Last Tuesday lunchtime in the RBA we got a sneak preview of some of the music that will feature at this year’s 20th anniversary Toronto Summer Music.
There was soprano Caitlin Wood with Philip Chiu performing three French chansons; at least one of which will feature in Mary Bevan and Roger Vignoles’ Walter Hall recital. Cait herself will be performing as part of the cast of Brian Current’s opera Missing during the festival.
The Excursions of Mr. Brouček is a rather odd opera by Leoš Janáček. It’s currently being streamed on the Opera Vision Youtube channel in a production at the National Theatre Brno directed by Robert Carsen.
Sometimes the Canadian Opera Company gets it right and the current production of Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen is a good example. It’s got all the things that might help boost a flagging audience. It’s not over familiar. Nobody is going to be complaining that they have seen the same old boring production five times already. It’s a brilliant score. The production is intelligent with enough for those who want more than a costume drama while not doing anything to shock the pearl clutchers. It’s well sung; with a goodly quantity of local talent, and the orchestral playing and conducting is exemplary. What more could one ask for? One could I suppose add that it’s an opera one could happily take children to.
Opera is full of patriarchy. It’s a bit odd then that Leoš Janáček wrote two operas about dominating matriarchs and the consequences of their actions. The better known of the two is probably Jenůfa but the later Kát’a Kabanová deals with similar themes. Both are bleak and have watery endings.
Things are a bit sub fusc at the COC these days. The season reveal isn’t a glitzy gala with a big fight to grab the charcuterie. It isn’t even a 10am doughnuts and coffee presser in the RBA where the ghost of Robert Everett-Green could ask what happened to the promised new Canadian operas . It’s just an email arriving at the prescribed time. There isn’t even an embargoed press only version to let us get our ducks in a row before the broader public get the news. Such is life.
Janáček’s Jenůfa was staged and recorded at the Staatsoper unter den Linden in 2021 under COVID conditions. There’s no audience and the chorus members, in black, are distributed all around the auditorium. Even without a live audience it’s extremely dramatic and intense.
It’s not often that I’m completely baffled by an opera production but Frank Castorf’s 2018 production of Janáček’s From the House of the Dead (Z Mrtvého Domu) at the Bayerische Staatsoper comes pretty close. Since I really can’t explain what’s going on I’ll try to describe the various elements.
Pavol Breslik headlines on a new recording of Janáček’s Diary of One Who Disappeared; a song cycle about a young man who runs off with a gyosy girl. The piece is given in its original arrangement which, besides tenor and piano, features a mezzo in several of the songs and a brief appearance by a three member female chorus. No doubt this is one reason it’s performed less often than it might be. Breslik is pretty much ideal for this music. Obviosly he’s completely at home in Czech and he sings with clear articulation and has a rather beautiful instrument. He’s well supported by Robert Pechanec on piano plus mezzo Ester Pavlu; who has quite a bright sound for a mezzo but works well enough with Breslik. Dominika Hanko, Zuzanka Marczelová and Mária Kovács make up the chorus.
The line up for Voicebox: Opera in Concert has been announced for the 2019/20 season. There are four shows:
All shows are at the Jane Mallett Theatre.
I guess previous times I’ve seen Janáček’s Jenůfa I haven’t really noticed the role that the idea of “bad blood” or inherited depravity plays in the plot but it’s there almost as starkly as in certain works by Zola and Buchan. Perhaps one of the strengths of Christof Loy’s very clean 2014 production for the Deutsche Oper is that it tends to show up such details. It’s certainly a very low key setting. All the action takes place in a plain white room with minimal furnishing. Costuming is modern (sort of); maybe 1950s or so. Sometimes one gets a hint of rather more going on on the edge of the stage but Brian Large’s typically close up video direction makes it hard to be sure. So, at least on disk, it’s all about the characters and their interactions and they are drawn pretty clearly.
operaramblings 