Needles and Opium

Posted on November 23, 2013 by barczablog

Robert Lepage (Canadian Press photo)

I’ve just come from one of the most absorbing 105 minutes I’ve ever passed in a theatre, thanks to Robert Lepage.  I take it on faith (from the program, and from the time on my phone when I came out), as the show felt less than an hour long.

Needles and Opium opened tonight at the Bluma Appel Theatre, presented by Canadian Stage.  It’s another Ex Machina production, in co-production with Théâtre du Trident, Québec and Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, Montréal.  I read somewhere that this is a new production, but never having seen it before, I wouldn’t know.

The mise-en-scène is so completely absorbing you’ll be beguiled even if you don’t like jazz or musings about life & art.  Anyone willing to meet the work halfway, which is to say, anyone with a poetic sensibility & imagination floats out of the theatre like a child on Christmas morning.  The show never lets down, but always offers something, whether eye-candy, music, profound concepts, clever writing, physical virtuosity, or several of the above at the same time.

Marc Labrèche in Needles and Opium. Photo by Nicola-Frank Vachon.

Marc Labrèche in Needles and Opium. Photo by Nicola-Frank Vachon.

I must say that I am very relieved.  The title is a little too close to home, what with the news item about the new toxic drug from Russia –krokodil is it?—that now may have reared its nasty head in St Catharines, and the druggy exploits of a certain local politician who shall be nameless.  And then there’s the federal leader who’s come out in favour of legalization of marijuana.  Onstage? This is a very romantic understanding of drugs and their dangerous allure (in other words Stephen Harper and Nancy Reagan would disapprove).

I don’t think I have the usual perspective on Lepage.  I know him mostly from his operatic work (which I’ll try to put in chronological order):

  • The Canadian Opera Company double bill of Erwartung and Bluebeard’s Castle
  • Le Damnation de Faust at the Metropolitan Opera (that i saw alas only through high-definition broadcasts)
  • The Nightingale and other stories also at the COC
  • Wagner’s Ring Cycle, mostly via high definition broadcast, although I did have the pleasure of seeing Das Rheingold and Die Walküre at the Met.  This might be the one tiny mark on Lepage’s record, and not because his work was less than brilliant. No, this was a collision between a conservative audience in NY and an original approach to Wagner. I was heart-broken by the response, summed up in Maclean’s (I was quoted in Lepage’s defense).  There’s nothing wrong with the production that open minds wouldn’t fix. The shows i was at? the audience ate it up.
  • Thomas Adès’ The Tempest, again via high definition broadcast (and this one was rapturously received on both sides of the Atlantic)

The descent to Nibelheim from Das Rheingold (Ring cycle at the Metropolitan Opera): one of a near-infinite series of configurations of a protean set.

The very first thing I reviewed on this blog, roughly three years ago was Eonnagata at the Sony Theatre.  Then as now we were seeing not just the Ex Machina brilliance, but a text written by Lepage.  While I’ve never seen any of Lepage’s Vegas spectacles nor anything with Cirque du Soleil, I believe I’m not just conversant in Lepage’s performance vocabulary, but somewhere between “fancier” and “fanatic”.

If there’s one thing I hate about opera –and as an opera lover, scholar, interpreter and composer, it’s painful to admit—it’s a particular attitude among audience members (that is, the subscribers, who are usually the oldest & most conservative).   They show up with more stipulations than a first-time home-buyer.  They would rather be right than have fun.  I say this because in the presence of Lepage’s original text there can be no stipulations.  What a blast to be in a theatre full of people loving the show. One is free to enjoy, have fun, to have one’s mind expanded: without drugs.  It may be trite to say so, but this is a very trippy show.  You will see and feel things that are unquestionably a sort of altered reality.

Wellesley Robertson III in Needles and Opium. Photo by Nicola-Frank Vachon.


Wellesley Robertson III in Needles and Opium. Photo by Nicola-Frank Vachon.

I couldn’t help seeing all sorts of connections & resonances with other work by Lepage.

As in Eonnagata we’re watching someone on the boundaries between worlds.  In Eonnagata we watched a person move between cultures, reminding me of Lepage himself, a francophone Quebecer who has come to English Canada & the USA, bilingual and likely with conflicted loyalties, someone fluent both in high art and popular forms such as circus & shows in Vegas.

In Needles and Opium we watch two (or perhaps three, as there is another figure whose name is Robert) similarly transient figures.  We see and hear Miles Davis taking bebop to Europe, where he’s not only appreciated more fully, but free of the usual racist restrictions.  And we encounter Jean Cocteau coming to America, a figure who for me echoed Lepage himself in his recent encounter with the philistines of NYC.  It’s darkly ironic, but also funny in a deadpan way.

The set and the projections work brilliantly with the aerials. Yes we’re watching people climb on the sides of surfaces or on wires, as in Erwartung or Damnation de Faust, or  Das Rheingold.  As in The Nightingale & other stories, shadow images tell a large part of the story.  The incessantly dynamic set is like life itself, changing endlessly, like that miracle machine in the Ring.  People may seem to be static but the set won’t let us see them that  way, but forces us to see change & transformation.  We’re watching people constantly on the edge, literally brought to a precipice, about to fall, dangling.  It may be the oldest of metaphors, but that doesn’t mean it’s not powerful.  Marc Labrèche and Wellesley Robertson III are endlessly fascinating to watch.

