Once in a while an opera performance really blows you away and it becomes quite hard to write about, especially when the work is as long and dense as Die Walküre because even with a great performance one is in overload by the end. Yesterday’s broadcast from the Met was one of those experiences. Here’s what I think I saw!
Last night we saw Rossini’s La Cenerentola at the Four Seasons Centre. It’s not my favourite opera by a long shot and reviews had been pretty mixed so expectations weren’t particularly high. Those expectations were, however, exceeded.
Cenerentola is a version of the Cinderella story and was cobbled together in a hurry for its first performance. It has all the emotional depth of a Disney Princess movie but it does have some reasonable comedy and some very singable music. The director, Joan Font, and designer, Joan Guillén, have taken the work at face value, created sets and costumes that look like something out of a children’s colouring book and upped the comedy, most notably by the introduction of six (non-singing) mice who provide a sort of physical commentary on the action while doubling as handy prop movers. The colour palette is very bright and reinforced by the lighting plot.
Critics have criticised this approach as lacking emotional depth and character development but, really, is there any to be found in this piece? I rather doubt it. Within the parameters that have been set the blocking and physical acting is remarkably good. There are a couple of places where characters seem to stranded uncomfortably far upstage for too long leading to some audibility problems but nothing grave. The ugly sisters (Rihab Chaieb and Ileana Montalbetti) camped it up better than I might have expected and veteran comedians like Brett Polegato and Donato di Stefano had a field day.
The singing was fine, sometimes very fine. Lawrence Brownlee as Don Ramiro and Elizabeth DeShong in the title role were quite excellent. Both sang beautifully and accurately as befits bel canto. Larry tossed off high notes with ease and Elizabeth’s coloratura was most assured. All the others were well up to their roles. The all male chorus was as good as ever. Anne Larlee accompanied the recitatives on the fortepiano and was her usual sympathetic self. Leonardo Vordoni in the pit took some sections perhaps more slowly than some others but at least that provided a bit of light and shade. There’s enough “breathless Rossini” in this score to sink a battleship.
So, all in all, an enjoyable production of a work that I think is rather over-rated. I don’t care whether I ever see Cenerentola again but I’m glad I went last night.
Should you go see it? Well tickets for the last three shows go as low as $20 (use discount code “RBA”) but the same is true for Ariadne auf Naxos which is also currently in repertoire and is a much more interesting opera. The Ariadne cast is stellar and Sir Andrew Davies is conducting. Hell, for $20 per show you can see both.
Today it’s off to the cinema to see the Met’s Die Walküre followed by sabotabby’s birthday bash at Vegan Valhalla.
Yesterday lunchtime was the last opportunity to see all the members of the COC Ensemble Studio before the season ends and some of them move on. It’s always interesting to see the Ensemble members as they are growing as singers so fast and, invariably, one hears a new and interesting side of someone that one hadn’t heard before. The programme material ranged from the 16th to the 20th century but it was all Italian and predominantly art song rather than opera. For me, the highlights were Ambur Braid singing a madrigal by Giulio Caccini; I think she’s so much better when she’s being lyrical rather than bravura, and, real eye opener, Rihab Chaieb singing Rossini’s Anzoleta avanti la regata with beautiful control, real feeling and rich, dark mezzo tone. I’ll be seeing Rihab tonight as one of the ugly step sisters in La Cenerentola and Ambur as Amore in Orfeo ed Eurydice next week.
We went to a lunchtime concert at the Four Seasons Centre. It was an interesting mix. The local tenor Richard Margison performed with his 19 year old daughter, Lauren, and pianist Christopher Mokrzewski. Margison is an opera singer of international stature currently singing The Tenor/Bacchus in the COCs production of Ariadne auf Naxos. Lauren, at 19, is already a well established performer and recording artist in a more popular vein. They both do crossover. Richard sang in a rock band and in folk clubs for ten years. Lauren was the youngest child ever to sing in the Canadian Opera Children’s Chorus and is currently enrolled in the Classical Vocal Performance programme at University of Toronto.
In the first half of the programme Richard powered through art songs by Scarlatti, Duparc and Beethoven and Lauren did a pretty good job with a couple of Schubert songs. She’s musical and accurate but a little tentative and underpowered, but then at her age one wouldn’t expect anything else. Then they switched to more popular rep. Richard sang a Gordon Lightfoot song, Moon River and You’ll Never Walk Alone, the latter sounding rather odd to one who used to live across the road from Anfield! There was a definite element of a battleship navigating a kayak slalom course but he did sound a bit less operatic than many singers would have done. Lauren also did a couple of similar songs plus a duet with her dad. She sounds utterly comfortable and mature way beyond her years in this rep.
In the intro to the concert we had been told that Lauren had chosen to sing Nessun Dorma at her audition for the Children’s Chorus way back so it was no surprise that Richard picked that as an encore. Calaf is one of his signature roles. He practically blew the roof off the Richard Bradshaw Auditorium. All in all, another fun, free concert.
