My first chance to take a look at this year’s UoT Opera Program came up on Sunday night in a concert staged jointly with the UoT Symphony and the MacMillan Singers. It was a series of opera orchestral pieces and ensembles kicking off with the overture from Die Zauberflöte, where the orchestra was Klemperer sized but the tempo distinctly quicker. The evening proceeded via more Zauberflöte, Don Pasquale, Cavelleria Rusticana, Die Meistersinger and Carmen to the party scene in La Traviata.
For the last few years the COC has had a fairly glitzy evening at which the next season is announced and there are interviews, a few performances etc. This year, for whatever reason, the two elements were divorced. The season was announced in a press release win January with no fanfare; not even a press conference. The glitzy bit happened last night with a cocktail reception and a stage event hosted by Brent Bambury.
There are some pretty silly opera plots. Donizetti’s Emilia di Liverpool comes to mind but the Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing probably tops even the thundering torrents of the Mersey as it descends from the Cheshire Alps for silliness. Basically one John P. Wintergreen is a candidate for POTUS. His campaign gimmick is that he will marry whoever wins a beauty contest, held naturally enough, in Noo Joysy. Unfortunately(?) he falls in love with the homelier corn muffin maven Mary Turner and marries her instead. He duly gets elected but diplomatic complications with the French follow when it is revealed that the pageant winner; Diana Devereaux of Louisiana is the “illegitimate daughter of the illegitimate son of the illegitimate nephew of Napoleon”. Impeachment proceedings follow but, of course, there’s a happy ending. Along the way almost every US institution and region gets gently pilloried and the jokes are even funnier because what might have seemed risque in 1930 seems “business as usual” now, as when three White House interns sing about how the Presidential Mansion is the safest place in America for a young girl…
UoT Opera’s fall production of Don Giovanni will open in three weeks time. Today, in Walter Hall we got a few hints on what we may be seeing plus some semi staged excerpts.
For director Marilyn Gronsdale one way into Don Giovanni (and she accepts that there are many) is to see it as being about how the actions of the powerful impact the lives of the many. In a sexual context it’s clearly of relevance to our times with a serial groper in the White House, a British cabinet minister out on his ear for sexual impropriety and one of Hollywood’s most powerful figures rapidly being cast into outer darkness. One technique to be used to emphasise this is a silent chorus of women who will witness/bear witness to the action. Maybe this is something like the Land Assembly in Peter Hinton’s take on Louis Riel? We also learned that the design aesthetic will be stylized 1940s film noir and that we may be in for a surprise with the ending.
Act 2 sextet: Brendan Friesen, Matthew Cairns, Alyssa Durnie, Jamie Groote, Sarah Abelard, Alex Halliday (I think)
Yesterday’s lunchtime concert was my second chance in just over a week to see Erin Wall in recital, in a completely different program from the Mazzoleni gig. There were three sets. First up were Korngold’s Three Songs Op.22. I’m all for more German songs in recitals, especially someone other than the Schus, but I wasn’t really taken with these. They seem closer to the later film music in style than to, say Die tote Stadt. They got the operatic treatment from Erin which is probably not a bad thing here.
Such was the title of yesterday’s performance by the UoT Opera ‘s performance in the RBA. Now personally I don’t subscribe to the notion of the 19th century (ugh!) as a “golden age” of anything but yesterday suggested that the UoT program, if not quite in golden age territory is going through a bit of a purple patch. This was, I think, the best student performance overall that I have heard in the last two or three years.
UoT’s show Porgi amor consisted of a series of staged and costumed scenes from Mozart operas with linking commentary, all designed by Michael Patrick Albano. The operas ranged from La finta giardiniera to La clemenza di Tito with all the major bases in between covered off. The emphasis was on ensemble numbers and providing opportunities for as many singers as possible so there was a cast of thousands. It was well structured, quite slick and there was some very decent singing. One expects a reasonably high standard from UoT Opera and we got it. As I usually do with this kind of show I’ll refrain from a play-by-play and just talk about a few highlights and do some “talent spotting”.