One nice bonus was getting the chance to bravo for Robert Lepage when he came out at the end.  Like Cocteau, he may not be understood or appreciated quite so well in America, but he seems to be at home here in Toronto.  I look forward to his next opera, whether it’s with the COC or at the Met.

But right now? You must see this if you can, only on until December 1st.

click for further information

Posted in Dance, theatre & musicals, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

JFK: Choose your conspiracy

Posted on November 22, 2013 by barczablog

November 22nd?  It’s Saint Cecilia’s Day, the patron saint of music.  It’s Benjamin Britten’s birthday, which this year means his centennial.

Okay, those are all in the fine print.  Written on my psyche since childhood?  November 22nd 1963.  Every other important date has been like a footnote to this date.

  • A day that will live in infamy? While I’ve heard FDR’s famous phrase again and again I still think of this more recent date.
  • The day the music died?  Not the day a couple of musicians fell out of the sky, but the day music ceased to be music.
  • Childhood’s end?  Nope.  Only retrospectively, I suppose, especially when conflated with RFK & MLK, but this was first in a series of profound shocks that disillusioned many people.

The official story –aka the Warren Commission Report—is that Oswald acted alone.  My gut feeling is that he could have done it, this marine shooting a good rifle from above.  Snipers were sometimes given heroic acclaim when acting in the heat of battle, but that only works in a civilian setting if someone wants the target killed. How does that work if the target is a beloved leader? It had been inconceivable, but alas would happen again.

That’s how I come back to Oliver Stone’s film JFK on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of that dark day in Dallas.  For someone who more or less accepted the Warren Commission’s premise, that Oswald did it, I find the film seductive.  The film isn’t really about the truth.  One of the amazing things about this long looping film is how it manages to problematize certainty.  Stone doesn’t claim to know who’s responsible.  His film takes us into a kind of epistemological labyrinth, messing with our heads like a good horror film.  Edgar Allan Poe couldn’t have written a scarier screenplay.  If there were a single bogeyman we’d have an easier time of it.

It’s not Stone’s best film.  Salvador, or Platoon or Natural Born Killers, had better critical receptions.  He’s done great writing on Midnight Express and Talk Radio.  But I suspect JFK will be the film for which Stone is remembered.  It excited me when I first saw it, and still moves me more than most films.  On this, the eve of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in  Dallas Texas, I thought I’d reflect again about this film, a great work of art.

I say “choose your conspiracy” because Stone is wonderfully equivocal.  We’re given several possible candidates, rather than zeroing in on one.  That marks this film as something very different from what you usually get. We’re not really looking at what happened so much as how the event changed our understanding (which is why I spoke of an epistemelogical labyrinth above) and even metaphysics, if you consider the terrifying pattern of lone killers taking out RFK & MLK.  I wish I could believe that James Earl Ray & Sirhan Sirhan simply acted alone, the way Oswald presumably did.  Life is so much easier in black and white, but JFK explores the shadows, and captures the change in what we believe: what we can believe.

One of the things I love about JFK is the astonishing depth of talent in this film.  Where in the 1950s you’d see a Biblical epic full of cameos from great stars (for instance John Wayne’s brief appearance in The Greatest Story Ever Told: which I refer to in my recent review of The Butler), Stone might be giving us The greatest story ever covered up, which is to say the earth-shaking day of Kennedy’s assassination.  What talent?

  • Tommy Lee Jones, very much against type
  • Edward Asner against type
  • Jack Lemmon against type
  • Vincent D’Onofrio, before he had yet become a star
  • John Candy against type
  • Did Joe Pesci ever do better work?
  • Sissy Spacek, brilliant as usual
  • Kevin Costner, in what could have been a break-out role for him.  Around this time he has his big success with Dances with wolves, and then..?  I had hoped for more, but this is surely his high water mark
  • Donald Sutherland takes on a role something like America’s superego, the moral intelligence inside our heads, riding that stunning speaking voice. Of course i connect because he’s a Canadian.
  • And perhaps most impressive as a pure performance, Gary Oldman’s Oswald, in the performance that I’d put alongside his turn as Beethoven in Immortal Beloved as his most impressive single creation.

John Williams found at least three wonderful music cues that make this for me among his best, and favourite of all his films.  In the opening motto (and recurring throughout) we get lovely echoes of Aaron Copland, quintessentially American sonorities.   There is another theme that is a pure dissonant agony, ninths and seventh, seeming to ask “why”.  No I don’t usually dare to paraphrase music this way, as if to say what it means.  I’m breaking my own rules this time.  Listening to this music is a kind of exquisite agony, something like the whole ongoing inquiry itself.  What will it accomplish except prolong our misery? Perhaps there’s catharsis there somewhere, but first: pain and tears.   

Why does a Canadian care so much? I have no idea, but maybe it’s because for awhile I dared to dream and to believe certain things are possible.  This film does not dishonour the dreamer even as it suggests the dream is over.  I love that at the end of the film there is at least a hint of hope, the possibility of truth coming out someday.  I suppose it’s all we’ve got.

Posted in Cinema, video & DVDs, Politics, Popular music & culture, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Beatriz Boizán: Pasión

Posted on November 19, 2013 by barczablog

Sometimes artists show two or more sides.  The different roles played in a concert hall or in a recording studio bring out different aspects of a creative personality, at least as masks if not as divergent personalities.

