his ‘tache and sideburns, he looks like a 1970s lounge lizard. Ann Howard is vocally competent as the governess/witch/Jezibaba but while she’s be fairly scary in a schoolroom she isn’t really the stuff of nightmares the part needs. Rodney Macann is a straightforwardly effective grandfather/Water Gnome but he doesn’t really dominate. The other parts are all quite well sung tough far from thrilling.Mark Elder conducts a rather routine sounding reading from the ENO Orchestra and Chorus. To be fair, part of the problem may be the sound, see below.
The video direction by Derek Bailey needs to be taken on its own terms for a record of what’s happening on stage it isn’t. There are lots of superpositions and some weird camera angles. It does reinforce the “dream” aspects of the production so I think it can be considered a valid approach.
Technically this is not a great disk. The 4:3 picture is 1986 TV to DVD quality. I suppose that, in a way, reinforces the dream quality too. The sound is very average Dolby 2.0. At times it’s worse than that. At the end of Act 1 it sounds like Treleaven is singing from the bottom of a well and nowhere does it do the orchestra any favours. There are no subtitles and the less than vivid sound makes it even harder than it otherwise might be to figure out the words. Documentation is limited to a track listing.
Given that Robert Carsen’s fascinating Paris production; strongly cast and well recorded, is also available on DVD it’s a bit hard to see why anyone would bother with this one.
Opera Atelier announces 2012/13 season
Opera Atelier announced their 2012/13 season today.
Carla Huhtanen slumming it with the rest of us, queuing to get into a concert at the Four Seasons Centre
The exciting bit is a move into early romantic territory with Weber’s Der Freischutz. The cast includes local favourites Krešimir Špicer, Carla Huhtanen, Curtis Sullivan, Olivier Laquerre and Michael Uloth. The creative team is the usual OA gang and Tafelmusik will be in the pit, which is an interesting choice to out it mildly.
The less exciting bit is another revival of The Magic Flute in English. I’ll be tempted to see it to see the Pamina of Laura Albino, Mireille Asselin sing Papagena and see how Ambur Braid does with the Queen of the Night in a smaller house. Still, I first saw OA’s Flute over 20 years ago. I’ve seen it quite a few times in both its “full” and cut down for kids versions and I’m not that excited. Has that “bums on seats” feel.
Here’s the full announcement.
operaramblings 