Walter Sutcliffe’s staging of Handel’s Brockes Passion, recorded at the Halle Festival in 2023, would be disturbing under any circumstances. Watching it during and just after the US elections borders on the unbearable.
A New Philosophy of Opera is a recent book by opera and theatre director Yuval Sharon. It deals with that thorny question “How do we revitalise opera?”. It contains a lengthy critique of the current opera world; repertory, performance practice, business model, and some pretty radical suggestions for ways forward. It’s focussed on the US but I think it’s pretty relevant to Canada too. It’s also worth pointing out upfront that Sharon’s way forward is not at all based on the German model. He’s actually quite critical of it as being almost as ritualistic, lifeless and elitist as the US model.
So let’s look at his critique of current practice. It can be summed up by the three adjectives in the previous sentence. So, inter alia: Continue reading
Friday night the Glenn Gould School presented a pair of French chamber operas in Mazzoleni Hall. The pieces were Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges and Debussy’s Prodigal Son with a new English language libretto by Ashley Pearson. Pearson’s libretto concerns a gay man estranged from his family so director Mabel Wannacott’s linking idea is that the principal character in both is the same person as a child and twenty years later.
Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince was a huge success when it premiered in New York in 1924. It’s not hard to see why. It’s an undemanding “love versus duty” plot with plenty of tuneful numbers and lots of drinking and drinking songs which must have had a particular appeal during Prohibition!
Nearly a year ago I reviewed Christopher Whitley’s album of pieces for solo violin and electronics Describe Yourself. In the same session Whitley recorded a series of short improvisations for violin using the same 300 year old Stradivarius. The half hour or so of music was recorded unedited in a single take and forms the album almost as soft as silence.
There are fifteen pieces ranging in length from 18 seconds to about four minutes. They are quite varied in mood and method but tend toward the meditative. He uses the full range of sounds from the violin. Sometimes, as in “six” the music is very high and chattery. For some reason it suggested squirrels discussing philosophy. Other pieces, like “a5 b5 g5” seem to have an geometrical structure; a series of smooth crescendos are each followed by a very fragmented fade-out, rinse and repeat. Continue reading
Mark Leiren-Young’s Playing Shylock opened at Canadian Stage on Wednesday night. It’s a one man show featuring Canadian stage, film and TV icon Saul Rubinek and directed by the equally venerable Martin Kinch. And it’s back where it all started for both of them in what was then Toronto Free Theatre on Berkeley Street (once, appropriately enough, a gas works).
Verdi’s Ernani is set in the reign of Charles V of Spain just before he becomes Holy Roman Emperor (1519), not that there’s anything remotely historical about the plot which is classic love and revenge stuff. The reason I mention it is because I’m trying to understand what director Lotte de Beer is driving at in the production staged and filmed at Bregenz in 2023.
My review of Opera Atelier’s production of Handel’s Acis and Galatea is now up at Opera Canada.
Photo: Bruce Zinger
Quebec based Les Violons du Roy performed on Sunday at Koerner Hall with soprano Karina Gauvin and contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux. The music was all drawn from Handel’s English language oratorios and featured orchestral pieces and a number of arias and duets. These works are some of my favourites so I was a bit surprised that I didn’t enjoy the concert as much as I expected.
Productions on the lake stage at Bregenz are usually spectacular but rarely stray very far from the traditional/canonical. The production of Weber’s Der Freischütz, directed by Philipp Stölzl and recorded in 2023 is quite radical though. I think there are three main elements to this quite ambitious reworking. One is to give Samiel a much enhanced role. Here he is both MC and puppetmaster; controlling the action, including playing with time, and addressing the audience directly. The second element is to emphasize that this is taking place in the aftermath of the Thirty Year War and, to add to the misery of that, the village has suffered severe flooding. This sets up a duality between Agathe as the one who still, despite everything, trusts in God and Ännchen who believes God has forsaken them. This tension serves to make the two girls perhaps the most important figures, after Samiel, in the piece.
operaramblings 