Click for information about obtaining the CD

That’s how I’m thinking, as I look at the different sides of the pianist Beatriz Boizán.  Her recent concert, launching a CD, could have been sub-titled “Action” for its vibrant physical appeal.  If “Action“ is to be at one extreme, the CD, titled “Pasión” is the opposite.  However this isn’t just a fantasy.  I saw the concert, which led me to use the word “feral”.

And the CD?  I think “passionate” is the right adjective, one that I’d like to unpack for a moment.  The word get thrown around a fair bit without any context.  A passionate embrace is one full of emotion, but not necessarily loud or active.  I believe it’s understood as a surrender to feelings, as if one were possessed by sensation.  In a CD, that means we’re encountering profound emotion in these compositions, but in the compact packages of these performances.  The music doesn’t shout, but speaks eloquently, moving us.

Boizán plays the most difficult pieces on her CD differently than she played them in live performance.  Where she was willing to risk the occasional missed note in the boldness of her attack, on the CD she manages to be carefully precise, containing the emotion in a tidy package.

Boizán takes us on a tour of Latin pianism, especially as it leads to two great masters of Cuban music.  I knew the famous names on this album, but until now did not know the Cubans, even though one is responsible for the most famous tune on the entire album:

  • Ernesto Lecuona 1895 –1963 (Cuban), including “Malagueňa”
  • Antonio Soler 1729- 1783 (Spanish), who wrote keyboard sonatas that remind me of Domenico Scarlatti, but with a Spanish flair
  • Ignacio Cervantes 1847 – 1905  (Cuban)? i am pleased to meet this subtle voice, who doesn’t seem at all out of his depth alongside the acknowledged Spanish masters of the piano
  • Isaac Albeniz 1860 –  1909 (Spanish)
  • Alberto Ginastera  1916 –1983 (Argentinian)

While this is a more passionate series of readings than what Boizán offered a few weeks ago, that is, with some of the emotion internalized rather than fully expressed in action, she holds nothing back  when we get to Albeniz’s fiendishly difficult “Corpus Christi en Sevilla”, processional music of a Sevillian sound-scape that gradually calms itself.  This is among the most difficult pieces for a pianist, powerful octaves hammering in both hands, a challenge to articulate clearly.  Boizán finds the right notes to emphasize, bringing forth key parts of the dense texture, wearing her Latina allegiance on her sleeve.

The picture is more abstracted in Ginastera’s Dances, such as “Danza del Gaucho Matrero”, a luscious waterfall of notes pouring in quick succession. Pasión is a wonderful CD, roughly an hour of music that introduces me both to the artist –who I’ve seen only in the one concert—and to several of her favourite composers. I am persuaded to make further investigations of Cuban music.

You would have no better place to begin such an investigation than with Pasión.

Pianist Beatriz Boizan in one of her Umetsu gowns (photo by Elizabeth Bowman)

Pianist Beatriz Boizan (photo by Elizabeth Bowman)

Posted in Music and musicology, Personal ruminations & essays | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Esprit /Evergreen: O Gamelan

Posted on November 18, 2013 by barczablog

“O Gamelan” is both José Evangelista’s composition & a handy name for tonight’s program by Esprit Orchestra, suggesting a genuine reverence for the Balinese ensemble of that name.  Many of the works on the program employed some or all of the players of Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan, in various constellations of players & instrumentation.  In addition we were treated to a dance performance from Evie Suyadnyani, World Music Visitor at the U of T‘s Faculty of Music (which is perhaps one reason I saw the Dean of the Faculty in attendance). My head is still buzzing in a good way from this exquisitely intercultural experience.

Alex Pauk

Alex Pauk

We began & ended with orchestral works invoking gamelan sounds via conventional western instruments.  Echo Spirit Isle (1983), a work by Alex Pauk (composer & also the conductor & artistic director of Esprit)  started us off.  When the orchestra was playing repeated notes (aka ostinati) I thought of Colin McPhee, a composer whose works suggest Balinese music.  Pauk also generated some big tutti, and passages of neutral colour something like washes of colour on paper.  Pauk’s work was one of the bookends for the evening.   Claude Vivier’s Pulau Dewata (1977), which closed the concert, also had me in mind of McPhee: which is to say that some of the passages sound like attempts to echo or even transcribe a gamelan’s timbres and effects using conventional instrumentation.

Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan (click picture for more information)

Chan Ka Nin’s Éveil aux oiseaux (2005) employed eleven members of Esprit + nine gamelan instruments played by Evergreen personnel.  At times they blend, at other times there are distinct differences in the ways each culture’s instruments are used.  Several moments are wonderfully ambiguous, creating sounds and combinations that are hard to place, delightfully disorienting.  The first sounds we hear reminded me of the deep Tibetan horn-sound associated with Buddhist ceremonies, a sound that gave me chills immediately.  In an evening where Gamelan sounds seemed to instantly guarantee entry into the spirit of another culture, this composition was for me the most authentic, precisely because I couldn’t place it within any culture, any particular place or time.  Very impressive!