Musical plans for the immediate future include an Ensemble Studio concert in the RBA tomorrow lunchtime, La Cenerentola at the Four Seasons Centre on Friday night and the MetHD broadcast of Die Walküre on Saturday.
Il Trovatore has gypsies, burning at the stake, dead babies, mistaken identity, poison, love, hate, revenge and enough plot holes to sink the Titanic. It also has some very effective dramatic moments and some utterly fabulous music. The biggest snag is probably that the utterly fantastic music needs a quartet of soloists who can deal with fiendishly difficult parts that require a combination of flawless bel canto technique coupled to Puccinian power and stamina. The power and stamina requirement being especially high in a barn like the Met. It also has a dramatical problem in that it consists if a sequence of fairly short scenes which means a production runs the risk of being chopped up by the changes of set.
This was a fun concert. Six members of the COC Studio Ensemble presented, more or less fully staged, three very short operas to piano accompaniment. First up was Ana Sokolovic’s Dring, Dring which was performed by Ileana Montalbetti, Rihab Chaleb, Neil Craighead and Chris Emms. It consisted of the singers weaving intricate patterns while making telephone noises and short “wrong number” type conversations in multiple languages. I quite enjoyed it. It’s the first thing by Sokolovic I’ve heard and i was interested as I’m planning on attending the premiere of her new opera in June. Next, the same cast did Barber’s A Hand of Bridge. It’s a melodic little piece about repressed middle class fantasies. I was a bit distracted by the stage direction which appeared to have been done by someone who had never seen, let alone played bridge but then I’m fussy that way. The highlight was definitely Neil Craighead’s recitation of his character’s fairly bizarre sexual fantasies. Finally, Adrian Kramer and Jacqueline Woodley performed Menotti’s The Telephone; a piece about a man who can’t propose to his girlfriend because she is always on the telephone. Performed by the Ensemble’s two best comedians this was predictably funny and very well sung. Liz Upchurch, as ever, was a first class accompanist on the piano.
Yesterday’s Met Live in HD transmission was Richard Strauss’ last opera Capriccio. It’s a curious work and I suspect how one thinks about it seriously affects how one reacts to it emotionally. On the surface it’s a sophisticated meta opera about opera with some side splittingly funny gags about unstageable production concepts accompanied by pastiche Wagner. Taken on that level it’s funny but perhaps, ultimately heartless. When one realises that the opera was written in 1941/2 it adds a new dimension. Why has Strauss set this opera in Enlightenment Paris? Where else could be more symbolic of everything the regime he is writing under is not? This work premiered a few weeks before the German defeat at Stalingrad. Does Strauss sense that german is losing the war? Is this less an affectionate farewell to the form from an elderly composer or an elegy for an artform that may not survive the destruction of European civilization which most would have thought the inevitable consequence of a Russo-American victory (who’s to say they weren’t right?). Any way these were the thoughts that were going through my head as I watched yesterday’s broadcast and no doubt helped give the work, for me, a greater emotional intensity.
Last night we went to the Quilico Awards competition. The prize was set up in honour of Canadian baritone Louis Quilico to support various aspects of vocal competition and performance and it has been competed for and awarded in different ways over the years. This year it was a vocal competition featuring the ten young singers of the COC Ensemble Studio. It was held in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre at the Four Seasons centre and Alexander Neef (COC), David Spears (Opera Hamilton) and John Hess (Queen of Puddings Music Theatre) were the judges. It was a free gig but held at 5.30pm with minimal publicity on a week day so it perhaps wasn’t surprising that the audience was a bit thin. The format was that each singer prepared three arias. S/he sang one of his/her choice then the jury selected one of the other two. The third was held in reserve in case of a tie (which didn’t happen). Liz Upchurch was the accompanist throughout which was rather impressive in itself.
The standard was really very high. I’ve heard all these singers before, either in recital and/or on stage at the Four Seasons Centre. They are all good and getting better. Repertoire was quite varied. There was lots of Mozart (unsurprising since the Ensemble Studio’s last two productions have been Idomeneo and Die Zauberflöte) but we also got Barber, Purcell, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Handel, Verdi, Wagner, Floyd, Smetana, Korngold, Britten and Barber. Quite a variety really.
One of my top picks would have been Met bound Wallis Giunta (mezzo) who sang “Parto, parto” from La Clemenza di Tito which I’ve heard her do before and the very different “Nobles seigneurs, salut!” from Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. Wallis’ musicality (as well as technical ability) was very evident in the way she tackled the tricky rhythmic flexibility of the piece. (You can check out what I mean about tricky rhythms here).
