Offenbach’s 1867 opéra bouffe, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, seems quite conventional after his forays into satirising the classics. It’s basically a love triangle set in a fictional Central European statelet wrapped in a send-up of militarism. Rather typical operetta fare really. That said it’s a perfectly acceptable example of the genre, if scarcely innovative.
Toronto City Opera opened a two show run of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld at (a very steamy) Trinity St. Paul’s on Saturday evening. It was auspicious in several ways. It, technically, marked the 80th anniversary of the organisation, which apparently had its origin at Central Tech in 1946 followed by many years as a TDSB Adult Ed programme at the Bickford Death Trap Centre. But really, TCO as we know it began life with the split from TDSB in 2018 and what’s notable about this latest production is that it’s their first with orchestra; the North York Concert Orchestra to be precise. And that really is a milestone!
Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann is a rather difficult opera to stage. There’s no definitive performing edition and there’s a lot of (too much?) material to work with so decisions have to be made about what to cut. There’s also the fundamental problem of how to frame the stories of Hoffman’s three great loves as he’s supposed to be recounting them in a bar, while drunk, some years after the events described. Plus, there is some sense that all three are really just projections of his current infatuation; the opera singer Stella.
Mariane Clément’s production of Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann recorded at the 2024 Salzburg Festival is not the sort of production that one dismisses as pointless and/or ill conceived but it is complex and difficult to read; at least on first viewing. That said, being on video rather than live probably doesn’t help.
A couple of years ago I took a look at the Bru-Zane reconstruction of the “original”; never performed, five act version of Offenbach’s La vie Parisienne. That version was recorded live on stage in Paris; which was one stop on a multi-city tour. Now it’s got the full Bru-Zane audio recording treatment complete with a 240 page book with much more information about what they did (and why) to create the performing edition used. I won’t duplicate what I said in the review of the video but there are some things I noticed anew on the audio version. Continue reading
George is a new CD from soprano Sonya Yoncheva and friends made up of music George Sand would have listened to and some readings fro her works. There’s a particular emphasis on Pauline Viardot; close friend of Sand and sister of Maria Malibran.
The music includes Chopin piano pieces played by Olga Zado, who also accompanies the songs. His Casta diva, based on the Bellini aria, is particularly interesting. There are songs by Leoncavallo, Delibes, Offenbach, Tosti and Liszt as well as piano music and songs by Viardot. On two of the songs Yoncheva is accompanied by mezzo Marina Viotti and Zado is joined by violinist Adam Taubitz for a Viardot Romance.
The Met HD in cinemas line up has been announced for 2024/25 so here’s my take on it. The first thing to notice is that there are only eight shows. There have been ten per season since 2012/13 and twelve before that. This is likely a reflection of the problems with audience numbers that all North American opera companies have been having. In the same time period the COC has cut back from 65-70 main stage performances per year to 42 and the Met’s “in house” audience problem has been well publicised. So what does that leave us with?
Offenbach’s La Périchole is one of his less often performed works and I think I can see why. It really isn’t as good as La Belle Hélène or Orphée aux Enfers but it has its moment and in the completely mad, over the top, utterly French treatment it got at the Opéra Comique in 2022 it’s really quite enjoyable.
La Vie Parisienne isn’t my favourite work by Offenbach by a long shot. The plot is absurd and the music, while not without wit (for example Bobinet;’s entrance in Act 5 is signalled by the Commendatore’s theme from Don Giovanni) and invention, mostly sounds like stuff one has heard before. I was intrigued though by a recent production in Paris that used an attempt to reconstruct the score as Offenbach and his librettists Meilhac and Halévy might have wished it in1866. As it happened a combination of censorship and the inability/reluctance of the cast (singing actors rather than opera singers) to tackle the more challenging music led to cuts throughout the rehearsal process and the virtual evisceration of acts 4 and 5. Now scholars at that most interesting organisation the Palazetto Bru Zane have gone back to the autograph materials used in that first run to try and reconstruct a “complete” version.
This year’s fall offering from UoT Opera is three short comic operas presented at the MacMillan Theatre in productions by Michael Patrick Albano. The first is Paul Hindemith’s Hin und Züruck; a twelve minute musical joke which manages to send up a lot of operatic conventions in a very short time. It’s a musical and dramatic palindrome. A man discovers his wife has a lover and shoots her. The paramedics arrive and attempt to revive her. In this staging this includes a giant syringe and no prizes for guessing where that goes. The remorseful husband shoots himself. An angel (Ben Done) appears and explains that the usual laws of physics don’t apply in opera and the entire plot and score is replayed backwards. It was played effectively deadpan by Cassandra Amorim and Lyndon Ladeur while Jordana Goddard, as the elderly deaf aunt, sat through the whole thing entirely oblivious. Good fun.
