Sounds and Sweet Airs: A Shakespeare Songbook is a long and unusual CD by Carolyn Sampson, Roderick Williams and Joseph Middleton. The songs set texts (mostly) by Shakespeare but some of it is translated into German or French and in the case of Hannah Kendall’s Rosalind it’s fragments stitched together. Some of the material will be familiar to amateurs of art song but less than one might expect. There’s no Finzi or Quilter!
mouvance is a CD of music by Jerome Blais performed by Suzie LeBlanc (soprano), Eileen Walsh (clarinets), Jeff Torbert (guitars), Norman Adams (cello) and Doug Cameron (percussion). At first glance it looks like a set of songs or maybe a song cycle in the sense that it sets a series of French texts by various writers. In fact it has its origins in a multi-media show about, to quote Blais, “the universal themes of movement, migration and uprooting”. I think this is why I found it more satisfying to think of it as an integrated whole because there’s really no sense of separation between the “songs”. Continue reading
To Crow’s Theatre on Sunday to see Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s Bad Roads; translated by Sasha Dugdale. It’s play set during the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s extremely skillfully and well constructed in six vignettes. Collectively they explore aspects of the conflict; especially sexual violence and the dehumanising effects that war has on just about everybody caught up in it.
Ariane is a late opera (1906) by Jules Massenet. Now largely forgotten it has recently been recorded by the Palazzetto Bru Zane in their admirably produced series of French rarities. Unfortunately, unlike some of their other rediscoveries I wasn’t much taken with it.
The plot is an odd take on the Theseus and Ariadne story. Ariadne helps Theseus defeat the Minotaur then sails away with him to Naxos taking her sister Phaedra with them. Phaedra and Theseus fall in love and Ariadne is devastated. When Phaedra learns what effect she has had she curses Aphrodite and attacks a statue of Adonis with a rock. Aphrodite causes the statue to fall on and kill her. This is rather more revenge than Ariadne wants so she goes down to the Underworld and trades a bunch of roses to Persephone for Phaedra. On returning to the light Phaedra vows to give up Theseus but it doesn’t stick and she and Theseus set off for Athens. Ariadne drowns herself. Continue reading
Soundstreams’ concert on Friday evening in the new TD Music Hall at Massey Hall was inspired by the Rothko Chapel in Houstion, Texas. It featured two works; Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, commissioned for the opening of the chapel, and Cecilia Livingston’s mark, commissioned for Friday’s concert. Both featured chorus (Soundstreams Choir 21), viola (Steven Dann), celesta (Gregory Oh) and percussion (Ryan Scott). mark also featured baritone Alex Samaras). Both were staged by Tim Albery with lighting by Siobhán Sleath and projections by Cameron Davis.
Tuesday’s free lunchtime concert in the RBA came courtesy of the German Consulate who had flown in baritone Samuel Chan and pianist Constanze Beckmann from Kiel to perform a recital of songs by Walter Braunfels and Hanns Eisler; both composers driven from public life in Germany by the Nazis.
Chinatown; music by Alice Ho, words by Madeleine Thien and Paul Yee, is a multilingual opera about the Chinese immigrant experience in British Columbia. It ws commissioned by Vancouver City Opera where it played in 2022. It’s now been recorded for CD by the original cast.
Like some of Alice Ho’s previous work (The Monkiest King, The Lesson of Da JI) Chinatown is cross cultural in many ways. It combines Western and Chinese instruments, musical styles and vocal styles and in this case it uses three languages; Hoisan dialect, Cantonese and English. Unlike the previous two operas though this one isn’t based in myth and legend. Rather, it’s a gritty and moving story that doesn’t shy away from confronting the brutal institutional racism that Chinese people faced in BC well into the 20th century. Continue reading
Damiano Michieletto’s production of Rossini’s La donna del lago filmed at the Rossini Festival in Pesaro in 2016 has some odd features but at least it’s not as all around annoying as the Met production the year before.
Puccini’s Tosca is a work that seems to turn the boldest directors conservative. Up until now the only one I had seen that wasn’t set in Rome in 1800 was Philip Himmelmann’s production in Baden-Baden. That starred Kristine Opolais and so does Martin Kušej’s 2022 production at the Theater an der Wien. And like the Baden-Baden work this sets the piece in some sort of Christofascist dystopia but a very different one from Himmelmann.
Belle Cao
VOICEBOX:Opera in Concert opened their 50th anniversary season at the Jane Mallett Theatre with the first of three Verdi rarities. Un giorno di regno was Verdi’s second opera and it premiered at La Scala in 1840 to no great acclaim. It’s a curiously old fashioned piece for its time. Perhaps the fact that it sets a libretto written over twenty years earlier accounts for some of that. It’s very much a bel canto work. It’s sort of a comedy though it’s not actually all that funny; being largely concerned with machinations about who marries whom played around a somewhat implausible impersonation of the King of Poland by a minor French aristocrat. It’s no sillier than many Donizetti operas but perhaps by 1840 that formula was wearing rather thin. Continue reading
operaramblings 