Next came something absolutely different in every respect. Lou Harrison’s Threnody for Carlos Chavez for viola and gamelan (1978) suddenly brought us into something intimate and the most tonal work we’d hear all night.  Violist Douglas Perry stood alongside seven of the Evergreen players, as he played something resembling a folk song, accompanied by the most delicate sounds I think I’ve ever heard from Evergreen.  For all intents & purposes, this is a thoroughly sensuous song, with an accompaniment that likely could be handled by one or two players, but instead flitting around seven different players.

Then we came to the work giving its title to the concert, namely José Evangelista’s O Gamelan, using a modern orchestra to suggest the magical sounds of a gamelan.  I was at times unable to figure out what instruments were playing to create the timbres.  Evangelista speaks of the gamelan as a goal, suggesting that its sound is an ideal.

My favourite piece on the program was from André Ristic, a work titled Project “Peuple” for gamelan & ensemble.  It’s a spectacularly clever composition.  If I were to quote the composer’s program notes to describe its ambitions you would likely be struck by the wit of the composer.

Two groups of individuals (the gamelan percussions and winds) are trying to find a “meeting point” through the inspiration provided by a “leader” (the double bass).  They succeed and the leader goes despotic.

Ristic refers to the concerto, in looking at the interactions of these musical forces.  The only work I can think of that’s comparable is Berlioz’s Harolde en Italie, a concerto that dramatizes the Byronic hero using a viola & orchestra.  Why am I not surprised that Ristic is from the former Yugoslavia?  I’ve met so many from this country whose well-developed political awareness boils over in the arts.  At the beginning, the groups of instruments –the western gang & the gamelan—are like political cartoons, satirical caricatures of two wildly disparate groups unable to communicate.  Gradually the double bass asserts itself, leading to one of the most delicious bits of comic virtuosity I’ve ever heard & seen, the bass player like a ferocious demagogue with a bow.

Pauk (conducting the group from Esprit + the Evergreen players) led a delightfully tight reading.

Esprit return January 26th, 2014 with a program titled “Strange Matter”
(…click logo for more information)

Posted in Music and musicology, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Christian Jeffries: The Truth About Xmas

Posted on November 16, 2013 by barczablog

I’ve never fully swallowed the Norman Rockwell images showing big happy families at Christmas, which leaves me much more comfortable coming at Christmas via angst than angels.

No wonder I feel as though I’m on the same page with Christian Jeffries.  His latest –presented Friday November 15th—reprises last year’s yuletide show,  called “Christian Jeffries: The Truth About Xmas—Live at the Flying Beaver Pubaret”.

We’re through the looking glass now.  Our mayor is eating at home, so there’s nothing especially shocking about flying beaver.  At one time the gay and lesbian demimonde helped us identify the edges of our world.  We no longer have our orientation, our up & down, our left & right, not under the current bizarre circumstances.  I felt a curious sense of nostalgia for the old days watching Jeffries, a time when you knew good & bad, and could rely on them to wear the right colour hat.

Jeffries is a complete performer, not just a singer but also a wonderful raconteur who holds the audience in the palm of his hand while drily making commentary on the wacky world we inhabit.  I’d love to spend the entire time listening to the singing voice, but then I’d lose that other dimension.

Christian Jeffries (photo by Erika Barcza)

Christian Jeffries (photo by Erika Barcza)

Jeffries sang with a trio, namely Donavon LeNabat at the piano, Dustin Shaskin on bass & Jamie Bird on drums.

While many of their songs are familiar melodies of Christmas, there was rarely anything conventional about the readings.  LeNabat & Jeffries often took adventurous routes from one chord to the next, as in a wonderfully jazzy reading of the Christmas Song for example.  Jeffries is a deceptive singer because his diction is so amazingly clear –I don’t think I missed a syllable all night—and his pitch so precise.  He makes it sound very easy, cruising through changes, bouncing around harmonies that make the most familiar song sound brand new.  We sat through an evening of charm & schmooze & effortless singing that lasted well over two hours, but felt like nothing. I didn’t want it to end.

I felt very comfortable as Jeffries offered himself as a kind of therapist for our collective ills.  No, we didn’t actually get on a couch, but even so, he spoke to us of how Christmas is challenging, a holiday for misfits.  I can relate, and evidently everyone else in the Flying Beaver felt as I did.  He can make us scream with laughter or applaud at the top of our lungs, yet for the last part of the second set we were exploring something a bit more serious & touching than just silliness.

Christian Jeffries is unlike any other performer I’ve ever seen or heard.  The voice is effortless, fabulously musical, floating up to notes without any anxiety that he can make it.  He dresses on the boundaries between male and female, inhabiting a persona with a drag element, but underplayed.  Seriously, that sort of description is so inadequate, so negative ultimately.  I believe Jeffries –perhaps with LeNabat along for the ride—should try performing something conventionally jazzy.  Yes I love the patter, but I simply mean that their chops are so good that they could fly purely on the basis of their musical wings, without relying upon their considerable cabaret skills.  From a  purely selfish perspective I’d want to keep Jeffries a secret, so that his extraordinary talent would stay in tiny venues like this one, where he must perform so intimately that every nuance is right in front of you.  But he deserves a bigger audience, the world needs to see and hear this amazing performer.

I’ll keep my ears open for the next show.  I understand something’s probably coming for Valentine’s Day.  I will do my best to let people know beforehand.

