Tag Archives: coc

Ein Volk, Ein Opera Company, Kein Opera

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Forgive the grammar, you get the idea.

So at today’s COC season launch there was an exchange that went roughly like this:

Alexander Neef: Any questions?

Bald academic dude in jacket and tie: I’d like to ask about progress on the two commissions (unannounced) to Margaret Atwood and [somebody else] and more generally when are we going to see a Canadian opera on the Four Seasons stage? makes unflattering comparisons to the SF Opera announcement yesterday.

Clique of Canadian Academic Composers: Here, here, rhubarb etc.

Alexander Neef: That’s become a ritual question so I’ll give you my ritual answer “When we have something concrete to announce we’ll announce it”.

Grumpy female: Claims that there are “many” Canadian composers who could compose something better than L’Amour du Loin (though mentions no names).

More rhubarb etc.

In principle I can see that it’s part of the remit of a national opera company to produce operas by its nationals though to what extent the Canadian Opera Company is a national company is well open to question. It only plays in Toronto. It raises just about all its funding there and it gets next to no support from either the federal government or the hockey channel which masquerades as a national public broadcaster. That said, I doubt one Canadian in a million could name a Canadian opera composer and if they could it would likely be one that no sane opera house would consider working with. So there’s a problem. No company can afford to give a seventh of its season to a guaranteed flop and no-one in Canada is going to pay for a vanity production by an unknown composer even if the libretto is written by Atwood or Ondaatje. I don’t hear solutions. I just hear over-entitled academics demanding that someone else throw away a couple of million bucks.

Rant over. Normal service will now be resumed.

Canadian Opera Company season announcement 2012/13

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So this morning I was at the Four Seasons Centre for the press conference to announce the COC’s 2012/13 season.

Board President Philip Deck started off with a strong statement about continuing to improve the quality of the product on the Four Seasons Centre stage and striving for “uncompromising and inspiring” programming with a goal of becoming “one of the world’s great opera houses”. There are crucial words here. If General Director Alexander Neef is to meet these goals he will need a supportive Board. It looks like they are there with him at least for now and that’s very good to hear.

There was a very good “teaser video” with contributions from the many Canadians who will feature next season. I guess this will be available on line at some point. Then we got to the main business with Alexander presenting the line up. It’s pretty exciting so here it is in all its glory and with my commentary.  Continue reading →

Opera 101 – Tosca

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Opera 101(I) at the Duke of Westminster last night was more interesting than I expected. Besides the usual host, Brent Bambury, we had the director of the current production Paul Curran, Mark Delavan, who is singing Scarpia, and Julie Makerov, one of two Toscas. Delavan and Makerov were engaging and funny if not specially revelatory though both revealed a taste for country music which is a bit disturbing. Most of the interest came from Curran. He’s an intense little Scot who tells it how he sees it. He grew up in the less salubrious parts of Glasgow (I’m reliably informed that there are salubrious bits!) and the first opera he saw was Wozzeck which he describes as the story of his life. I was struck by his emphasis on the role of the music in his directorial process. He described himself as a “musician first” and talked at some length about his role in making sure that the singers can sing to their best ability. He’s also no literalist. I asked him whether the very specific time and place setting of Tosca was constraining or liberating and he went on a bit of a rant which I loved! He listed off the historical inaccuracies with the Tosca libretto with encyclopaedic accuracy peppered with expressions like “complete bullshit” basically ending up at “so I feel I can do pretty much what I like with it”. He’s also not one for the pretties. He told a story about being criticized because Tosca’s dress in Act 2 was inelegant. His response “It’s a rape scene (F word not far away here we feel). I don’t think she’s asking ‘does my bum look big in this?'”. I liked his take on “Vissi d’arte” as a Jewish aria too. He’s alluding to it’s sense of a contractual relationship with God as opposed to Tosca’s over Catholicism (he’s from a very Catholic family). All in all good value.

We had a brief chat afterwards about Britten, ‘difficult’ operas and stuff. I want to see his Peter Grimes but, unfortunately, Santa Fe isn’t exactly next door.

In a couple or three hours it will back to COC for me for the third time in 24 hours. This time for the 2012/13 season announcement.

fn1. Opera 101 is a pub based series of fairly informal talks by members of the creative team for various COC productions.

COC Ensemble Studio – Works by female composers

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It feels good to be back listening to live music after a bit of a drought. Today I was at a lunchtime recital in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre given by members of the Canadian Opera Company Studio Ensemble. It was very good indeed. I want to start with the undoubted highlight; Jacqueline Woodley‘s performance of Judith Weir’s piece for unaccompanied soprano, King Harald’s Saga. It’s a complex, fascinating and very difficult piece requiring the singer to switch between voices and to pull off a range of singing styles. Woodley was awesome. I’ve heard her now in quite a few contemporary pieces, though perhaps none as hard as this, and she has always impressed.

