Tag Archives: de ridder

Only the Sound Remains

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Only the Sound Remains is a chamber opera by Kaija Sariaho based on two Noh plays translated by Ernest Fenellosa and Ezra Pound.  The piece was premiered in Amsterdam in 2016 by Dutch National Opera, where it was recorded.  It’s a co-pro with Teatro Real, Finnish National Opera and the COC so Toronto audiences will likely get a look at it eventually.  Which is good because it’s really hard to figure out much of it from the video recording.  As he so often does, Peter Sellars directs for both stage and camera and while I like his stage work here I find his video direction quite annoying, especially in the first piece.

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Tanya Tagaq at the TSO

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Last night saw the opening concert of the TSO’s New Creations Festival.  It opened with a sesquie by Andrew Staniland; Reflections on “O Canada” After Truth and Reconciliation.  Sesquies are two minute “fanfares” composed to commemorate Canada’s 150th.  Staniland’s version was a bold attempt to deal with the immensely complex subject of reconciliation between Canada and its native peoples and, of course, one can’t do that in two minutes in any medium.  Reflections was an interesting stab though.  It was structured as a very quiet canon for high strings in a minor key using the principal theme of O Canada and ending with an overblown fanfare in the winds.  You can apply your own political interpretation.

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Boobs in Venice

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Johann Strauss’ Eine Nacht in Venedig is a pretty slight piece.  In fact it makes Die Fledermaus look like Parsifal.  It’s set during Carnival.  There’s a visiting duke who is out to bed the last woman in Venice he hasn’t already slept with, the young wife of a doddery senator, but she’s being impersonated by her maid and her foster sister for reasons of their own while she gets off with her nephew.  The duke fails to seduce anyone.  Ash Wednesday arrives and everybody, on the surface, returns to her proper partner.  All this serves as an excuse for lots of boob and thigh flashing, some big dance numbers and lots of, by Fledermaus standards, rather dull music. Continue reading →

Fidelio at Glyndebourne 1979

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Southern Television’s 1979 Glyndebourne broadcast was Beethoven’s Fidelio. The production by Peter Hall with designs by John Bury is conventional enough though tendencies to exaggerate are clearly creeping in. The chorus of prisoners is almost zombie like and Florestan looks disconcertingly like the legless sea captain from Blackadder II. Apart from that it’s a conventional 1800ish setting where the prison’s a prison, the dungeon’s a dungeon etc. It’s also very literal in that the dungeon is so dark it’s almost impossible to see anything.  Continue reading →