Posted in Dance, theatre & musicals, Reviews | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Civil Rites

Posted on November 12, 2013 by barczablog

It’s quite a bargain, this deal we’ve struck.  Any social contract is a trade-off, giving something to get something.  Nobody ever thinks about it, this amazing exchange, because it’s almost totally invisible, unless someone shines light on it, as they do at certain times of year.

Today is a day when people may seem to reflect on that social contract, even if the language is indirect.  November 11th is Remembrance Day, a celebration of the lives of those in various arms of the service.

Nobel Prize winner Lester B Pearson (click the picture to read about him)

The participation of Canadians in world wars has been one of the benchmarks measuring the progress of the country on the world stage.

  • Our sons enlisted on behalf of Britain in the Great War, 1914-1918, with conscription invoked in 1917
  • Our sons & daughters enlisted in the Second World War, with conscription finally invoked in 1944.
  • Canadians fought in Korea, 1950-52
  • In the 1960s and in the decades that followed, our military took on a new gentler role, largely shaped by Lester Pearson’s idea of peace-keeping forces.

For over three quarters of a century we’ve had volunteer armed forces.  Most tours of duty over that time were not lethal, although that changed a little over a decade ago, when volunteer forces often found themselves in hostile places such as Afghanistan.

Whatever sort of service –conscripted or volunteer, lethal or peace-keeping–we celebrate in services held on or around November 11th.  At any of those services one finds  a few common elements:

  • Poems such as In Flanders Fields and High Flight are read
  • Honour roles of names are read.  In my high school we read the names of students who had died in service during one of the wars. In my church we hear of those who fell and those who served.
  • Testimonials from those who were there, which becomes a bigger challenge with every veteran who passes away
  • A poetic evocation of the battlefield in the playing of “The Last Post” and “Reveille”.  While this ritual is done in many different configurations I believe the most meaningful was the one I first experienced at UTS, where a two-minute silence would be observed between the two trumpet calls.  Stuart Bull, a UTS teacher who served in the war, explained the meaning of this ritual very powerfully to me and the other boys in my school.  He spoke of the genuine fear one might have going to bed, that one might not awake, that this trumpet call telling us to go to bed suggested darkness & night, followed by the restoring call of Reveille.  In the moments of silence in between we could contemplate those who did not awake and be thankful for our own morning after.  If I may add a parenthetical remark, any Remembrance Day ritual that puts something other than silence between the Last Post and Reveille is a kind of ritualistic mixed metaphor.
  • Hymns such as “Oh God Our Help in Ages Past” and “Eternal Father Strong To Save” are sung.

When I was younger I distinctly remember feeling guilty, as someone who lived in a time of peace.  Yet as I’ve grown older, with every year I am more and more grateful for the example of those such as Stuart Bull, who passed many years ago now.  What did I know then?

I only know that I feel fortunate to be in this country, a place where I am not facing the dangers I see regularly on the news.  They don’t ask much of me in this place where I was born. If you work you’re expected to pay taxes.  If you see a red light, you stop.  If you see crime being committed you report it, if you don’t have the nerve or wherewithal to jump into the middle of it to put a stop to it.

I’m not asked to go to war, nor was I ever asked to serve.  Others have generously done that for me.  While I pay my taxes, that’s an easy process, compared to sitting in a plane as it flies into flak, sitting in a tank as it drives across a minefield or under artillery, walking towards enemy fire, riding a landing craft across the English Channel to invade…

It is truly the least I can do to observe those sacrifices, to shed tears for those who did not hold back.  It’s part of the deal, and it’s truly a good deal.

To close, the best anthem i know, written in the darkest hours of war as an inspiration, mentioning a sword & a chariot but invoking mental fight rather than real bloodshed.

Posted in Personal ruminations & essays, Politics, Spirituality & Religion | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Tcherniakov’s Serendipitous Trovatore

Posted on November 11, 2013 by barczablog

Having seen a small local production of Verdi’s Il trovatore in Richmond Hill Saturday night, the tunes & situations were very fresh in my head tonight for a broadcast of a 2012 production of the very same opera with big name talents from La Monnaie directed by one of the hottest young directors in the world, namely Dmitri Tcherniakov.

Dmitri Tcherniakov (click for interview)

This is the Tcherniakov who makes his Met debut in a few weeks with a production of Prince Igor.  Peter Gelb was quoted in a NY Times article as saying the director “would strip away the usual medieval pageantry and send Igor on a “psychological journey.”  I’d already seen something as adventurous in a TFO broadcast last year of Ruslan und Ludmilla that included the most outrageously camp beginning, that was then revealed to be merely a costumed performance, a virtual opera within the opera.  What looks conventional turned out to be edgy and provocative.

I did my best to decode Tcherniakov’s take on Trovatore in a single viewing on television (thanks to TFO,  the most exciting programming in the area), but would welcome a second look. It’s deep.

The entire opera is set in one room.  Azucena and Ferrando seem to work together, handing out printed scenarios to the others –the Count di Luna, Manrico and Leonora—who then roleplay them out in full view of the others, at least until they lose control of the exercise.  When they walked into the space at the beginning it felt as though Ferrando and Azucena were real estate agents, with Di Luna & Manrico sizing up the place as though they were potential buyers.  As it went along, Ferrando felt more like the man with a memory, the story-teller we’re accustomed to from conventional readings of the opera.  The space is classical but timeless, sparsely furnished, and well lit.

