The Canadian Children’s Opera Company is reviving Dean Burry’s adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit on its twentieth anniversary. The first performance was on Friday evening at the Harbourfront Centre Theatre. It’s really quite an achievement to condense a 320pp novel into an 80 minute opera respecting the constraints of writing mostly for young voices. It’s clever. It’s structured as twelve discrete scenes and most of the singing is choral. Groups of performers; essentially sorted by age cohort, represent the various “tribes” of Middle Earth; hobbits, humans, elves, dwarves etc. There are a limited number of solo roles and dialogue is used rather than recitative so exposed solo singing is kept to a minimum. This all provides meaningful roles for lots of performers without creating “impossible to cast” ones.
A vocalist accompanying himself on the guitar (or one of it’s predecessors) is one of the oldest and most prevalent tropes in western music. From Blondel to Billy Bragg it’s always been with us but it’s quite rare in the world of modern art music where the roles of singer and accompanist are trades as rigidly delineated as anything in a Clydeside shipyard. Doug MacNaughton breaks the rules by playing a variety of kinds of guitar and singing in a range of styles. For that question of style is vital too. The mechanics of doing two jobs simultaneously affect singing style and centuries of performance history offer a bewildering range of stylistic choices. It’s an issue I examined once before when reviewing a Bud Roach CD for Opera Canada.
Not so much on this week. Tuesday COC chorus member and guitarist Doug MacNaughton, currently appearing as Antonio in Marriage of Figaro, has a noon hour concert on Tuesday in the RBA featuring a new piece by Dean Burry and other works ranging from John Rutter to Donald Swann. Then on Friday CASP have an evening recital at the Enoch Turner Schoolhouse featuring Philip Addis and Emily Hamper.
operaramblings 