Almost as impressive was Ileana Montalbetti’s performance of Libby Larsen’s Donal Oge. It’s a work that requires considerable power from the singer and Ileana, unsurprisingly delivered. She’s got a big voice and she knows how to use it. Neil Craighead gave us two songs by Cecile Chaminade. He sounds a good deal more powerful than last time I heard him. He has a lovely tone and now the power too. He hasn’t quite got the knack of throttling it back yet but that will come I expect. We also got some fiendishly difficult Alma Mahler songs which clearly taxed tenor Chris Enns. They would have taxed anyone I think. Mireille Asselin gave a pleasing unaccompanied performance of a piece from Hildegard von Bingen and the programme was rounded out by two duets by Fanny Hensel sung by Asselin and Craighead and Montalbetti and Enns.

The pianists were the excellent Jenna Douglas and the even more impressive Timothy Cheung. All in all, this was as good a concert as I have heard in the COC’s free lunchtime series.

Joan Sutherland in Toronto

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It’s a pet peeve of mine that, alone among state funded TV broadcasters in the industrialised world, CBC doesn’t broadcast opera on TV. There are many other reasons why the CBC is a national embarrassment but this one rankles. That said, there have been a couple of CBC broadcasts over the years and they did make it to DVD. These include a 1981 Canadian Opera Company performance of Bellini’s Norma with Joan Sutherland. It’s a great big pile of steaming whale dreck. The production, by Lotfi Mansouri, looks more like it was done in 1881. The Gauls have helmets with horns on. Sutherland seems to be dressed as the Statue of Liberty and the tenor playing Pollione (Francisco Ortiz) looks like Stephen Fry as the Roman centurion in Black Adder Back and Forth. Add to that it’s pretty much park and bark as far as blocking goes.

Sutherland is on poor form. She has no lower register to speak of and she gets about as much drama out of the music as a doorpost. Whether her powers were in serious decline at this point or she was just having an off night I can’t tell but it’s pretty sad. Ortiz is dreadful. He’s often below the note and seems to be using every trick in the tenor playbook to approximate his music. Bonynge’s conducting is deadly dull. The only part of the music making worthy of note is Tatiana Troyanos as Adalgisa. She’s very good indeed.

Technically the DVD is at least as bad as the performance. It’s recorded in mono (mono, in 1981!) and the sound is muddy and badly balanced. At some points the chorus is completely inaudible. Of course, some of this maybe the lousy O’Keefe Centre acoustics but I think it’s mostly just bad engineering. The picture is very poor quality too. There are hard coded English subtitles. This is one to avoid.

“Thanks” to Lydia at Definitely the Opera for drawing this to my attention!

Buzz about the Canadian Opera Company

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David Cangelosi, who is in town to sing Spoletta in the COC’s upcoming Tosca has an interesting blog post about the buzz in the business about the COC. Check out the comments. I’d bet my mortgage (if I had one) that “Alan H” is Alan Held who will sing in the Zemlinsky/Puccini double bill in the spring. It’s good news indeed that he has more work here booked. FWIW, Lawrence Brownlee said similar things to me about the COC in a conversation late last year when he was in town singing in La Cenerentola. Like Cangelosi I’ve been impressed by the current management’s willingness to experiment both with new repertoire and bold productions. Keeping the seats full in the face of an audience with a significant ultra-conservative section and local newspaper critics who are both ignorant and conservative will be tough but I hope they stay the course.

Best of 2011

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Herewith a personal take on the best things that came my way operatically in 2011.

Live performances

It was a pretty good year for live opera in Toronto. I’m certainly not going to complain about two Robert Carsen productions in the same calendar year. Good though the Gluck was though top honours in the fully staged opera in a real theatre go to the COC’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Neil Armfield’s production was fairly conventional but the music making was superb. Adrienne Pieczonka, Jane Archibald and Alice Coote headlined with strong support from Richard Margison and a whole bunch of past and present Studio Ensemble members. The orchestral playing too was absolutely first class and Sir Andrew Davis conducting looked like he was enjoying it as much as the audience. Later in the year I think we had a bit of “a star is born moment”. Christopher Alden’s Rigoletto was challenging enough that I wanted to see it a second time so took the chance to get a cheap ticket for the B cast. Thus I got to see the extraordinary chemistry between two very fine young singers; David Lomeli and Simone Osborne. Go see them if you get a chance. Actually, nothing at the COC seriously disappointed in 2011 (well maybe the The Magic Flute had a bit of a 200th performance of my career feel to it.) It looks like we are moving at last into an era when Toronto gets consistently high class singers and conductors in decent or better productions. It’s a shame there are only seven productions per year.

As for smaller venues, highlights included Against the Grain’s funky La Boheme in the highly outlandish setting of the Tranzac Club and Queen of Puddings’ world premiere of Ana Sokolov’s Svadba – Wedding; an hour long piece for six unaccompanied female voices. There were also any number of excellent free lunchtime concerts in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre.