We discover that the chorus will not appear.  When the men listen to Ferrando telling stories in the first scene, it’s di Luna and Manrico who engage him.  When the chorus are written to show fear, these two choristers –the  principals that is—laugh it off, until they hear the offstage chorus expressing their fears, and then start to show their doubts.  It’s in moments like this that Tcherniakov lures us in, surprising us with depths.

Where are we exactly?  For the first two acts I thought I might be watching a kind of therapy, where Azucena & Ferrando engage with persons or souls such as Di Luna, Manrico & Leonora, who listen to one another as if in group therapy.  That changes partway through, as di Luna pulls out a gun, changing the dynamics suddenly from something that seems to be about story-telling, spirits & karma, to something suddenly about power & fear.  In due course di Luna shoots Ferrando and then when –in the usual place—discovers he’s been betrayed, shoots Manrico too.  With the texts being enacted we are able to have our cake and eat it too, to have cardboard rigidity in some of the lines, with overtones of subtlety & depth.

I’d expressed my scepticism generally about Regietheater approaches to this opera, which I believe is one that is so melodramatic as to resist modernization.  But in fairness Tcherniakov brings some wonderful insights into many moments in the scenes, stirring things up.  Trovatore is an opera full of stories from long ago, told in a series of scenes that are themselves full of stories.  Ferrando tells a story of long ago.  Leonora tells Ines about a voice she heard singing.  Azucena tells a story about something that happened long ago.  And so on and so on.  So while the original is melodramatic and in some respects two dimensional, those two dimensional aspects can inform moderns as if they were archetypes.  At times it is as though we are watching modern people who have a deep subtext haunting them from another century,  or another life.  They sing of the old medieval story while looking like moderns.  And so, while Leonora ostensibly says she will give herself –future tense—to di Luna, in this story it seems very evident that she’s done so, as we watch them lying onstage for the substantial scene of the last act where Manrico talks to his mother.  It’s dense with meanings that I believe would be released even further with multiple viewings.

I continue to be impressed with Tcherniakov, and eagerly anticipate his Prince Igor.  For what it’s worth, he was received rapturously by the audience at this live broadcast, which likely wasn’t an opening night.  But overall this is Regietheater that works.

The singing is mostly excellent.  The women are the best singers in this production. Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo has a stunning voice, offering a rather subtle Azucena, especially in context with the directness of the performances I saw last night.  In the first half of Tcherniakov’s reading, we could be at a séance watching people speak of souls from other lives, even when they’re singing passionately about their own lives.  Marina Poplavskaya is spectacular throughout, dramatically very complex in her response to the layers implicit in this production.  Misha Didyk is a spinto Manrico with no high C but lots of power throughout.  Scott Hendricks gives as sympathetic a portrayal of the Count di Luna as one could expect, given Tcherniakov’s overlay.  Hendricks is a local favourite, having sung Iago & Amonasro here in recent years.

Marc Minkowski’s conducting was brisk & clear, always helping his singers.

I didn’t see any sites offering anything but PAL discs (which aren’t usually compatible with North American players), and so for the time being I’d be cautious about buying them unless you’re certain you have the right equipment to play that format.

Posted in Cinema, video & DVDs, Opera, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Opera York: True to Verdi

Posted on November 10, 2013 by barczablog

It’s exciting when you get a chance to test an offbeat theory, and even more exciting when you prove it.

Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore was at one time –perhaps at the end of the 19th century—the most popular opera in the world, the sine qua non of beautiful singing & dramma per musica.  Now? According to operabase.com’s 2012-13 stats Trovatore is merely the fifth most popular of Verdi’s operas –after Nabucco for crying out loud—and merely 20th most popular. And their earlier survey for 2005-6 through 2009-2010 puts Trovatore at 23rd.

And so as I’ve pondered why it fell in popularity, i had my theories. Maybe the problem is that the work is never allowed to work the way it’s written, which is to say, as a conservative and mechanical melodrama heavy on religion and old-fashioned values.  When you tell the synopsis to people they often speak of it as embarrassing, as though opera were somehow supposed to be realistic; what, Das Rheingold or Rusalka are realistic or believable?  We’re okay with the witch in Hansel and Gretel and the nasty lady with the high notes in the Magic Flute but NOT the one in Il trovatore??

Directors who modernize only heighten the disconnect, as if you’d taken a medieval mystery drama telling the biblical myth of Noah and decided to stage it as though there is no God, and no boat.  In my review of the COC’s recent Trovatore for example, i acknowledged how nice it sounded, but I felt it made little or no sense (but i didn’t address that in much detail).  OR as Richard Ouzounian of the Star put it:

And while it’s generally acknowledged that the strength of Il Trovatore is in its passionate characters and sublime music, it needs a strong hand on the design and directorial elements to make its overwrought saga of gypsy vengeance ultimately not seem risible or dull. It doesn’t get that assistance here.

And so no wonder that it’s always believed that if only the director were  to fix it the thing would work, when the whole problem is directors fighting the work’s naturally melodramatic tendencies, fixing something that isn’t actually broken.