The other would have been baritone Adrian Kramer who goes from strength to strength. He gave us “Pierrot’s Tanzlied” from Korngold’s Die tote Stadt and what has rather become his party piece, Sid’s aria “Tickling a trout” from Britten’s Albert Herring. Watch out for this guy. He has a very good voice and wicked comic timing but showed he also has a lyrical side in the Korngold.
Had I been a judge I would have found picking a third winner close to impossible. There was so much to like. So what did the judges decide?
In third place they had tenor Chris Enns (a fine Tamino earlier this season). Last night he gave us Lensky’s aria from Eugene Onegin and “Here I Stand” from Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. I particularly liked the Tchaikovsky which showed off a nicely developing lyrical tenor voice very well.
Second was dramatic soprano Ilieana Montalbetti. Ileana is a bit of an anomaly. The other girls in the programme are your modern lyric, look the part, sort of modern soprano/mezzos (one of them moonlights as a fashion model). Ileana is the one truly dramatic voice and can we say she looks a bit more like the popular image of a dramatic soprano (actually she’s not really that big but…). She gave us “Come in quest’ora bruna” from Simon Boccanegra and “Einsam in trüben Tagen” from Lohengrin. The RBA is not a huge space and it was piano accompaniment so I don’t think she was close to maximum power (I’ve heard her sing much louder!) but the impression of lots of gas in the tank was definitely there along with a good deal of control and attractive tone colour.
The winner was Adrian Kramer. No surprise there.
Fortunately for us we will get to see most of these singers next month on stage in various roles. Ambur Braid is singing Amore in Orfeo ed Euridice, where Simone Osborne is understudying Isabel Bayrakdarian’s Euridice. Rihab Chaleb will sing Tisbe and Ileana will sing Clorinda in La Cenerentola. Ariadne auf Naxos has a slew of Ensemble Studio members in the cast. Simone Osborne sings Naiad, Adrian Kramer is the Wigmaker, Chris Enns is Scaramuchio and Michael Uloth is Truffaldino and it seems like everyone is understudying something!
There are good things in Toronto. How many places can you see ten first rate singers perform for two hours in a beautiful, acoustically excellent setting, for free?
Yesterday’s free “concert” at the Four Seasons Centre was a bit different. It was an illustrated talk entitled 110 Years of Singing on Record: An Introduction to the Evolution of Style. It was illustrated with a number of recordings played over the speaker system in the RBA and two records played on a 1914 Victor VI acoustic gramophone; an instrument that produced surprisingly good sound.
The title was overly ambitious. We didn’t get any sense of evolution and, since the most recent recording was from 1983, the “110 years” bit was something of a misnomer. The basic premise seemed to be that there was a distinct shift in singing style between the first and third quarters of the twentieth century; which I think is probably true. Demonstrating using a pretty wide variety of voices and repertoire was rather less than convincing though. Still more peculiar was the (implicit) idea that nothing has changed since the 1970s. To give one example, sure one can demonstrate that Renata Scotto used a great deal more vibrato than Nellie Melba but what singer today would use as much vibrato as Scotto? In a slightly different vein, to argue that Peter Pears phrasing a song more dramatically than Karl Erb is purely a matter of singing style when Ben Britten is at the piano is rather missing the point of that particular partnership.
The Victor gramophone was truly a thing of beauty though.
That horn is laminated mahogany and all the fittings are gold plated.
Berg’s Lulu is a fascinating piece. The plot is unremittingly bleak including (by implication) child abuse, murder, cholera and prostitution culminating in Lulu’s death at the hands of Jack the Ripper. The music is dense and fascinating. Most of it is written using twelve tone technique with a different tone row for each character. It’s not an easy listen. I watched it on a DVD of a 1996 Glyndebourne production directed by Graham Vick, with Andrew Davis conducting and Christine Schafer, then 30, in the title role.
The set for the entire production is a series of contrarotating circles of floor set around a hole in the stage by which characters can enter and exit. Behind this is a high curving wall with a staircase up it and various doors. This allows Vick to use space to explore the relationships between the characters in some interesting ways.
At the heart of this production is Schafer(*) she has the ideal looks and voice for the part. There are only a handful of singers in the world who can throw off the some of the fiendishly high coloratura work and wear the outfits she wears in this piece. The rest of the cast is stellar and the orchestral playing and conducting is about as lyrical as Berg ever could be. It all adds up to a musically and dramatically satisfying package.
Video direction (by Humphrey Burton) is unfussy and undistracting. The DVD is 4:3 and the only audio option is Dolby Digital 2.0.
Here’s the scene with Lulu and Jack the Ripper as a sampler.
*The more I see of Schafer the more impressed I am. She sings a lot of difficult modern music but she also brings real character to a wide range of traditional lyric soprano roles. I’ve seen her as Sophie in Rosenkavalier, as Gretel in Hansel and Gretel and as Cherubino in Il Nozze di Figaro. She really inhabits the characters she plays. As she does in Lulu.
operaramblings 