DVD

The surprise highlight of the year for me was the restored print of the 1961 Rosenkavalier from Salzburg. Everything about it is surprising and wonderful and undermines a great deal of received wisdom about opera in that era. Other personal discoveries were the Salzburg King Arthur (who knew Germans could be funny?) and Calixto Bieito’s truly disturbing Wozzeck starring Franz Hawlata at his very considerable best.

Personal epiphany

I started the year thinking I didn’t really like John Adams much. I had hated the Met broadcast of Doctor Atomic and while I liked some of the non-operatic stuff rather more I wasn’t a fan. After watching Nixon in China twice in 24 hours (COC on the Friday night followed by the Met broadcast on the Saturday) and attending a lunchtime concert of arias introduced by the composer and sung by Peter McGillivray and Betty Wayne Allison I was converted. I even went back and watched the Amsterdam production of Doctor Atomic on DVD. I still think Doctor Atomic has its weaknesses but Nixon in China is pretty much a masterpiece.

On-line stuff

I started this blog as a way of keeping up writing analytically while I wasn’t working. It’s helped keep me sane. Through this and Twitter and other on-line stuff I’ve met some really cool people in 2011; some in meatspace including Lydia of Definitely the Opera, Cicely Carver from COC, couturier Rosemary Uhmetsu and up and coming soprano Simone Osborne. On-line folks who have helped this year along are really too numerous to mention individually but thanks anyway!

Other stuff that happened

I met Lawrence Brownlee and Leonardo Vordoni in the cinema at a MetHD broadcast! I discovered that baritone Brett Polegato (one of the funniest people in opera) has a little grey cat called Lady Jane Grey just like my little grey monster.

Curious about young artists programmes

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A lot of opera companies have young artists programmes. They seem to vary a lot and so I’m curious to know more about them and what opera goers think about them. I’m no expert but I do have quite a lot of exposure to my local YAP; the Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio. I know a couple of the singers. I’ve seen many of them perform both in COC sponsored ventures and otherwise. I’ve seen many graduates of the programme perform too and I’ve been enormously impressed. One of the things about the Ensemble Studio that I really like is that it provides lots of performance opportunities. I don’t really understand how one can grow in a performing art without performing. I’m not sure though that this emphasis on performance is universal with YAPs. The Met programme for instance seems to offer few performance opportunities (please disabuse if I am wrong!). Here in Toronto our young performers get frequent opportunities in the free lunchtime concert series at the Four Seasons Centre, they do an annual schools tour with works geared for kids, they do a special performance with full orchestra on the Four Seasons centre Stage of one of the COC productions that year and they, crucially, take on many of the lesser, and sometimes not so lesser, roles in the COC’s productions. For example in the two productions mounted so far this season three members of the Ensemble Studio sang in Robert Carsen’s production of Iphigenia in Tauris alongside Susan Graham, Russell Braun and Joseph Kaiser and the roles of Marullo, Countess Ceprano and two other roles in Rigoletto were sung by ES members not to mention that the Gilda in four performances was also an ES member. How does it work in your local company?

If I ruled the world…

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… or at least if I ruled the COC and could design a fantasy season what would I do?

Design parameters:

  • Seven productions (because that’s what COC does).
  • Has to be balanced in the sense that it can’t all be obscurities I want to see.
  • Has to appeal to a reasonably wide audience but I’m not giving in to the sort of people who want to see Zeffirelli direct La Traviata every year.
  • Not constrained by some productions being long and expensive.

Continue reading →

Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder

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Today’s free lunchtime concert in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre was given by Canadian bass, Robert Pomakov and the Gryphon Trio (Annalee Patipatanakoon – violin, Roman Borys – cello, Jamie Parker – piano).

First up we got Parker and Pomakov performing Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte.  Pomakov has a big voice as I knew from having heard his Monterone twice this month at the Four Seasons Centre.  I was impressed by how well he could scale back his volume and even more impressed by the wide and appropriate range of tone colours he deployed.  He doesn’t sound entirely secure at ppp but for a voice of his type he was pretty good!  Next the Gryphons gave us the Elegia from Arensky’s piano trio.  I don’t know this work at all but they sounded very accomplished and musical.  The finale was Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death in Gary Kulesha’s arrangement for voice and piano trio.  This time Pomakov could let rip with all his considerable power accompanied with equal fervour by the Gryphons.  The whole thing was very impressive and very loud!

The scary thing is that Pomakov has only just turned thirty and already has this huge sound.  Apparently he’s had it for a while because he’s sung in twenty COC productions going back ten seasons. I did check out Youtube to see if I could find Pomakov and there is one clip of him singing the Russian National Anthem at the World Cup of Hockey in 2004. Here it is.