Tonight I saw Opera York stage a conservative reading of trovatore, largely driven by melodramatic acting and staging.  We were in the intimate space of Richmond Hill’s Centre for the Performing Arts, a comparatively small space with exquisite acoustics.  Where the Four Seasons Centre seats around 1900, I believe this space is somewhere around 600.  Opera York’s Artistic Director Sabatino Vacca conducted a small orchestra (22 players) ensuring that no singer was ever covered.  Opera York’s chorus is likely a group of 20 amateurs, a bit daunted by the complexities of Verdi, bravely singing some of the most glorious numbers ever written even as they’re often unable to muster a collective sound as loud as a single genuine operatic voice.  The costumes suggest the middle ages as if we were watching a B-picture from the 1950s.

And yet for me it was far more satisfying than what I saw from the COC, precisely because the opera was allowed to work the way it was written.  Director Gabe Graziano doesn’t fight the inevitable, allowing his cast to mostly stand and deliver in those situations that Ouzounian had spoken of as “risible or dull”.  And my theory is confirmed, that directors have been fighting Verdi, whereas Graziano more or less let Verdi work as written.

Kristine Dandavino as Azucena in Opera York's Il Trovatore

Kristine Dandavino as Azucena in Opera York’s Il Trovatore.   Click picture for Opera York website.  (photo: Lance Gitter)

 

This is especially so with Kristine Dandavino who was an over-the-top Azucena, or in other words, giving us the gypsy woman the way the role is written.  We watched an interpretation so blatant as to resemble a throwback to Verdi’s time, an authentic piece of melodrama always in character.  The voice is startlingly powerful with a few soprano high notes interpolated, and an amazing chest voice.  Her work in Act II was so chilling the audience was too stunned to applaud at the end of her big –and brilliantly sung—aria “stride la vampa”.

Paul Williamson’s Manrico was much more about the voice than the dramatic characterization, which –again—is consistent with how I believe the work should be done.  We watch someone whose emotions turn on a dime, someone who—like Siegfried or Rhadames—believes what he’s told, a hero whose reactions are instant and genuine, without intellectual depth.  This too is exactly what the melodrama requires, particularly the luscious line and the high notes.

Nicolae Raiciu was the most enjoyable Count di Luna I think I’ve ever seen.  I should mention that I believe this role is largely un-singable.  With a full orchestra (rather than the 22 players in a tiny house) much of the role tends to get drowned out.  Di Luna is a jerk, a jealous obstacle in the plot whose actions are unsympathetic in any presentation attempting to give the characters depths.  While I loved Russell Braun’s singing & sophisticated portrayal with the COC, it ultimately made little sense because the opera doesn’t reward three-dimensional characterization.  Raiciu was savage, as jealously romantic as a French apache dancer.  Yes, the smaller orchestra changes everything, but in fact Raiciu had lots of voice with a spectacularly full top.  Di Luna often sounds like a bizarre hybrid, a transitional creation from Verdi that’s partly bel canto, and at times has to honk out impossible lines during ensembles.  This is the first time I’ve ever heard those notes.  In fact I could hear everyone clearly.

Rachel Edwards had some great moments, especially in the last act, and was very good dramatically.   Henry Irwin was a very dynamic Ferrando, especially in his big scene at the beginning. Also rounding out the solid ensemble were Sarah Hicks, making a lot of the small part of Inez and Richard Iannello, a very sweet-voiced Ruiz.

On balance I believe Opera York should be very proud, a company gradually building a foundation for the future.  Vacca kept things moving at a brisk pace, getting a lovely sound from this small orchestra, easily filling the intimate theatre with more than enough power, and delicacy when necessary.  This is an opera company with a great future.

Posted in Opera, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Songs in the key of F Mayor

Posted on November 7, 2013 by barczablog

Meaning is where you find it.

Toronto’s mayor is bigger than ever.  He was always large, but now he’s becoming an international icon.  If he wanted it, I’m sure a reality TV show could follow His Worship and his brother around town.  The talk shows are waiting for him if he’s willing to go there.

And the whole time it appears that support for our mayor is growing.  No wonder, when the chief issue is not finances or gravy or libraries, but Ford himself.  He is the biggest issue. All the others who would run define themselves by him.

In the meantime I’m seeking solace in various pieces of music, presented herewith as a kind of therapy.  Can music help?  I got the idea from John Terauds of musicaltoronto.org  If you’re anything like me, you’ve had enough headlines & humour. The joke’s on us.
I present these examples without prejudice, and in each case, with a title that I hope connects it to current events.

“News” 

“But who are you, actually?” 

This is a longer segment from Verdi’s Otello, directed in his usual over-the-top way by Franco Zeffirelli.  Cassio leers after Desdemona.  Otello sees it and so does Iago.  So let’s have a drinking song, some drink, and poor Cassio gets drunk. Before you know it everyone is laughing at him.  He’s set up by Roderigo & Iago. Moments later –after the foolish fight—Otello comes out angrily, demoting Cassio.

“Drink & reputation go hand in hand.” 

“A bully” 

“And the bullied.”

Thank you Adams, Beethoven and Verdi three times.

Posted in Personal ruminations & essays, Politics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Reinventing the audience

Posted on November 5, 2013 by barczablog

No, I am not reinventing,  I am the anthropologist busily observing, and seeking to articulate something that’s out there among the specimens.  Humanity –at least the western version thereof—are busily changing the social consensus.

Surely the changes have been underway for decades, like the movements of subterranean tectonic plates.  The young are flexible, mobile, active.  When they change they influence everyone, including their immobile elders, who—no matter how they may deny it—regularly imitate youth.  I’ve seen more upheaval in the past ten years than in the previous forty, but maybe it took a kind of critical mass for any of that to surface.  And then again when society is reinventing itself, the last place this manifests itself is in the concert halls & opera houses I frequent, performances where the average age is somewhere around 60.  If I don’t miss my guess, the consensus –itself an unspoken set of assumptions that were never really discussed—seems to be changing.

I made a list of remarkable moments, not in any special order.

  • Tapestry Briefs a few weeks ago offered a series of short operatic experiments.  The premise was a kind of theatrical speed-dating, where composers & librettists were mixed & matched, in search of theatrical gold.  Leaving aside the texts, in production several of these played with our understanding of the interface between audience & performance.  The most troubling moments were confrontational.  In one, a performer sang about her fertility in a narrow space resembling a birth canal, surrounded by uncomfortable auditors.  In another the singer dialogued with someone just stabbed by a machete (and yes it was really uncomfortable).
  • Bruce Barton’s YouTopia used a set resembling a jungle-gym both to enable aerial work and a kind of sculptural commentary on our civilization, while putting us in headphones for a layered soundtrack.
  • I was a guest at Figaro's Wedding

    I was a guest at Figaro’s Wedding

    Toronto Summer Music’s Minimalist Dream House Project dared to take its audience out of their comfort zone.

  • Einstein on the Beach (receiving its final performance just a few weeks ago in LA, after touring around North America the past couple of years) encouraged us to go in and out as we pleased.
  • Stewart Goodyear’s Beethoven Marathon created a happening out of a concert, reinventing (at least temporarily) the role of the virtuoso along the way.
  • Sasha Lukac’s production of Move(me)ant. The Marat/Sade Occupied at York University in 2012 incorporated social media.
  • Figaro’s Wedding by Against the Grain Theatre, in a Queen West space, was the highlight of the early summer.  For much of the evening we could have been at an actual wedding.  I shared a picture of myself taken during an intermission next to a wedding cake on Facebook.

There are really several audiences of course.  You don’t see the same behaviour at bars as at theatres or concert halls, and again, it depends whether you’re listening to ear-splitting rock, jazz, or classical.  As a super-vocal loudmouth I am regularly at a loss to know how to behave when I change milieu.  Friday night’s concert at Gallery 345 was in the land of clapping and the occasional bravo, whereas yesterday’s play in Tarragon’s Extraspace was in the land of the woot-ers, a curious species of enthusiastic creature who aren’t really very loud –I can’t woot 1/10th as loud as I can bravo—but well-meant.  Of course when the woots morph into screams –and yes I mean my own—we can be much louder.  Pardon me if this sounds critical, but all I’m getting at is that each group seems to have restrictions and unspoken boundaries they don’t transgress.  In some places –for instance in the jazz world—you clap immediately when you love something, no matter what’s happening.  The last parts of solos are often drowned out by raucous applause.

I wonder, then, is the movement of those tectonic plates I spoke of partly because of the intersection of strata?  There are age strata of course, where the old meet the middle aged meet the recently young meet the young, or the cultural strata, where woots meet bravi meet screams or other sorts of cheers.

Okay, let’s stop this discussion for a moment.  You probably think that the good old days are gone now, the time when nobody would dream of texting during a film or a play because those devices hadn’t been invented.

But no, I actually long for a return to a golden age of a different sort.  I long for a time much more remote from our own.  Nevermind those quiet audiences.

At the premiere of Hector Berlioz’s Harolde en Italie, a wonderful concerto for viola with a program based on Byron’s poem, the audience asked for encores of the middle movements.  I love it so much, why wouldn’t they want to hear it again? We play tracks on our CDs over, why not in a concert?

We live in a funny time, when we’re told that there’s no applause between movements of symphonies.  The concert I was at Friday night, Ernesto Ramirez sang a series of Mexican songs that by usual practice call for applause at the end of the group.  My hands kept wanting to applaud, partly because he was so good, partly because it’s simply un-natural to hold our applause the way we are always told to do.  At a few points in this concert, attended by at least a few family members, applause erupted in the middle of groups of songs, and protocol be damned.

We have much to unlearn.  While mobile phones are spoken of as a curse, I am loving this dogfight between the rules for repressing human impulses, and those unquenchable impulses.

Adam Paolozza and Viktor Lukawski in The Double (photo by Lacey Creighton)

Adam Paolozza and Viktor Lukawski in The Double (photo by Lacey Creighton)

I close with a quote from Viktor Lukawski, whose words in the talkback for The Double and afterwards in conversation largely stimulated me to write all this.  Speaking about the contrary human impulses we observe in a theatre, we were discussing the different responses humans make in different places, the respectful crowd that in some places resembles a church congregation afraid to let loose, and the inter-generational thing I alluded to.  In fact this whole essay is really just expanding on what he said so succinctly.

We’re trying to fight against the “church congregation”. Hopefully, by doing this kind of work, and the cabaret-style itself, allows people to relax those stiff shoulders. The idea is to make it feel like you’re watching a concert, rather than some period piece. … Maybe then the inner wild high-schooler might have come out in the older audience! 

We shall see.  And hear.

Posted in Personal ruminations & essays, Popular music & culture, Psychology and perception | 2 Comments